As we contemplate the Christmas miracle, Fr John Boles invites us to learn about a Columban miracle – the Prayer Trust – which has published an astonishing seven million booklets and is marking its silver jubilee this year.
The Prayer Trust is one of the most enduring – and endearing – features of Columban mission ever to come out of Britain. For a quarter of a century its prolific output of publications – over 150 titles to date – have brought consolation, inspiration and enrichment to thousands. Translated into various languages, booklets have appeared in Britain, France, Ireland, Australia, the US and as far afield as China and India.
They have touched the lives of young and old parishioners, patients, pilgrims and prisoners, people in all walks of life and in all situations. Altogether, it is estimated that the number of individual copies produced has surpassed the seven million mark. Yet the whole enterprise had very humble beginnings.
Time has flown for Carol Beck, the Prayer Trust’s Co-Founder, who has been there from the start. “Twenty-five years and it seems only like yesterday since we started,” she smiles. Born in Yorkshire, by the early 1990s Carol was settled with her family in the quiet West Midlands village of Balsall Common, close to the Columban Central House in Solihull. Her local parish had a somewhat unusual patron, Blessed Robert Grissold – the only church in the country to bear that name.
Robert Grissold had been a Catholic layman from the area who, during Reformation times, had joined with a Fr John Sugar in secretly keeping the Faith alive. They proved to be an effective underground team, and Robert stuck with Fr John through thick and thin. Maintaining the tradition of Robert Grissold, Carol was soon to find herself as a lay volunteer who teams up with a Catholic priest in a missionary enterprise and stays with it through all the resultant ‘ups and downs’.
Columban Fr Pat Sayles had returned home to England after having done parish work in Peru and served as Far East editor in Ireland. He had got involved in home visiting but quickly realised there was a limit to the number of homes he could reach on his own and so hit on the idea of producing little prayer pamphlets. He recalls the moment it occurred to him that, if one person “had a little prayer book and could hand it to a neighbour and so on, it would be a wonderful way to spread the Gospel”. It would jump-start a kind of “spiritual multiplier”.
Fr Pat knew he would need help with the project and thought of Carol, whom he’d come to know while serving as a supply priest in her parish. The way her three altar-boy sons, “trooped to the altar one after another to serve Mass” had brought a smile to his face. For her part, Carol immediately took to the style and content of Pat’s early booklets. “They were simple, straightforward, with no jargon”, she explains. “They could mean a lot to people going through all sorts of problems: bereavement, illness – even cancer.”
She had read a book Pat had written for his 25th ordination anniversary in 1998 – ‘Lord, Inflame our Hearts with your Spirit’ and felt that “for the first time, I realised who the Holy Spirit was”. She began helping Fr Pat prepare his booklets and accompanying cassettes (the peak of technology at the time).
Pat saw he needed a base. In 1999 he took on a nearby parish in the delightfully named hamlet of Wootton Wawen and began publishing in earnest. Carol drove over every day. In 2000 they decided to organise themselves as a formal charity, choosing as a name ‘The Prayer Trust’, influenced by Pat’s membership of ‘The National Trust’, which administers sites of historic and scenic interest in England and Wales.
The scheme thrived from the outset. The idea was to distribute one booklet and, with the returns from it, publish the next, and build the project up accordingly. “In the first year we sold 125,000 booklets”, remembers Pat. Demand soared. Some 20 friends volunteered to help. Three containers were brought in to store the material. Bookmarks and the occasional full-length book were added to their portfolio.
Soon they were not just delivering to homes and parishes but to schools, prisons and hospitals. They diversified the range of topics and devised themes for children, Christmas and Easter, First Communions, Harvest Festival and so on.
So far, Carol and Pat were mirroring the success of the 17th century lay/priest team of Robert Grissold and Fr John Sugar. Unfortunately, Robert and Fr John met with disaster in 1603 when they were caught by Crown forces as they were returning from celebrating a clandestine Mass. They were taken as prisoners to Warwick, where they were tried and condemned to death.
Similarly, the team of Carol and Fr Pat were to undergo a trial, albeit of a more prosaic 21st century type. In 2008 they were coming back from Worcester after taking photographs for a new booklet when an out-of-control vehicle hit them head-on. Both were injured and hospitalised. They could have died.
Blessed Robert Grissold and St John Sugar were executed in 1604. However, Carol Beck and Fr Pat Sayles survived and recovered. It seemed like a miracle. It was only later that they realised how great a miracle it had been, when they suddenly recalled that the ‘great escape’ had occurred on 17th July – the Feast of Blessed Robert Grissold! They returned to work and The Prayer Trust continued to grow.
In 2016 it moved premises, taking over part of the office extension and old stable block at the Columban’s Solihull house. It flourishes to this day, celebrating its Silver Jubilee with Carol and Pat still at the helm and those seven million copies under its belt. Carol and Pat even went on to complete the booklet they’d be preparing before the crash. Fittingly, it was called ‘In Joyful Hope’. A miracle indeed. A seven million miracle.
https://www.theprayertrust.org.uk
Columban Missionary Fr John Boles is from Stockport. Ordained in 1996, he served on mission in Peru. He is currently Regional Director in Britain.