Joseph Conroy on Catholic, anti-puritanical, parenting
Treat children as God's special creation
Father Daniel Coffey, raised in a Catholic family in Brooklyn in the 1870s and 80s, became the pastor of the parish in Mingo Junction, Ohio, a steel town on the Ohio River south of Weirton. The story of his upbringing appears in the biography A Mill Town Pastor: The story of a witty and valiant priest, by Father Joseph P. Conroy, SJ, published in 1921.
It was not one of those mortuary households where ten thousand and ten commandments, mostly “don'ts,” like a swarm of hornets, are daily unloosed around the bewildered head of childhood, and where forcible feeding followed by the broomstick drill administered with grim Puritanic ferocity, are the staple family devotions.
On the contrary, Dannie had the good fortune to be trained in a home where the great principle was understood that each soul is a special creation of God, with its own allotted characteristics, its unique temperament, its assigned gifts, its definite limitations. “As a tree planted by the running waters, that will yield its fruit in its own season” this was the underlying idea followed out in the upbringing of young Daniel . . . .
He wasn't allowed to grow wild, of course. Dan got his “trimmings” like any other boy. But he got them when he needed them. He wasn't torn up by the roots; suffered from no freak graftings, was stripped of none of the strong, reaching boughs of individuality.
No attempts were made to get the fruit before the blossom, but there was always patient waiting, attentive watching, nevertheless, that the fruit should appear “in its own time.”