The Man of God

The Man of God is a prayer book that assumes you have duties: a wife or the hope of one, children or parents, work, a parish, and a death to get ready for. Two Dominican priests, Fr. Charles Jerome Callan and Fr. John Ambrose McHugh, put it together for Catholic men in 1928, and before it reaches a single prayer it gives several pages of plain counsel. A young man is told never to keep company with a girl he has no intention of marrying, and not to marry until he can support a wife. A husband reads that if he and his wife are properly mated, cooperation takes the place of bossing. A father who neglects Mass is warned never to wonder when his sons do likewise. An old man is told that old people often turn selfish and disagreeable. Then comes a rule of life in ten numbered points.

After that it is a working prayer book. The whole Mass is here in Latin and English side by side, with a plainer set of prayers for following it, and the server’s responses at the back. Confession gets a complete examination of conscience and the words to say once you are in the confessional. There are Communion prayers, Benediction, the litanies, the rosary, the Stations, a prayer for success in work, and prayers for the dying that tell you what to set out in the sick-room. A husband’s prayer, a father’s prayer, and a son’s prayer, each a few lines long, sit near the end.

It is a short book that speaks to a grown man, and the right one to hand a son at his confirmation or a husband who has never had a prayer book of his own.