.
The Most Precious Blood of Jesus might seem to occupy a curiously narrow part of the Church's universal liturgical tradition, if one looks to recent developments alone, for it wasn't until Pope John XXIII that the Litany of the Precious Blood of Jesus was granted indulgences to Catholics, in June of 1960.
(Note, this was only four months after that curious and anonymous paragraph appeared in an Italian periodical saying that
the Third Secret was not going to be revealed, not now and probably not ever. In other words, while he spurned Our Lady's request, he nonetheless called down mercy from God in his Opening Speech (2 years, 8 months later, 10-11-62) after having 2 years and 4 months earlier (6-30-60) granted new indulgences for private and public recitation of the Litany.)
After 1960, we had the 1962 Missal of John XXIII, Vat.II (1962-65), the death of John XXIII (1963), the abandonment of the Oath Against Modernism (1966 +/-), the Newconsecration formula for bishops (1968) and finally the abolition of the Feast of the Most Precious Blood that had been longstanding since 1849. So this action of John XXIII would seem to have endured only for about 8 or 9 years.
But John XXIII was not the beginning of devotion to the Precious Blood (even if Paul VI was the "end" of it, as it were, 'officially'). As he reminds us in his own Apostolic Letter of June 30th, 1960, "
ON PROMOTING DEVOTION TO THE MOST PRECIOUS BLOOD OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST," it goes back to Apostolic times, and he quotes I Pet. i. 17-19 to back that up.
The "Good Pope John" ignores St. Catherine of Siena, though and seems wont to attribute her devotional inspiration rather to someone else: "the devotion to the Most Precious Blood, which owes its marvellous diffusion to the 19th-century Roman priest, St. Gaspar del Bufalo..." (Hey, maybe that's why Francis thinks he's a saint because he was a misogynist who disguised himself so well! He was then "the Good Misogynist-Pope John.")
St. Catherine of Siena (this OP) lived a long time ago (d. 1380). But even in her time, the Church was already 13 centuries old, and yet, there had been no liturgical focus on the Precious Blood. (Outside of the obvious fact that the Consecration at Mass distinguishes between the chalice and the host).
Even after her life, it took four hundred sixty-nine years for this theme to rise to the attention of the Pope. In 1849 Pope Pius IX extended the Feast of the Most Precious Blood to the universal Church, as John XXIII says in his Letter, "...to fulfill a vow [he] made at Gaeta...," nearly a century later, "...as a commemoration of the nineteenth centenary of our redemption, Pius XI of happy memory raised this feast to the rank of first-class double, so that the greater liturgical splendour would highlight the devotion and bring to men more abundant fruits of the re deeming Blood."
Notice the dichotomy. As he waxes eloquent over the good action of his predecessor "of happy memory," he nonetheless harbors the plan to abolish this very memory with his wholesale elimination of the rank of first-class double," when he trucked in the Newmissal of 1962 with all its updates and revisions and abandonments of Scripture readings (in preparation for the excuse to say we need a lot more Scripture and therefore let's have a THREE YEAR CYCLE so we can read more of the Bible at Mass like the protestants do at their legions of 'worship services').
This is typical of John XXIII, the two faces of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde: while he gushes over how wonderful Pius XI was for making this into a feast day with rank of first-class double, he's quietly planning to trash the very concept of such ranks. While he recalls his youth when his parents recited the Litany of the Most Precious Blood all during the month of July, he's trying to forget about how he had just denied the request of the Immaculate Heart of Mary to consecrate Russia to her, she being the very source of the Sacred Heart of Jesus whose purpose in life was to move this Precious Blood through Our Lord's Body.
This is an awareness that should help us in our devotion, not hinder it, because it goes to explain some of the mystery of iniquity under which we live today, day in and day out.
The sedevacantist answer is, of course, "Well, this just proves that he wasn't really the pope." And I reply, no, this just proves that the pope had a double purpose. (Hey, maybe that's where +Fellay learned it!!) And he manifested it in many ways. He brought into more obvious focus something that had been rolling around in the back of the minds of Modernists for hundreds of years by that time, the principle of self-contradiction, which was something that did not get into writing until 47 years later, when Benedict XVI called it his "hermeneutic of continuity." (And he played the 'good cop' against the 'bad cop' by proposing that as a 'good' thing while opposing it with the "hermeneutic of rupture" as a 'bad' thing. This way B16 can scorn the sedevacantists just like John XXIII scorned Our Lady, by saying that sedes are adherents to the 'bad' thing, the hermeneutic of rupture!)
.
Topic: Prayer to the Precious Blood of Jesus (Read 630 times)