The Fatherhood of God, the Fatherhood of the Priest

The following excerpts are drawn from the chapter entitled "The Challenge of Fatherhood" in Massimo Camisasca's The Challenge of Fatherhood: Thoughts on the Priesthood, trans. Adrian Walker (Fraternity of St. Charles, 2003): 101‒109, 112‒113. It is reprinted with permission.

A Look at the Present Day

The drama of human existence is relationship with the father. This has clearly been the case in every period of history, but it is especially so today.

The desire for privacy, for escape into one’s past, the withdrawal into oneself, or into one’s family home, and the disinterest in the polis that characterize many people’s lives today derive from, among other things, a field experience of the father. When God first thought of the Church, that is, of a guided company, he thought of man’s constitutive need for a father and a mother. He wanted us always to have fathers and mothers to accompany us.

The experience of the absence or abscondence of the father manifests itself in insecurity, lack of resolve, and resistance to being loved and guided. The experience of being loved and fostered by the mother is disproportionately important, even as the energy communicated through this relationship can find no outlets for creative self-expression. A fatherless young man is unable to take responsibility for his everyday choices, he feels that reality is hostile or is the arena of a challenge that costs too much psychic, spiritual, and effective energy. If you don’t have a father, your life is populated with enemies.

More recently, especially since the 1970s, there has been a progressive attack on fatherhood. The stated goal of the revolutions of 1968 was precisely the destruction of the role of the father and of every authority. The figure of the father was frequently identified with that of the paternalistic master; analogously, the same period brought forth theories of the death of God. A certain one-sided feminism has further contributed to the depreciation of the father in his maleness. The result has been a general crisis of the family, centered on the separation between sexuality and generation, between sexuality and education: sex understood purely as play.

This is the raison d’être for the existence of the Church and every vocational company: to accompany our personal drama, so that the original perception of being loved may become a habitual awareness in us.

The daily news shows that the crisis now affects not just the experience of paternity and maternity, but the very possibility of giving these names a meaning. Think about heterologous insemination, which makes it impossible to know who one’s father and mother are; think of appalling things like “renting” wombs or the cloning of human beings. Does being a father still have any meaning?

Everyone can understand that a “genetic” mutation has occurred, and is still occurring, in man’s conception of himself and what a source of unhappiness and violence it is. The ultimate root of unhappiness and violence is precisely the absence of the experience of sonship. Sonship and paternity are strictly correlative. If one does not recognize that one is a son, if one does not recognize one’s own father, one is unfruitful, because one is incapable of penetrating into reality, of plowing the soil of the world. The experience of sonship, by contrast, turns into an ability to generate and to create; one is able to face reality, to express oneself, to communicate intense affections. Having gotten to know so many young men, I can say that even priestly vocation can be connected with the search for the father. No one should be scandalized by this: the experience of becoming a father in the priesthood can turn out to be a path to discovering a sonship that has been absent in one’s life. The vocation can thus open itself to the search for the origin of oneself and to the recognition of what is other than oneself, of others, and of the Other.

Today’s crisis of fatherhood goes hand-in-hand with the crisis of belonging, which is perhaps the acutest form of the crisis of contemporary Catholicism. The world has dismissed belonging as an expression of sectarianism, thus radically undermining faith’s ability to be the form shaping the whole of life. The weakening of the experience of paternity makes the figure of God as father ethereal and thins out the affective and creative density of faith’s presence in history.

God calls us to be fathers and mothers today. We cannot forget the present, the context in which this call is addressed to us, in which this possibility is offered to us.

What are we to do? In guiding the young men who come to me and whose superior I become when they join the Fraternity of St. Charles, the main thing I tend to emphasize is that there is no getting around one’s own carnal father: the point is not to censor him, forget him, or neglect him, but accept him, love him, and perhaps rediscover him. One mustn’t sublimate the fatherhood-sonship relations, censoring one’s historically and carnally given father. One must rather rediscover it and relive it within a new relationship.

Young people need to be educated to live out in relation to themselves and to things (even before they live it out in relation to other persons!) the paternity that they have experienced in a weak or problematic way. This education demands of them acceptance of reality and of their own freedom. Acceptance of reality: my being is dependence and belonging because I did not originate myself; the fact that my birth lies some distance in the past does not cancel this dependence and belonging, but rather clarifies and deepens it. Acceptance of freedom: to live is to take up creatively the challenge of a task that has been assigned, a task that involves work, trials, and difficulties, but also rewards, joys, and gratifications, and a task that defines one’s place in the history of men and of God with men.

