MONTH OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD OF JESUS - TWENTY FIRST DAY

Venite, quo tquo t criminum Funesta lobes inficit; In hoc salutis balneo, Qui se lavat, mundabitur.

Come, bathe you in that healing flood, All ye who mourn with sin opprest, Your only hope is Jesus Blood, His Sacred Heart your only rest.

The Precious Blood of Jesus, the Blood of His sorrowful, suffering, agonizing Heart at Gethsemane, will help us to excite in our hearts acts of lively contrition. All sins, as our Lord Himself says, originate in the heart; therefore He wanted to expiate our crimes in His Heart first before He carried them in His Body to the Cross on Calvary. As the grape in the wine press yields its juice to the heavy weight placed upon it, so the Blood of Jesus flowed from His Sacred Heart under the weight of sin and the intense agony of His soul. From this precious grape of the Sacred Heart the purple wine of salvation was pressed. I have trodden the wine press alone.

Since from the heart proceeds all evil and since the heart is the battle-ground of our spiritual combats, the remedy must be applied to the heart. The first and essential parts of penance, therefore, must be the penance of the heart, or contrition. The heart must be detached from all bonds that connect it with sin and bad habits. A sacrifice to God is an afflicted spirit: a contrite and humbled heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.
 The Blood of the Atonement is the most powerful antidote to the allurements of pleasure, and devotion to this Blood cannot fail to strengthen the will against the seductions of sin. The Blood of Christ is honored and glorified by the fruits of a good will in the Sacrament of Penance, because in this sacrament it can unfold and display its purifying power and sanctifying activity.

 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath predestinated us unto the adoption of children through Jesus Christ unto himself: according to the purpose of his will: unto the praise of the glory of his grace, in which he hath graced us in his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption through his blood, the remission of sins, according to the riches of his grace.