Carol Beck in The Prayer Trust office at St Columban's Solihull in Britain. - Photo: Fr John Boles
In its Silver Jubilee year the Columban-run Prayer Trust celebrates the publication of an astonishing seven million booklets. Columban Co-worker Carol Beck has been there from the start.
“Twenty-five years … and it seems only like yesterday since we started.”
Time has flown for Columban Co-worker Carol Beck, Co-Founder of The Prayer Trust, one of the most enduring and endearing features of the Columban mission ever to come out of Britain.
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, these booklets have appeared in Britain, France, Ireland, Australia and the United States and as far afield as China and India. They have touched the lives of young and old “parishioners, patients, pilgrims and prisoners” and people from all walks of life and in all situations. More than seven million individual copies have been produced.
Yet the whole enterprise had very humble beginnings.
Born in Yorkshire, by the early 1990s, Carol had 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 an unusual patron; it was dedicated to 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 Protestant Reformation times, joined with a priest, Fr John Sugar (now Saint John Sugar), to secretly keep the Faith alive. They proved to be an effective underground team and Robert stuck with Fr Sugar through thick and thin.
Maintaining the tradition of Robert Grissold, Carol soon found herself becoming a lay volunteer who teamed up with a Catholic priest in a missionary enterprise and stayed with it through all its 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 had involved in home visiting but quickly realised there was a limit to the number of homes he could reach on his own and so he 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 neighbour and so on, it would be a wonderful way to spread the Gospel”. It would jump-start a kind of “spiritual multiplier”.
He knew he would 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-server 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 Fr 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 “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, he 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 organise 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).
Carol Beck and Columban Fr Pat Sayles at The Prayer Trust desk, St Columbans Solihull in Britain. - Photo: Fr John Boles
The scheme 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,” recalls Fr Pat. Demand soared. About twenty friends volunteered to help and three containers were donated 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 Communion, 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 John Sugar. Unfortunately, the career forged by Robert and John met disaster in 1603 when Crown forces caught them as they were returning from celebrating a clandestine Mass and took them 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, twenty-first-century type. In 2008, as they were coming back from Worcester after taking photographs for a new booklet, an out-of-control vehicle hit them head-on. Both were hospitalised and 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 realised how great a miracle it had been, when they suddenly recalled that the “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 an 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 with those seven million copies under its belt.
Carol and Fr Pat even went on to complete the booklet they had been preparing before the crash. Fittingly, it was called In Joyful Hope. A miracle indeed. A seven million booklet miracle.
Columban Fr John Boles lives and works in Britain.
Listen to "The seven million booklet miracle
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- Read more from The Far East - January/February 2026
