Fatherhood, Marriage, Faith, and Family: Father’s Day Thoughts 2013

Paul Adams

All the young families at Mass today, together with our new young parish priest and several other spiritual fathers, made vividly present to me the links among fatherhood, marriage, faith, and family.  

Fatherhood and marriage

Marriage created fatherhood. Not biologically, of course.  When men mate, most will sooner or later become fathers.  All of us alive and dead had a father.  But not all our fathers were married or stayed married.  Marriage creates fatherhood as a social role, in the sense of a male caring for children he knows to be his (see Miller, 2000 on “The Troubled Dawn of Fatherhood”), a sense unknown to our closest kin, the chimpanzees.  This was the explicit aim of marriage law from the very earliest known legal codes in Mesopotamia, which concerned themselves mostly with marriage, its nature, rights, and obligations. Their point was to give to the child the mother and father who made the child. They created fatherhood, so to speak, with the stroke of a pen.

Marriage is the institution through which one generation sacrifices itself for the next.  It is the institution that binds fathers to their own children.  It is the institution that enables and supports a man’s decision, as between the choices all males face, to be a protector rather than a predator.

Faith and family

As Mary Eberstadt compellingly argues, there is an intimate and complex tie between faith and family.  Not only do the religiously observant have more children, but couples with more children are more likely to be or become religious.  Children drive their parents to church.  Christianity, in particular, with its God as Father, its Holy Family, is hard to comprehend in the absence of a natural father who loves and protects, guides and corrects.  Where such fathers are rare in the experience of communities, Christianity atrophies. Christianity and the natural family rise and fall together.

In our community of Ave Maria, we see fatherhood, marriage, faith and family, thriving together and supporting each other.  This has, of course, ceased to be the norm in the larger society in the West.  Even a place like this is not immune to the anti-family, anti-marriage, secularizing influences expressed in explicit promotion of the sexual revolution and all that attends it as official government ideology - the new state religion.  Or in the ubiquity of internet pornography.  Each in its way delinks sex from marriage and both from children.  It is astonishing to me now to see how openly a show like Frasier, not to mention Seinfeld or Sex and the City, promoted casual sex as normal, morally acceptable, and healthy, as well as how minimal (exiguous to the point of nullity) a role children play in their individualistic ideology of sexual expressionism.  

Strong faith and large families are the norm here, but for some of us, myself included, it was only, in Hegel’s metaphor, with the coming of the dusk that the owl of Minerva spread its wings and took flight.  And no-one imagines that even the young who grow up or study in this community are uniformly virtuous.

There is any case, no utopia on earth - the very etymology of the term, coined by St. Thomas More in 1516, tells us that there is no such place.  We fathers are, in the English understatement, no better than we should be.  Our efforts to do the best by our families are shaped, enabled and constrained by the community of faith and family life around us - and the wider pressures of media and government that impinge on it.

Fatherhood, we are reminded today, is a social role shaped by the experience of millennia.  It is created by and tied to marriage and to faith.  The results of breaking those links are disastrous - the social and personal costs of fatherlessness in our society are staggering.  We are reaping what the sexual revolution in its myriad social, legal, and ideological expressions sowed.  The weakening of the links among marriage, sex, and fatherhood has affected even the way we define and conceptualize marriage.  This is apparent in the widespread tendency to reduce our concept of marriage to a kind of Hallmark card sentiment, having to do with the feelings of love and commitment between two adults (so long as the feelings last), but nothing intrinsically to do with sex, sexual complementarity, or children.

Walking the Way

Last month I walked the Camino de Santiago from Sarria to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain with my adult daughter (see the blog posts here - working from last, April 26, to most recent, June 10).  Others we met on pilgrimage also undertook the journey at least in part as a time for family bonding.  The father-child theme is at the center of the The Way, the film by the father-son team of Sheen-Estevez.  It is also the heart of the best recent writing I have seen on the Camino, about another father-daughter team, ten years younger than us, who made the pilgrimage last year.  The father blogged the experience from start to finish along the whole of the longest, French route - see Webster Bull’s vivid and inspiring narrative - now an e-book and to be developed into a memoir.

The Camino continues to be, as it has been for more than a thousand years, many things - religious, spiritual, cultural, even athletic - to many people.  But for some of us it serves as a time of respite, of healing or convalescence.  Even without the personal drama and intensities of the movie, it is a time of restoring or rebuilding or sustaining those bonds of family and fatherhood that time along with other demands and pressures, competing ideological tendencies, and the mad, dehumanizing pace of our mundane lives, as well as our own fallen natures, vices, and follies, has weakened.

