FOREWARD
(The little book with a red cloth cover has no date in
it or copyright or even the name of who printed it. The
only date appears in this Forward and the Archbishops
letter that follows the Forward. It is very interesting.)
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!
Father Mateo Crawley-Boevey, SS. CC.
FOREWORD
(September 1953)
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 of 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 Aposotlic 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 (measuring four inches wide by six inches long by one and a half
inches thick and bound in a red paper cover): 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!
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