Hell - Yes We Can Teach Kids About It

The plot of Maurice Sendak's latest children's book, Bumble-Ardy, which the old master has managed to put out at the age of 83, reads like The Basketball Diaries. In The Atlantic, Joe Fassler summarizes: "Bumble-Ardy, a young pig, is an orphan. Even worse, our hero has never in his life enjoyed a birthday party . . . when his parents are sent off to the slaughterhouse, Bumble's sweet Aunt Adeline adopts him, and gives him his first modest party . . . Left to his own devices, Bumble invites nine hedonistic, brine-guzzling swine into Aunt Adeline's home for an evening of no-holds-barred revelry."

As with Sendak's other words, parents are freaked, but kids are delighted. Fassler quotes one parent's Amazon review of Outside, Over There: "My mother refuses to read it to my girls, who are just-turned-two and almost-five . . . But my girls, both of them, ADORE this book. It seems to speak to them on some deep level."

The evidence that kids have a surprisingly high threshold for mayhem and horror carries implications for catechesis, especially where the subjects of hell and damnation are concerned. In describing Gehenna, Jesus quoted Isaiah to the effect that it was a place where "[sinners'] worm does not die and their fire is unquenched"—a nasty place, in short. I'm not sure whether it's universal practice among catechists to marginalize this image, but a certain Mary Ann Moresco might say it is. In an opinion piece that appeared a few years ago in Free Republic, she complains that today's catechists have said "to Hell with Hell"—omitting it from the curriculum, and teaching only those versions of the Act of Contrition in which no reference appears.