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.
