Fathers provide focal point
in search for God

Men and women complement each other in God, to share in His community of love

By Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.

This is the first in a two-part series on fatherhood.

Father's Day is coming soon. It is good for us, as individuals, and as the Church, to reflect on the importance of fathers in our search for God.

Our economy has changed. Many men don't play the same, clear, solitary provider role for their families they once did in the past. At the same time, family members are taught by the mass media to see themselves as self-contained consumers. So the internal economic life of the family has also changed — from a common purpose shared by all family members, to a collection of competing individual interests. In other words, Dad's muscle work isn't as valuable as it used to be. And even a good male "brainworker" can rarely keep up with the costs of consumerist family life.

Tough decades for fathers

These have been a tough couple of decades for fathers in particular, and men in general. In saying that, I need to underline that no man should be excused his abusiveness, and no father should be excused the abandonment of his children. Much of the trouble men find themselves in these days is of their own making. If men act like bullies or drones, women will very reasonably act to defend themselves and their children. But today, the critiques of men in our society go a lot deeper than just correcting bad male behavior. They attack men's identity and undermine the whole idea of fatherhood. In the process, women and children are hurt, families are damaged, and our understanding of God Himself becomes confused.

The myth of easy divorce

The biggest delusion of the 1960s, '70s and '80s was that women and children could survive and even prosper without husbands and fathers; that divorce could be a good thing with little or no impact on the children involved. Just the opposite is true.

The evidence is clear. The breakdown of intact, two-parent families severely damages children. Worse, as single-parent and step-parent households increase, our social fabric weakens. There's no mystery to the data: Children need fathers, and we all suffer if fathers disappear. Which is why David Blankenhorn, the author of Fatherless America, can say that "fatherlessness is the most harmful demographic trend of this generation. It is the leading cause of declining child well-being in our society. It is also the engine driving our most urgent social problems from to crime to adolescent pregnancy to child sexual abuse to domestic violence against women."

Husbands love their wives

Author Robert Samuelson puts it another way: "The only solution [to our contemporary problems] is to reconstruct, somehow, families that provide the love, sense of self-worth and discipline that children require to develop into responsible, self-sufficient adults. But no one really knows how to do this . . ."

Of course, that's not quite true. I think the solution exists, and we can find it in our faith.

God created men and women to complement each other, to complete each other in Him, to share in His community of love. We love God best by loving and serving each other sacrificially. That takes many different forms. But it's the family, the love between a husband and wife, a mother and father, which is the glue of everything else in society. Children learn the language of love — the vocabulary which enables them to understand God — by watching their mother and father. They need both.