As for attendance at the Mission, we are working hard, the Consagrados and the Consagradas and I; and on these first three days the attendance has been 145, 265, and 303. As for Torres, it seems to me as soon as he sees the well's dry, he'll blow away.

But we were talking about Father's Day. St. Paul certainly felt like a father, simply because he was a father: “Even though you have ten thousand guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers, for in Christ Jesus I became your father through the Gospel (1 Cor 4:15).” (St. Paul, in fact, even felt like a mother: “My dear children,” he says to the Galatians, “for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you (4:19).") People call me Padre, people call me Father. Every time they say it I am glad, because they are making an implicit act of faith, of belief, in the whole invisible and divinely real realm of Grace, where the priest, who is another Christ, engenders in Christ the sons and daughters of God.

Oh, for some three decades now I've been running into people who make a crusade of eliminating the word Father with reference to the priest; sometimes priests themselves fall into the trap: I once met a priest who told everyone he met to call him “Boots.” They're wrong. I set aside my God-given right to become a father because God called me to be a Father. I set aside my right to have my blood flow in the veins of sons and daughters and grandchildren, to set in motion the Spirit of Adoption whereby the whole Church can say to God: “Abba!”—that is, “Father!” Tell you what: you meet a priest, you call him Father. He is. He doesn't like it? You call him Father anyway.

I'm writing very fast because this very afternoon I must drive an hour or more to Navidad, where the Mission is, and celebrate Mass and give a one-hour Mission discourse under the stars. But allow me to observe a few things about the situation of fatherhood in the United States.

For years now there has been an impulse, strong as it is wrong, to reduce the priest to the level of a nice guy: he should eat and drink and talk and act and react just like all other decent people, because he isn't anything special. And then you have Catholic (?) writers putting down the Church as Christ founded her—yes, hierarchical and magisterial—putting down the Church as “patriarchal structures.”

Just last month I saw a leaflet written by a priest and a member of a truly great Religious Order, a hapless leaflet about how to approach God; every time it referred to God, it called Him the Heavenly Parent. (Did you ever, in your whole life, after talking with your Mom or Dad, say to someone: “I was just talking to my parent”?) Mother is mother and father is father; and God chose to reveal Himself as Father. Once in California, just as I was leaving the sacristy for the altar, I was asked to refer to God as Creator, not Father. The Missal directs the priest to say: “Jesus taught us to call God our Father, and so we have the courage to say: Our Father...”; I never thought it would take an act of courage to stand up in a Catholic Church and call God our Father.

Now, what about the fatherhood of you men, you millions and millions of fathers? It takes no going out on a limb to say: governments are absorbing all fatherhood, while generously allowing the real fathers to foot the bill. Isn't it true that they want to do abortions on schoolgirls without the father—or mother—ever knowing it? The textbooks of (at least some) universities are telling the ones at whose feet your kids (or kids' kids) will sit, that the ideal personality is neither masculine nor feminine, but androgynous. Androgynous. So a man is not to be a man nor a woman a woman: just androgynous; that your kids can say: “Our androgynous parent, who art on our level, hollow be thy name...” You do not dare, even in some ‘catholic' circles, highlight a man as a man: you get yourself called chauvinist.

And so it often happens that a man winds up with very little real authority over his sons and daughters (the very word authority sounds strange), and the only sway a man has over his fast-growing children is by his ability to win them over. You'd better charm your kids out of their socks; otherwise they'll pay you no heed.
And how does all this affect the family? About a year ago I was in a beautiful Midwestern city, and a couple was taking me to preach at a conference, and we passed through a neighborhood of sumptuous housing: sprawling three-stories with swimming pools and field house-sized garages. And I asked them what kind of people live there. And they said people who are making an awful lot of money, and have one child, and when the child turns about ten and the couple can't stand one another any more, she gets to keep the child, and they split the house and the pool and the cars down the middle. Split. Already fifty percent of marriages split. In some places it's only twenty percent; so in some places it's eighty.

These things have been dictated by the powers of darkness: the attacks on marriage and the family; the violent separation of love and life in sex; the effective denial of real fatherhood.

