Booklet Review: The Mass Explained for Kids

The Mass Explained for Kids is my latest Catholic Company review item, and as usual it is a good one.  I’ll cut to the chase: This is an excellent tool for anyone who wants to make sense of the Mass.

What it is: A short, affordable booklet from Pauline Press that walks through the new translation of the Mass.  Even-numbered pages contain the text of the Mass and all the necessary instructions (sit, stand, kneel, rise, bow, beat chest, shut up priest says . . ., etc.).  On the facing page are notes explaining what is happening, what difficult vocabulary words mean,  and all kinds of other useful information.

Why I like it:

1. I’m always looking for a good Missal to give to non-Catholic grown-ups who come to Mass, that makes it easy to follow along.  This one wouldn’t stand out as a kid’s book, if you put a sticker over the “for kids” on the cover.  At $1.95 retail, you can afford to send them home with your guests as souvenirs.  It would be pretty easy to put post-it notes at key places when your guest needs to pick up the hymnal.
2. The explanations are great.  Tons of good info.  But the format makes it easy to read as much as your brain can take, and leave the rest for another day.
3. There are definitions or explanations for all the new words showing up with the new translation (“consubstantial”, “incarnate”, etc.).  In addition, all the changes are in bold face.

Who is it for?  People who can read pretty well.   Other than the cover art, there are no pictures.  All the explanations are written clearly, and my very average-reading 4th grader says she had no difficulty understanding them.  But you do need to be ready to tackle big words and gather useful information from your reading.    Words like “epiclesis” and “anamnesis” have pronunciations (“ep-ih-CLEE-sis” and “an-am-NEE-sis”).

Useful for catechists?  Absolutely.  The format makes it super easy to find the info you need for class, and the explanations are already translated into plain English.  Much easier than tearing through a pile of Scott Hahn books trying to remember where you found that quote that one time, and/or trying to translate The Catechism into something ordinary mortals can understand.  Plus I learned some things I didn’t know.

Other important info:  It’s 5.5″ x 8.5″, with a flexible heavy-paper cover, very trim, so designed to be stuffed into your purse in doled out during Mass.  But note the cover is not paperboard, so don’t let the baby put it in her mouth. Also there’s some info about the Daughters of St. Paul in the back, who have got to have the coolest charism in the universe.  Nuns that run bookstores and a publishing company.  How awesome is that?

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Thanks to the Catholic Company for filling the mailboxes of bloggers with excellent products; this one is coming to Mass with us this Advent, no question about it.   In addition to asking for an honest review (check), our sponsor would like me to also tell you that if you need a Catechism of the Catholic Church or a Catholic Bible, they sell those too.

DMV Follow-up: Catechists and the buildings they like.

Ha, who would have guessed that hidden among the backlog of catechist posts (which you should also read), Christian LeBlanc also has a little post with non-DMV-looking* churches.  To give you ideas. Apparently when he isn’t teaching CCD, he gets to design buildings and stuff.

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Funny story about a certain space-cadet catechist:

So I was in Aiken, SC, Saturday afternoon and had an hour to spare before meeting a friend for dinner.  I knew from their website that St. Mary’s was now holding weekend masses at the parish hall, but I thought I’d see if the old church building was open and I could just take a peek.  Door was open, but when I looked through the windows in the vestibule doors into the nave of the church, there were evidently people gathered there for some kind of service.  A handful of ladies in chapel veils in the pews, someone praying at the tabernacle, and a few more clustered along one of the walls.  Very silent. Intent.  Maybe they were praying the Stations of the Cross?  I couldn’t see everything happening.

A cleric appeared out the sacristy, bowed at the altar, walked to the rear of the church and out of sight.  No one else moved.  Finally one of the ladies in the pew got up and left with a handful of children.  I whispered, “Is there some kind of service going on?”

“Yes,” she answered.  “Confession.”  And of course encouraged me to go on in . . .

Not DMV. St. Mary's Help of Christians Church, Aiken, SC. It is more beautiful than this, but you get the idea. Not my picture, h/t to the St. Mary's website people. Click this image for more.

See all that blue and gold squiggly stuff on the ceiling up front?  Here’s a flyer that tells you what it all is.

 

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Even cooler: After I was finished being amazed at how much more beautiful St. Mary’s is than I had  remembered, back outside I overheard a church-mom telling a big kid, “I’m going to go into the adoration chapel for a few minutes.”

“Adoration?”

Yes indeed. I have no photo for you.  But the little St. Clare chapel is everything an adoration chapel ought to be.  If you are in Aiken, go.  Go go go.  Fabulous.  Only open to the public during daylight hours.

