July 1 (Feast of the Precious Blood). Did we ever ask God that He should create us reasonable creatures, in His own image and likeness, rather than brute beasts? No. Or that He should create us by Grace by the Blood of the Word, His only-begotten Son, or that He should give us Himself for food, perfect God and perfect Man, flesh and blood, body and soul, united to Deity? Beyond these most high gifts, which are so great, and show such fire of love toward us, that there is no heart so hard that its hardness and coldness would not melt by considering them at all: infinite are the gifts and graces which we receive from Him without asking.  St. Catherine of Siena

July 2. In the Eucharist, You show how much You wanted to communicate Yourself to us, for You were not content to give  Yourself to men only during the thirty years You were on  earth; in addition to this, You wanted to leave us Your  Body and Blood, so that we might be continually in You  and You in us. Thus when You are in a soul, You deify it, so to speak, transforming it into Yourself; You communicate  Yourself to it unceasingly, and keep it united to Yourself”  St. Mary Magdalen dei Pazzi.

July 3. None of us can actually see Christ the man in the appearance under which Thomas saw him, but we receive Christ man and God and partake of his body and blood, manhood and Godhead in the Sacrament of the Eucharist. "Mitte manum turn et cognosce loca clavorum. " Christ speaks these words to us, actually, at every elevation of the host, and it is with the words of Thomas that we reply in our hearts: "My Lord and my God.”  Thomas Merton

July 4. All over the world — all the troubled, indeed anguished spots of the world — there Christ is with the poor, the suffering, even in the cup we share together, in the bread we eat.  Dorothy Day

July 5. Show this bread to be truly the precious body of our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ and this chalice to be truly the precious blood of our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ shed for the life of the world so that all of us who share this one bread and chalice may be united with one another in the communion of the one Holy Spirit,  and that none of us partake of the holy body and blood of your Christ for judgment or condemnation.  Anaphora of St. Basil

July 6. The Son will be forever the slain Lamb, on the throne of the Father’s glory, and his Eucharist — the Body shared out, the Blood poured forth — will never be abolished, since the Eucharist it is which must gather all creation into his body. What the Father has given, he will never take back.  Hans Urs von Balthasar

July 7.  Until a human being is cured of that deadly poison [of sin] by eating the flesh of the Son of God and drinking His blood, his memory is weak, his judgment erring, his step staggering; nor is he at all capable of choosing and desiring the good gifts which he cast off of his own free will.  St. Prosper of Aquitaine

July 8. Wisdom says: Come, eat my bread, and drink the wine I have mixed for you. To those who are still deficient in the works of faith and in the more perfect knowledge of God that inspires them, he says ‘Come, eat my body, the bread that makes you grow according to virtue, and drink my blood, the wine that delights you according to knowledge and intoxicates you to become divine – the blood which I miraculously mingled with my divine nature for your salvation.’  St. Procopius

July 9. I hunger for You, true Bread, living Bread, Bread  of life. You know what my hunger is—hunger of the soul, hunger of the body—and You will to provide for the one  as well as for the other. By Your teaching, by Your Body  and Blood, You strengthen my spirit; You strengthen it  abundantly, withholding nothing, except what I myself  keep by the coldness of my love, the smallness of my heart. Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalene

July 10. The Eucharist is not only a particularly intense expression of the reality of the Church’s life, but also in a sense its “fountain-head”. The Eucharist feeds and forms the Church: “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor 10:17). Because of this vital link with the sacrament of the Body and Blood of the Lord, the mystery of the Church is savoured, proclaimed, and lived supremely in the Eucharist.  Pope St. John Paul II

July 11. Let us then give, as Christ ; this is His own precept : Sicut dilexi vos. Our Divine Saviour has no need of us; and yet He has given Himself, Heart, Blood, Life ; He still delivers Himself up daily in the Eucharist. Every day, Christ Jesus gives Himself to all those who wish to receive Him, whatever be the state of their soul: “Both the wicked and the good ” receive Him. Let us too give without reservation…. That is our ideal, and it is by ever striving to reach this ideal that, according to the precept of St. Benedict, we shall fully pay off the debt of fraternal charity.  Bl. Columba Marmion

July 12. After having spoken thus ‘This is My body . . . This is My blood’, the Lord rose up from the place where he had made the Passover and had given his body as food and his blood as drink, and he went with his disciples to the place where he was to be arrested. But he ate of his own body and drank of his own blood, while he was pondering on the dead. With his own hands the Lord presented his own body to be eaten, and before he was crucified he gave his blood as drink.”  St. Aaphrates the Persian

July 13. The true sacramental sign in the Eucharist is the event of eating and drinking...It is evident that the mystery itself cannot be ‘explained,’ neither the ‘transubstantiation’ of bread and wine into Flesh and Blood nor the other far more important happening which can analogously be called ‘transubstantiation’ of Christ’s Flesh and Blood into the organism of the Church...What is important is not that we know how God does it, but that we know that and why he does it.  Hans Urs von Balthasar

July 14. The eucharistic consecration not only gives us the glorified body and blood of Christ, under the species of bread and wine but by this very means, the definitive divine presence of God with his people in the Church, the body of Christ.  Louis Bouyer

July 15. O Jesus, by a divine decree, a soldier was permitted  to pierce Your sacred side. As the blood and water came  forth, the price of our salvation was poured forth, which  flowing from the mysterious fountain of Your Heart, gives  power to the Sacraments of the Church to bestow the life of  grace, and becomes for those who live in You, a saving drink  of living waters, bubbling up to life eternal. Arise, my soul,  beloved of Christ, watch unceasingly, place your lips there,  and quench your thirst in the Savior’s fount. St. Bonaventure

