Home Duties and Home Difficulties

A London mission priest’s blunt, practical guide to the Catholic home, written in 1885 from inside the houses he visited.

Fr. Bernard Feeney was a mission priest in London, and the homes in this book are ones he had been inside. Some he was called to because a grown son was beating his parents. In one, a father supported a drunken wife for years and still walked back to that house every evening. He wrote the book in the spare hours of that work, and it has the plainness of a man with no time to waste.

He takes the house one relationship at a time. Husband and wife owe each other patience and confidence, and the husband who treats his wife as head cook and governess in one is told so. Parents are warned that a child reads their lives before it can read anything else. Grown children are reminded what they owe, including the ones who marry in secret or spend their wages on dress while their parents go without. Then come the difficulties: drink, cheap novels, a young couple’s first quarter of unpaid bills, and the father who sends his sons to the best colleges and gets back a finished rake.

The advice is specific enough to act on tonight. Keep every promise you make to a child, including a promised punishment. Try a rebuke first, then take something away, and leave the rod for last. Never tell a child it will come to no good, because it will believe you. Keep drink away from the children entirely. Cardinal Manning wrote the preface and hoped the book would reach priests above all. It belongs just as well with any parent who suspects the trouble at home is in the small daily things and wants someone to say so plainly.

About this edition

From the 1885 edition published by James Duffy and Sons, London and Dublin, with Cardinal Manning’s preface. The wording of the historical text is preserved in this newly typeset edition. EPUB edition.