Time has flown for Carol Beck, Co-founder of The Prayer Trust, one of the most enduring — and endearing — features of Columban mission ever to come out of Britain.
“Twenty-five years... and it seems only like yesterday since we started,” says Carol. For a quarter of a century, its prolific output of publications — over 150 titles to date — has brought consolation, inspiration and enrichment to thousands.
Translated into various languages, booklets have appeared in Britain, France, Ireland, Australia and the U.S. and as far afield as China and India.
They’ve 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.
Born in Yorkshire, by the early 1990’s 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, being dedicated to a certain 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 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’d got involved in home visiting but quickly realized 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 neighbor and so on, it would be a wonderful way to spread the Gospel.” It would jumpstart a kind of “spiritual multiplier.”
He knew he’d 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 onto the altar one after another to serve Mass,” had brought a smile to his face. For her part, she 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’d read a book Fr. 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 realized who the Holy Spirit was.” She began helping him prepare his booklets and accompanying cassettes (the peak of technology at the time).
Fr. Pat saw he needed a base. In 1999, they 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 organize themselves as a formal charity, choosing as a name “The Prayer Trust” (influenced by Fr. Pat’s membership of “The National Trust,” which administers sites of historic and scenic interest in England and Wales).
The program 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 Fr. Pat. Demand soared. Some twenty 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 Fr. Pat were mirroring the success of the seventeenth-century lay/priest team of Robert Grissold and Fr. John Sugar. Unfortunately, Robert and Fr. John’s careers met disaster in 1603 when they were caught by Crown forces as they were returning from celebrating a clandestine Mass and taken as prisoners to Warwick, where they were tried and condemned to death.
Similarly, the team of Carol and Fr. Pat was to undergo a trial, albeit of a more prosaic, 21st-century. 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 hospitalized. They could have died.
Blessed Robert Grissold and Saint 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 realized how great a miracle it had been, when they suddenly recalled that their great escape had occurred on July 17 — 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 Columbans’ Solihull house. It flourishes to this day, celebrating its Silver Jubilee with Carol and Fr. Pat still at the helm and those seven million copies under its belt.
Carol and Fr. Pat even went on to complete the booklet they’d been preparing before the crash. Fittingly, it was called “In Joyful Hope.” A miracle indeed. A seven-million miracle.
Columban Fr. John Boles lives and works in Britain.
