Book Review: Catholic Household Blessings & Prayers

Catholic Household Blessings & Prayers is an attractive hardbound prayer book that would be a lovely addition to the bookshelf of any Catholic home.  The book is published by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and contains a wealth of prayers and blessings for just about every state of being.  The book contains a dedication page making it suitable for gift giving.  It would be a nice gift for new parents, recent converts or even a newly married couple.

The book is presented in ten parts.  There is a section on basic prayers which has prayers that every Catholic should know.  The "essential prayers" in this section are presented in both english and latin.  Part II of this book focuses on daily prayers with the Liturgy of the Hours and offers prayers from waking to bedtime.  Part III is focused on helping you live out the days and seasons of the liturgical year.  While this book is aligned with the ordinary calendar, it does make mention of rogation and ember days which I previously have only ever seen mentioned in pre-Vatican II books.  Part IV contains family prayers that range from birth to death with a focus on major life events such as the birth or adoption of a child.  Part V includes various prayers for Catholic living.  In part VI you'll find prayers for the church and the world.  A host of litanies can be found in part VII.  The focus of part VIII is God's word in times of need.  Readers will find scripture for a range of topics in this section.  In part IX you'll find two different approaches to the Stations of the Cross.  There's the traditional stations of the cross and a scripture-based stations of the cross.  Lastly, there is a calendar of the saints.

Overall, I think this is a nicely done volume that would be worth having on hand in your home.  I take issue with one thing that this book is lacking.  The book would be so much better if it listed indulgenced prayers.  I'm actually a bit perplexed as to why many modern day prayer books seem to ignore indulgences.  From what I understand after having read through my copy of The Handbook of Indulgences, you need to have at least a general intention to obtain an indulgence when praying or performing a particular devotion in order to obtain it, so I cannot fathom why this topic is virtually ignored in most prayer books today.  In fact, there isn't even a single mention of indulgences of any sort in this book.

I was provided with a copy of this book by Tiber River in exchange for my honest review.

I wrote this review of Catholic Household Blessings & Prayers for the free Catholic Book review program, created by Aquinas and More Catholic Goods. Aquinas and More is the largest on-line Catholic bookstore. I receive free product samples as compensation for writing reviews for Tiber River.