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Forming those who form others

A Fairy-Tale Hope

A source of great hope to the very young can be fairy tales. For this reason they should really be part of the essential reading for pre-school children and beginning readers. For any who need convincing of their value in offering solid moral formation and encouraging the necessary values and help essential for enabling children to find ‘reasons for living and hoping’ I would recommend an excellent book by Bruno Bettleheim: The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales.[i] What I write here owes much to the wisdom contained in that book.

Fairytales offer hope first because they are realistic about evil

Because of this they enable children to face the things that can destroy hope. Despite popular identification of the term ‘Fairy tale’ with make believe and the avoidance of reality, the very opposite is true - fairy tales are full of ogres, giants, witches, wicked stepmothers, indifferent fathers, spiteful brothers and jealous sisters. They are filled with death, grief, danger and struggle. The pages teem with characters who are prone to all the basic human vices and weaknesses - fear, cruelty, hard-heartedness, greed, stupidity, disobedience, anger, thoughtlessness, cruelty, cunning and deception - all of these are found in the basic repertoire of stories. Fairy tales, then, do not shield a child from all that he knows about the world and about himself - including the basic facts of ugliness, evil, sin and death.

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Dr. Petroc Willey BD, STL PhD, PhD (Lateran) studied theology at King's College, London and Maynooth in Ireland and philosophy at Liverpool University in England and the Lateran University in Rome. From 1985-1992, he was Lecturer in Christian Ethics at Plater College, Oxford. From 1992 until October 2013 he worked at Maryvale Institute, Birmingham, where he was Dean of Graduate Research overseeing a doctoral program in Catholic Studies at the Maryvale Institute, offered in collaboration with Liverpool Hope University. He is a consultor for the Pontifical Council for Promoting New Evangelization. He currently is a professor at Franciscan University for the Office of Catechetics. His publications include Become What You Are: The Call and Gift of Marriage (with Katherine Willey), and The Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Craft of Catechesis (co-authored with Professor Barbara Morgan and Fr. Pierre de Cointet, and with an introduction by Cardinal Schonborn), and he has articles in collections of essays and in journals such as New Blackfriars, Faith, The Nazareth Journal, and Catholic Canadian Review. He has written and edited numerous distance-learning course texts at Masters degree-level and higher education levels, and six volumes of commentary on the new Catechism, Adult Studies in the Catholic Catechism. He was the Host of the EWTN series Handing on the Faith (2007).

This article is from The Sower and may be copied for catechetical purposes only. It may not be reprinted in another published work without the permission of Maryvale Institute. Contact [email protected]

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Catechesis and Culture

Catechizing Children

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33.1

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The Catechetics Degree Programs and the Catechetical Institute (CI) at Franciscan University of Steubenville work in concert to prepare clergy, religious and laity to join the “army of catechists” called for by St. John Paul II, eager to help the Church in her mission of making all nations joyful disciples of Jesus Christ. We combine a thorough formation in Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and Magisterial documents with training in effective pedagogical techniques to help those we serve to grasp the truth, goodness, and beauty of the Father’s plan, and to bear witness to others faithfully of the wonderful life of grace in the Holy Spirit.

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