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Eleventh Sunday of the Year
15 June 2008
Dear Friends in Christ,
At the heart of the teaching of the Lord Jesus is the Fatherhood of God, and only in Christ can we call on God as Father. Christians use this title for the one, only, living and true God so often that we risk losing a clear understanding of how revolutionary it is to address our Creator as Father. Muslims, for example, would never address God as Father because it would be considered blasphemous, but Christians are taught by God the Son to speak in loving confidence to “Our Father who art in heaven.” On this secular observance of Father’s Day, we must acknowledge that one difficulty in thinking of God as our Father is caused by the contemporary crisis of fatherhood in our culture. So few husbands (and so few priests) fulfill their fatherly duties faithfully and well that many millions of people have little or no positive experience of fatherhood, and one remedy for this daddy deficit is to search Holy Scripture for divine teaching on the essential nature of fatherhood. Such a search will turn up many dimensions of paternity and qualities of good fathers, but three of the most important of these are that a true father (whether natural or apostolic) must be the head of the family he generates, the nourisher of all in his household, and the protector of his bride and children. To be the head of the family is to take responsibility for the common good of all and to teach by word and example how to live a good and well-ordered life. To nourish all in the household means to feed them physically and spiritually. And to protect his bride and children means that a man must uphold and defend them from all danger. These duties correspond to the threefold offices of teaching, sanctifying, and governing which come to priests in ordination and to husbands in marriage, and what the bishop is to his diocese and the pastor is to his parish, a husband and father is to his family: the high priest of his domestic church.
In our time we were blessed with one of the great exemplars of Christian fatherhood of all time: Pope John Paul the Great. As George Weigel recently said in Poland to a group of 100,000 men gathered at a Marian shrine for an annual pilgrimage, “During the many years this son of Poland walked the world’s stage, he became a spiritual father to tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of people.” Weigel goes on to explain that the future pope learned the art of fatherhood from two men: his natural father, Captain Karol Wojtyla, and his spiritual father, Adam Cardinal Sapieha. From Wojtyla senior the young Karol learned “that prayerfulness and manliness go together. Being a man means being a man of prayer.” And from his archbishop and his own priestly experience, Father Wojtyla learned that “everything else will turn out to be unimportant and inessential except for this: father, child, love. And then, looking at the simplest things, all of us will say: ‘could we not have learned this long ago? Has this not always been embedded at the bottom of everything that is?’” Weigel concludes, “Our families need this fatherhood. So do our nations. And so does our world. The loneliness that so many people experience in the world today is a loneliness that can be healed by men who live their fatherhood with strength and compassion.”
Father Newman