The Sacred Heart and the Catholic Home

Fr. Garesché opens with a warning that a devotion to the Sacred Heart which stops at tender feeling is not worthy of the name, and the rest of the book is about what the devotion looks like when a whole family practices it. The first chapter is on peace in the home, and its advice is the simplest in the book: when your temper is up and the words are about to come out, look at the picture. Another chapter warns against the house where all the giving-way is left to the mother. The books you allow in are judged the way you would judge a caller at the door. The man who assumes this devotion is meant for women and children gets a chapter of his own, and is answered with the carpenter who made plows and yokes for oxen.

The later chapters carry the same test outside the front door: the poor who live near you, the parish society and its factions, the priest whose personality you find hard to like, the duty to vote, the missions, and the lay apostolate. Along the way the author asks questions a family can actually answer. Does the talk at your table ever turn to the poor? Has anyone in the house gone to see a sick friend? Is there any self-sacrifice going on that is not the mother’s?

There are twenty-six chapters of two to four pages, most of them first printed in the Messenger of the Sacred Heart, and the author suggests them for use during a Holy Hour. None of them are syrupy, and all of them assume the reader is an adult who means it.