Faith-talk and reflection spaces: an empirical study of Catholic primary school pupil accounts of the exploration of faith at home

In the Catholic faith tradition, the home is seen as the primal space for the child's religious socialisation, supported by the Catholic school and parish. There is however, a paucity of research on how the three work together to facilitate a child’s exploration of faith. This chapter considers Catholic primary school pupils’ descriptions of their explorations of faith at home, and investigates the stimulus for this activity. The focus is on the child's perspective, recognising that the child is an active agent, not a passive recipient in the faith transmission process. It employs the lens of French sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s (2000) concept of ‘Religion as a Chain of Memory’ to illuminate the changing patterns of influence of the three pillars of home, school, and parish church. The data is drawn from three Catholic primary schools, part of a wider empirical research study, Faith in the Nexus, which investigated how twenty church primary schools facilitated children's exploration of faith in the home. A consideration of two aspects described by pupils in all three Catholic schools, reveals that children are often the initiators of faith-talk in the home and seek out time and space to reflect and pray. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the changing importance of home, school, and the parish church in the process of transmission of the Catholic faith tradition to the next generation.