Passing on Faith to your Children, by Peter Kahn. CTS. £1. 95

Prayer in the Family, by John and Beth Viatori. CTS. £1. 95

Generosity in the Family, by Eldred Willey. CTS. £1. 95

These three booklets are part of a new CTS series entitled ‘Family Matters’. They reflect both that the family does matter if civilisation is to flourish and that there are ways of helping it to do so. Today more than ever, Christian parents need all the support they can get so these booklets, which are short, lively and to the point, are most timely.

Peter Kahn is aware of the heartache of parents whose children have abandoned faith as they grow up. His advice is wise but not prescriptive, emphasising that children need to see the example of a lived faith in their parents: trust, generosity and self-sacrifice. Again, he points out that the bond between parents and children is far more important for passing on faith than the parents’ religious practice.

Love has to underpin the rules: “Simply requiring our children to go to Mass, but doing little to help them to own this choice, will clearly stir up trouble for the future.” Parents have to show their children that their marriage is more than simply “companionship in one’s leisure time” and that family life is not self-centred: on holidays “perhaps a pilgrimage would be more appropriate than lying in the sun” and in welcoming guests to the home care should be taken to show a special “charity” to those in need.

Saints Margaret Clitherow and Thomas More are cited as inspiring models of spousal and parental living. Kahn points out that Christianity, unlike Judaism, does not have formal liturgical celebrations built into family life, so that we have to work harder to demonstrate the link between faith and home.

John and Beth Viatori tackle a theme that some parents find enormously difficult: how to pray as a family in a natural and regular way. Like Kahn they emphasise that children need to witness the example of their parents praying together. Prayer, they add, requires humility; we need to admit to our children that “we, too, are travellers on this journey to greater closeness with God.” Otherwise a certain hypocrisy can creep in, where the requirement to pray is divorced from the inner life.

They also have encouragement for single mothers and wives whose husbands are absent, reminding them that God will always supply the grace necessary to fulfil the tasks they are faced with. A greater challenge, they observe, is when spouses are present but are “unenthusiastic or antagonistic towards prayer”. Here they cite the examples of St Monica and St Rita, both of whom had difficult husbands; these wives’ fidelity to prayer triumphed in the end. Like Kahn they point out that prayer is part of a happy family life, not separate from it; “A family that comes together only for prayers may discover that their communal prayers are characterised by a certain hollowness or loneliness.”

They include many helpful suggestions for prayers and how to fit them round family life, quoting actual families’ customs and practices. One of these examples, where a couple home-schooled eight children, always taking them to daily Mass as well as coping with many house moves, sounds a little daunting but the booklet is an encouragement to look again at one’s own situation. “We must not be deterred by our inability to pray perfectly”, the authors rightly observe. As the Chinese proverb has it – a journey of 1000 miles begins with the first step.

Eldred Willey, brother of Petroc, the director of Maryvale, complements the other two booklets by drawing attention to the ways in which families can live the Gospel requirement of practical charity. He gives an anecdote of a time when he and his wife were literally homeless and lived in a tent; not having a key to open one’s own front door taught him to trust more in the Providence of God. Most readers might not be in such a drastic situation but as Willey says, the Scriptures continually advocate “poverty” rather than “riches.”

He and his brother lived for a period among a Christian community in America, the “Families of St Benedict”, who shared all goods in common, much like the first century Christians. It seems clear that Willey still hankers after this model of family life. Although he cites St Thomas Aquinas on the right to own private property (phew!), I feel he is secretly more sympathetic to St Ambrose who believed that it was a form of “theft”, a reproach to the homeless.

He suggests some practical ideas on budgeting and learning to live more simply as a family and cites the late John Paul II for his belief that we must open ourselves to the merciful love of our fellows. Although we must look after our own family we must also look outward and support charities - but be discerning about which we choose; we should prefer those that meet spiritual as well as material needs. Willey and his family now live on a council estate in Norwich; from his graphic description of it, it sounds like a “sink estate”, so much a feature of modern Britain. He does not say whether this is from choice or necessity; yet it is definitely heroic as he struggles to bring Gospel values to an environment where gangs and broken windows are commonplace.

These three booklets should not be read separately. They are part of a new and imaginative exercise by CTS to help Christian families, as John Paul II said, “Become what you are”. I strongly recommend them, particularly to those who are just starting down this road and need practical help and encouragement.

The Mass, illustrated for children by Susan Bateman. Second Spring Books. £5.

This booklet is that very rare thing: a good children’s book about the Mass. Most offerings on this theme over-simplify what happens and underestimate children’s intelligence. This does neither. The careful, sensitive line drawings avoid a further error: irreverent, comic-cut illustrations that many catechists employ, hoping to liven up the subject. They are intended to be coloured in, but not by the podgy palms of pre-schoolers, enthusiastically armed with wax crayons.