July 16. There can be nothing of the Spirit in the Church that does not also coincide with Christ’s reality, christologically, that does not let itself be translated into the language of the Eucharist—the surrender of Christ’s own flesh and blood, the streaming outward from Christ’s self up to the very point of his heart being pierced and his side flowing with water and blood.  Hans Urs von Balthasar

July 17. The mass is a memorial of Christ's death; his body, sacrificed and his blood poured out are shown to us. But that this body and blood should become food and drink for life is fruit and symbol of the resurrection to everlasting life. Through these mysteries the Church takes her share in the passion of Christ, the passion by which “he died to sin”, and through this dying she takes her share in his life which “he lives for God”. Through the cross she is filled with the pneuma, made holy, brought to glory, deified.  Odo Casel

July 18. Jesus says: “Take this body which is given for you, drink this blood poured out for you.”  And through the power of His creative word which changes the subsoils of reality, He makes Himself exist in the form of bread and wine, the everyday sign of loving unity with His disciples, so that all of this – His sacrificed reality for their salvation – becomes manifest and manifestly operative; it truly belongs to them and enters into the centre of their being.  Karl Rahner

July 19. God-made-man had to accept into himself all our finiteness, our whole condition of separation and death, in order to fill it with his light. It is this deified humanity, this deified creation, this transfigured bread and wine, this body bathed in glory yet bearing for ever the wounds of the Passion, that the Eucharist communicates to us.  Olivier Clement

July 20. These things, which God has prepared for those who love Him, are not protected by heights, nor enclosed in some secret place, nor hidden in the depths, nor kept at the ends of the earth or sea. They are right in front of you, before your very eyes. So, what are they? Together with the good things stored up in heaven, these are the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ which we see every day, and eat, and drink. These, we avow, are those good things.  St. Symeon the New Theologian

July 21. Through the Eucharist we may enter into holy humility and acquire that sacrificial way of life. Therefore in celebrating the Divine Liturgy we are not simply looking for the bread and wine to be transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ but seeking to acquire Christ’s way of life. And this is humility. We seek to clothe ourselves in the spirit of the Eucharist, which is self-emptying.   Hierotheos of Nafpaktos

July 22. Since Mary Magdalen is the symbol of the Church to be called out of the Gentiles, she was given the privilege of handling all the signs of the mystery of salvation. With the ointment she poured out, she herself was anointed. Her penitent tears became for her a cleansing bath, her heartfelt love of sacrifice. Yes, her hands and mouth were allowed a foretaste of the living and life-giving Bread, and her sucking kisses a first draught of the Blood of the Chalice before it became Blood in the Chalice! Blessed are they who were able to taste the Lord in the flesh and with their own bodies to welcome the Body of Christ…Blessed is she who was given the privilege of being the type of the Church!  St. Paulinus of Nola

July 23. I firmly believe that, just as the word sent to Mary was made flesh and blood in her womb, so too that which I now see in the hands of the priest I believe to be true God and man.  St. Bridget of Sweden

July 24. As often as you will be moved piously and faithfully by what Christ did, in memory of him who suffered for you, you eat his body and drink his blood; as long as you remain in him through love, and he is in you through the working of sanctity and justice, you are reckoned in his body and in his members.  William of Saint-Thierry

July 25. O Lord our God, the bread from Heaven, the food of the whole universe, I have sinned against Heaven, and before you, and I am not worthy to receive your most holy mysteries.  But, in your compassion, grant me by your grace uncondemned to partake of your holy body and your precious blood, to remission of sins and life eternal.  Amen.  Liturgy of St. James

July 26.  The imagery of marriage between God and Israel is now realized in a way previously inconceivable: it had meant standing in God’s presence, but now it becomes union with God through sharing in Jesus’ self-gift, sharing in his body and blood.  Pope Benedict XVI

July 27. Thanks to You, Creator and Redeemer of men, Who, to declare Your love to all the world, have prepared a great supper in which You have placed before us as food not the lamb, the type of Yourself, but Your own most precious Body and Blood, making all the faithful glad in Your sacred banquet, intoxicating them with the chalice of salvation in which are all the delights of paradise; and the holy angels feast with us but with more happiness and sweetness.  Thomas a Kempis

July 28. When the chalice we mix and the bread we bake receive the word of God, the Eucharistic elements become the body and blood of Christ, by which our bodies live and grow. How then can it be said that flesh belonging to the Lord’s own body and nourished by his body and blood is incapable of receiving God’s gift of eternal life?  St. Irenaeus of Lyons

July 29. My Flesh is truly food ( John 6:56) [and my Blood drink]. Since people expect that food and drink will cause them to be no longer hungry or thirsty, this result is truly achieved only by this food and this drink which makes those who take it immortal and incorruptible, in the companionship of the saints where total and perfect unity and peace will reign.  St. Thomas Aquinas

July 30. How marvelous is the priesthood of the Christian, for he is both the victim that is offered on his own behalf, and the priest who makes the offering. He does not need to go beyond himself to seek what he is to immolate to God: with himself and in himself he brings the sacrifice he is to offer God for himself. The victim remains and the priest remains, always one and the same. Immolated, the victim still lives: the priest who immolates cannot kill. Truly it is an amazing sacrifice in which a body is offered without being slain and blood is offered without being shed.  St. Peter Chrysologous

July 31. This, then, is what He did in the Eucharist, communicating His richness and goods: His Body, Blood, merits, virtues, soul and divinity with an invention so admirable that the Seraphim could never imagine it even if they were to think for all eternity. Therefore, in this life one cannot ask for anything better, anything greater from Our Savior.  St. Ignatius Loyola