The Christian family today is under siege. Every father who honestly surveys the world in which he is raising his children knows this. He feels it in his marriage, in the confusion aimed at his sons and daughters, in the hostility of the age toward the very idea of a household ordered to God.

The Church has always taught that the Christian home is a domestic church, a phrase used by St. John Chrysostom in the fourth century and repeated by the Second Vatican Council in our own. A church requires a priest. In the home, that office falls to the father.

"Pater Familias: The Domestic Altar" is the manual for that office. It is organized as a reference work rather than a read-through. Every prayer begins on a new page and is easy to find. Every prayer is given in Latin and English side by side. Each is preceded by a brief historical note so the reader knows what he is praying and who first prayed it.

Eleven chapters:

- The Daily Rule: Morning Offering, Our Father, Hail Mary, Credo, Confiteor, Angelus, Examen, Act of Contrition, Compline.

- Marian Devotions: the Holy Rosary, Salve Regina, Memorare, Sub Tuum Praesidium, the Litany of Loreto, seasonal Marian antiphons, the Chaplet of the Seven Sorrows.

- St. Joseph, patron of fathers and terror of demons: his Litany, the Memorare to St. Joseph, the prayer of Leo XIII, the Thirty Days' Prayer.

- The Sacred Heart: Enthronement in the home, the full Litany, the Act of Reparation, First Fridays and First Saturdays.

- A Father's Blessings: the paternal blessing of each child, the blessing of one's wife, grace before and after meals, blessings for the journey, the sick, a new home, a car, medals, and - new to any manual we know of - a bilingual rite for the hotel room on travel.

- Blessing the Home: walking the perimeter, room-by-room blessings in Latin and English, including the modern rooms no older manual ever addressed (bathroom, hallways, laundry, basement, open spaces, plus a general formula for any unnamed space); the Epiphany door blessing in chalk (20 + C + M + B + 26); the night blessing of the sleeping house.

- Spiritual Combat: the short Leonine Prayer to St. Michael; the long Leonine Exorcism of 1890, with an honest historical note on its restriction by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1985; the Chaplet of St. Michael; Guardian Angel prayers; the Medal of St. Benedict with the account of the attempted poisoning from Gregory the Great; Psalm 91 in full; the Lorica of St. Patrick; the full Renunciation over the Household adapted from the Rituale Romanum.

- Liturgical Seasons: Advent, Christmas, Lent (with the Stations and the Miserere), Easter, Pentecost, the consecration to Christ the King.

- Life and Death: prayer at the birth of a child; baptismal renewal; prayer in serious illness; preparation for Anointing; the Commendation of a Soul (Proficiscere, anima christiana) from the Roman Ritual; De Profundis and Requiem Aeternam; the great Eucharistic hymns of St. Thomas Aquinas.

- A Prayer for Our Time: the book's distinctive offering.

The final chapter contains the bilingual "Prayer for Binding AI," composed for the Christian who works with artificial intelligence and refuses to be mastered by it. To our knowledge, it is the first prayer of its kind. With it is "The Christian User's Preamble" - a short prompt the reader can paste into any large language model at the start of a session, ordering the tool under Christ the King.

Every prayer in this book is drawn from the traditional sources of the Roman Rite or from the long-settled devotional tradition of the Latin Church. Every historical claim is verifiable; every Scripture citation is RSV. The Latin is the Latin the Church actually prayed.

This is not a book to read. It is a book to use. It will become tattered.