Selecting Reading Materials For Your Catholic Children
How we read can sometimes be just as important as what we read. Do we allow our children to devour their favourite books or do we ask that they prolong the fun by reading chunks at a time getting know and understand characters and the plot? Do we preview new books with our children and pre-read new authors to keep our children's hearts and minds pure and healthy? Do we teach our children how to discern a "good" book from a "poor" book or do we throw everything out because it has one or two "questionable" words. Literature based learning can serve as an awesome catalyst for Socratic learning.
What we choose as reading material for our children to read is a very personal thing. We have come across homeschoolers who will only read Catholic authors as well as families who will put anything in front of their kids just to get them to read. Our job is not to judge what people read, we simply provide resources for books we have read or that others have requested we consider using to create resources. The Catholic Church does not dictate what should or should not be read. The Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a one time list of over 100 prohibited books by the Holy See, was abolished in 1968. The choice is now exclusively up to us parents to select proper reading material for our children keeping in mind that we cannot and should not shelter our children from everything lest our children appear ignorant to their peers and the community at large. We can act as healthy filters until they can make good choices, but at some point we must rely on the seeds of our faith and morality that we have planted during their education to feed them on their lifelong learning journey.
There is great disagreement over the worthiness of works in certain genres as good reading material. There are still many heated debates over whether fairy tales are okay for the young to read or if The Chronicles of Narnia, and Dante's Divine Comedy are safe and worthy of mental consumption as well. I've seen Catechism books use fairy tales for learning examples and even Pope John Paul II was once credited with complementing J.K. Rowling on her literary works of fiction for children. He saw her works as mere stories to help children to tell the difference between good and evil not as religious treatises. It is not uncommon to see the same book on both recommended and not acceptable book lists. One family may find a work offensive while another family may use it to point out the faults of the modern world. Choosing literature is a very personal thing. Lists are good but ultimately we are the ones held accountable for our choices for our children. Pray over your selections and perhaps consider these little tidbits of wisdom, from our home to yours, the next time you go to the books store:
Whatever doesn't lift us up, brings us down.
If what we are doing doesn't bring us closer to God in some way, then it pushes us farther away from Him in another.
Always live by the Canon Law.
-That Resource Site Team