Since 1969, the Catholic Church has celebrated the Precious Blood alongside the solemnity of Corpus Christi. An exception remains: Every July 1 at Gethsemane, the faithful venerate Jesus’ drops of blood, materialized by red rose petals. Although a liturgical exception, it makes sense, as the universal Church dedicates the entire month of July to the veneration of the Precious Blood.
The feast of the Precious Blood is celebrated as a solemnity on July 1 exclusively at the Church of All Nations in Gethsemane. At the foot of the Mount of Olives, facing the Old City of Jerusalem, the Franciscan friars who guard the holy place venerate the blood the Lord sweated during his Agony in the Garden.
After the Last Supper, while awaiting his arrest and asking his disciples to stay awake, Christ turned to the Father: “In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground.” (Lk 22:44).
St. Luke is the only evangelist to report this detail. As he is generally thought to have been a physician, he was perhaps best equipped to understand that extreme anguish can lead to such a physiological phenomenon.
The blood of the agony announces the Cross
Tradition has kept a trace of this episode from the Passion: a stone, known as the Rock of the Agony. The Basilica of Gethsemane was built so that the altar overhangs the sacred rock where Jesus sweat blood, whose falling drops represent his entire life. Christ freely chose to die for the remission of sins, submitting to the will of the Father. This blood of the agony thus foreshadowed the blood of the Cross.
To incarnate this shed blood—because the liturgy is an act of the heart united to the body—the Franciscan friars spread red rose petals on the stone at the beginning of the solemn Mass. This gesture makes Christ’s act come alive for all who see it. At least, it does for the faithful who have the joy of attending this unique Mass.
In the universal Church, the Precious Blood has been celebrated since 1969 alongside the Body of Christ on the solemnity of Corpus Christi. The combined feast offers a way to better unify the Lord’s sacrifice in his body and his blood, delivered and poured out on the cross.
“Blood is life” (cf. Dt 12:23), the Old Testament says. Honoring the Precious Blood is therefore primarily about highlighting the mercy of a God who gives his life. He does this not out of a morbid taste for bloodshed, but because the Son’s sacrifice is the source of divine life from which all people can drink.
This reality is expressed in the collect pronounced before the Rock of the Agony on July 1: “Lord, you who by the precious blood of your Son have redeemed all men, keep in us the work of your mercy, so that by celebrating these holy mysteries we may obtain the fruits of our redemption.”