 

 

 

*That’s the technical term.  You might be more comfortable with the vernacular “Romanesque,” though of course that is just one of a multitude of non-DMV styles.

Life Imitates Internet Rhetoric

True story:

Driving out to a distant parish for the homeschool All Saints’ party today, I got off the interstate one exit early.  Quickly realized I was at the wrong exit, and looked for a place to turn around.  Pulled into the nearest big parking lot.

Child in the back says to me, “Are we at the church?  It looks like the church.”

“No dear.  That’s the Department of Motor Vehicles.”

Not a church.

Avoid embarrassing mix-ups. Build your church like this.

Modesty & Sexism

UPDATE: I’ve switched out a few of the photos to ensure they are public domain.

In the combox at Ashely McGuire’s “Case for a Catholic Dress Code”, a reader argues that such dress codes are sexist — what with all the talk being about short skirts and cleavage.

So let’s clear something up: Men should not wear tight, skimpy clothing to Mass.  Here’s a picture tutorial to assist.

1. Skirt meet knees, knees meet skirt:

Yes.

No.

 

2. Cover the shoulders.

Yes.

No.

3. No cleavage.

Yes.

No.

4. Tailored yes, tight no:

Yes.

No.

3 Quick Takes: Rosary, College, Good things to read.

I could never be coordinated enough produce seven on a Friday.  But here’s three:

1) If you ever wondered how someone like me ended up in the Legion of Mary, yeah, it’s about how you’d think.  Don’t be fooled by that lovely little picture Sarah R. stuck up, I pray nothing but plastic these days.  Unblessed at that, which horrifies the gallant rosary-maker I thanked the other week, but I tell you right now there is a rosary permanently stuck in the track of the seat of my truck.  Yes.  With the cheerios crumbs and the hardened mass you secretly hope is just gum, but maybe it isn’t.  It’s all I can do to pray the thing; keeping it from falling out of my pocket and into the netherworld where no blessed objects belong is beyond my  ability.

2) I don’t care what the nice guy at the Newman Society says, $20,000 a year for college tuition is not “affordable”.  Put me firmly in the camp with Msgr. Pope, on the question of “Are We Unjust to Require College Degrees As Often As We Do?” Yes.  We are unjust.  It is a mockery to post “degree required” positions for jobs that don’t pay enough to cover the cost of student loans.

3) I am having massive fun today hitting the “share” button in Google reader.  I made a little sidebar here on the blog that shows my favorite google-read posts.  If you are like me and never, ever, actually visit your favorite blogs (because you read everything in RSS), but weirdly you want to know what things other people wrote that I think are worth reading, I think the link to my Google Reader Shared Posts page is here. Which in theory you could subscribe to.  I have to test and see if that works.  (Update: Yes!  It works!)

Vocation and Education

Glad I clicked on this article by Elizabeth Scalia at First Things.  (I almost never click on anything that doesn’t arrive whole and entire in my feed reader.  This one was worth it.)  She writes:

A sense of calling is an idea to which our children often lack an introduction. We tell students they can plot their futures based on test scores measuring information regurgitation; we have no means of measuring their imaginations or their dreams, yet is from these that their deepest and truest longings—and thus their vocations, the things they were born to do—are discovered.

Last year I tried discussing vocations with the fifth graders.  I began by asking, “What are you good at?  What do you love to do?”

My own children have a clear sense of these things by late-elementary school.  They know what they like — military history for that one, emergency medicine for the other.  Even younger, they know what they are like.  This one reads massive quanitities of everything, writes satire, and loves hard manual labor; that one has a talent for teaching and connecting with small children; this one wants to know how it works and then make her own; that one feels everything very, very deeply.

Those were the types of answers I expected from my 5th graders.  Instead, they produced a list of academic subjects and school sports.  They were a room full of people who like math and play soccer.  Very few had a hobby other than an organized sport or club; even fewer had an interest in a field of study beyond whatever passes for “social studies” or “language arts”. The idea that you might, say, love poetry and have developed a taste for this or that type of poem? Nope.

Their worlds, it seemed, were so narrow. No room in the schedule for finding out who they were and what they loved.

Sometimes I feel like the music instructor pushing the talented kid to attend a thousand workshops and camps, when I take parents aside and tell them that this son or daughter has a talent for theology, and needs to be given more instruction, above and beyond the regular parish offerings.

I tell my DRE that if we don’t offer a serious high school religious ed program, we are like a school praying for more pre-med students, but never offering high school biology.  Do we really want more priests and religious?  We have to give our students a chance to discover the depth and riches of an adult faith.  And then, if they are called, to fall in love.

