Edward Sri, founder of a fellowship for Catholic university students and professor of theology at the Augustine Institute, has written Into His Likeness (Ignatius Press, 160pp, £13). It is a frank, personal and challenging short book, inviting readers to “Be transformed as a disciple of Christ” (his subtitle).
Addressing all those people who fulfil their Sunday obligation as a matter of course but do not realise this is the least they are called by Christ to do, Sri emphasises that “Being a Catholic is not a stagnant reality.” We are not born to be “a normal Christian”. Rather, we are called personally and just as dramatically as St Matthew in the Gospel, as imagined by Caravaggio in his famously haunting depiction.
Sri describes a memorable three-month period when, as a young man, he lived with Fr John Hardon SJ, the saintly American Jesuit whose Cause for canonisation is underway. Hardon’s daily timetable remains in his memory: he rose before dawn to pray and celebrate Mass; he prayed unceasingly throughout the day; he loved going to Confession and prepared for his classes in the house chapel. Above all, he was patient and gentle – especially with his many enemies – and radiated a love for Christ.
The author’s underlying appeal is for readers to recognise that “Right now, there’s a battle going on for your mind – for how you look at reality.” Are we unknowingly worldly, with religion merely “bolted on” to our lives, or do we grasp that the deepest part of the universe is “spiritual reality”, the state of our souls?
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Roy Peachey, a parent, teacher and home educator, has written Out of the Classroom and into the World: How to Transform Catholic Education (Second Spring Books, 194pp, £14.50). It is a concise, impassioned reflection on what true Catholic education should be about: helping children, in the words of Benedict XVI, to become saints.
How do parents fulfil this seemingly daunting task? By both recognising their need to deepen their own faith and realising that they are their children’s primary educators. Schools are there to support them in this supremely important task, not the other way around.
In Peachey’s view, Catholic schools should not “bolt on” RE lessons to the normal school syllabus as this only emphasises the separation of faith from life. They should be imbued with the conviction that students are “created to know, love and serve God … not to get into college and find a well-paid job”. Academic excellence still finds its place, but ideally within smaller schools and classes, where individual children matter, prayer is fostered, and the relationship between teacher and pupil is seen as crucial to the learning process.
For the author, “The end of education is not knowledge but wisdom.” All Catholic parents, home educators or not, will benefit from Peachey’s own wisdom.
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The author of Inspiration from the Saints (Angelico Press, 254pp, £12.50), Maolsheachlann O’Ceallaigh, is a journalist living and working in Dublin. He has written an idiosyncratic account of the lives of certain saints, not all of them well-known. Unusually, he moved from a fixation on the genre of horror films to a realisation that sanctity is just as “otherworldly” as horror, yet much more inspiring. It helped him understand that “my deepest hunger was for the sacred – for God”.
O’Ceallaigh’s method of grouping saints is to see them in the light of their most significant characteristics. Thus there are chapters on “Losers”, “Sinners” and “Mirth”, as well as on more obvious themes such as “Prayer” and “Evangelisation”.
He includes Blessed Bartolo Longo, a former Satanist; Charles de Foucauld, who, having led a rackety life, declared: “As soon as I came to believe there was a God, I understood that I could not do otherwise than live only for him”; and St Maximilian Kolbe, whose extraordinary achievements prior to his death in Auschwitz led the author to reflect on the urgency attendant on our lives: “Each of us has only one lifetime to say ‘yes’ to Christ.”
He includes GK Chesterton in his Appendix, reminding us that this prolific author and most lovable man only went to Mass on Sundays and appears to have had no excessive devotions. Yet his writings (his true apostolate) brought many people into the Church.
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In Further Up and Further In: Understanding Narnia (TAN Books, 216pp, £20), Joseph Pearce, biographer of several eminent 20th-century Catholics, draws out the underlying Christian themes in The Chronicles of Narnia, which still exert their enchantment over children.
Putting the series in the order that CS Lewis wanted them to be read – though not in the order in which they were published – Pearce starts with The Magician’s Nephew, followed by The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, The Horse and His Boy, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair. He concludes with The Last Battle.
Along the way Pearce discusses the significance of fairy tales for the developing imagination, GK Chesterton’s defence of the importance of childlike awe, Tolkien’s influence on Lewis and Philip Pullman’s misreading of the fables of Narnia.
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