Father Steve Gallagher is intimately familiar with the daunting challenges that confront our law enforcement officials daily.
His grandfather, James R. Gallagher, was the sheriff of Clallam County in Washington State and retired as captain of the Port Angeles Police Department. His uncle, Deputy Sheriff Gilbert Gallagher, was killed in the line of duty on Easter Sunday, 1949.
And before he was ordained a Catholic priest, Father Gallagher served as a police officer for 30 years in Washington State. You can learn about his journey to the priesthood here.
Fr. Gallagher originally drafted the prayer devotional during the 1990’s. However, the unfinished project stayed on the “back burner” until recent years while he focused on more pressing matters such as his seminary studies and recovering from a series of health setbacks — a bout with cancer and a heart attack in 2012 right after his ordination.
The prayer devotional book includes daily prayers ‘At the Beginning of Your Shift’ and ‘At the End of Your Shift’, prayers for courage, for mercy, for healing, for assistance, and for blessings upon all whom our ‘Men and Women in Blue’ serve, including the homeless, those in physical danger, for the lonely, and even for our enemies.
In this timely devotional, Father Gallagher has assembled a powerful collection of antiphons and canticles; readings from the Old and New Testaments; prayers and reflections written by the saints and by Father Gallagher himself; and more — all of which are designed to help renew our courageous police officers’ minds, nourish their spirits, and protect them from harm.
Formatted to fit a busy police officer’s daily schedule
A Police Officer’s Devotional is thoughtfully organized to be user-friendly, practical, and above all, helpful. There are inspiring readings and prayers to begin and end each shift for every day of the week, as well as for holidays. There are also sections dedicated to different special assignments, including for patrol officers, traffic officers, detectives, S.W.A.T. officers, juvenile officers, police administrators, and others.
Help us get copies of Father Gallagher’s inspiring daily devotional into our police officers’ hands NOW. Get a copy for a police officer in your town!
We have steep volume discounts to enable broad distribution of this timely devotional.
What if you don’t personally know a police officer? Here are some ideas:
- Order some for yourself & friends to join in prayer (we’ll enclose a prayer card to post on your fridge, too)
- Ask you parish priest for police officers in your parish
- Order some and have us distribute them for you (just add a note to your order–we’ll refund S&H and distribute on your behalf)
The men and women who put their lives on the line for us every day are facing unprecedented stresses and challenges. Now more than ever, they need our concrete support and our prayers.
Using their copy of A Police Officer’s Devotional, they can “put on the full armor of God” every day as they can go out into our streets and neighborhoods and combat the forces of irrationality, racism, violence, and hopelessness with the “weapons” of compassion, faith, hope, and self-sacrificing love.
From Ephesians 6: [P]ut on the armor of God, that you may be able to resist… and, having done everything, to hold your ground. So stand fast with your loins girded in truth, clothed with righteousness as a breastplate, and your feet shod in readiness for the gospel of peace. In all circumstances, hold faith as a shield, to quench all [the] flaming arrows of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.
Ken Davison created Glory Stories, which became a weekly radio series heard globally on the Ave Maria Satellite Radio Network and EWTN’s radio network, WEWN. In 2007, he and his wife, Kerri, founded Holy Heroes–and their children stepped in to help shortly thereafter to create the online “Adventures” for Advent, Lent, Spiritual Adoption, and Marian Consecration.