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Authority Conjoined with Love

The Meaning of Fatherhood in Heaven .... And on Earth (Part 1)

by Dawn Eden 

In this day and age when best-selling “new atheist” authors, as Mark Shea notes, spend their time “pointing out to us childish believers that God is not an old man sitting on a cloud,” it is instructive to note that that there is nothing particularly new, let alone creative, about attacks on the fatherhood of God.

I recently discovered a 1934 radio address by the Rev. Daniel A. Lord, S.J., in which the great Jesuit author said, “If ours is an unhappy generation, it is largely because it is a generation that has forgotten Our Father Who is in Heaven.” Modern atheists, he added, sought to make the human race “a family without a father.”

Seventy-five years later, that phrase has an additional meaning that would have chilled Father Lord. A “family without a father” is exactly what the average American human family has become. As my former colleague Patrick Fagan of Family Research Council noted a few years ago, some 60 percent of U.S. children will experience the breakup of their parents before they turn 18. (Given the recent uptick in out-of-wedlock births, that number is probably even higher today).

Is there a connection between attacks on the fatherhood of God and the decline of human fatherhood? Pope John Paul II thought so, writing in his 1995 book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, “Original sin attempts ... to abolish fatherhood ... leaving man only with a sense of the master/slave relationship.”

That master/slave image was perpetuated by the first wave of “new atheists,” such as Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and Darwin. These were the men John Paul II called the “Masters of Suspicion.” Their philosophies, Mark Shea explains, “were founded on the denial of God as Father, and the consequent perception of God as Master, giving us only the choice to be slave or rebel.”

But the fatherhood of God, as Donald DeMarco, adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College and Seminary, recently wrote, “conjoins authority with love.”

“The Masters of Suspicion have told us that no such conjunction is possible, that all authority, by its very nature, is contrary to love,” DeMarco continued. “On the other hand, the Holy Father has told us that ethos and eros (law and love) are not only compatible with each other, but are essential to the integrity of the whole person. Ethos without eros (law without love) is identified with sin and thereby betrays the heart. The dignity and nobility of fatherhood lies in the ability to find a basis in the heart that is deeper than sin, one that unites love for others with an equally passionate concern for how they should live and where they are going.”

How does that union of “ethos and eros” look in the life of a real-life man – be he a natural father or a spiritual one? According to Andy Jaspers, a Jesuit scholastic who is a schoolmate of mine at Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., an answer may be found in the writings of St. Catherine of Siena.

St. Catherine noted that “if we imagine Sts. Paul, Peter, Thomas Aquinas, and John the Baptist standing next to each other, we’d see little in common in their physical resemblances,” Jaspers says. 
What they share is what made them saints: “They were above all men who saw themselves involved in a great drama. That drama was the Father’s plan to redeem all of creation through the Son and Holy Spirit.  This is a drama upon which all depends, and which defines everything. 

 “Second,” Jaspers continues, “they were men who accepted their mission in Christ and did not look back.  They saw the need for commitment and did not flinch in committing. They did not complain about their burdens to gain sympathy. They did not read books on how to be men. They simply plunged into Christ, and he made them men.”

Lastly, “they were men who unified their talents and parts for the sake of proclaiming the Gospel. Men are tempted to disunify their characteristics. They separate their minds from their bodies, their thoughts from external acts, and their bodies from responsibility. Saintly men unite theory and action. ... They are confident and have a quiet authority that draws others to Christ. They get this confidence from two sources: their absolute commitment to Christ and a nature disciplined to accord with that commitment.”

Coming in Part 2: Author Anthony Esolen and other authorities discuss how a renewed emphasis on fatherhood by homilists and catechists could help spur men to answer the call to the priesthood.

For resources on Christian fatherhood, visit www.FathersForGood.org, an initiative of the Knights of Columbus.

 

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)