Stream of Mercy: The Forgotten Feast of the Most Precious Blood, by David G. Bonagura, Jr.

By David G. Bonagura, Jr., Catholic Culture, July 01, 2025

David G. Bonagura, Jr. is an adjunct professor at St. Joseph’s Seminary and Catholic International University. He is the author of 100 Tough Questions for Catholics: Common Obstacles to Faith Today, and the translator of Jerome”s Tears: Letters to Friends in Mourning. He serves as the religion editor of The University Bookman, a review of books founded in 1960 by Russell Kirk. See full bio.

For just over 100 years, beginning in 1849, the universal Church celebrated the feast of the Most Precious Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ in July. Then it fell victim of a strange irony: the post-Vatican II commission that was established for revising the liturgy, while seeking to implement Sacrosanctum Concilium 55 that admitted the faithful to receive the precious Blood of Christ at certain Masses, eliminated the feast of the Most Precious Blood, which had a double first-class rank. Christ’s precious Blood apparently could be received but not celebrated, shared but not exalted.

This feast, it seems, is a casualty of the misguided theology that drove a wedge between Eucharistic practice and Eucharistic worship, between the Mass and adoration. “The Eucharist is for eating, not for looking,” went the refrain. Eucharistic adoration and holy hours, once mainstays of Catholic devotion, were summarily abandoned. Pope Benedict XVI, in his mild way, rebuked this error in Sacramentum Caritatis 66: “[E]ucharistic adoration is simply the natural consequence of the eucharistic celebration, which is itself the Church’s supreme act of adoration…. The act of adoration outside Mass prolongs and intensifies all that takes place during the liturgical celebration itself.” ….

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