Do listen carefully: Fatherhood is the highest, the most beautiful, the most complete expression of manhood. Bishop Sheen used to say that when a man dies, the first thing God asks him is: Where are your children? God hates sterility. Now...this fatherhood and this manhood are the key to one another: the better you know the one, the better you know the other. And God has taught us—He has publicly revealed to us—what fatherhood is and what manhood is.
May God give you the grace to desire to know at depth what fatherhood is. He made it known to you and me, publicly; all we have to do is open our hearts and listen: “For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom all fatherhood in heaven and on earth derives its name...” (Eph 3:14-15: your Bible may say family because the Greek word for family has the identical root as the word for father.) In God is the fullness of fatherhood; and all true fatherhood has its root in Him; and outside Him there is no true fatherhood.

If I am a father truly, if you are a father truly, our fatherhood is a dynamic participating in that one-and-only Fatherhood: God's. But if I—or you—attempt any kind of fatherhood outside God, then it's not fatherhood. It might be a power grab, or a pleasure thrust, or a search for the self; but if it is not fatherhood-in-God then it is counterfeit. Because God is “...the Father, from whom all fatherhood in heaven and on earth derives its name.”

Do you remember St. Philip at the Last Supper? Philip found it hard to listen even to Jesus talking about an unseen Father; so the poor fellow plaintively says: “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.” Hear, hear what Jesus answered him: “Don't you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father (Jn 14:8ff).” If you receive and exercise the grace to contemplate who Jesus is, you will know God the Father; and, knowing Him in Christ, you will know the Eternal, Subsistent Fatherhood. Because Fatherhood is what God the Father is.

But if you cannot see God the Father, how can you see Fatherhood? In Christ, in the One who freely chose not to marry. In the Virginal Man, the One who set aside His human right to marry. Because He wanted His Church to be His bride, and she was and is, streaming forth from His wounded body, blood of His Blood, flesh of His Flesh, divinely more than Eve is flesh of Adam. Look at Him. Look and see if He is not Manhood itself.

Has there ever been a man in whom is found the fullness of Manhood as you find it in the Man-God Jesus? Look at Him in the Garden of Olives: He has just spent three hours at the threshold of death, sweating Blood, kept alive by a special ministry of angels (cf Lk. 22:39ff) and some two hundred armed and violent men surround Him; they have orders to seize Him. You could see every detail of that incomparable Face by the light of the full moon and the Roman torches. And He speaks first:

“Whom are you looking for?” They answered Him, “Jesus the Nazorean.” He said to them, “I AM.” Judas His betrayer was also with them. When he said to them, “I AM,” they turned away and fell to the ground. So He again asked them. “Whom are you looking for?” They said, “Jesus the Nazorean.” Jesus answered, “I told you that I AM. So if you are looking for Me, let these men go (Jn 18:4-8).”

Two hundred captors, heavily armed, and just one Captive, who didn't even make a fist; and the captors obey the Captive, and they tie His hands—when He tells them to. They could not place a finger on Him until His eyes gave permission, the finger on Him until His eyes gave permission, the eyes of the One who is Manhood itself. Do not call me a man—unless you find me to be like Him. Nor yourself. Because all the manhood there is, in heaven and on earth receives its name—its reality—from Him: there is no Manhood outside Him.

He has no need to establish Himself: He knows what He is. And—look at Him—He bends over and washes the feet of His Church, His bride that must obey Him. He washes her feet and towels them dry, just a few hours before going to His death for her, to save her and make her holy. And only in that washing of the feet can we understand the authority of a father and husband, or the obedience of a wife and of children: authority not for self-fulfillment, nor obedience for self-abasement, but rather authority and obedience for salvation and holiness.

This loving authority and loving obedience—let it be known—just will not be found if man and woman cannot truly speak with one another. You don't love me if you don't respect me; and you don't respect me if you don't listen to me.

In this article—maybe because I am in such a hurry—the most important comes last and shortest: what makes my Sacrament—Holy Orders—fruitful for the people and the only happy way of life for me, is Confession and Communion well received—not for routine's sake—and constant, sincere (though quite poor) prayer.

My very dear friend, husband and father of a family, you have a Sacrament whose purpose is to transform you and your wife into a living copy of the love eternal that unites Jesus and His bride, the Church. Your Sacrament will bear much fruit, and will be a happy way of life, by the Sacraments of Confession and Communion well and often received, and by sincere prayer. Could you not given fifteen minutes a day to prayerful reading of the Gospel—of what Jesus says and does? He will enter you. Do it. Everything about you will be transformed.

--Father Pablo Straub, 1994