Fr. Dominic White OP, chaplain to St. Dominic’s Primary School

Like many newly-ordained priests, one of my first jobs has been school chaplain. St. Dominic’s, one of two primary schools in our parish in Kentish Town, North London, is a friendly and welcoming place to work. It has a strong Catholic ethos, with all classes being named after a saint, and there is a good and supportive religious education team. The children are from many ethnic groups, and integrate well together: their faith is a major factor in this. The hard work and commitment of the staff has made for a happy school, something much needed in a challenge inner-city area. Poverty and family breakdown are serious problems, and I have become aware that part of my role as Father Dominic is to be a father figure for those whose fathers are absent.

One thing I love is the sheer variety, though this is demanding too! 7-year-olds are still very much children, for the most part full of wonder and excitement, but the 12-year-olds are growing up fast. If I treat them as young adults, I find that’s how they behave. So it’s very important for me to spend time in prayer before my weekly visits, and ask for the Holy Spirit’s inspiration. If there’s to be a Mass for a year or for the whole school, I’ll have prepared this with the children in advance. But the content of my sermon might depend very much on the “feel” of things on the day. For classroom visits I sometimes have a theme or an idea in mind, especially as this term we’re focussing on Mission Together as our Lent Charity. But with the nursery children I either need to bring something to show them or just see what God sends. Yesterday they were studying nature, and digging up worms from the flower bed! So I taught them about God as Creator, and we said a prayer open and far less cynical than adults, so often have the most perceptive questions and insights.

This term as a whole we’ve been focussing on Confession, and again, how I preach this depends very much on the age of the children. Discipline is good, but where children show signs of being naughty or disruptive it’s often because they’re angry at things going on at home. I find that talking about confession as getting the bad things off your chest, and taking your anger to Jesus, often appeals to them and, I hope, is sowing the seeds of prayer.

In the Parish we have a strong child-friendly approach, and in a year the number of children at the Sunday Children’s Liturgy has doubled to nearly 100. This is also an important means of adult evangelisation, as it is bringing back parents who have been lapsed. Nevertheless, the problem remains that many children at the school are hardly if ever brought to Sunday Mass. So they don’t know the responses, and particularly with the older ones this can be embarrassing and off-putting for them. But one of the great gifts of the school is music. We have an excellent music teacher, and the children singing wonderfully and with enthusiasm. So that gave me an idea. Before joining the Dominican Order and being ordained, I was organist and choirmaster of St. Dominic’s Church. Some people think that when you become a priest you “give all that up”. But talents are from God. When we give up with Jesus on the Cross, this is only to receive back at the Resurrection. So I’ve used my musical training to start writing tunes for all the people’s responses and parts of the Mass. My aim is to have all of them done by the time First Holy Communion come round. With a tune associated with the words, the children will learn the responses far faster. It would be quite unrealistic to imagine that this will suddenly make them regular Mass-goers for the rest of their lives, but I hope this will leave them with the memory that Mass is something enjoyable and special. We can but sow the seed: and that seed may well die. But we trust to Jesus’ words, that “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John)