“The Great Adventurers of the modern world.” With these words Charles Péguy, the great French Catholic poet of the early twentieth century, honored the fathers of families. Péguy was killed in the first of the modern world’s global wars, but if he were alive today, he would probably feel the need to underscore his statement. […]

Forget the dads you see on Television: selfish, workaholic, lazy, absent, bullying, pushover dads. They do not deserve the name. Real dadness is bigger than that. It’s as big as Our Father who art in Heaven. The call to be a Catholic dad is a call to suffer—as a husband, as a father, as a […]

This post is part of a three part series. See parts one and two. Of all the duties of fatherhood, it is the munus regendi —the duty to shepherd, based on Christ’s role as King—that is most likely to offend modern sensibilities. The father has authority? The father is a king? Come on! That’s outdated chauvinistic patriarchy. […]

This post is part of a three part series. See part one here. As we continue our look at the three munera, or duties, of fatherhood revealed to us in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, we today turn our attention to the munus sanctificandi, or the father’s duty to sanctify his family. The Priesthood of Jesus Before we […]

In the introduction to this series, I wrote about how each father is entrusted with three duties, or munera in Latin, and that these three duties are modeled by Christ himself. While traditionally associated with the ordained priesthood, these duties just as much apply to the fathers of families, who also share in a priestly role, albeit […]

There are few roles as mocked and derided as that of the father. Watch any TV show or movie made in the last 40 years or so, and you will see fathers portrayed variously as buffoons, domineering jerks, or at best, good-hearted but clueless simpletons. What you’ll never see is a father portrayed as loving and […]

Best known for his fantasy novels The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien is probably better known by members of his family for his profound example of true fatherhood. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892 in Bloemfontein, South Africa. His life growing up there and then later in England would prove […]

Divorce rates skyrocketing; adultery rampant; non-married cohabitating couples; children abandoned by their fathers or mothers; “same-sex unions” adopting children and calling this the “modern family”; pornography invading homes, leading to powerful addictions and total alienation from other members of the family: all of this is a bird’s eye view of the family situation in the modern […]