The book is aimed at 6-10 year-olds who can ponder and read for themselves and who enjoy being painstaking with felt tips. Much care has been taken with the typography and one senses that a child who reads it slowly at Mass, guided through each section by the prayers and pictures, will achieve a real and permanent understanding of the Mass’s mystery and meaning, appropriate to his/her level.

For their parents, too, anxious to bring their children up in the faith they love but unable through lack of confidence or a lack in their own catechesis to explain what the Mass is about, the book will be a godsend; it will teach them even as it teaches their children.

The Challenge of Bernadette, by Hugh Ross Williamson. Gracewing. £7. 99

This slim and stimulating book, first published in 1958, the centenary of the apparitions at Lourdes, can be read at a sitting. Hugh Ross Williamson is not writing a biography; what interests him is the answer to three questions: why Lourdes, why Bernadette, why 1958? His responses handle many different themes deftly and with concision.

Lourdes, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, had long been the locus for historic clashes between Christianity and other forces so Our Lady’s choice of place was not random. It is also notable that in her approved apparitions her choice of seers has not been (for instance) journalists and book reviewers but those of a humbler calling – peasants and shepherds. Bernadette, who had known poverty and suffering and who was, although uneducated, spiritually mature beyond her 14 years seems in retrospect an ideal choice: humble, level-headed yet uncorrupted by the world.

All those who examined her commented on her modesty and self-possession. When asked in 1870 at the onset of the Franco-Prussian War if she feared the Prussians’ advance, Bernadette replied she was only afraid of one thing: bad Catholics. Those who undermined the Church from within could, she knew, do greater damage than that inflicted by external enemies.

The author notes that the timing of the first apparition, 11 February 1958, was just a fortnight after Charles Darwin had delivered his seminal paper that was to become The Origin of Species. Our Lady’s acknowledgement of her identity as the Immaculate Conception, which had been proclaimed a dogma in 1854, could not have delivered a more profound or devastating response to the rationalism and materialism of the age.

Ross Williamson is also keen to rehabilitate the personage of Mother Vauzou, the novice-mistress at the Nevers convent who in the 1958 film, The Song of Bernadette, is portrayed as both cruel and warped. The saint herself stated “I owe her much gratitude for the good she did my soul” and as the author points out, Mother Vauzou recognised both a strong emotional kinship with Bernadette and that mortification of the heart required this kinship to be put aside.

Ross Williamson, who died in 1978, wrote extensively on historical and literary, as well as religious subjects. He was a pioneer in studies of Shakespeare’s Catholic background and influences. It is good that his robust, wide-ranging intelligence is being introduced to a new readership.

The Seven Sacraments, by Stratford Caldecott. Crossroad. £9. 99

It would be a serious mistake to exclaim at this title “Not another book on the sacraments!” for Caldecott’s work is both original in its treatment and ambitious in its scope. Only 133 pages, it is a profoundly prayerful meditation on the sacraments from the point of view of Christian gnosis; as such, it throws down a gentle but firm gauntlet to neo-gnostics who believe they are in possession of a secret wisdom superior to orthodoxy.

Subtitled “Entering the mysteries of God”, the book reminds us that conversion is more truly about inner transformation than rules of behaviour. We are transformed (rather slowly it has to be admitted, for “the process of dying and being reborn is always a struggle”) by sacramental grace; and this seven-fold grace can itself be linked to other scriptural patterns of seven. Indeed, Caldecott suggests that there is a “genetic code” in Christianity that derives from the seven-day structure of creation in Genesis.

His inspiration for this book comes largely from the writings of the mystic Adrienne von Speyr, who found a symbolic link between Christ’s seven last words on the Cross and the seven sacraments. Caldecott describes his own book as “a rather audacious extension of hers”, whereby he also ponders a correspondence between the sacraments and the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, the seven archetypal miracles in the Gospel of St John and the seven sections of the Mass.

This necessarily brief synopsis might suggest the book teeters on the edge of occult numerology, but this is far from the case. Nor is it a flight into intellectual elitism, like that fictionalised in Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. It is an eloquent plea for converts - and those outside Christianity - to recognise that “the Christian life is essentially creative” and to discover “the beauty that unites logic with life and truth with goodness.”

I recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone whose faith has settled into a rather arid, rule-bound routine - and to all who haunt the forlorn, benighted occult books on the “spirituality” shelves of their local bookshops.

© 2006 Francis Phillips

Theotokos Catholic Books - Book Reviews Section - www.theotokos.org.uk