All Dressed Up Children tell their first communion stories

Drawing courtesy of Susan Bales

Susan Ridgely Bales’ graduate research on children’s religious experiences began with a dress.

While taking a course on women and religion at Princeton University, Bales studied young girls’ first communion dresses — white, lacy creations many Catholic girls wear the day they participate in communion for the first time. “I wondered why people dressed little girls up like brides for this event,” Bales said. “I’m not Catholic, but most everyone I knew growing up near Philadelphia was. I wanted to understand more about mass, and I was interested in material culture, so I started reading about it.”

In the course of her exploration of communion dresses, Bales learned that academia had produced almost no scholarship on what children think of their first communion or other religious experiences. “Kids have been virtually ignored in religious studies, as have older people,” she said.

Bales’ first-communion research grew beyond dresses and evolved into a broader interest in children’s religious experiences, which led her to the graduate program in the Department of Religious Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill. “UNC was a perfect fit for me,” Bales said. “The faculty and their openness to work with other departments, like the anthropology department, are great. UNC also has good relationships with religious communities in the area.”

Bales wrote her ethnographic master’s thesis on children at Holy Cross Catholic Church in Durham, a predominantly African-American congregation. She attended church activities once or twice a week, including masses, retreats and faith-formation classes, and interviewed nine children before and after their first communion. “I was trying to interpret what they thought about what they were learning in their first communion classes,” Bales said. “I also wanted to see if racial and ethnic factors and location made a difference in what the children were experiencing, so I began looking for another church to compare Holy Cross to.”

After completing her master’s thesis in 1998, Bales embarked on a similar study for her dissertation, this time with a larger church. Working with church administrators and parents, she conducted an ethnography of a first communion class at Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church in Burlington, N.C., an Anglo and Latino parish. Before conducting any interviews, though, Bales immersed herself in the first communion class for two-and-a-half months, coloring with and getting to know the 41 children in the class, their parents and their teachers. Later, Bales sat down individually with 18 of the 7- and 8-year-olds in the class and asked them to draw a picture of first communion. “I let the kids tell me their stories through the drawings,” she said. “I was focusing on their individual stories and connecting how this fits into their experience.”

Photo by Karen Tam

Susan Bales studies N.C. children's religious experiences.

Through the drawings, Bales learned that all of the children at both Blessed Sacrament and Holy Cross, regardless of their level of involvement in the church, were excited about taking communion for the first time. “They see first communion as something really important,” she said. “Many children also see it as a time when they’re taking responsibility for themselves. They see themselves as real members of the church, and they think they’re seen differently by the church after first communion.”

Indeed, for some Blessed Sacrament families, first communion represented a significant event. One girl who said she hadn’t been able to afford a birthday party that year arrived to church in a limousine and hosted a party at a nearby hotel. Other families had relatives fly in for the event, and many young girls got new dresses.

Bales dedicated the 2001-2002 school year to writing these stories and others for her dissertation, thanks to the Jessie Ball du Pont Dissertation Fellowship in the Society of Fellows. “The fellowship freed me up to do an interview whenever I wanted,” she said. “Not having to teach or be in class really allowed me to focus on writing.” The fellowship also funded a trip to a conference in Denver, where she was able to meet with some of the foremost scholars in the religious studies field and potential employers. She even had a chance to meet with a publisher who has shown interest in publishing her dissertation.

After graduating in summer 2002, Bales hopes to teach religious studies and continue focusing on children’s religious experiences. “We need to consider age along with race, class and gender,” she said. “Including children in religious studies could be as revolutionary as including women.”

- Elizabeth Spainhour

© 2002, The Graduate School, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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