BY Father Mateo Crawley-Boevey, SS.CC.
- To start the New Year in the Spirit of the Sacred Heart.
- Holy Hour for the First Friday of January and the Feast of the Sacred Heart
- Holy Hour for the First Friday of February
- Holy Hour for the First Friday of March and the feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary
- Holy Hour for the First Friday of April
- Holy Hour for the First Friday of May
- Holy Hour for the First Friday of June, specially dedicated to suffering souls
- Holy Hour for the First Friday of July — offered in reparation for public and official outrages against our Lord
- Holy Hour for the First Friday of August — meditation on the seven last words of the Dying Savior
- Holy Hour for the First Friday of September and for Holy Thursday in Lent
- Holy Hour for the First Friday of October
- Holy Hour for the Feast of Christ the King, the last Sunday in October, and also for special occasions, social crises, and threats or attacks against the Divine Kingship of Christ
- Holy Hour for the First Friday of November
- Holy Hour for the First Friday of December — meditation on the five principal requests of the Sacred Heart
Here concludes the set of Monthly Holy Hours (1-14).
Here commences the set of Holy Hours dedicated to special intentions (15-21).
- Holy Hour for the Apostles of the Sacred Heart, through love, suffering, and Eucharist — Especially dedicated to contemplative Communities
- Holy Hour on the Lord’s Passion at Jerusalem, on the altar, and in souls
- Holy Hour on the Holy Thursday Dungeon and the Tabernacle Prison
- Holy Hour to enlighten and comfort souls who suffer
- Holy Hour on the intimate family and social reign of the Sacred Heart
- Holy Hour dedicated to the Friends of the Sacred Heart
- Holy Hour for mothers
Appendix: Enthronement of the Sacred Heart
| National Center of the Enthronement Fathers of the Sacred Hearts WASHINGTON 17, D. C. 1954 |
NIHIL OBSTAT VINCENT DAVIS, SS.CC, Censor Deputatus |
| IMPRIMI POTEST WILLIAM CONDON, SS.CC., Provincialis |
NIHIL OBSTAT JOHN TRACY ELLIS Censor Librorum |
| IMPRIMATUR + PATRICK A. O’BOYLE Archbishop of Washington |
August 4, 1953 |
Foreword
Through the hands of Mary, Mother Immaculate, Queen of America, I offer this little book of twenty-one different Holy Hours as a token of love and reparation to the most Sacred Heart of Jesus, the King enthroned in very many Catholic homes, and the Adorable Friend of parents and children.
With childlike trust in the Divine Promises, I ask in exchange His countless blessings upon that great army of Night Adorers in the many homes scattered throughout this great nation. They are the genuine heirs of Margaret Mary’s vocation—to watch during the night close to her agonizing Master, consoling Him for the coldness of so many careless souls, and offering atonement and penance for prodigals and sinners.
This book is dedicated also to the numerous priests to whom I have had the honor of preaching a Retreat, with the hope that it may help them to cultivate a deep spirit of prayer, and that it may encourage them to preach the Holy Hour, a devotion very dear to many Americans.
With deep appreciation I extend my thanks to the great number of religious Communities who invited me to preach to them, and who have cooperated so earnestly in spreading and organizing the Social Reign of the King of Love in the Catholic home. May God bless their work and help them to develop in homes a great and fervent love for the Mass, an earnest desire to receive Holy Communion frequently, and a tender and enduring love for the Sacred Heart.
More precious than the prayers contained in this book is the official prayer of the “Canon of the Mass.” I humbly ask the Night Adorers to begin their monthly adoration by reading carefully and lovingly the whole Canon and offering it in union with the thousands of priests who, in other distant hemispheres, are at that same moment offering the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
Conquer America, most Sacred Heart of Jesus
Reign in America, Christ the King!
Fr. Mateo Crawley-Boevey, SS. CC.
Foreword
The evident and encouraging success of this little volume of Holy Hours, written long ago on my knees, is indeed extremely suggestive and eloquent.
In fact, these pious and somewhat mystical pages are very far from being a mere literary work or a sacred song. They are meant to be an intimate and fervent supplication, expressing our longing for a greater intimacy with Jesus, offering Him a living atonement for our sins and especially the sins of ingratitude and the easy-going ways of many formalistic friends. This was His own divine complaint made to St. Margaret Mary at Paray-le-Monial, precisely when the Sacred Heart requested the sweet consolation of the Holy Hour.
I prayed them a hundred times before I tried to transfer to these written pages the vibration of my soul.
How then are we to explain their success?
Simply because this prayerful hymn corresponds to a very strong Catholic feeling of the American pious elite that I met and admired during my unforgettable apostolic trip a few years ago. Yes, this hymn has struck the noble cord of very many loving souls in that America that is falsely supposed to be icy, indifferent, especially in matters concerning the supernatural, the inner Christian life. I wrote, speaking symbolically, the words, and American Catholics added the wonderful music, the sacred song.
Many foreigners, if they read this, would probably smile, thinking I am dreaming. But no; this is the touching fact that struck me the most when discovering the heavenly stuff of which the American Catholic elite is made. Ah! I will never forget those enormous crowds that overtired me — very happily indeed — when giving them countless lectures and very often when I prayed these Holy Hours aloud with them in big churches.
This exterior success was certainly not a bonfire, and once more the best proof is the wonderful success of this simple little volume: a success, then, that is both yours and mine, dearest American friends and apostles of the Social Reign of the Sacred Heart in the homes of your dear country.
Stir up this sacred fire everywhere: in parishes, in centers of social apostolate, in religious communities, but most especially light the lamps of Holy Hours in your Catholic homes, in the faithful Bethanies of the Sacred Heart.
