Francisco de Herrera the Elder, St. Joseph and the Child Jesus
Fatherhood is one of the most fundamental human and social roles. However, many point to a crisis of fatherhood across the West. It is not simply that many fathers neglecting their vocation and responsibilities. More concerningly, there is a widespread confusion about what it means to be a male and a father.
To overcome this crisis we need to turn to Christ and his Church for grace and guidance. As the Church teaches, “In revealing and in reliving on earth the very fatherhood of God (Ephesians 3:15), a man is called upon to ensure the harmonious and united development of all the members of the family: he will perform this task by exercising generous responsibility for the life conceived under the heart of the mother, by a more solicitous commitment to education, a task he shares with his wife, by work which is never a cause of division in the family but promotes its unity and stability, and by means of the witness he gives of an adult Christian life which effectively introduces the children into the living experience of Christ and the Church.” Familiaris consortio 25.
In this interview, Deacon David Delaney discusses the Christian conception of fatherhood and recommends five books on it.
Deacon David Delaney is the founder of the Mother of the Americas Institute, its current Director, and a Senior Fellow. He is also Chairman and President of the Board of Directors. Deacon Delaney previously served as founding academic dean for two separate institutions of higher education dedicated to theological formation. He has his doctorate in systematic theology from The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. His research interests are in the areas of the Trinity, Christology, ecclesiology, liturgy and the Sacraments, mission, and the new evangelization, all considered from the perspective of an adequate anthropology. He is the author of Viri Dignitatem: Personhood, Masculinity and Fatherhood in the Thought of John Paul II and The Great Mystery: Formation for Flourishing Marriages.
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Fatherhood is both a biological and a moral category. The latter is rooted in the former and consists in being a good father: discharging well the responsibilities incumbent upon a father. Presumably the books you have selected deal primarily with fatherhood in the moral sense. How would you define fatherhood? Ultimately, we need to go back to the Trinity to understand the human condition and what it means to be created. Fatherhood is understood in terms of God's fatherhood. That is how many of the spiritual masters discussed it.
Fatherhood has many different manifestations. Ultimately, however, it is rooted in the order of love.
Fatherhood begins with the love of initiation: a love that offers itself first. Then, the father ought to await the response patiently.
It also begins with masculinity. Masculinity is one of two complementary ways of being a human person. As St. John Paul II points out, we can only be a human person as either male or female. A human person is made in a certain sense to pour itself out.
In my book,The Great Mystery, I use two of Raphael’s pictures: the Crucifixion and the Marriage of Mary and Joseph. In the former, the angels catch the precious blood that comes out of Jesus's side. This outpouring is a good manifestation and analogy for human personhood, which reaches fulfilment through an outpouring of self. Fatherhood is the fulfillment of masculinity and consists in pouring oneself out to give whatever the other might not have and bring that unactualized good to fulfilment in the other person. It is a structure of love that is ordered to bringing about the good of the other.
As you have already mentioned, fatherhood is an analogical concept, whose source and exemplar is the first person of the Trinity. Is consolidating their relation to God the Father though the liturgy, sacraments, and prayer the first thing men need to do to cultivate fatherhood? Within the natural order, it is certainly possible to cultivate fatherhood without reference to the supernatural order. However, in the fallen world one cannot do that adequately or effectively. Fatherhood, whether it be in the natural order, by procreating children and bringing to birth or nurturing an unactualized good within another person, or the supernatural order which gives this work redemptive value, it can only be accomplished adequately with reference to the Father, the first person of the Trinity, and fructifying that through the liturgy.
Another model of fatherhood's that the Church proposes is St. Joseph. Just as the Holy Family is the model for all Christian families, so is St. Joseph a model for all fathers. Have you addressed this model of fatherhood in your work? I have. St. John Paul II wrote a play called The Radiation of Fatherhood. It is a beautiful meditation on the difficulties of fatherhood within the fallen order. This meditation prefigures his later work in which he presents St. Joseph as the perfect manifestation and radiation of God's fatherhood: of the Father of the Word of God. This is what we are called to do as men, regardless of our state of life. We are called to irradiate the fatherhood of God. Within the fallen order this means that we need to be attentive to the spiritual life die continually to ourselves, just as we did in baptism. We need to crush the impetus to turn in on ourselves. We need to be oriented to others. Our primary reference point should not be our own good but the good of the other. This frees us from ourselves.