Walking the Way

Paul Adams

In a couple of hours (DV), I will be on my way to Barcelona and thence to join the Camino de Santiago, the pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James in northern Spain, with my adult daughter Katryn.  That means there will be a three-week hiatus in my blog.

I have been asked about blogging the experience day by day.  I expect to write about it when I return but there are several reasons not to do it day by day.  One of them is that there is a very fine blog of that kind already by a father, Webster Bull, who walked the whole 500 miles of the camino with his adult daughter last year.  It is beautifully done and fascinating.  Father and daughter respectively are ten years younger than me and my daughter, so their experiences were inevitably different but his troubles sleeping in the albergues certainly reinforced my determination to bring a large supply of ear-plugs.

Each day's post is linked to the next so you can read it like an e-book.  I was reassured by his observation that, despite expecting to feel a certain superiority to those who joined the pilgrimage, as we will, at Sarria, the last place on the French route you can do so and still put in the 100 km you need to get a certificate--but he found that many of these pilgrims were Spaniards with jobs and families using their vacation to do a religious pilgrimage.  That gave him a fresh respect for them, since both he and his daughter are serious Catholics, whereas many who do the whole camino--as we know from The Way (the movie with Martin Sheen) are non-religious, spiritual-but-not-religious, or even anti-Catholic.

A favorite part of the blog is the account of their time in Santiago de Compostela, including this anecdote from June 18, 2012, about Pope Benedict XVI.  It starts like this:

In Seattle you have the Space Needle, in Paris the Eiffel Tower. In Santiago de Compostela, the number-one tourist attraction seems to be the Botafumeiro, the giant censer propelled on a pendulum swing by six rope-pulling stewards and spewing scented smoke in front of the altar before the final blessing, especially at SRO pilgrim masses. It's a sensation, hurtling on its trapeze like a death-defying circus artist or a space capsule out of control. 

It's most of what you hear about. A couple from Holland here on holiday asked me during the Spain-Croatia soccer match tonight if I had seen the Botafumeiro yet. A fellow pilgrim and a Protestant complained to me that the Botafumeiro was "too commercial," and proved his point by standing with hundreds of other gawkers to snap still and video images when it swung into action at the end of noon mass on Sunday. When the giant, flaming ball was wrestled to earth by a courageous caped attendant, the cathedral broke into applause. Before giving us his final blessing, the celebrant made the best of an awkward moment by saying that he hoped we were applauding the Lord and not the Botafumeiro. 

A pilgrim who had been following Webster's blog as it unfolded and who was on pilgrimage at the same time, told him that

when the Pope was in Santiago a couple of years ago, everyone was eager to see his reaction to the Botafumeiro. Some thought he would look up in wonder. Some thought he might even gesture approvingly. 

Instead, our Pope kept his head lowered in prayer throughout the swinging, which lasts at least 45 seconds. He never looked, never flinched. He just waited for the censing to be done with, then delivered his blessing. 

I have concluded, and this anecdote reinforces my conclusion, that it is impossible to make a proper judgment of the Catholic Church without having lived inside it seriously. Few have lived longer or more deeply inside the faith than Pope Benedict.

To all my fellow peregrinos, I wish buen camino.  See you soon.

Sigrid Undset and the Fate of Europe

Paul Adams

I am reading Sigrid Undset’s Stages on the Road, a collection of essays written in the years after she won the Nobel Prize for literature, published in English in 1934, and now reissued with an introduction by Elizabeth Scalia.  As the new edition’s blurb says, it is a “fascinating collection of of saints’ lives, a prophetic critique of modernity, and a surprisingly contemporary take on being Catholic--in particular a Catholic woman--in a sometimes hostile secular world.”  It is also - strikingly in these days of religious indifferentism, casual heresy, and lowest-common-denominator ecumenism - a powerful critique of Protestantism, its history and continuing legacy in Europe. 

Undset wrote as a Catholic convert, raised by atheists, in a country, Norway, then and now every bit as hostile to the Catholic faith as England.  (Today there are more Muslims than Catholics in Norway.)  In her preface to the English edition, Undset makes two points about an ancient Christian practice that Protestantism abandoned, the veneration of saints.  She herself produced some of the finest writings on saints, including a vivid, beautifully written biography of Catherine of Siena and the essays in this book.

