Christus vincit! Christus regnat! Christus imperat! The Sacred Heart of Jesus is the King, not only of families, but of individuals, societies, and nations, whether they know it or not.
From One Peter Five
By Loreto Xavier
Journeying into the Sacred Heart of Jesus with Family and Friends
During the month of June 2025, our family continued our journey into the Sacred Heart of our Lord and King. The Saturday after the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a group of twenty family friends gathered in our home chapel for the Enthronement of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary along with the annual renewal of consecration to them. Our Latin Mass priest led the ceremony, with a hearty Indian meal following.
How it all started
Although our family adopted the tradition of Enthronement and Consecration a couple of years prior to COVID-19 as a means of intensifying our own family devotions, we had not fully recognized its connection to Holy Mother Church beset by a crisis. We were yet to connect the dots from a soul in the danger of perdition to a whole society dissolving in a poisonous culture under the watch of ungodly secularists, and the Petrine Church in a state of disarray. We imagined Christendom to be merely mystical if not a matter of history.
With the COVID-19 shutdown of churches, my family, mere cells in the Body of Christ, seemed to have been pushed towards His very Heart so we could survive the Eucharistic deprivation. We found ourselves at a Latin Mass over two hundred miles from home and have assisted at it ever since, now, it is closer home at an hour away.
With the discovery of the Latin Mass, we became more serious about the First Friday Devotion, regular Eucharistic Adoration, Confession, Consecration to the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart, and spiritual reading. This publication provides us with ample guidance for the liturgical year. We imbibed the correct attitude towards hierarchy, authority and obedience, becoming aware of the Rights of God.
With Holy Mass taken away, we looked for priests willing to go underground and desired to have the settings at home for it.
Providentially, we moved to a new home, our first in the United States, with a basement conducive for a home chapel. It was significant to move in on July 8, the Feast of Saints Aquila and Priscilla, the married couple who worked with and “risked their necks” for the Apostle Paul.
In view of the home chapel, we received a special gift of an altar, which was a side altar from a closed Catholic church, on the Feast of Saint Anthony (June 13), the Hammer of Heretics. Pews came in; then altar paraments, sacred vessels, sacred art, Stations of the Cross and more followed.
‘A Little While’
A good priest counseled us that the most excellent use of the home chapel would be to pray the Divine Office in preparation for Holy Mass, the highest prayer of the Church, and keep the traditional devotions. Therefore, in order to remind ourselves both of the wait for the promised return of Christ as well as the necessity and transience of earthly suffering, we called our home chapel ‘A Little While.’
God sent faithful people to pray with us in our home chapel, an answer to prayers following the priest’s counsel. Saturday mornings are for praying the Holy Rosary in Latin for the express intention of the perpetuation of the Ancient Mass.
Second Fridays are for a Holy Hour of Reparation for offenses against the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus.
The Holy Hour of Reparation
The Home Holy Hour of Reparation was inspired by a rather troubling episode. In the early period after finding the Latin Mass, my family was still heavily involved in our Novus Ordo parish. On one occasion, while working on the first ever Eucharistic Procession in the parish, the pastor and the parish secretary questioned the inclusion of the Act of Reparation in the liturgy. Outraged, outnumbered and rendered outcast over this and similar issues, we resolved to adopt in our home chapel as many of those Catholic acts that we saw either canceled or neglected in the local church.
The Home Holy Hour is a solution based on the nightly Adoration recommended by Father Mateo Crawley-Bovey, the Apostle of the Enthronement of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. His idea was meant for large families with young children or elderly members, or those who lived far from the closest church, who otherwise would be unable to make a Holy Hour. Our case seemed to qualify as well—we were those to whom public reparation was denied.
Although there would be no Real Presence, an Altar of Reparation was set up in one corner of the Home Chapel.
The goals of the devotion are repentance for one’s sins, reparation for the offenses against the Most Sacred Heart, restoration of Sacred Tradition, rebuilding of Christendom, and a revival in the number of authentic vocations to the Holy Orders. We would also pray for the Repose of poor souls.
A reflection on the Sacred Heart and its qualities such as from Humility of Heart is read. The Seven Sorrows Rosary helps in a closer walk with Christ through the sorrows of His Blessed Mother. The Hour of Reparation concludes with the chanting of Compline.
The attendance is just a few, but we remain faithful as we wait for more to be drawn together in His Divine Heart.
‘Outside the Camp’
‘Outside the Camp,’ named based on Hebrews 13:13, is a YouTube Channel effort to reach more souls with the treasure of Catholic spirituality, to create awareness of the imperative to make Eucharistic Reparation. Once again, Father Mateo Crawley-Bovey’s writings help direct the course. His book Holy Hours, with twenty-one Holy Hours covering each month of the year apart from meditations for important feasts, moves the heart and soul. Here is the Holy Hour for June.
More recently, I found Power of Reparation by the Jesuit Father Raoul Plus who offers a deeper appreciation of the spiritual dynamics of making reparation.
Learnings with Community
In the beginning of our ‘chapel apostolate’, our zeal to spread the Sacred Heart devotion and share the principle of Christ’s Social Kingship led us to extend an open invitation to nearly thirty families to join our Enthronement and Consecration ceremony in our new home. Several attended and even brought gifts, but only one family chose to espouse the cause of the Sacred Heart by adopting the tradition.
We learned that although things must be left to God’s grace, we must make a way for it to flow. Mother Teresa’s own efforts to spread the devotion of Enthronement of the Sacred Heart image and Consecration of families provided us the idea how to go about it. Listen to her elaborate on it here:
Encouraged by Mother Teresa’s conviction and devotion to the Sacred Heart of our Lord, this year, we identified a family to introduce the devotion to. A beautiful new image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was set up on a special altar at the start of the Novena to the Sacred Heart (June 18).
On the day of the gathering, the priest blessed this new image and presented it to the grateful ‘target’ family. We promised to help them with the Enthronement of the Sacred Heart image in their home.
The priest’s address was about the Sacred Heart as the source of living waters of grace delivered through the Holy Mass and the Priesthood, and the sacrifice of Saint Margaret Clitherow, a laywoman, in using her home and resources to shelter Catholic priests and host the Holy Mass, eventually being martyred for it. The seed is sown. May the living waters from the Divine Victim water it in His time.
A Throne ‘Already’ Prepared
The ceremony concluded with a little procession to the singing of Christus Vincit, from the basement chapel to our living room where the ‘throne’ was prepared. My husband carried the Sacred Heart image while I carried the image of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, with the priest leading us, and our friends following.
A backstory to my project of creating a nobler throne this year: My late Dad was an ardent devotee of the Sacred Heart and a spiritual son of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque. He was fatherless at three years old and was spiritually raised by “many fathers.” Having joined the British-Indian Army in 1944 at fourteen years of age, he went on to have a 41-year military career. He continued to be cared for by several priestly fathers in the towns he would be stationed. Others were religious priests he befriended. These “fathers” included quite a few military chaplains.
His favorite anecdote was of the Indian Army taking over the palace of the king of Jammu and Kashmir (1947) at which time Holy Mass by the military chaplain was arranged in the king’s court, using for a high altar, the king’s royal throne made of 265 lbs of gold.
As a young girl, I believed it to be a tall tale. In more recent years however, I pieced together some evidence of my Dad’s war-time story.
We pray our ‘throne’ dazzles by the gold of our devotion to the Most Sacred Heart of our King, and the King of the Universe as we reaffirm Him as the Head of our household.
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