St. John Paul II’s Redemptoris custos(Guardian of the Redeemer) is a beautiful meditation on how St Joseph does this perfectly. That is a central theme in my book.
"The crisis of fatherhood has always existed on an individual level. However, it has spread to us corporately."
Is there, as some claim, a crisis of fatherhood in the West? There is. This has not gone unnoticed. However, we have not really been able to do much about it, primarily because we have not recognized sufficiently, whether individually or collectively, the need to be in the world without being of the world.
The crisis of fatherhood has always existed on an individual level. However, it has spread to us corporately. Many men do not understand adequately what it means to be a male. This is part and parcel of a broader problem because women are also confused about what it means to be a female.
Nevertheless, this is a great opportunity to understand better and articulate more deeply the nature of personhood, the difference between the sexes, masculinity and femininity. That needs to be at the root of the solution.
There are certainly practical steps that we can take. Men, need to continue to offer themselves fearlessly. The difficulty in radiating God's fatherhood is that we need to pour ourselves out. In this world, that means that we might experience what seems like loss alongside love. However, Christ’s cross shows that with authentic love there is no loss but only gain.
There has been a trend to level all differentiation between the sexes and wash away authentic masculinity. Clearly, there have been excesses and a fallen imposition of masculine gifts that have done damage to women and society. That does not mean that we can disown our obligations.
Jesus Christ is the perfect representation of authentic masculinity. He is the bridegroom who continually offers himself to the bride. His bride ends up putting him to death but he continues to pour himself out for her. This fearlessness and willingness to offer oneself continually to one's wife and children, regardless of whether they accept and respond to this love, is what fatherhood means.
We cannot become shrinking violets. However, neither should we respond with machismo: my way or the highway. That caricature of masculinity has enabled and is used to justify this levelling of the differences between the sexes.
So, there is a crisis of fatherhood and it is getting worse. However, this is also an opportunity for a greater clarification and embrace of authentic fatherhood.
Could you elaborate on the causes of the crisis of fatherhood in the West? Ultimately, it is Adam and Eve. Moreover, as with Adam and Eve, the contemporary crisis begins with an attack on a woman and the husband’s failure to protect her.
It began with the dissatisfaction of women and with narratives that were partly true, partly not. Throughout the twentieth century, women desired to play a greater part in public life and overcome the masculine oppression that did exist. However, the inadequate response to that leant into the caricature of masculine oppression and sought to diminish every difference between the sexes.
Most people recognize that wives and mothers have generally had a dominant role in family. However, to win opportunities for women to be more engaged outside of the home, whatever restricted women from doing this was attacked.
The 1930 Lambeth Conference was a seminal event in this regard and allowed a change in mindset. It led to the disconnection of procreation from married life. The meaning of sex became open to new definitions and became increasingly self-referential. This manifestation of our new will-to-power began to turn our relationships against one another.
In the United States, the excesses of the 1920s laid the foundation for the sexual revolution of the 1960s. It was quelled by the Great Depression and World War II but after the war it came back with a vengeance. The moral decadence promoted by the sexual revolution is now accepted as the norm in the dominant organs of academia and public life. As a result, there has been a fragmentation of the connection between masculinity and femininity; between marriage and family life. We are utterly lost and no longer know what it means to be a human person, or male and female.
The crisis of fatherhood is nothing other than a symptom of a much more fundamental problem.
St John Paul II claimed that the crisis of the twentieth century was that of the human person. We continue to experience this crisis of human personhood. At its root, the crisis is now about it means to be a male and a female person.
"Jesus Christ is the perfect representation of authentic masculinity. He is the bridegroom who continually offers himself to the bride."
