The other devotions are all means of facilitating Catholic piety, but this is its base, its support and its essence.
St. Gaspar del Bufalo
St. Gaspar del Bufalo was imprisoned during the Napoleanic occupation of Italy. This occupation was about much more than a military feat. The French occupiers were infected with a secular bloodlust that regarded the Church as an enemy to social progress. Industrialization and Enlightenment thinking were beginning to come together in ways that would anticipate the heartless ideological wars of the 20th Century. Some in Italy welcomed this harsh attitude even if it meant the imprisonment and persecution of priests like Gaspar. The priest, however, stayed focused on his sacred purpose. As soon as the French left and he was released, he began the task of the re-evangelization of Italy, and to accomplish this re-evangelization, he promoted devotion to the blood of Jesus.
This inspiration built on the devotion of Saint Paul of the Cross who in the generation just before his own founded a religious community dedicated to the passion of the Lord. In both cases, devotion to the passion and to the blood of Jesus evoked a renewal of mental prayer in the Church. It seems that the love revealed by pondering Christ Crucified silences the soul and inclines it to linger with the Lord in gratitude. St. Paul of the Cross believed that spending time considering the radical extent Christ went to bear away our hostility towards Him, to bear away our sins, allows the Lord to speak to the soul words of love that it needs to hear.
When you are alone in your room, take your crucifix, kiss its five wounds reverently, tell it to preach to you a little sermon, and then listen to the words of eternal life that it speaks to your heart; listen to the pleading of the thorns, the nails, the precious Blood. Oh, what an eloquent sermon!
St. Paul of the Cross
St. Paul of the Cross and St. Gaspar were not proposing anything that did not already live in the Catholic Tradition. But they brought out the wisdom of the great mystics who came before them, including St. Thomas Aquinas in his Adoro Te Devote, This Blood that but one drop of has the power to win all the world forgiveness of its world of sin.
It was John XXIII who put all of this together in a letter that promoted devotion to the precious Blood of Christ. He explained,
Unlimited is the effectiveness of the God-Man’s Blood — just as unlimited as the love that impelled him to pour it out for us, first at his circumcision eight days after birth, and more profusely later on in his agony in the garden, in his scourging and crowning with thorns, in his climb to Calvary and crucifixion, and finally from out that great wide wound in his side which symbolizes the divine Blood cascading down into all the Church’s sacraments. Such surpassing love suggests, nay demands, that everyone reborn in the torrents of that Blood adore it with grateful love.
There are prayers for the souls in purgatory that evoke the precious Blood, O Lord God omnipotent, I ask You by the Precious Blood which Your divine Son, Jesus, shed in cruel scourging, deliver the souls in purgatory, and among them all, especially that soul which is nearest to its entrance into Your glory, that it may soon praise You and bless You forever. Amen.
To this prayer, I would add just one more petition:
Let me add Lord Jesus a cry of the heart for the poor soul most in need of healing - the one farthest from glory, the poorest of the poor souls - the one who others have forgotten to pray for. If one drop is enough to cleanse him of sin, then pour out your precious blood on this soul until your very life lifts him to the bosom of the Father. Amen.
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