We are an association of Catholic families raising our children within the fullness of the Roman Catholic Tradition. While Sacred Heart Home Educators (SHHE) welcomes non-members to attend First Friday Masses with the group, SHHE members must be parishioners of a Catholic church in order to preserve the Catholic culture and the reason for the existence of Sacred Heart Home Educators.
HOW WE BEGAN
There was a time when the only known Catholic homeschooler in our area was Chris Moleski. She was contacted by Kelly Beck, who in 1998 began to gather families together, and slowly the numbers grew….The purpose of our little group was to provide loving support for each other as we took on the often difficult and demanding task of educating our children. This remains our foundation. We are a support group; each of us is called to serve other members who are in need.
We are named Sacred Heart Home Educators because it is the love of Jesus flowing from His Sacred Heart that enables us to support and love each other. Consequently, our core group gathering is on the First Friday of each month, the devotion based on a promise made by our Lord Jesus to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque:
I promise you in the excessive Mercy of My Heart that My all-powerful Love will grant to all those who communicate on the First Friday in nine consecutive months the Grace of Final Penitence; they shall not die in My disgrace nor without receiving the Sacraments; My Divine Heart shall be their safe refuge in this last moment.
On the nine First Fridays of our school year we gather for Mass, then for fellowship and to learn more about the beautiful and rich traditions of our Catholic faith. During the first few years, we would gather at a park – but usually at the Mangan house – for times of praying the rosary and extra fellowship during the week. Then a Little Flowers group formed for our girls, again held at the Mangan house. After awhile, our group began to overflow that welcoming home, and we moved our activities to a local parish, thanks to the gracious hospitality of Fr. Foley and the members of the parish. Our group has continued to grow and now offers many more opportunities, including co-op classes and field trips, and through them we have shared many hours of fellowship and support. Our core, however, remains the devotion to the Sacred Heart and to our First Friday gatherings.
During this time of formation and growth, Sacred Heart Home Educators defined and summarized our mission, and we were blessed for a time to have Dr. Tom Neal as our advisor who helped put our mission statement into words:
The Sacred Heart Home Educators is an association of Catholic families in the Tallahassee area whose central commitment is to the formation of our children in every dimension of their life, within the fullness of the Roman Catholic Tradition. Our cooperative organization is meant to foster educational excellence in a community of families bound together by charity, founded on a faith that is solidly in communion with the magisterial authority of the Catholic Church, united in mind and heart with our Holy Father and our local Bishop, and organically linked to the life of our respective parishes. The foundation of this cooperative educational work is the belief that God has entrusted to parents the primary responsibility for forming our children in body, mind and spirit, and that that work is best carried out in a communion of families that are each one a domestic Church.
Homeschoolers are inherently diverse, like a pile of multi-colored tiles – each beautiful on its own but chaotic when thrown together. Then God picks up a beautiful blue tile and places it lovingly into His design. He continues with a deep green tile, then an orange, a turquoise, a purple, a brilliant red, and crowns it all with pure gold. A beautiful mosaic emerges, each tile representing a different family with a unique color, held together by, the love flowing from the Sacred Heart of Jesus. This is a mosaic that somehow miraculously holds more and more colors without the picture becoming distorted as long as the eye stays focused on the Sacred Heart.