Know well, you are in the front ranks of the Night Watchers in the home, you Americans!
This is not a mere title given you through admiration, not even out of gratitude; this is, with your Eucharistic spirit and fervor, really your noblest title. Yes, faithful Americans, valiant, generous sentinels of the night, you are a great Legion, nay, already an imposing army of Night Adorers in the Home!
Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, King of Love, bless and sanctify these Bethanies!
Bless and sanctify and save your dear Americans!
FATHER MATEO CRAWLEY-BOEVEY, SS.CC.
September 1953
Hospital Notre Dame de la Merci
Montreal, Canada
ARCHBISHOP’S HOUSE
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
Feast of the Sacred Heart
June 12, 1953
To appreciate truly the value of this book containing the twenty-one Holy Hours by the saintly Father Mateo, let us go back to the year of 1674, to the convent where St. Margaret Mary is kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament exposed. The Saint says, “I felt drawn within myself by an extraordinary recollection of all my senses and powers. Jesus Christ my adorable Master presented Himself to me all resplendent in glory. His five wounds shone like five suns. From the sacred Humanity issued flames on all sides, but most especially from His adorable Breast which seemed to be a furnace. This was opened and disclosed to me His most lovable Heart, the living source of all these flames.”
Among other things He said, “Every night between Thursday and Friday I will grant you to share in that mortal sadness which I chose to feel in the Garden of Olives. You shall keep me company in the prayer I then offered to my Father. In order to accomplish this you shall arise between eleven o’clock and the midnight hour, and remain prostrate with me during the space of an hour, and so appease the divine anger by imploring mercy for sinners. Thus, too, shall you assuage in some sort the bitterness I felt at that time because of the abandonment by my Apostles, and which led me to reproach them for not having been able to watch with me for the space of one hour.”
How sacred then is this pious exercise of the holy hour! It has its origin in a divine request from the Heart of God. He who alone is, beside Whom no one else is necessary, He the beginning and end, the Alpha and Omega, He the all-perfect, Almighty, all-wise and everlasting, begs the love of His poor little creatures in an hour of prayer. In truth, such a holy hour is most excellent and most helpful to sanctity!
The night adoration in the home is an hour of reparation. Oh! how badly and urgently we need to make reparation! How the Heart of our Divine Lord must be offended and saddened by the sight of so many sins and crimes committed by enemies and friends alike, by nations and by individuals! We can almost hear His bitter complaint coming from a Heart torn by the ingratitude of those He loves,” Why dost thou persecute me? What have I done to thee?”
And it is an hour of reparation made in the home, in the bosom of the family. In writing about the special mission of the family in Catholic
Action, our Holy Father Pope Pius XII said, “In our time the family has a special mission. For it is the spirit of the family that exercises a most powerful influence on the rising generation. As long as the sacred flame of the Faith burns on the domestic hearth and the parents forge and fashion the lives of their children in accordance with this Faith, youth will ever be ready to acknowledge the royal prerogatives of the Redeemer and to oppose those who wish to exclude Him from society or wrongly usurp His rights. When churches are closed, when the image of the Crucified is taken from schools, the family remains the providential, and in a certain sense, the impregnable refuge of Christian life.”
How consoling to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is the reparation made by a family before His enthroned image during the quiet of the night, in the sanctuary of their homes, when so many offenses and insults are being proferred Him in other places.
When Our Blessed Lady said to the children of Fatima, “Many souls go to hell because there is no one to pray for them,” She recalled to mind the need of victim-souls, of souls willing to pray for those who pray not and to do penance for those who practice no restraint of any kind. One has only to look at the hard-faced young girls and our prematurely old young boys who belong to an age that has traded on lust so hard and so long that the classic lines of Pope seem so true: “Sin is a monster of so horrible a mien as to be hated needs only to be seen, but seen too oft, familiar with its face, we first endure, then pity, then embrace.”
The conspicuous absence of purity in our modern world is the reason why the heart grows quickly old in the world’s specious wisdom, and the body is listless before it has quickened to the joys visible only to the clean of heart. Only the pure know how to love, for chastity is something positive and flaming. It is in the sanctity of the home, where the King of Purity, the Immaculate Lamb of God, is enthroned, where He is the Master of hearts, that the blaze of youth will return to modern, hard, young faces and release fragrance down the path of our stale age.
It is the nature of goodness to diffuse itself, and in quiet. It is the nature of evil to defend itself and most often with noise. A holy soul has said, “Noise is waste. Silence is strength.” We learn nowhere so quickly and so profoundly as we learn in quiet.
Our Blessed Lady has left us the legacy of Her quiet. If we are to live as children of God, we must be careful not to substitute a great deal of “doing” for a great lack of “being.” In the quiet of the night hour of adoration in the home we will learn the secrets of the King and gain open entrance to His Heart. And gradually we will understand His love and then cry out not only that we love Him, but in simple wonder say, “Oh! how He loves us!”
+EDWIN V. BYRNE
Archbishop of Santa Fe
Related Resources
Book of the Enthronement of the Sacred Heart of Jesus
Appendix to Enthronement of the Sacred Heart
Night Adoration in the Home, by Father Mateo Crawley-Boevey, SS.CC.
Jesus, King of Love, by Father Mateo Crawley-Boevey, SS.CC.
The Holy Hour by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen
Devotions for Holy Hour (in the Church or Chapel, with the Blessed Sacrament Exposed)
Readings and reflections for the Holy Hour — 52 weekly holy hours for a full year (1917)
Manual of adoration of the most Blessed Sacrament — 619 pp. (1897) ⧉