I recently received an e-mail with the curious subject line: “Men are like water heaters”. I opened up the e-mail to find a picture of a confused-looking, middle-aged man struggling to fix a water heater in what appears to be his basement. Alongside this image appeared the words, half-warning, half-command: “Stop the leak.” Lest there be any confusion about the man in the picture, subsequent text clarifies he is a dad: “As a father, you are basically a living water heater.”
I was disturbed by the choice of mechanical metaphors for fatherhood (and by extension, family). Clicking through the e-mail, I was further disturbed by the application of an empowerment rhetoric—rooted in that twilight zone where business-driven motivational speaking overlaps with New Age spirituality—to the vocation of fatherhood. Most disturbing of all, I found that this messaging came from a Catholic men’s organization, which shall remain nameless. I have no wish to offer a full critique of that organization.
It is hardly the only Catholic men’s group that has arisen in recent years to address the perceived “crisis of fatherhood.” As we are in the month of Father’s Day, I would like to offer some reflections on the history of fatherhood with particular reference to how the Church has approached fatherhood over the centuries.
At one level, reverence for fatherhood has been a part of Catholic tradition at least since Jesus told us to pray to God as “Our Father”. Still, for centuries thereafter, reverence for God as Father did not translate into a special concern for earthly fatherhood. Part of this simply reflects the early and medieval Church’s general lack of attention to the spiritual possibilities of family life; the Church did not really begin to promote devotion to the Holy Family until the sixteenth century. Particular devotions to St. Joseph reflected confidence in his power as intercessor, not as role model.
The great solemnity of March 19 began as a feast of thanksgiving for St. Joseph’s intervention in relieving a famine in medieval Sicily; the tradition of St. Joseph’s bread has nothing to do with St. Joseph as a 1950s-style “breadwinner.” Pius IX declared St. Joseph Patron of the Universal Church in response to the myriad threats facing the Church in the nineteenth century, but the “crisis of fatherhood” was not one of them.
As role model, St. Joseph has made his most significant appearance in the Church calendar as “St. Joseph the Worker.” Pius XII instituted the feast in 1955, choosing May 1st as the day to proclaim the Church’s respect for the dignity of labor in direct response to the Communist-backed May Day celebrations. Though inspired by the continued threat of communism in the East, the feast also reflected the triumph of the Church’s engagement with modern industrial capitalism in the West.
For many in the Church, the New Deal liberalism of the United States and the traditions of Christian/Social Democracy in Europe stood as close enough approximations of the “third way” between free-market capitalism and state socialism advocated by the tradition of the papal social encyclicals, beginning with Rerum Novarum in 1891. Compared to the dark industrial age of the nineteenth century, the United States in 1955 seemed like a worker’s paradise. Catholic workers found the patron saint of this paradise in St. Joseph.
We still await a feast celebrating the St. Joseph as foster father of Jesus. Pope Francis’s recently proclaimed “Year of St. Joseph” (2021) helped to promote greater reflection on St. Joseph as a model of fatherhood, but most of this reflection focused on the “crisis of fatherhood” in contemporary Western society. This is a sharp contrast with the near triumphalism of the feast of St. Joseph the Worker. This is even more troubling considering how long the Church has been directing attention to developing a spirituality appropriate to family life.
The U.S. bishops established a Family Life Bureau as early as 1931. In the following decade, the Cana Conference movement grew out of a married couples’ retreat first held in New York City in 1943; by 1950, seventy-five percent of the dioceses in the United States sponsored Cana conferences (these survive in the “pre-Cana” programs that provide marriage preparation in most Catholic parishes today). At about the same time, the Christian Family Movement (CFM) arose to provide more sustained guidance and reflection on Catholic family spirituality. CFM grew out of the broader movement of “Catholic Action” promoted by Pope Pius XI to infuse every aspect of life with Catholic spiritual and moral principles; it was, in effect, the domestic equivalent of the Catholic labor movement. Though it focused on family in general rather than fatherhood in particular, CFM rejected the sex segregation of most of the Catholic Action groups, drawing men into a domestic sphere conventionally understood as a woman’s world.
This unprecedented Catholic focus on the family resonated with the broader American celebration of family life that continues to define the 1950s in the popular imagination. Those who bemoan the “crisis of fatherhood” often look to the 1950s as the ideal of family life in general and fatherhood in particular, a time when all of America agreed that in TV as in life, “Father Knows Best.” Yet if families and fathers were so strong in the 1950s, why did everything seem to fall apart in the 1960s? This is one of the questions that continues to shape the ”culture wars” that have plagued life both in and outside the Church since that watershed era.
I will not even try to provide any definitive answer here to that question. Still, I would like to consider the history of one aspect of contemporary fatherhood that most observers can agree on, regardless of where they stand on the nature of fatherhood itself. Pope Francis has suggested: “The first thing needed is this, that the father be present in the family.” The implied absence reflects, at one level, basic sociological data such as one out of every four children in America today lives in a home without a father.
