Saturday, June 30, 2012

Feast of the Most Precious Blood, July 1



In the 1962 Roman Calendar (but not the 1962 Benedictine calendar), July 1 marks the Feast of the Most Precious Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, a first class feast, so with I Vespers of the feast.

The feast has its origins in the sixteenth century, but was extended to the universal Church in 1849, to recognition of the liberation of Rome.

It was originally always celebrated on the first Sunday in July; Pope St Pius X shifted it to July 1 as part of his clean out of feasts fixed for Sundays. 

Pope John XXIII went so far as to write an encyclical promoting devotion to the feast in 1960, and as a particularly liturgical devotion, one might have expected to escape the wreckovaters, but alas, it was abolished altogether in the 1969 calendar on the grounds that it duplicated other Solemnities (though it still exists as a votive mass).  One can't help suspecting, however, that the real reason those 1960s revolutionaries baulked at it was the perceived 'triumphalism' in its association with the return to the Papal States to their proper ruler...

It was in the older Benedictine calendar, so those with an Antiphonale Monasticum (or older form of the Breviary) will find the texts there.  Others wishing to say the Office of the feast could utilise the antiphons and proper texts from the Divinum Officium website, and apply them to the Sunday festal psalms.

You might want also to consider saying the litany of the Most Precious Blood, traditionally said each day during July.

Saturday, June 2, 2012

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Thursday, May 10, 2012

SS Gordian and Epimachis (May 10)


From the martyrology:

"At Rome, on the Via Latina, the birthday of the holy martyrs Gordian and Epimachus. In the time of Julian the Apostate, the former was a long time scourged and finally beheaded for confessing the name of Christ. He was buried at night by the Christians, in a crypt to which, shortly before, the remains of the blessed martyr Epimachus had been transferred from Alexandria, where he had been martyred for the faith of Christ on the 12th of December."


Wednesday, May 9, 2012

St Gregory Nazianzen (May 9)


From the martyrology:

At Nazianzum, the birthday of St. Gregory, bishop, confessor, and doctor of the Church, surnamed the Theologian because of his remarkable knowledge of divinity. At Constantinople, he restored the Catholic faith which was fast waning, and repressed the rising heresies.