Reading the right books can be helpful, even necessary. However, is that enough to help men learn about fatherhood? It is a start. We need to know the truth to identify the good to be pursued. If you do not know the good, you are grasping in the dark. So, reading books is essential, but never sufficient.
We must transform ourselves in Christ. To do so we need to say no to ourselves and put into practice that which is true and ordered to the good.
In anaddressto the 2000 Jubilee of catechists and religion teachers, Joseph Ratzinger remarked that the Church has made a lot of progress since the sixties and seventies in intellectual formation, but not paid sufficient attention to the formation of the will. That is still the case 24 years later.
I have taught in formation, including in a seminary for some twenty years. Most of what we call human and spiritual formation tends to be intellectual formation on those topics. In my view, we still have not figured out what the practical formation needs to be and how it should take place.
The Great Mystery marriage program tries to take such an integral approach to formation. I belong to the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter and, as director of diaconate formation, am working with the Josephinum to develop a more integral and practical approach to the formation of deacons.
Obviously, pastoral formation has been much more practical. However, the human and spiritual formation has not. Each man needs to recognize that he has to be his own formator if he wants to be a good man. It is not just something you can learn about. You need to change yourself. Nevertheless, you need to begin by learning about it.
This the classical theme of the formation of the moral virtues. Yes, exactly. In the West or the United States at least, we have lost this idea because we live in a consumer-oriented economy where you need to get people to consume things they may not need. It sells to set concupiscence against the human condition. Such a society builds vice. As a result, virtue is either forgotten, seen as an unreachable idea or, for most, is lampooned as something completely contrary to human good and so is rejected.
Working practically on building virtue is a necessity and begins with overcoming vice.
I have a ten-point program as part of my formation program. The very first point consists in drawing up an inventory of one’s vices to overcome and identifying the opposing virtues to build up. We cannot begin to be authentic men and fathers without doing so.
Could you explain the work of the Mother of the Americas Institute? The Mother of the Americas Institute is an apostolate that was formed around the issue of formation. There are many different apostolates that do a lot of good work. Rightly, they adopt many of the means and strategies that have helped society become more efficient, productive, and reach more people. These are all good. However, we need to step back and look at the way in which we are conducting evangelization, catechesis, and ministry. Society’s approach to communication and organization are based on an industrial model and mindset. That industrial model has a corrupt view of human nature and the human person. We see this in business, which uses the term ‘human resources’ and thinks of the person as raw material to grind up and extrude into the different shapes that we want. We fall into this mindset when we look at things primarily in terms of outcomes. If outcomes become the end, then the human person becomes a means. We need to take a new look at what we are doing. We need to improve the fruitfulness of our endeavours by starting with an adequate anthropology, and then looking at what we are doing and how we are doing it. Apostolic endeavours are primarily about the formation of the human person, or at least they ought to be.
Hence, The Mother of the Americas Institute starts from the foundation of what it means to be a person. The person is made for relationships and needs to be able to live those relationships truthfully and fruitfully. So, we look at the potencies God has placed within the human person and how, instead of imposing outcomes, we can best bring them to actualization. We try to be better midwives, as Socrates would say, and bring to fulfilment that which is already within us.
We are just beginning and are working on rolling out two products.
One is already available: Made for Communion. It is a free, self-paced video based course and is on our website (mainstitute.org). It begins by looking at how everything in creation, Redemption, and human fulfilment can be understood from the perspective of the interior life of the Trinity. It shows how this is manifested in the liturgy, sacraments, moral life, and social teaching of the Church, and will be brought to fulfilment at the end of time.
The second product is The Great Mystery marriage formation program. It consists of intellectual formation that brings together all of this knowledge about what it means to be human and its implication for marriage. Then, it turns to the practical implementation of these lessons.
Eventually, we would like to take the insights and lessons learned from building these programs and help other apostolates to look at what they are doing and pursue it more fruitfully.
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The first book you have chosen is Karol Wojtyła’s Love and Responsibility. It is not about fatherhood and motherhood, but a broader argument: how human sexuality finds its fulfilment in marriage. Is accepting this broader argument crucial to understanding the nature of fatherhood?
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