Cor Jesu Sacratissimum: From Secularism and the New Age to Christendom Renewed

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’s mission is precisely to disclose and address those obscuring forces: 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 a 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 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 personal cry from the heart: a cry for Christendom renewed.

“In this elegant feast of a book, Roger Buck—master of the blog of the same name—expertly skewers the modern world, with its twin horrors of arrogant materialism and non-specific ‘spirituality.’ But he does this without a drop of malice in his compassionate soul. Rather, he strives to tear away the choking illusions of modernity, to reveal the bright, shining love and truth at the center of the universe—symbolised by the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and incarnate in the Catholic Church and her Sacraments. Buck cuttingly diagnoses, but lovingly prescribes.”— CHARLES COULOMBE, author of Puritan’s Empire and Everyman Today Call Rome

“Roger Buck goes to the heart of the problem paralyzing our broken-hearted world. As a seeker after truth, he first thought he could find it in the New Age movement, but finally discovered it in the goodness and beauty of the Catholic Church, moving beyond the spirit of the age to the Spirit who moves all ages.”—JOSEPH PEARCE, author of Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G. K. Chesterton

“In Cor Jesu Sacratissimum, Roger Buck traces his journey—geographical, metaphorical, and mystical—from New Age adventurer to Catholic traditionalist, from spiritual dilettante to repentant wayfarer, from lost to found. Along the way we are treated to spiritually rich meditations on politics, economics, social movements, modernity, the spiritual dangers of our age, and the eternal mysterium of the Church. But Roger Buck does not merely describe his own journey. No, he holds our times up to a mirror and shows us our own faces. And with great clarity.”—MICHAEL MARTIN, author of The Submerged Reality: Sophiology and the Turn to a Poetic Metaphysics

“Roger Buck has done a great service to the Church by his careful and well-informed examination—both charitable and unflinching— of the New Age, and his discussion of wider issues in the Church from the perspective of a former New Age initiate. Buck shows that the New Age is an attempt, however flawed, to escape the materialism of modernity, and that it is Catholicism in its traditional forms—with its mystery and ritual, its sacramantals, art, and pious practices—that can best reveal the immense reality of the suffering and love for all mankind of Christ’s Sacred Heart to those trapped in the false mysteries of the New Age.”—JOSEPH SHAW, Chairman of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales