Bulletin column from June 19, 2022

Dear Friends at Saint Mary’s Immaculate Conception Parish and Saint Frances Cabrini Parish:

Praised be Jesus Christ! Among the other blessings and celebrations of this Sunday, most especially of the Body and Blood of Christ, is our gratitude for the gift of fatherhood, on father’s day.

It seems increasingly important to state, on Father’s Day, the beautiful truth that fatherhood is simultaneously and inseparably a biological and spiritual reality. God made us male and female meaning that he made us at our deepest levels with the capacity to grow up and be fathers and mothers. For much of the world this will be a biological reality as men father new, biological children to continue on the next generation of the human family, multiplying as God commanded us to do because he saw humanity as a good thing even with our flaws. Many men will not father biological children for various reasons. In the case of priests it is because we renounce this very good thing for the sake of an even deeper reality that must be made present on this earth, the Kingdom of Heaven. Still, at our core, all men are fathers meaning that in our unique way that complements (is the other half of) motherhood, we image the divine, generative love of God.

The only perfect father is our Heavenly Father which means that all of us, try as we might, will fall short of loving in the way that we should. The wounds of imperfect fatherhood, both spiritual and biological, do run deep in the human family and are part of the reality of original sin that Christ came among us to slowly heal from the inside out. It is a healing that comes about by embracing the vocation of fatherhood that is given to all men, living it out based on the inspired teachings of the Scriptures, taking up the crosses of life with a fatherly heart, and gradually learning the gift of sacrificial love.

A tragic modern mistake is to attempt to deal with the undeniably real wounds of fatherhood that exist in families by somehow adopting the notion that if we don’t like the pattern of how maleness is expressed in the ways we have encountered it that we can choose our own sex and break out of the mold. This is a false solution to the age-old problem of how to be a man in a fallen world. Only men can be fathers, only men can be men. If something about this sits poorly within us, and it might for good reasons at times, then we must work on the remedy within the confines of the unalterable human nature that God has given to us for his own very good reasons.

It is a curious fact that a modern cultural dogma of our current moment is that we must not tamper with the natural world as we encounter it. The green environment of the world must be respected in its pristine state before humans taint it from its necessary, natural pathways that ensure its continuation. If we look at the rest of created order in this way, it makes little sense why we do not look at the human species in this way, too. For some reason we have decided the most basic laws of male and female do not apply to us in the same way that they do to everything else around us. How do we not see that tampering with the male, female, and generativity in humanity has disastrous consequences in the same way that we see it has in every other living thing around us?
A person of true, authentic ecology celebrates Father’s Day knowing what a precious gift fatherhood is, even in our imperfect way of loving as men. Authentic ecology understands that men are men, and women are women, even for the often messy reality that this is. Fatherhood is of God. Today we thank him for it, we celebrate it, we (men) commit ourselves to living it better, and all of us commit ourselves to defending its authentic definition in our world today.