Communicating Faith

5. Sacramental Preparation: Uneasy Partnership

66 5 Sacramental Preparation Uneasy Partnership Peter McGrail Most education goes on quietly and out of the general gaze; while its contours may be fiercely disputed among practitioners, for the main part it occupies a relatively low profile in public discourse at the local level. However , within the Roman Catholic (henceforth, “Catholic”) community, there is one dimension of specifically religious education that of its nature annually breaks onto the highly public liturgical stage and has been and continues to be a source of concern, debate, and, at the local level, even of conflict. This dimension is the preparation of children for the sacraments—specifically first confession, First Communion, and confirmation. While a considerable amount has been written on catechetical theory , and a good many catechetical resources have been produced, there has been relatively little detailed work done on how such catechetical sacramental material plays out in the real world. To fully engage with these realities an ethnographic approach is required. Perhaps surprisingly, contemporary ethnography into the preparation for and celebration of school-age sacraments has been limited. With regard to the major ritual enacted during Sacramental Preparation 67 the primary-school stage, First Communion, only two published full-scale studies are currently available—those of Susan Ridgely-Bales in the United States1 and my own work from England.2 There are a few published articlelength ethnographic accounts of First Communion3 and a similarly small number of unpublished Ph.D. theses.4 This gap is surprising, given the raised profile that the event enjoys. Therefore, while this chapter focuses on my own fieldwork in England and Wales, it is offered as a stimulus to questions that generally are still waiting to be answered elsewhere. For example, the educational framework in England and Wales may differ considerably from that experienced by most American children—but one may ask the extent to which the underlying tensions that I have identified can also be found in some American settings. I begin by mapping the broad historic contours of school-based sacramental preparation in England and Wales. I then examine in closer detail the educational and theological positions that underpinned the formal embracing of a parish—rather than a school-based catechetical process. Finally I shall examine the degree to which that new formal position is actualized on the ground through my own ethnography of the study of the processes for the preparation and celebration of First Communion in four parishes within the Archdiocese of Liverpool, England.5 Twentieth-Century Background To foreign educationalists visiting England and Wales, the extensive provision at all levels of Catholic schools that attract government funding is remarkable . This network of schools has its roots in the instinctive desire of the nineteenth-century Catholic community for a separate system of Cath1 . Susan Ridgely Bales, When I Was a Child: Childrens’ Perceptions of First Communion (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 2. Peter McGrail, First Communion: Ritual, Church and Popular Religious Identity (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007). 3. For example, Michael J. McCallion, David R. Maines, and Steven W. Wolfel, “Policy as Practice: First Holy Communion in a Contested Situation,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 25, no. 3 (1963): 300–26; Anne Lodge, “First Communion in Carnduffy: A Religious and Secular Rite of Passage,” Irish Educational Studies 18 (Spring 1999): 210–20. 4. E.g., Carlos Alberto Tozzi, Parent and Family Religious Education: A Case Study Based on an Ecological Theory of Human Development (Ph.D. diss., Fordham University, 1994); Catherine E. Williamson, “Passing on the Faith: The Importance of Parish-Based Catechesis” (Ph.D. diss., University of Brighton, England, 1999). 5. McGrail, First Communion, 87–167. 68 Peter McGrail olic schools to safeguard the integrity of that faith community and to prevent “leakage” in the face of a frequently hostile sectarian society. Within that perspective, schools functioned not only as educational, but also as catechetical , centers, and preparation for the reception of the sacraments traditionally took place within the religious education class. Thus, the Graduated Instruction for Holy Communion approved by the English and Welsh bishops in 1911, in the wake of the 1910 decree Quam Singulari on early First Communion, was incorporated into diocesan school syllabuses of religious instruction.6 The trend continued across the century: the 1943 Syllabus of Religious Instruction authorized for schools in the Archdiocese of Liverpool offers a very detailed list of the material that teachers were expected to deliver to their pupils...