Sacred Heart School: Fill & Download for Free

"The aim of the institute is to spread devotion to the Heart of Jesus by means of the practice of spiritual and corporal works of mercy. The sisters conduct homes for the aged and the sick, orphanages, industrial schools, sewing classes; they visit hospitals and prisons, and give religious instruction in their convents, which are open to women desirous of making retreats."Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of JesusSounds about as conservative as you can get - doing the things the early deacons did as described in the New Testament. :)But did I get the right organization? That's a pretty common name:Sisters of the Society Devoted to the Sacred HeartFranciscan Sisters of the Sacred HeartCarmelite Sisters of the Most Sacred Heart of Los AngelesReligious of the Sacred Heart of MaryHome - sacredheartsistersLet me know which organization you are talking about and I can dive deeper. Generally anything with "sacred heart" in the title embraces mainstream, conservative Catholicism.

Yeah, as a teenager. By my little sister.Over my stash of porn mags.We’d just moved over into our new home when I was sixteen (she was thirteen) and we both had our own rooms. This was a big deal since that was a huge 4X up-sizing going from the tiny one-room tenement of my childhood to this three bedroom apartment.She got a brand new bed, study table and all of that in her room while I inherited all of the old furniture. It made sense since I would be going away in a few months to med school in a city six hundred miles away from home, so it made no sense to furnish my room. And I then stashed away all of the lad mags which I had in the storage under my bed.She discovered it one of the afternoons that summer while she was searching for some old bed spread (from our previous home) which was still stored under my bed.And then she threatened to tell Mom. I pleaded of her not to do it, so she said “Fine, I won’t.”Ah, but that wasn’t the end of it.See, I was in charge of tutoring her. And I was a harsh disciplinarian with anyone I taught. So then a couple of times when I was angrily berating her for not doing her studies properly, her patience was at an end and she says defiantly“Stop yelling at me Allen, or I’ll tell Mom about your stash!”What a little rogue!Well the first time she did it, it gave me pause “Wow! This one might actually be serious about her threat.” That took me aback at first but then it got me pretty angry.So then when she tried playing that card again a couple of days later, I called out her bluff and said “Okay, you know what? I don’t need to tutor you anyway. It’s not like I’m getting paid for this or something! Just means I have more time now to sleep or play football.”That surprisingly worked.Actually thinking in retrospect, it shouldn’t have been one bit surprising.For one thing, my little sister and I shared a very deep bond right since our youngest years and were thick as thieves, how we NEVER EVER ratted out on the other. That continues right to this day. Oh we had more fights than we could keep count of but as I used to tease her“Mom has eight siblings, Dad has five. But you and I?We have only each other as brother and sister, so get used to it!”Secondly and rather ironically, it was she who had initially demanded that I tutor her instead of Mom!Because while I was unarguably more stern and even severe as a teacher, I was also very consistent and fair. I didn’t send mixed signals, didn’t get suddenly unpredictable, the rules got laid down clearly right upfront. And as an added bonus, I got results and everyone loves winning or ranking at the top.The funny thing is that once I left home to start med school that year, Mom started to check on her again and she complained while crying about how “Allen was much more fairer than you! He understood me much better but now he is gone!”Later that year she told me how Mom would then discover my stash of lad mags and the sweet devout woman described them as the seed of evil!Hahaha!She was in a dilemma how to dispose them off and eventually decided they needed to be burned.I told my little sis “Tell Mom to give them to the garbage collector, he’ll be delighted!”Didn’t happen, Mom burned them.I swear to god man, my mother has always been very devout but this was straight-up “16th century Puritan mode.”Of course it didn’t help one bit that my bed (and the stash) was right below the prayer altar in my bedroom with those two large portraits of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Holy Mother Mary looking down on it.I can imagine how she must’ve thought“What unspeakable sacrilege! This den of sin right in the line of sight of God!”Truth be told, I would be surprised if it didn’t cross the mind of my sweet mother at least once to ask the church priest to cleanse my room with holy water. But she didn’t say a word of it to me.Apparently she told Dad and he just brushed it off saying something like “That’s fine, boys his age do far worse.”When I visited home the next time, sure enough there was nothing left of the stash, Mom and I just pretended as if the whole thing never happened.

Not much. Not any more.Ireland is a country that remains massively culturally Catholic - just look at the way people express their exasperations. “Jaysus!”. Or, if it’s about something really bad, “Jaysus, Mary and Joseph!”. People in Ireland have formal living rooms in their houses that exist purely for the hypothetical moment when they get a visit from the priest and are never used otherwise.But in terms of Mass attendance and the influence of the clergy on government? Ridiculously minimal. Not since the Catholic Church shot itself in the foot with all its scandals - Bishop Casey and his American family, the Magdalene Laundries, and, of course, all the paedophile priests.I spent a couple of years living in Ireland as a small child while my parents were in between jobs. Mass every Sunday, without fail, and you had to wear your Sunday best. I cringe when I look back at the pictures now. Tea in the rectory afterwards, followed by Sunday School. Pictures of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Pope everywhere (complete with weird, flickering red cross-shaped lightbulbs illuminating them). I got grief from other kids - because I still had an English accent, I was automatically labelled a ‘protestant’. My dad even got some of this too - despite being Irish, he’d lost his accent over the years.That’s me in the red, with some of my cousins, all rocking our Sunday best, circa 1978 or so.Even after we returned to the UK, we’d visit for a month or so every year. This state of affairs with the church continued unabated until probably the late 80s, when you started to see it diminish. It reached its nadir at some point in the mid-90s - just as Ireland was starting to become economically prosperous thanks to the Celtic Tiger, church attendances were dropping, divorce had been legalised, the scandals just kept coming and then, to cap it all off, Father Ted came along and finally put Ireland’s innermost thoughts on their relationship with the Catholic Church on television for all to see.Then, famously, Stephen Fry was asked by (Irish television legend and devout Catholic) Gay Byrne about why he was an atheist. His response resonated.There was even a half-hearted attempt to charge Stephen Fry with blasphemy! That was pretty much Catholicism’s last gasp right there. Ireland had moved on. That blasphemy law has now been stricken off the books too.By the time I returned to Ireland to live in 2007, there was little sign of the parochial, pious Ireland I’d experienced as a kid.Nowadays, Mass attendance is about 5% of what it was. Almost all the priests are Eastern European, African or South American. There is no religious influence in the Irish government anymore. Divorce, gay marriage and abortion are all now legal, and all were passed by referendum. The current Tánaiste (and former Taoiseach) Leo Varadkar is gay, half-Indian and married, and nobody really cares.Welcome to the 21st century, Ireland.