There cannot be many issues which preoccupy Christian parents more than how to keep their children engaged with the Faith. This is hardly a new problem; think of St Augustine recalling in The Confessions the patient prayers of his mother, St Monica, which he credits with bringing him back to the Church: “My mother … did not cease to weep for me to you at all her hours of prayer.”
All the same, it is especially acute in a modern world, which sometimes feels as if it has been consciously designed to erode belief in God and to frustrate a well-developed individual interior life. As the French writer Georges Bernanos said: “You understand absolutely nothing about modern civilisation unless you first admit that it is a universal conspiracy against all interior life.” He was writing in 1947, long before televisions were a fixture in most homes (as late as the mid-Fifties only 36 percent of UK homes owned a TV), and when smartphones and the internet were the stuff of science fiction.
Without a robust interior life, it is difficult for people to develop and reflect upon their own ideas, to understand their own vocation and their own personality, and to consider carefully the arguments and data that are presented to them. As Pope Francis said towards the end of last year: “How good it would be if each one of us, following the example of St Joseph, were able to recover this contemplative dimension of life.”
Every parent will have their own solutions to the problem of how to raise children to acknowledge their interior life, who do not need or seek constant stimulation by screens and music, and who can hold their own despite peer pressure.
One way to effect this is to give them beautiful books. Not just morally edifying stories, but volumes that are well-produced and attractive, to fire children’s natural curiosity and wonder. I have recently come across a book that fits this description, thanks to the recommendation of a friend and fellow parent: Enid Chadwick’s My Book Of The Church’s Year. Chadwick was a relatively little-known Anglo-Catholic artist who died in 1987, having lived for many years in Walsingham. My Book Of The Church’s Year was first published in 1948, but the book – reprinted in 2018 by the St Augustine Academy Press – retains a striking freshness and charm. My own children have been entranced, looking through it at Mass and while we say evening prayers.
The format is simple: a month-by-month guide to the principal feasts, seasons and celebrations of the church’s year, all illustrated with Chadwick’s own colour drawings, which are simple but not crude. She was obviously of a conservative bent: January 30, for example, is noted as the memorial of Charles I, “the White King”, who “died to save the English Church”. On April 23, we have St George contending “for Merrie England” by plunging his lance through the neck of the dragon.
On May 3, we are encouraged to commemorate the pious legend of the finding of the True Cross by St Helena (mother of the first Christian emperor Constantine the Great). And the book talks frankly about the devil and hell, in a way that I have not seen in contemporary Christian books for children.
Chadwick clearly understood the delight children take in the macabre and dramatic. Other writers might have baulked at drawing St Vincent next to the gridiron on which he was roasted alive, or including St Pancras the boy martyr. But both are here, alongside St Edmund, Martyr King of East Anglia and sometime Patron of England, who is shown being riddled with arrows by the marauding Danes of the Great Heathen Army. Similarly, Michaelmas, September 29, is marked by a glorious picture of the Archangel Michael and his fellows attacking a dragon – a representation of Satan.
The theology is traditionalist, albeit lightly worn. The chapter on Advent reiterates the need to meditate on the Four Last Things – death, judgement, hell and heaven – in the run-up to Christmas. The “Gesimas” (the three Sundays before Lent that were removed from the revised liturgy after the Second Vatican Council) are included. The section on Easter has a full-page picture of Jesus hanging on the cross which is not graphic exactly, but nevertheless not commonplace in children’s books these days.
Children instinctively seek out heroes – people to emulate and admire (I’m sure I am not the only parent who is frequently asked “who are the goodies in this story?”). They gravitate towards excitement and drama and grandeur. My Book Of The Church’s Year is a fantastic way to satisfy these longings while also immersing them in the great story of our faith. It provides a wonderful stimulus to imagination and to the development of a distinctive inner life that will, one hopes, keep them firmly anchored in the storms of life.
Niall Gooch is a regular Chapter House columnist. He also contributes to Unherd.
This article first appeared in the March 2022 issue of the Catholic Herald. Subscribe today.
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