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Month of the Precious Blood (July 24)

July 24, 2026

Fr. John Colacino C.PP.S.

Day 24

A reading from the First Letter of St. John

This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. (1 John 1:5-10)

RESPONSORY

God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. -- and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.

If we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another. -- and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.

From The Mysteries of Christianity by Matthias Scheeben (+1888)

In the Godhead the mutual love of the Son and the Father pours itself out in the production of the Holy Spirit, who issues from their common heart, in whom both surrender their heart’s blood, and to whom they give themselves as the pledge of their infinite love. In order worthily to represent this infinitely perfect surrender to His Father, the Logos wished in His humanity to pour forth His blood from His heart to the last drop, that blood in which and through which the Holy Spirit gave life to His humanity, the blood that was pervaded, sanctified, and scented with heavenly loveliness, and so ascended to God with such pleasing fragrance. The Holy Spirit Himself is portrayed as the agent of this sacrifice. He is the agent in this sense, that in His capacity of amor sacerdos He urges on the God-man to His sacrifice, and brings the oblation itself into the presence of the Father, uniting it to the eternal homage of love, which is He Himself. Since the Holy Spirit proceeds from the love of the Father for the Son, and through the Son is to be poured out over the whole world, nothing is more appropriate than that the Son in His humanity, as the head of all creatures, should represent and effect this outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the outpouring of His blood, and that this latter outpouring should become the real sacrament of the other outpouring. Is not the shedding of the blood of Christ’s heart the truest pledge that He and His Father will, in their own Spirit, share with us the innermost character, so to speak, of their divinity? Is not the blood with its purifying, warming, life-giving energy the sacrament of the corresponding activities of the Holy Spirit? And is not the mystical body and corporal bride of the God-man formed from the blood of Christ’s heart by the power of the Holy Spirit dwelling in Him, just as the Spirit of the Father and the Son and their partner in love springs forth from their divine heart? At bottom, the heart’s blood of Christ is the bond between God and the world, the bond in which heaven and earth are brought together, just as in the Trinity the Holy Spirit, the outpouring of the mutual surrender of the Father and the Son, is the eternal bond which joins these two persons with each other and with creatures. Thus the idea of Christ’s sacrifice thrusts its roots deep into the abyss of the Trinity. As the Incarnation itself was to be the prolongation and extension of the eternal generation, and can be adequately comprehended only from this viewpoint, so the sacrificial surrender of the God-man was to be the most perfect expression of that divine love which, as God, He shows forth in the spiration and effusion of the Holy Spirit.

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