Keeping the flame alive: BBC documentary ‘First Communion’ is both tender-hearted, insightful and cynical

Watching the BBC’s new documentary “First Communion”, I was struck by the image of a child’s Star Wars stormtrooper toy adorned with a rosary: was it a sly dig, I wondered, casting the Church as a crumbling institution governed by dark, druidical megalomaniacs? Mercifully, the show is tender-hearted enough elsewhere.

It follows the lives of four young children – Niall in County Armagh, Tia in West Belfast, Seren in Formby, and Magdalena in London – working towards their first Holy Communion amid the unfolding drama of family illnesses, personal doubts and unresolved generational trauma.

One wonders what journey the filmmakers went on while completing the documentary. Their first stated aim is to ask: what place does First Communion have in our modern world? Broadly, it makes a good fist of answering this, with results that are worth getting despondent about. The show reveals just how rapidly the surrounding context for first Holy Communion evaporated within a generation. Seren’s grandmother Norma remarks candidly that being at Mass without fail was just what a Catholic did; her children, however, barely attend, and have not married within the fold. It just suddenly seems very implausible.

A teacher later ruminates that the last generation “outsourced” their responsibility for handing on the Faith to schools, while slackening in their own religious observance. Only Magdalena’s family seem interested in cultivating piety as a unit, and it comes at the cost of being portrayed as slightly dorky: daily family worship at the kitchen table features questionable singing and guitar-plucking. Even here, though, as revealed in candid moments with Magdalena, scepticism seeps in: “Sometimes I feel like it’s not real, sometimes I feel like it is.”

It is the programme’s second aim that causes more trouble: has this sacred day become too much celebration and not enough ceremony? While intelligible enough as a question, it yielded much that could be accused of enabling middle-class voyeurism at Catholic kitsch. Tia arrives on a pony carriage, spruced up like a bride. The final scene of the show has Niall, dangling icing into his mouth, gurgle that the cake has been the true highlight of the day. But there is a cynicism to these moves – he is an awkward child, whose love of treats is demonstrated when he stops the documentary to go to the corner shop.

I couldn’t help but detect a cryptopuritan disdain that lurks within secular liberalism: “This Catholic stuff is all too externalised – too out of touch with the inward conversion of heart that really matters!”

This stands in tension with a particular indignation the interviewers have about sinfulness. There is handwringing about children’s confessions. Norma is asked whether children can really sin; “It’s tradition,” she shrugs. The implication throughout is that penance is the last vestige of what holds First Communion hostage; Niall’s mother is asked why she is even bothering, after a nun is supposed to have remarked of the crying baby Niall, born out of wedlock: “That’s the devil coming out of him.”

It is true that Confession could lead some children to overestimate their faults. Seren’s mother, Alex, rightly notes that it might imply they possess some obvious guilt – as if they have stolen a sibling’s toy. But growing up learning to receive forgiveness, and to examine ourselves, are things which even the non-practising parents like Alex speak so well about.

The filmmakers praise as well as blame. They devote much time to the idea that these popular, folky expressions do dignify some human longing, even if they would do well to be finally de-anchored from traditional commitments to dogma. Even someone as wounded by the Church as Niall’s nanny can’t bring herself to withdraw him from the ceremony; even someone as prone to thinking of it all as a “fairy tale” can’t suppress an instinct to pray for ancestral intercession when she is given a cancer diagnosis.

But this documentary, which speaks of First Communion as “a major milestone – or sacrament – in the Catholic faith”, perhaps misunderstands something, if they think those are worthy synonyms. It is not, properly, a rite of passage which ought to lose some retrograde hang-ups about guilt. Admittance to Communion as an outcome of receiving mercy is the story which justifies the thing in itself. The pony-riding Tia would only become more “externalised” – more ridiculous, more gauche – if she had not, with real tenderness, observed earlier to a priest that Jesus was present to her as “second chances even when I do something wrong”.

That instinct to beautify is plausible only as an outworking of feeling oneself to be, despite everything, saved, and made a fitting bride. As a mere outward form for the milestone of coming of age, it would be a hollow crown indeed.

Photo: screenshot from ‘First Communion’.

‘First Communion’ is available on BBC iPlayer. Jack Chisnall writes at holyfooling.substack.com.

This article appears in the March 2025 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our thought-provoking magazine and have independent, high-calibre and counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click HERE.

The post Keeping the flame alive: BBC documentary ‘First Communion’ is both tender-hearted, insightful and cynical first appeared on Catholic Herald.

The post Keeping the flame alive: BBC documentary ‘First Communion’ is both tender-hearted, insightful and cynical appeared first on Catholic Herald.