Christ’s Forgotten Nighttime Suffering (And That’s Not All), by Dr. Jeff Mirus

By Jeffrey Mirus, Catholic Culture, Feb 03, 2026

Jeffrey Mirus holds a Ph.D. in intellectual history from Princeton University. A co-founder of Christendom College, he also pioneered Catholic Internet services. He is the founder of Trinity Communications and CatholicCulture.org. See full bio. Thomas W. McGovern,

MD. What Christ Suffered: A Doctor’s Journey Through the Passion. Revised and expanded edition. Our Sunday Visitor, 2025. 423 pp. Paper $32.95.

Christmas seems to take a very long time to arrive, while Lent leaps out and grabs us before we have time to blink. Ash Wednesday 2026 is just a week away. So now we are called upon to reflect not on the baby in the manger but on the man whose “sweat became like great drops of blood falling down upon the ground” (Luke 22:44). The realities of the passion and death of Jesus Christ trigger in us a significantly different response than do the details of His nativity.

Our Lord’s bloody sweat was almost certainly a mixture of blood seeping through the skin and mixing with sweat, rather than the production of blood by Our Lord’s sweat glands. Though St. Luke was a physician, he was describing all this at second-hand and he likely did not know of the rare condition now called hematidrosis, in which blood seeps out through the skin without any unusual cuts or openings and mixes with sweat on the surface. But there are now many recorded cases in which this has happened under conditions of physical or emotional stress. …

Continue reading >>>>>>>>>>>