What Sort of Fatherhood?

God is Father. Jesus Christ has revealed this definitive word about man and about history. God therefore places his seal on man by instituting in man a fatherhood similar to his own. How does God reveal his paternity to us? Through the paternity of human beings. If there are times when fathers disappoint, it is because, as Jesus says, “only one is Father” (Mt 23:9).

In chapters five and seven of the Gospel of St. John, we find a particularly suggestive expression of Christ’s experience of his relationship with the Father. He gives voice to his feeling of being urgently called upon by the Father to work without rest: “My Father is always at work, and I, too, am always at work” (Jn 5:17). Fatherhood is tireless activity: its task is to welcome, preserve, correct, and foster growth. This is the task that Saint Joseph had with respect to Jesus: to protect him and bring him up.

Every father is an educator. To educate a person means to guide him to the knowledge of the path on which he is to realize the eternal plan for his life in time. An example of paternity that has always struck me occurs in Dante’s Inferno. The poet meets a fellow-citizen who has been ill-treated and exiled as he was: Bruno Latini, a man of learning, a profound philosopher, and an authority on the stars. Dante regards him as the model of the man capable of guiding others to make their lives a sign of the divine in time; he therefore feels him to be a father. The poet then addresses him in the following words: “In my mind is fixed, and it warms my heart to recall / the dear paternal image / of you who led me step by step / to learn how man becomes immortal.” Dante meets Brunetto among the sodomites, but, notwithstanding the moral judgment he makes on Brunetto, what concerns him is to throw into relief the place that Brunetto has had in his life. Brunetto was able to show him the path towards self-realization. Since Brunetto was an astrologer, Dante makes use of the metaphor of the star to indicate the sign of the eternal in time, by following which one cannot “fail to reach the glorious port.”

Dante thus seems to delineate a certain antinomy: on the one hand, the goal of education is to bring the person to autonomy, to the ability to face reality and to plan freely his own future; on the other hand, the person’s maturity involves the awareness of his own ineliminable dependence. Aren’t these two claims contradictory? For the contemporary mentality, they are: autonomy means not depending on another, but on oneself. Here we touch on what is the crucial question of the history of humanity and of each man’s existence.

The Christian experiences that he daily becomes more and more himself, with an identity of his own, by adhering to a Presence. As he journeys forward, he does not deny his own origin; on the contrary, he is born ever more profoundly from it—and just so becomes ever more profoundly himself.

Modern civilization has asserted from its very beginnings that the high-point of education is the severing of all bonds (think of Makarenko’s Pedagogy for Schools or of Rousseau’s Emile). Let us instead go to a different source: the Mystery of the Trinity. The Son’s absolute relativity or belonging to the Father was manifested in his cry of “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mk 15:34), which is at one and the same time the moment of the greatest distance and the greatest proximity. The central chapters of John’s Gospel show us Christ as the one sent by the Father. The Son has manifested himself in the full power of his mission for the whole of human history precisely through this absolute and free unity with the Father: “What I see him do, I always do,” “What pleases him, I do” (cf. Jn 4:34; 5:19; 7:16; 8:28, etc.).

God’s Spirit also evacuates the antinomy between freedom and belonging for us who thus share analogously in what Christ himself lived. He thereby enables us to experience that the greatest freedom lies in the greatest belonging. This experience is one that we live even before being able to describe it: nature itself plainly teaches that the constructive energy with which a person throws himself into history increases with his awareness of being loved.

The thought of God’s fatherhood is always with me and is for me a source of continual wonderment, of a gratitude that is a matrix of rebirth for me. God has made me from nothing, because once I did not exist, and now I do. This experience is the beginning of freedom, for freedom is self-possession, full self-realization, and the first realization of oneself is the very fact of existing. Every fatherhood that would imitate God’s is one that creates and accompanies, that calls forth, enhances, and preserves the freedom of the other. This is the raison d’être for the existence of the Church and every vocational company: to accompany our personal drama, so that the original perception of being loved may become a habitual awareness in us.

