Before Aquinas, Chesterton, and Hahn, Your Kids Should Read Maguire Armstrong, by Kevin Wells

By Kevin Wells, Catholic Exchange, Oct. 31, 2023

Kevin Wells is a former Major League Baseball writer, Catholic speaker, and author of Priest and Beggar: The Heroic Life of Venerable Aloysius Schwartz (Ignatius Press). His best-selling book The Priests We Need to Save the Church was published by Sophia Institute Press in 2019.

As a child, my family would crowd around our dining room table most nights, where toward the end of mom’s meal Dad would reach onto the window sill for Little Visits with God, where he would begin to read tales on morality from the 1950s-published book.

All these years later, when my siblings gather to resurrect memories from growing up in our bluish-gray corner colonial home in Bowie, Maryland, Little Visits From God invariably comes up in conversation. Those nights around the table, we each agree, have become cherished heirlooms of warm memory. 

Here’s the way it worked: At the head of the table, Dad read a short 2-3 page story, where characters named Henry the Grocer, Frank the Milkman, Judy the Homemaker, etc. came to life through storylines to speak words of wisdom to children. Thereafter, Dad worked his way around the table to ask us three or four questions based on the right or wrong moral choices made by the children featured in that story. …