Friends, welcome to Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. Word on Fire is an

apostolate dedicated to the mission of evangelization using media both old and

new to share the faith on every continent and to facilitate an encounter with

Christ and His Church. The efforts of Word on Fire engage the culture and bring

the transformative power of God's Word where it is most needed. Today we invite

you to join Bishop Robert Barron as he preaches the gospel and shares the

warmth and light of Christ with each one of us.

Peace be with you. Friends, we come today to this wonderful feast of Corpus

Christy, the body of Christ. We know the full title of this feast is the

solemnity of the body and the blood of Christ. I wonder times if we put a

hyperstress on the body of the Lord and we don't talk enough about His blood.

And I'll tell you the readings for today are practically dripping in blood.

So I want to spend whole time with this great motif. You know they say if we

went back in a time machine to the ancient world, we'd be surprised by many

things but one thing we'd be particularly surprised by was the prevalence of

animal sacrifice. Now maybe some who live in a rural setting have an experience of

an animal being put to death but probably most of us in the Western world have

little experience of that. We'd probably be a little bit shocked by seeing an

animal slaughtered before us but it was a very commonplace thing in the ancient

world especially in a religious context. The offering of a bloody sacrifice to

the gods or to God was just part and parcel of ancient religious life and it

runs right through the scriptures including and especially the scriptures

...