At Last! Cor Jesu Sacratissimum – the Book

Well, it took so many, many years to finally arrive – eight years, to be precise, of blood, sweat and tears from 2008 to 2016 – and composed whilst living across four countries: France, Spain, England and now Ireland.

But now it is finally due in the next week or so.

I speak of my ‘new’ book Cor Jesu Sacratissimum: From Secularism and the New Age to Christendom Renewed (henceforth: CJS) most of which was written before my ‘first’ book The Gentle Traditionalist (TGT).

Indeed, The Gentle Traditionalist was such a different experience. I wrote it in ten weeks last spring, with it erupting out of me after CJS was basically complete.

But my illustrious publisher Angelico Press thought it best to go forward with TGT first and so CJS was delayed and also polished just that little bit further.

Unsurprisingly, we will be saying more of CJS in the next days. But today, I will not give you, dear Reader, much more than the cover above, the book description and few remarks regarding that description.

Now, CJS is a big, complex book – 464 pages – and it is virtually impossible to sum up such a big book in a few lines.

Nonetheless, I am very gratified by the words Angelico Press and I have come up with.

Here they are:

The Cor Jesu Sacratissimum IS the Heart of the World, the beating Heart of the Church, yet that truth becomes ever more obscured in our modern age.

This book addresses many of the principal obscuring forces in our time: the New Age movement, globalized secular culture born of the Enlightenment, the often-hidden legacy of Protestantism in the Anglo-American world, and, perhaps most baneful of all, the liberal excesses in the Church Herself, unleashed after Vatican II.

It details also the personal journey of a Catholic convert, once submerged in the New Age, who found liberation in Catholic Tradition.

Drawing upon his intimate knowledge of all things New Age, Roger Buck first unveils its Eastern origins in an explicit way that goes far beyond what most Christian and Catholic books ever say on the subject, and then confronts head-on the apparent death of Christianity in the West.

For, increasingly, he argues, Westerners face a tragic choice between either Secularism or a vague post-Christian New Age spirituality that subtly and insidiously depersonalizes what is truly human.

The only answer, he contends, entails restoring not only Catholic culture, but also the spirituality of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, born in France at the cusp of modernity.

The book owes an unusual debt to the Catholic thinkers Valentin Tomberg and Hilaire Belloc, as well as the author’s own experience of living in France and Ireland—all of which are explored in this very personal cry from the heart: a cry for Christendom renewed.

A final comment, for now.

Probably the most key phrase here is this: ‘a tragic choice between either Secularism or a vague post-Christian New Age spirituality that subtly and insidiously depersonalizes what is truly human.’

This is the controversial core of the book.

It is what feels most urgent to me.

Post-Vatican II ‘Protestantised’ excesses, the New Age movement, globalised secular and liberal values – they are all leading to THIS.

They are robbing people of Christ, as they robbed me for many, many years.

Here is why the book is a cry from my heart.

Foreword for Monarchy by Roger Buck

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