 

Theology of the Body For Teens: Middle School Edition

The Catholic Company very kindly sent me a review set of the Theology of the Body for Teens: Middle School Edition bundle. Okay, so I begged for it.  They sent an e-mail out to all the reviewers (they are still accepting new reviewers) asking who wanted it, and I gave it my best me-me-me-meeeeee! and made the cut!  Yay!  And then I told my DRE, who explained how she was busy trying to finagle a copy on loan from another parish.  Because yes, it is that good.

What’s in the packet:

• A student book.  Eight chapters of substantial, readable lessons.  Upbeat format.  Rock solid teaching.  You will need one of these for each student.
• A teacher’s guide.  It’s the student book page-by-page, with helpful teaching notes.  Includes some lesson-planning ideas, answer keys of course, additional information about the Theology of the Body, and supplemental material on difficult topics.  If you are teaching this as a class, you need this book.
• The parent’s guide.  This is a small book (75 pages, pocket-size) that explains what students are learning.  It is more elevated, adult-level content, focused on how to parent middle-schoolers — it is not a re-hash of the student guide at all.
• The DVD collection.  There is a set of videos for each chapter of lesson, plus additional material on difficult topics, and a show-this-to-the-parents chapter that explains what the course is about.  The videos are fun, held the interest of my small test-audience of adults (me) and kids (mine), and add significantly to the content of the course.  You would want these if you were teaching this as a class.

What does the course cover?

Well, the focus is John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, but it comes down to: How do I live?  What will make me happy?  And what do I do with this body I’m growing into?

Most of this is not about sex.  It’s mostly about virtue, identity, and love.  How do I love and respect myself and others?  How do I build good relationships?  How do I know what God wants me to do?  It’s a serious, useful, substantial set of lessons that really teach how to be the kind of person God wants you to be.

–>I read the student workbook first.  I found it helpful for me, personally.  To the point that in my opinion, parishes would do well to offer the course to both teens and their parents.  As in: I myself, a grown-up, NFP-using, CCD-teaching, cave-dwelling bona fide catholic dweeb lady, found this to be a course that pushed me to grow in my Christian life.

What Age Student?

The books are targeted towards middle-schoolers — grades 6th to 8th.  I may be under-estimating his maturity, but I felt that my own 6th grade boy, who lives a fairly sheltered catholic-homeschool life, and is not one bit interested in girls, he was not ready to fully benefit from the program.  I held onto a copy of the student book for us to use at home, and when my parish offers it next year (please God), I will send him then.  But for girls (who mature earlier), and for boys and girls who are more fully immersed in our sex-saturated culture, this is about on target for as young as 6th grade.

Sex-related topics are taught in a wider context.  First students learn how we use our bodies to communicate, how we must make an effort to grow in virtue and purity, and how we should not use others for our own gratification, within the wider context of regular life.  It is only after these essentials are thoroughly explored, many weeks into the course, that students are shown how they apply specifically to sex.

Sexual topics are dealt with directly but modestly.  If you don’t know what porn is, all you’ll find out is that it is “the display of images for the purpose of arousing lust”.  (Lust is “a vice that causes people to view others as objects for sexual use”).   So this is a step more mature than earlier-grades catechesis, where the details of “impurity” are left entirely to the reader’s imagination.  If your student is not yet ready to learn about the existence of pornography, sexting, and fornication, hold off on this course for now.

Difficult topics are not presented directly to teens.  There are some video segments the instructor can choose to present depending on the maturity of the group, as well as supplemental teaching material in the teacher’s manual.  One teaching technique I found very helpful was a script where a teacher reads a scenario (young people gathering in the alley behind a movie theater), but the actual misbehavior is not specified.  The teacher then asks: What do you think was happening there?  It’s an opening for students to share the kinds of things they know are going on in their community, which the instructor can then address as appropriate.

I’m cheap.  Or poor.  Do I need to buy the whole nine yards?

The materials are made to be used together.  For a knowledgeable parent wanting to teach at home for the minimal investment, purchasing just the student book would provide a substantial lesson for the least cash outlay.  Note however: The other items do add to the overall content of the course. This isn’t a case of the videos just repeating what the book says, or the parent book being a miniature version of the student book.  Each element contributes new and useful material.  If I were teaching this in the classroom, I would want the whole collection, no question about it.  As a parent, I would want my children to view the videos.

Is it Protestant-friendly?

