French 1st communion is a magical right of passage, with an unexpected St. Louis connection

I hadn't been to a Roman Catholic First Communion since my own.

That was a distant age, when Richard Nixon was president, Roberta Flack's The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face was No. 1 in the charts, I wasn't allowed to watch the news because it was dominated by Vietnam and I had to be torn out of bell bottoms and a macrame vest to don my angelic white dress and veil. Honestly, I don't remember a great deal about the ceremony beyond being made a big fuss over. It never occurred to me just how significant a milestone it is.

Today, watching my godson at the centre of his own ceremony, I wondered anew at the magic of this right of passage and felt a sadness for the growing numbers of non-religious families who have no such formal event for their own children. That's perhaps a controversial stance to take in a world where any discussion of religion is increasingly incendiary. But it's not actually the religious element I'm focused on here. It's the beauty of a ceremony that provides what's perhaps a child's first formal gateway to adulthood. It puts an eight-year-old at the centre of a special day, but ... unlike the giddy madness of a child's birthday party ... is a day infused with gravity, structure and responsibility.

I was enchanted by the ceremony, even though my French wasn't up to deciphering the fine points of the sermon.  Every child had a specific solo role: reading things, helping the priest, carrying things in procession. As a group, they acted out the gospel. Two hours later, they'd reverted to screaming banshees tearing about the family garden, but for that wondrous hour they were pictures of earnest concentration and budding maturity.

I felt the beauty of continuity and tradition. The next time someone moans about disaffected youth, I'll smile and think of these kids.

I also, to my complete surprise, found a link between my home town of St. Louis and Annecy. Throughout the ceremony, I contemplated the mosaics above the altar of a saint who'd already been pointed out to me as Francis de Sales and a nun in a habit that looked remarkably like the 19th century costume of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart (the RSCJs) who'd educated me. Back in St. Louis, I knew that the city's second-largest church ... a neo-gothic masterpiece on the South side of the city, was named after de Sales. What was the link, and why did that nun look so familiar?

The lady in question was Saint Jane Frances de Chantal. She and de Sales were both Annecy natives and worked together to form a new group of nuns: the order of the Visitation of the Virgin Mary. In the mid-19th century the order founded convents in St. Louis and St. Charles. Just like the RSCJs, they'd come from France to serve a community with deep roots in French catholicism. The RSCJ tradition survives at my alma mater, Villa Duchesne, while the Chantal-Sales connection carries on a few miles up the road at Visitation Academy, from which my aunt graduated. It's a small world.