Yet Francis speaks to a broader absence obscured by raw sociological data. A father who shares the same street address with his children (or as is so often these days, his step children) may be nearly as absent as if he lived at a different address. The 1950s dad spent most of his waking day away from the home at work; a long commute or an especially demanding career (pursued for the sake of his family, of course) would only further minimize his contact with his children.
Those most concerned with preserving something like the “natural” or “traditional” family too often take this absence for granted, as if it were always the case. It is, in the grand sweep of history, a relatively recent development, dating back no further than the nineteenth century. Before the industrial revolution, fathers and mothers were in the “home,” or more properly, the home economy, some form of farm life in which father, mother, and children all contributed to the material survival of the family. This common material struggle for survival, along with the strong link between marriage and property, provided the basis for traditional family unity. Paternal influence exerted itself less through modeling abstract virtues—much less through spending “quality time” with the kids—than by a father passing on essential skills to his son, skills that would make that son not so much a “man” as a farmer.
With the decline of the agricultural way of life, fathers were driven from the home to the office and the factory. Fathers lost their traditional connection to their families, perhaps most especially to their sons. Among the middle class, a new family model arose that promised unity through emotional bonds—first “togetherness,” later “family values”—that were to provide psychological substitutes for these earlier social, legal, and economic bonds. This model gradually filtered down from the middle class to the working class. By the 1950s, most Americans accepted this family model as the norm and could only see other models of family life as deviations from this norm.
Mothers bore the burden of the emotional work required to keep this new model family together. Fathers struggled to find a place in an increasingly feminized home life. With a few notable exceptions, popular culture tended to present fathers as somewhat clueless. The title of the popular comic strip “Bringing Up Father” best captured this situation; though set in an uncomfortably upwardly mobile Irish American milieux, it had its equivalents in middle-class WASP comic strips such as “Blondie” and any number of other stories that circulated, and still circulate, in American popular culture. Comic exaggerations aside, fathers are in a sense objectively clueless, at least by traditional standards of fatherhood. With rare exceptions, they can no longer pass on occupational skills to their sons; with even fewer exceptions, they do not pass on land to future generations. Many look to sports to provide a father-son bond no longer possible in work and property.
Even defenders of the “traditional” family seem to sense the limits of the aspects of the 1950s model of fatherhood. Despite a persistent, even exaggerated, emphasis on manliness, those who seek to renew fatherhood often emphasize the need for men to develop their emotional side. I have seared into my memory television footage from the 1990s of a football stadium filled with big, manly men, all hugging each other and crying: it was a meeting of “The Promise Keepers,” an Evangelical men’s group founded by Bill McCartney, then head football coach at the University of Colorado, for the expressed purpose of inspiring Christian men to reclaim their manhood by embracing their responsibilities as husbands and fathers.
I have to say that much of the Catholic fatherhood material I have come across strikes me as very Evangelical in its tone. Despite, again, a superficial manliness, much of the emotional modeling in these movements seems simply to transfer the ideals of nineteenth century “nurture” from the mother to the father. I have no problem with men developing a richer emotional life, but the idea that more sensitive interpersonal relations will keep families together does not have a good historical track record. Given the broader social changes that continue to assault family stability, it is the equivalent of responding to a flood by teaching people to swim.
So, is the only solution to the crisis of family and fatherhood to go back to the pre-industrial home economy? In some sense, yes. The social encyclical tradition of the popes has rightly been understood as the Church’s effort to make some kind of peace with the modern, industrial economy. Though the encyclicals say much to address issues of justice within the industrial system, they also address the possibility of some alternative to it. In Rerum Novarum, for example, Leo writes of (male) workers earning enough to support their families in modest comfort and set aside some savings to eventually buy land and become economically self-sufficient; St. John XXIII expresses similar hopes for Third World peoples in his writings over a half century later. Popes have consistently affirmed small (productive) property ownership as a legitimate aspiration.
What this could mean in the post-industrial era is anybody’s guess. We must certainly avoid the trap of nostalgia, thinking we can turn back the clock and return to some earlier golden age; we must also avoid the trap of progressivism, which sees the past as simply a stepping stone to some brave new world of the future.
Perhaps most of all, we must avoid proposing purely spiritual solutions to social problems. We can all embrace the new concern for fatherhood and the effort to imagine a spirituality appropriate to fatherhood. In his classic Introduction to the Devout Life, St. Francis De Sales insisted that true devotion was not only for the vowed religious, but for all Christians, including the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker. Still, if St. Francis considered the possibility that there might be a spirituality distinct to the vocation of baker, he did not propose this spirituality as a response to some crisis in the art of baking, as if to say: “Nobody knows how to make good bread anymore! We need bakers to develop a true spirituality of baking!” Though the analogy has its limits, the current debate over the “crisis of fatherhood” shows too much concern for spirituality and not enough for baking good bread.
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