It’s a very Catholic program.  (Don’t let the “Pope John Paul II” thing fool you.)  You’ll hear references to saints, to the sacraments, the Catholic faith.  BUT, keep in mind, this is all just normal healthy human life.  Love, virtue, modesty, chastity — these are for the whole human race.  The message is right on target with what any Christian youth program would want to teach.  So if you are comfortable with Catholic-trappings,  you could work with the whole course as-is, and just explain to your audience that it was made by Catholics.  If not, you may want to get the materials for yourself, and use them to train yourself how to teach these topics to your teens.

Summary:  I give it a ‘buy’ recommend, if you are responsible for teaching a young person how to act like a human being.  Thanks again to our sponsor The Catholic Company, who in no way requires that I like the review items they send, but would like me to remind you that they are a fine source for a Catechism of the Catholic Church or a Catholic Bible.

Link – NFP v. Contraceptive Mentality

Nice post here on the question of NFP & the dreaded Contraceptive Mentality.  Written all grown-uppy.  (Which is good.)  Don’t read the comments.  No really.  You have other things to do today.  Better ways to fill your brain.  But the post itself is spot-on handy.  H/T to the Pulp.it.

Health Insurance Regulations – Go Comment

The Impractical Catholic has a very practical link to how to submit your comments on the new health insurance regulations.  Click on his link, it is very easy from there.   You can scroll through the regulations to make sure you know what you are talking about, and then submit the comment of your choice.

Naturally I forgot to copy mine for posterity before it submitted, by my talking points were this:

• I quoted the bit about how the goal of the religious exemption was to protect houses of worship.
• I observed this was too narrow a view of “religious institution”, that did not represent the reality of religious institutions such as hospitals, schools, and other benevolent works.
• I proposed a compromise, in which employees of such institutions could choose either to accept the employer-provided plan, or use a cash allowance of the same value to purchase the plan of their choice from another source.
• In that way, the religious employer is not required to directly fund a health care plan that includes treatments contrary to its religious tenets, but employees remain free to choose some other plan as they see fit.

I didn’t say it, but it’s a bit like the difference between saying, “every employee shall be given a per-diem allowance to pay for travel expenses at a hotel or brothel”, versus specifying a per diem amount per day, and leaving it to the employee to decide where he wishes to lodge.

So that’s what I wrote.  Go write something yourself.  It is so easy and fast.  Really, it is.

 

Okay, here’s the link directly to regulations.gov that I followed from Impractical Catholic’s post.  Go.  Now.  Seriously.

 

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Also: Reconsider giving your nine-year-old a blog on the same blogging program you yourself use.  I almost posted this on a hot-pink ProudKittyCat blog.  That woulda made the grandparents raise an eyebrow.

“But I am not that attractive . . .”

I was in a private conversation with a young woman a few years ago, and the topic was modesty.  No, she told me, she didn’t think outfit she had shown me was a problem.  Her reasoning?

I’m not that attractive.

She meant it.

Let me tell you, she was and is BEAUTIFUL.   I don’t just mean “all young women have a special inner beauty of their own if they just let it shine blah blah blah.”  I mean like, Wow!  Gorgeous!

–> One thing Jon and I discovered when we quit watching TV many years ago, is that our sense of beauty readjusted.   Our brains no longer held up some kind of fake, air-brushed perfect standard as the model to which all humans must be compared.   It is a kind of freedom.

Girls today are not growing up in my little cave of normalcy.  They are surrounded by images everywhere of Perfect People.  Those people are pretend.  They are fake.  They are like the hamburger in the picture on the menu at the fast food restaurant.

But here’s the thing about modesty:  Men are perfectly happy with regular hamburgers.  They don’t need it all fluffed and shellacked and with lettuce and onions hanging out just right to show off what’s inside.  Maybe you have to photograph a hamburger just right to sell it to a girl.  But all you have to do is say, “Hey, hamburgers!” and the guys will line up.

Really.

Girls, even if you aren’t super gorgeous, guys are THAT interested in you, just because you are a girl.  You!  Yes, you!  You don’t need to “sell” yourself.  You don’t need to put your every asset on display.  Be a kind, friendly person who cares about others.  That’s what real men are looking for in a wife.

PS: Betty Beguiles comes well-recommended, if you are looking for fashion ideas that show off the best you, without showing off more of you than needs to be public.  Thank you to the Dorian/Bearing blogging powerhouse for their regular reminders that I really need to subscribe.

[And if you make a point of not showing off your body, you’ll eliminate from the field all the jerky dogs who are only interested in that, and who will drop you in ten years if you don’t stay perfect enough.  You don’t need that.  Do you have ten years to waste, and no desire to find a guy who loves you for YOU?  No.  Use the power of clothing to cull the field of the losers.]