Hatch, Match & Dispatch: A Catholic Guide to Sacraments
RICHARD LEONARD, SJ
(Paulist Press, 160 PP, £15.99)
Tablet bookshop price £14.39 • Tel 020 7799 4064

By his account, Richard Leonard’s engagement with the sacraments has often been disastrous. At his ordination, he collapsed unconscious in the heat of an Australian December, only saved from a hard encounter with the floor by his mother’s brilliantly timed save. At his first ministerial baptism, of his niece, he insisted upon full immersion. The screams of the baby as a wave hit her provoked his mother to leap up from the front bench exclaiming: “I told you this was a stupid idea.”

This personal approach serves the three purposes of this short book: catechesis for children, material for adult preparation and theological reflection. The thrust is pastoral. It is a splendid book to provoke a reconsideration of sacraments that are taken for granted, but it would leave a very incomplete picture if mistaken for a course of instruction.

The most moving story Leonard tells is of Sister Mary Consuelo (or Sister Mary Consume-a-whale-o, as his unkind primary-school classmates in 1959 called her, since she was “as wide as she was tall”). When he ran to show her the china holy water stoup that was his favourite present for his First Holy Communion, he stumbled and it was smashed into tiny pieces. She comforted him in her ample bosom, and the boy got over the loss. But three weeks later, having spent hours piecing it together, she presented the mended stoup, skilfully repainted. Leonard keeps it to this day.