Father Duddleswell welcomes his new curate, the recently ordained Father Neil, with a teasing baptism of fire, which opens the young priest's eyes to the complex nature of his parish duties and responsibilities.
Father Duddleswell plans to install a new church bell.
Father Duddleswell refuses to make bad-weather plans for the annual bazaar.
Father Duddleswell decides to disprove the curse of a doomsday chair.
Father Duddleswell accidentally damages the hideous portrait of the founder of the local convent, uncovering a concealed French masterpiece.
Father Duddleswell enters a tennis match against the Anglican clergy.
Father Neil tries to modernize with a P.A. system and soundproof confessionals.
Father Duddleswell is convinced that his bottle of holy water has performed a miracle, a miracle he refuses to share.
Father Duddleswell decides that Neil is ready for fresh responsibilities and makes him official Catholic Chaplain to the local hospital.
Father Neil receives embarrassing attentions from Miss Davenport, which he must tolerate because she is a generous benefactor of the Parish.
Neil has to have his appendix removed, and Father Duddleswell is perturbed to note that Neil's nurse is young and extremely attractive.
A seaman dies in a rest home for sailors near St Jude's, but the man who runs the home is not sure whether Driscoll was a Catholic or a Protestant.
Father Duddleswell is consumed with the Christmas spirit. As housekeeper Mrs Pring comments: "When he's bad he's hard enough to live with, but when he's good he's awful"
Exhausted from performing several marriages, Father Duddleswell takes Father Boyd to the pictures as a treat -- where they are paged to return to the parish to perform one more forgotten wedding. After placating the angry families and seeing the young couple off on their honeymoon, Father Duddleswell realizes that he performed the ceremony after 6 pm, and therefore the bridge and groom are not legally married.
Father Neil offers advice to a woman with marital problems and thereby provides a field day for gossips.
Father Duddleswell is being bothered by Mother Stephen, who wants to put a relic of her convent's patron saint in St Jude's parish church.
Acting against Duddleswell's advice, Neil starts a family group so that married couples can meet with him to discuss their problems.
On hearing the catechism of the local Catholic school Neil notices that a little boy is in tears.
When he was young, Father Duddleswell was curate to a legendary eccentric. Now, 40 years late, the old man has come to stay just when Father Duddleswell is incapacitated with lumbago, and manages to turn the parish upside down -- including locking Fr. Neil in the church with Mother Stephen.
When Billy Buzzle sets up a pig-sty in his back yard to accommodate Porgy and Bess, two pigs he has received from a defaulting better, the resultant stench proves too much for Father Duddleswell, who desperately resorts to pig-napping, stealing Porgy by dead of night and taking him to a nearby farm. When Porgy subsequently dies, Billy takes Fr. Duddleswell to court, but the judge, while berating Fr. Duddleswell for his transparently dishonest testimony, rules in his favour. Then Bess appears to be succumbing to the same sickness, but Dr. Daley reassures everyone that she is only in labour...
Mother Stephen demands an audience with Fr. Duddleswell over a serious problem: Christine Hammond, a war orphan brought up in the convent, has fallen in love with Isaac Rosen, the elder son of the local rabbi. When the priest and the rabbi meet, they immediately agree that the marriage is impossible; so the young couple decides to ask the Anglican vicar to marry them. When Mr. Pinkerton insists that they wait two weeks before making a decision, the couple come to see Fr. Boyd, who suggests a ""naughty"" plan: Christine and Isaac announce that they have already been married in the registry office. Both Fr. Duddleswell and Rabbi Rosen are overcome with joy and wish them happiness -- whereupon they confess they were only testing them to see who would treat them with greater kindness. Fr. Duddleswell invites Rabbi Rosen to dinner (which Mrs. Pring supplies from a local kosher caterer), and we learn that the wedding did indeed take place in the registry office, as Fr. Boyd leads a toast to th
