Precious blood. The blood of Jesus as an object of Catholic devotion. Apart from the veneration of particles of Christ's blood as relics, devotion to the precious blood was most of all a product of the medieval spirituality of the passion. The period of its greatest cultivation was the 19th cent., when Pope Pius IX proclaimed its feast day as part of the calendar of the whole Church (1859).

precious blood the blood of Jesus, as shed for the redemption of humankind; the phrase (first recorded in Wyclif's translation of the Bible) is frequently used in the names of religious orders and feast days.