CATHOLICS DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY DON'T KNOW (First published in 'NZ Catholic', July 7)

Our home has been graced with the presence of Our Lady of the Place, who from her niche under a bay tree keeps watch over our front door. Perched on a broken culvert pipe salvaged from the farm, she was blessed recently by Fr Paul Gurr, O Carm.

It was a misty moisty morning. Father Paul’s brown cassock echoed the habit of an eremitical nun, a friend and advisor to us lay Carmelites who stood by with the Moderator for Australasia, ‘im indoors (outdoors for once) and my pious poodle Bosy. We gave her the title chosen by the first Carmelites and Father Paul, an Australian singer of note, pleasured her by ‘silencing all the songbirds’ with a song by Handel.

I’d found her by climbing a ladder through cobwebs and a trapdoor into the belfry of our church. As ‘Queen of Heaven’ she once upon a time on  Sundays presided over us convent girls on Our Lady’s side (as opposed to boys on the Sacred Heart side) with the Sisters of St Joseph of Nazareth right behind, within prodding distance. She’d been sent to the belfry in the  ‘70s, when the tabernacle was demoted to her place on the sanctuary sidelines.

On Monday mornings we kids acquired a taste for schadenfreude as occasionally an unfortunate was stood up in class and asked, why weren’t you at Mass yesterday? I was never thus - my parents were always there, several pews back, once a month separated like their children behind banners proclaiming the Holy Name Society and the Catholic Women’s League (the latter, broadly speaking, wives of the former).

At Communion time none of us kids stayed in the pews. We’d been baptised practically at birth and dragooned, some would now say, into First Holy Communion at age seven. Two of us were young for our class and had to wait six months to be served a special breakfast afterwards on our own by the nuns in the convent parlour: boiled eggs.

Since then two generations have grown up and largely gone. Now we must welcome into our schools the non-baptised children of parents who haven’t been sufficiently educated in the faith, the primary reason being that prayer is insufficiently taught and known. Knowledge being a gift of the Holy Spirit received in baptism, we now don’t know what we don’t know. See what a bind we’re in?

I’m currently reading Pope Francis: Untying the Knots, named for a painting of Mary in Germany which Francis ‘in exile’ had copied and took back to Argentina. There on the monthly anniversary of her installation thousands of pilgrims now revere her as the Mother who can solve our knottiest problems.

It seems to me that teachers, parents and children need to put prayer first and in prayer, under any title Mary is our paradigm. ‘Thou art careful and art troubled about many things: but one thing is necessary’ (Lk 10: 41, 42).

No one knows better than Mary what Jesus meant. Prayer.