First, Undset notes that “the cult of saints excludes the cult of success--the veneration of those people who have got on well in this world, the snobbish admiration of wealth and fame” (p. xii).  She points out that the heresy so much associated with the Protestant ethic - what Undset calls the “religious business instinct” that attributes worldly success, personal or national, to divine favor and poverty or disaster to God’s punishment of vice - is opposed by the Church in her veneration of saints.  They were martyrs or exemplars of heroic virtue in life, but very few were successful in worldly terms.

The second point relates to the limited effectiveness of the threat of Hell in bringing about justice and charity on earth.  

Even in those times when most men firmly believed in Heaven and Hell there were always plenty of them who preferred to brave the threat of Hell rather than renounce the joys of self-worship, the gratification of hatred and power, or subordinate themselvesto a force to which their whole ego was antagonistic (p. xiii).

It seems that there are two ways of dealing with this problem, both of which become evident in Protestant Christianity.  One is to intensify fire-and-brimstone preaching, to put the fear of Hell into men’s hearts; the other is denial (outright denial of Hell’s existence or its compatibility with the existence of a loving God, or a psychological denial that represses consciousness of what is at stake).  These find expression in today’s fundamentalist and liberal tendencies respectively.  Undset points to the saints and their veneration by the Church as providing a different perspective:

The position is this, that the Christian Church can never have the right to suppress what her Founder has said about eternal perdition.  But it is equally certain that what the Church has achieved has not been achieved by frightened instruments who shrank in slavish terror before the wrath of a cruel God.  She has accomplished it through her saints who had the heroic love of God--of the Uncreated Creator of the created world, in which the fight is for or against God.  The sectarian animosity against the cult of saints is one of the reasons which have made it possible to represent Christianity as a religion of fear, not of heroism (p. xiii).

The excellent, thorough, and not-to-be-missed review of Stages of the Road by Webster Bull at his blog site, Witness, emphasizes several other telling points in what amounts to a devastating critique of the Reformation.  That catastrophe, Undset argues, “was no reformation of the Church but a new formation, which was in keeping with the taste and feelings of the rising middle class. It needed vast and unscrupulous propaganda before it could make any pretense of being an ‘improvement’ of the Church . . . ”

In response to Protestant and secularist criticisms of the Church’s attitude to women, Undset claims that Catholic women traditionally have been given “a freedom from interference which would be inconceivable in a society molded by Lutheranism or Calvinism.”  Bull’s review echoes my experience growing up in an Anglican-secularist environment in England:

This struck a chord with me. As a convert from the Anglican Church, I never stop hearing about women in the priesthood. Yet as a young Episcopalian I never heard tales of a single notable Anglican woman, the way a young Catholic hears tell of Mary, Margaret, Monica, Catherine, Teresa, Thérèse, and their saintly sisters. “So long as Catholicism was the dominating element in the intellectual life of Europe,” Undset says, “a woman who really had a contribution to make to the spiritual life of her time was given an opportunity to do so.” St. Angela (1474–1540), a third-order Franciscan who founded the Ursulines as a company of virgins living outside any convent, was a stellar example. 

Then came the Reformation. “Where the culture of a country was molded by Lutheranism or Calvinism,” Undset writes, “the women in the course of a few generations were brought up to be content with existing simply for the sake of the men.” Can I hear you say ouch?! Such a charge could not have gone down well in 1930s Norway, when Undset wrote it.

The essays, written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, have a strikingly contemporary and prophetic feel.  In the final essay, which addresses marriage and suicide, as Bull says, “she accuses Protestant churches of caving in to the middle-class mentality, which overlooks the gravity of taking one’s own life while condoning divorce. In both cases, only the Catholic Church has kept its eye on the prize: our eternal salvation.”

Undset warns her fellow Europeans that they cannot expect to throw aside Catholicism while keeping its many benefits:

We must try to make this clear to ourselves—we have no right to assume that any part of European tradition, cultural values, moral ideas, emotional wealth, which has its origin in the dogmatically defined Christianity of the Catholic Church, will continue to live a ‘natural’ life, if the people of Europe reject Christianity and refuse to accept God’s supernatural grace. One might just as well believe that a tree whose roots were severed should continue to bear leaves and blossoms and fruit.

As Bull’s review puts it, “Eighty years after these essays were written, Europe is suffering the consequences of its disavowal of the Catholic faith, just as Undset predicted.”