In June of every year, we honor our fathers. For many fathers, their special and demanding vocation has taken on added meaning as they have spent more time with their children over these past three months due to the coronavirus pandemic. The Fourth Commandment calls us to honor our father and our mother so allow me to offer some reflections on this important national holiday.
Mother’s Day was established by presidential proclamation in 1914, but a holiday honoring fathers did not become official until 1966. This doesn’t mean, however, that the holiday was not celebrated before this time. Here is some interesting history. The idea for Father’s Day is attributed to Sonora Dodd, who was raised by her father after her mother’s death during childbirth. While listening to a sermon at church on Mother’s Day, she thought about everything that her father had done for her and her siblings and decided that fathers should have a special day, too. Because Dodd’s father was born in June, she encouraged churches in her area – Spokane, Washington – to honor fathers that month. The first Father’s Day was celebrated in Spokane in 1910.
Over the next few years, the idea spread, and people lobbied Congress to establish the holiday. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson, who had signed the proclamation establishing Mother’s Day in 1914, approved the idea, but never signed a proclamation for it. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge made it a national event to “establish more intimate relations between fathers and their children and to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations.” But, as I mentioned above, it wasn’t until 1966 that President Lyndon Johnson declared the third Sunday in June to be Father’s Day. President Richard Nixon made this proclamation permanent in 1972.
Like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day is not part of the Church’s liturgical calendar. In fact, liturgical directives state that “this secular observance must in no way diminish the primary focus of Sunday as the celebration of the paschal mystery.” Yet, this national holiday allows an opportunity to reflect on the essential role of a father in everyone’s life; after all, everyone has a father. No one is born except through a father’s cooperation with a mother to conceive. Saint John Paul II provided us with some very important reflections on the vocation of a father in his apostolic exhortation, The Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World:
Within the conjugal and family communion-community, the man is called upon to live his gift and role as husband and father. In his wife, he sees the fulfillment of God’s intention: “It is not good that the man should be alone, I will make him a helper fit for him,” and he makes his own the cry of Adam, the first husband: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.”
Authentic conjugal love presupposes and requires that a man have a profound respect for the equal dignity of his wife: “You are not her master,” writes St. Ambrose, “but her husband; she was not given to you to be your slave, but your wife…. Reciprocate her attentiveness to you and be grateful to her for her love.” With his wife a man should live “a very special form of personal friendship.” As for the Christian, he is called upon to develop a new attitude of love, manifesting towards his wife a charity that is both gentle and strong like that which Christ has for the Church.”
Love for his wife as mother of their children and love for the children themselves are for the man the natural way of understanding and fulfilling his own fatherhood. Above all where social and cultural conditions so easily encourage a father to be less concerned with his family or, at any rate, less involved in the work of education, efforts must be made to restore socially the conviction that the place and task of the father in and for the family is of unique and irreplaceable importance. As experience teaches, the absence of a father causes psychological and moral imbalance and notable difficulties in family relationships, as does, in contrary circumstances, the oppressive presence of a father, especially where there still prevails the phenomenon of “machismo,” or a wrong superiority of male prerogatives which humiliates women and inhibits the development of healthy family relationships.
In revealing and in reliving on earth the very fatherhood of God, 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.
I continue to be greatly impressed by the presence and active participation of so many fathers here in the parish and particularly in our school, PREP and CYO. It is evident that many of you understand and embrace your essential and irreplaceable role in your families and in our faith community. And, your children and our parish benefit from it so, in the name of your children and the entire parish, I commend and thank you!
As we worship God, who has revealed himself as our heavenly Father, let us honor and respect our fathers, not only today but every day, as they share with their wives the very important role of growing into a loving family, caring for their children and sharing in the life and vitality of the parish. To all of you great dads –