Coming Home

The host of life issues, riotous and varied as they are, share a very simple common thread. We have forgotten who we are and what it is we are supposed to be about. Perhaps the most lost among us are the men. That’s a tough one for me to choke out, but fearfully accurate.

We have replaced one extreme, characterized by male dominance, with another characterized by female dominace. Both are hateful in God’s eyes. A look at 90% of TV sit-coms and advertisements shows men to be dumb, clueless, weak, homosexual (of the effeminate stripe, which is not characteristic of all gays), and for the most part aloof. Television both reflecting and sculpting reality.

Of course, any males exhibiting testosterone’s effects are usually males shown to be suffering from testosterone poisoning, blowing up half the world and having sex with half its women in the process. Where are the men in the middle? Where is marriage presented as something more than the extremes of gauzy romance or divorce court fodder?

Children don’t thrive on the margins. The men on the extremes harm children through their abdication of authentic masculinity. It is the men in the middle who appreciate their true dignity and that of their wives and of their marriages. It is the men in the middle who provide the genuine strength of character that nurtures children with firmness and principle.

Pope John Paul II saw that twenty-nine years ago when he wrote on the family. Here an excerpt directed at men.

APOSTOLIC EXHORTATION
FAMILIARIS CONSORTIO
OF POPE
JOHN PAUL II
TO THE EPISCOPATE
TO THE CLERGY AND TO THE FAITHFUL
OF THE WHOLE CATHOLIC CHURCH
ON THE ROLE
OF THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY
IN THE MODERN WORLD

Men as Husbands and Fathers

25. Within the conjugal and family communion-community, the man is called upon to live his gift and role as husband and father.

In his wife he sees the fulfillment of God’s intention: “It is not good that the man should be alone, I will make him a helper fit for him,”(67) and he makes his own the cry of Adam, the first husband: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.”(68)

Authentic conjugal love presupposes and requires that a man have a profound respect for the equal dignity of his wife: “You are not her master,” writes St. Ambrose, “but her husband; she was not given to you to be your slave, but your wife…. Reciprocate her attentiveness to you and be grateful to her for her love.”(69) With his wife a man should live “a very special form of personal friendship.”(70) As for the Christian, he is called upon to develop a new attitude of love, manifesting towards his wife a charity that is both gentle and strong like that which Christ has for the Church.”

Love for his wife as mother of their children and love for the children themselves are for the man the natural way of understanding and fulfilling his own fatherhood. Above all where social and cultural conditions so easily encourage a father to be less concerned with his family or at any rate less involved in the work of education, efforts must be made to restore socially the conviction that the place and task of the father in and for the family is of unique and irreplaceable importance.(72) As experience teaches, the absence of a father causes psychological and moral imbalance and notable difficulties in family relationships, as does, in contrary circumstances, the oppressive presence of a father, especially where there still prevails the phenomenon of “machismo,” or a wrong superiority of male prerogatives which humiliates women and inhibits the development of healthy family relationships.

In revealing and in reliving on earth the very fatherhood of God,(73) a man is called upon to ensure the harmonious and united development of all the members of the family: he will perform this task by exercising generous responsibility for the life conceived under the heart of the mother, by a more solicitous commitment to education, a task he shares with his wife,(74) by work which is never a cause of division in the family but promotes its unity and stability, and by means of the witness he gives of an adult Christian life which effectively introduces the children into the living experience of Christ and the Church.