|
document: Redemptoris custos
Men as Husbands and Fathers
25. 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 Gods 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.
|
For
Father's Day...
