The Precious Blood of Our Lord was shed on the Cross; by It Our Lord won all the graces necessary for the salvation of every human being. We simply need to grasp these graces and apply them to ourselves and others. The Precious Blood is a flowing Fountain of spiritual gifts that will never run dry.

It is the long tradition of the Church, which celebrates today the Feast of the Most Precious Blood of Jesus, that Christ was entirely exsanguinated during His torture, crucifixion, and death, drinking the chalice of suffering “to the dregs” by shedding every last drop of His inestimably treasured blood. One drop of his blood, it has been said, would have been enough to redeem the world, but Our Adorable Savior spared nothing in His suffering of the cruelest imaginable torments to show us that “God so loved the world…” (John 1)

In The Liturgical Year, Dom Prosper Gueranger explains the centrality of the Precious Blood in the Mass: "The Blood of the Man-God, being the pledge of peace between Heaven and earth, the object of profoundest worship, the centre of the whole liturgy, and our assured protection against all the evils of this present life, deposits, even now, in the souls and bodies of those whom it has ransomed, the germ of eternal happiness; The Church, therefore, in her Collect, begs of the Father, Who has given us His Only-begotten Son, that this Divine germ may not remain sterile within us, but may come to full development in Heaven."

In the life of St. Dominic we read that on one occasion when he was preaching about the veneration of Mary, he saw the Blessed Virgin sprinkling his devout hearers with the Blood of her Divine Son. Once while the Saint was celebrating Mass, three hundred persons, among them the king and queen, saw the Mother of God, at the elevation of the chalice, pouring the Precious Blood over all present and over the whole Church.

Let us, particularly during Holy Mass, beseech Mary to offer to the Eternal Father the Blood of her Son in the chalice, for the holy Catholic Church, for the conversion of sinners, for the souls in Purgatory and for our various needs. We may enumerate them to her with full confidence, and the greater their number, the better will she be pleased. That which we offer to God in Holy Mass is of infinitely greater value than the gifts for which we ask. God remains our debtor, as it were, so great is the value of the Precious Blood.

One of the best means of participating in the graces and blessings of the Precious Blood is to offer it to the Eternal Father. “An offering,” says Father Faber, is “more than a prayer.” In prayer, we are the recipients, but when we make an offering, God vouchsafes to accept something from us. St. Mary Magdalen de Pazzi, when in ecstasy, once exclaimed: “Every time a creature offers up the Blood by which he was redeemed, he offers a gift of infinite worth, which can be equaled by no other.” God revealed the practice of making this offering to this Saintly Carmelite nun when He complained to her that so little effort is made in this world to disarm His Divine justice against sinners. Acting upon this admonition, she daily offered the Precious Blood fifty times for the living and the dead. She did this with so much fervor that God showed her on different occasions the numerous souls who had thereby been converted or delivered from Purgatory.

Of particular import in the devotion to this central mystery of our salvation is the Litany of the Precious Blood of Jesus, which is especially effective in spiritual warfare against the forces of Hell.

The “Blood of Christ,” as the Litany says, is truly “most worthy of all glory and honor…”

Litany of the Most Precious Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ

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