June 16, 2019 - "Father's Day"

Today we celebrate Father’s Day in the United States.  Other countries, especially in Europe and Latin America, celebrate Father’s Day on St. Joseph’s Day (March 19).  The first event sponsored in honor of Fathers occurred in 1908 in memory of 362 coal miners who died in explosions at the Fairmont Coal Company in Monagh, West Virginia in December, 1907.  The next year, Sonora Smart Dodd, a resident of Spokane, Washington, who was one of six children raised by a widower who was also a veteran of the Civil War, tried to establish an official equivalent to Mother’s Day for male parents.  She was successful in her efforts.  Washington State celebrated the first state-wide Father’s Day on June 19, 1910, which was the third Sunday in June that year.  Slowly the holiday spread.  President Calvin Coolidge urged state governments to observe Father’s Day in 1924.  Father’s Day finally became a national holiday, celebrated on the third Sunday in June in 1972.  This was fifty-eight years after Mother’s Day became an official national holiday.
 
I remember reading about a survey conducted in Switzerland in 1994 in which those who conducted the survey asked a question to determine whether a person’s religion carried through to the next generation, and if so, why or why not.  It seems that the one critical factor is the religious practice of the father.  That is to say, it is the practice of the father of the family that above all, determines the future attendance at or absence from church of the children.
 
If both father and mother attend church regularly, 33% of their children will end up as regular church goers.  41% of their children will attend church irregularly.  Only a quarter of their children will end up not practicing at all.  If the father is irregular and mother regular, only 3% of the children will become regular in their church attendance, while 59% will become irregulars.  Thirty-eight percent will be lost.  I think that this is a very important thing for the dads in our midst to consider:  how much influence you have on the future religious practice of your children simply by your own example.  I think that this still holds true in spite of the devastation caused by the clergy sex abuse scandal and subsequent cover up by the hierarchy.  I have just finished reading an advance copy of Bishop Robert Barron’s latest book, Letter to a Suffering Church:  A Bishop Speaks on the Sexual Abuse Coverage, in which he speaks about this terrible scandal that has racked the church in the United States for many years now.  I shall devote some columns to this book in the near future.  But let me get back to the importance of the example of parents upon the religious formation of their children.
 
Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore who is also the Supreme Chaplain for the Knights of Columbus has published a meditation for the month of June in a book entitled  The Family Fully Alive:  Building the Domestic Church. Prayers, Meditations, and Activities to Enrich Your Family Life. This is published by the Knights of Columbus.  I share it because I think it is very relevant for Father’s Day.

Parents have, or should have, unique relationship with their children.  They have been called by God to love their child with the same faithful, self-giving love in which the child was conceived…. To be sure, the notion of “self-giving love” is not an idealistic or naïve concept dreamed up by theologians.  It is demanding and sacrificial.  Self-giving love has its source in the Trinity and is revealed most fully by Jesus on the Cross.  It requires what Pope Francis calls “an exodus from self” so that we might focus on the needs of others, even when that causes disruption in our lives….
 
Most fundamentally, teaching children the “art of living” involves lessons of faith and character.  Parents teach children their first prayers, bring them to Mass on Sunday, and help them develop a basic sense of right and wrong coupled with a sense of responsibility.  They also teach gratitude and generosity by helping their children learn to take care of their possessions; to not always expect to have the latest and best of everything; and to grow in the habit of sharing what they have with others.  Moreover, parents help their children learn to handle life’s inevitable disappointments, including the invidious comparisons that part of the highly competitive and materialistic culture in which we live.  Such lessons are best learned at home, in an atmosphere of respect and love….
 
As Pope Francis said, “Parents are called … not only to bring their children into the world but also to bring them to God” (Lumen Fidei, 43).
 
Archbishop Lori concludes his meditation by posing three questions, which are great questions to Father’s Day:
 
1. What do we learn from our family?  Have we learned “the art of living”?  If so, of what does this “art of living” consist?
2. What is self-giving love?
3. How have we learned about self-giving love from our family?
 
Until next week,
Fr. John