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‘A paradise on earth, a foretaste of heaven’: English Catholic Understandings of Domesticity and Marriage, 1945–1965

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The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800

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Abstract

In a sermon delivered to the Catholics of northern England in 1945 which explicitly addressed issues such as the breakdown of family life and the spiritual priorities for post-war renewal, Bishop Marshall of the Salford diocese held before his flock a comprehensive model for familial relations:

Catholic fathers can endeavour to follow the footsteps of St Joseph by the purity of their lives, by their vigilance and self-sacrifice. Catholic mothers can imitate the Mother of Jesus by their example, their modesty, their resignation and perfect faith. Catholic children can strive to be pious and obedient as the Child Jesus was. The whole family, father, mother and children, can unite daily in the service of God by family prayers. Thus Catholic homes can be preserved from the many dangers around them and, like the Holy Family, they can serve as models for many homesteads.’

Whilst this ideal was modulated through a distinctively Catholic rhetoric of the Holy Family, and one that had been vigorously promoted since Pope Leo XIII instituted a feast day in 1892 to commemorate the holy home in Nazareth, men and women within post-war England were also searching for models to inform and interrogate changing understandings of marriage, parenthood and domestic roles. For as Edward Griffith, co-founder of the National Marriage Guidance Council (NMGC), wrote in anticipation of the end of the war, ‘the home, and all it stands for, must be the pivot of our social reconstruction’.2

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Notes

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Authors
  1. Alana Harris
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, UK

    Lucy Delap (Fellow and Director of Studies in History) (Fellow and Director of Studies in History)

  2. Girton College, Cambridge, UK

    Ben Griffin (Fellow and Director of Studies in History, and Lecturer in History) (Fellow and Director of Studies in History, and Lecturer in History)

  3. Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, UK

    Ben Griffin (Fellow and Director of Studies in History, and Lecturer in History) (Fellow and Director of Studies in History, and Lecturer in History)

  4. Brasenose College, Oxford, UK

    Abigail Wills (Postdoctoral Fellow in History) (Postdoctoral Fellow in History)

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© 2009 Alana Harris

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Harris, A. (2009). ‘A paradise on earth, a foretaste of heaven’: English Catholic Understandings of Domesticity and Marriage, 1945–1965. In: Delap, L., Griffin, B., Wills, A. (eds) The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230250796_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230250796_8

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-36836-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-230-25079-6

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