Peter Costello
Starchaser by Jacintha Mullins (Veritas, €12.99/£10.99)
This is a book very much of the moment, but with a long life before it. Jacinta teaches in a primary school, the Midwest School for the Deaf in Limerick. This book arose out of the experience of the school losing two pupils.
Her moving and effective pages were written and illustrated to let children focus and process their grief at such a loss. Though written from a Christian perspective, it is not written in the traditional language of such books, but in images more appealing to a wider range of young readers such as schools have in Ireland today.
The book shows death, and what follows death, are a part of nature, just as love helps all loss take on meaning and allow life and the great hopes we all have to last. A fine little book.
Remember and Give Thanks: Reflections on Eucharist by Patrick McGoldrick (Veritas, €17.99/£14.99)
The last few years have been very hard for everyone, and have brought many especially those with a religious role in society to reflect on life and things they might once have taken for granted.
These essays are the product of the last months of the author’s life, but into them are packed the thoughts and insights of a lifetime as a liturgist at Maynooth and as a curate in Co. Donegal. He opens with a reflection of Thomas Merton on the day that Germany invaded Poland in 1939, and the thoughts arising from the call at High Mass that day to be “always and everywhere thankful”.
On the morning I write this, these reflections seem very much to the point and of the moment. All derived from a Eucharistic faith for Christians to “remember and give thanks”. His friends and associates have brought these pages into print out of their love for the author, and in doing so have brought to light a gift that many readers will cherish.
The Courage of their Convictions: Stories of Inspirational Men and Women of Faith by Gemma Grant (Veritas, €14.99/£12.99)
Gemma Grant is a Belfast women now married and living in Dublin. Her book contains some 28 brief lives of saintly Catholics, some religious, some lay. They are all of people many will have heard of, such as Fr Peyton, for instance, but about whom little is often said. So these portraits will interest a great many readers; but her choice is personal: no room here for such a hero of faith as Oscar Romero.
But there is Dorothy Day, “one of the most remarkable American women and social reformers of the last century”. This is very true; but when an attempt was made to get her movement going in Dublin, and to open ‘a house of hospitality’ to provide free meals, shelter for the homeless, and assistance it failed.
Irish Catholics had little or no time for Dorothy Day, potential saint or not. This was not a rejection by ‘agnostic materialists’, but by ‘ordinary Catholics’. A sad debacle worth pondering.