The other experience with which I identify God’s fatherhood in my life is liberation from fear. St. Paul contrasts the slave and the son, and says: “all those who are guided by the Spirit of God are sons of God. And you have not received the spirit of slavery to lead you back in fear, but you have received a spirit of adoptive sonship through which we cry ‘Father’” (Rom 8: 14–15). The slave’s relation to the master is one of fear, because the master commands. The son’s relationship with the father is one of freedom, because the father guides him. Because he belongs to the Father through the Spirit, the Christian recognizes that he is a son and experiences liberation from fear. St. Paul describes the Christian as a slave who has been set free and adopted as a son: “you are no longer a slave, but a freeman” (Gal 4:7). For St. Paul, liberation was his personal experience of passing from Hebraism to Christianity; for us it is emancipation from the laws of the world. The world has its laws, and whenever it speaks of liberation, what it is really talking about are new laws that beget new forms of slavery.

St. John has recorded for us these words of Jesus: “I no longer call you servants, but friends.” These words set up a contrast between the servant and the friend that parallels the Pauline contrast between the slave and the son. Jesus goes on to explain “because I have told you everything” (see Jn 15:15). The servant lives in fear because he does not know: he knows only what he has to do from morning till evening, but he does not know the meaning that what he does has in the master’s plan for his household. We, by contrast, are free because we know the truth (see Jn 8:32). We know that we have been saved at the cost of Christ’s blood (see Rom 5: 6–10). This certainty removes fear from our lives. It takes away the fear that our limits and our sins are the final word about us. This is why Jesus identifies the essence of the Father with mercy.

What is it about us that keeps us prisoners? The past, when we do not believe that the Spirit of Christ is able to wipe away our evil; the present, when we imagine that our relationship with Christ is measured by our ability to respond, rather than by his continuous initiative in coming to us; the future, when we do not have enough faith to be able to hope.

“In love there is no fear” (1 Jn 4:18). I am reminded of the Psalms and the Prophets that speak of God as a father who bends over his child, gathers him up, and holds him in his arms. “Even if your father and mother should abandon you, I will never abandon you” (see Ps 27:10; Is 49:15). The Prophets are given the task of tirelessly reminding Israel that God’s fatherhood is inexorable, tender, and not at all generic. In Jesus’ last hours (see Jn 12–17), he talks several times about the elimination of fear. On leaving the Apostles, Jesus gives them the Spirit, who will make Jesus’ presence in their lives actual and concrete. Just as Jesus is the one on whom the Spirit descends and remains, the Christian is the one who in the Spirit experiences God permanently accompanying his life (see Jn 1:33; 3:34). The Spirit is like fresh and clear water that continually bubbles up from the depths of our being (see Jn 4:14) and enables us to recognize the outward and historical signs of Jesus’ presence.

The Foundation of All Paternity

St. Paul states that God the Father is the source from which “every paternity is named in heaven and on earth” (Eph 3:15). When we talk about fatherhood, then, we are talking in the first instance about the mystery of the person of God the Father, of the one from whom all being takes its origin—“the source of being is in You,” as a hymn from the liturgy of the hours has it—and from whom each one of us, who at one time did not exist, but then began to exist, comes into being. This means that we have been wanted, loved by a Freedom, by a Person who has made us be and continues to do so. 

[…] 

Called to be Fathers in the Church

God’s design comes to pass in history through a continual rebirth of his people, which is made possible by the presence of a “holy seed” (Is 6:13). This is still true of the Church today.

The world hates the Church, it perceives the Church as an intrusive and bothersome presence. Why? Because the Church recalls men to the truth, reminding them that no form of power can adequately answer their deepest needs. As T.S. Eliot once powerfully put it, the Church exists to remind man that lust, money, and war are incapable of quenching his heart’s thirst. This is not the only function of the Church, of course, but when human beings do not participate in its life and do not discover it as bearing a possibility of fullness, they see it merely as a source of intolerable claims, admonitions, and prohibitions.

Why is the Church important for man? It is the place of true paternity and maternity, which express the maturity and fullness of the human. Although paternity and maternity are physiologically and psychologically different, on a basic level they have the same value, because they share the same task of begetting and educating. They represent the highest form of participation in the end for which we exist.

God is the one who begets and does not forsake, who admits to being and educates us in it. The first task of spiritual fatherhood is therefore to educate. Christ has left this task above all to holy Mother Church: she generates her children in the baptismal font, she feeds them, raises them, and sustains them through the sacraments, catechesis, and mutual belonging. Priests are the servants of the fatherhood of God and the motherhood of the Church.