[00:00] Ah In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit Amen Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

[00:39] Our Lady, Mother of the Word Incarnate Our Lady of Cordentrics St. Joseph our Patron Saints and Guardian Angels Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen Today we celebrate a votive Mass of the Precious Blood of our Lord July 1st normally was the traditional feast day of the Precious Blood But for some reason the Church

[01:10] took that feast away and made it only as a votive Mass that you could offer at various times when there's an opportunity But the whole point was that we had Corpus Christi Sunday or we had Corpus Christi, which was always on a Thursday, and the reason was on Thursday was because that's when our Lord instituted the Eucharist But on Corpus Christi, we called to mind the sacrament that our Lord instituted the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity, the truth of

[01:44] this reality of the Real Presence the Church combined them both together for Corpus Christi, the Body and Blood of our Lord, but the reason why the Church separated and had Precious Blood on a separate date was to call to mind the other part that we were reminded about the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, that the Eucharist is not only a sacrament but a sacrifice And the sacrifice was represented, of course, by

[02:14] the shedding of our Lord's blood And that, of course, we know is symbolized represented in the two-fold consecration: first we consecrate the body, and then we consecrate the blood And because it is separate in those two separate consecrations that's how we represent sacramentally the sacrifice of the Mass that our Lord's sacrifice on Calvary, that when you separate the blood from the body

[02:46] you represent, you might say sacramentally, the death of our Lord and so it was always important because not only does our Lord want us to call to mind His sacrament, that He is really present, but also His sacrifice that He offered Himself for us and, of course He could have shed one drop of blood. St. Alphonsus Liguori says

[03:16] that our Lord could satisfy the justice of God, you might say to make atonement for our sins And even in that word atonement we have "at-one-ment." The whole point about atonement is to make us one with God again that atonement could have been satisfied with just one drop of blood The drop of blood or the little blood that came forth from our Lord's circumcision could have satisfied, but just a tiny drop of His Precious Blood could have satisfied God's justice

[03:54] But St. Alphonsus said it would not satisfy His love that our Lord wanted to show His great love for us. So He poured out His blood for love of us And when we thought that He had no more blood to give when His heart was pierced on the cross, we know that blood and water flowed out from His heart, a torrent, it says, not a trickle, a torrent And that the blood and water represents the sacraments that our Lord instituted

[04:26] primarily the Eucharist, but all the others by which, you might say, we are washed in our Lord's Precious Blood when we are washed clean, as the people cried out at His crucifixion washed clean. You know, they were doing it more in a mockery at that point But literally that's what our Lord did as His blood poured out from His sacred side has washed us clean when we receive Baptism And then when you are further fortified by all the other sacraments, you might say they are the channels

[05:00] of our Lord's Sacred Heart being poured out, whether it be Confession Confirmation Eucharist, Holy Orders even Matrimony Our Lord is helping to configure couples to His great love Because what does He say? "Love one another as I love you." And He says, "No greater love than one has than he who laid down his life for his friends." And what does He say about husbands, that they must, you know, love their spouses as Christ loved His Church

[05:35] He laid down His life for them so this notion of our Lord's sacrifice is so important because I think that's why some people kind of come to Mass and they think that it's just, you know, kind of nonchalantly that they're just coming for a sacred meal Well, it is a sacred meal, but it's a sacrificial meal Our Lord is feeding us with His very Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity And how could we not also see and appreciate

[06:07] Our Lady's role in this great mystery of His Precious Blood Where does He get His body and blood from but from this most precious womb Our Lady, who provided for Him the substance of her own heart, you might say to bring about our Lord's human nature that God took from her and created for Himself a human nature body and blood

[06:39] As one priest said, our Lord's DNA is totally Marian and so therefore we honor Our Lady too because she helped provide, as Wisdom says, "Wisdom has prepared her sacrifice, has mixed her wine." Well, Our Lady has prepared the sacrifice by saying yes to the angel Gabriel and that blood, her blood, helped to bring about and to form

[07:09] the body and blood a body and blood of our Lord's sacred humanity So today as we honor our Lord's Precious Blood we want to thank our Lord for His great love for us, for laying down His life for us, for sacrificing Himself for love of us, and that He was not satisfied for just doing a drop of blood but that He poured out all of His blood for love of us

[07:41] and so therefore we want to also remind ourselves of the sacrifices that we can offer in return for His great love for us These next few days you're going to have plenty of opportunities to offer sacrifice with the heat You know, we can offer that up for love of poor sinners for the poor souls in purgatory. Read today about how the poor souls in purgatory

[08:11] suffer from an intense fire that burns purifies them like gold in fire and that we can offer up our sacrifices especially to help quicken their time and lessen their time in those terrible sufferings that they undergo in purgatory that they will be soon released. And so let us be mindful of the importance of sacrifice

[08:44] as we celebrate this Mass in honor of our Lord's Precious Blood, as Saint Paul reminds us: "Do you not know that you have been purchased not with, you know, gold, but with something, the Precious Blood of a Lamb poured out for us?" You know, the Lamb of God and let us pray that we will always be mindful of our Lord's great sacrifice and unite ours to His for the salvation of souls and our own sanctification

[09:19] In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen May