Dawn Eden - Fatherhood

Our friend and modern-day St. Joan of Arc, Dawn Eden, while busily working toward her Masters degree in theology, also finds time to post at a gig called "Headline Bistro." Her most recent offering is a topic near to the hearts of the Mass'keteers:

Authority Conjoined with Love

The Meaning of Fatherhood in Heaven ... And on Earth (Part 1)

by Dawn Eden

In this day and age when best-selling “new atheist” authors, as Mark Shea notes, spend their time “pointing out to us childish believers that God is not an old man sitting on a cloud,” it is instructive to note that that there is nothing particularly new, let alone creative, about attacks on the fatherhood of God.

I recently discovered a 1934 radio address by the Rev. Daniel A. Lord, S.J., in which the great Jesuit author said, “If ours is an unhappy generation, it is largely because it is a generation that has forgotten Our Father Who is in Heaven.” Modern atheists, he added, sought to make the human race “a family without a father.”

Seventy-five years later, that phrase has an additional meaning that would have chilled Father Lord. A “family without a father” is exactly what the average American human family has become. As my former colleague Patrick Fagan of Family Research Council noted a few years ago, some 60 percent of U.S. children will experience the breakup of their parents before they turn 18. (Given the recent uptick in out-of-wedlock births, that number is probably even higher today).

Is there a connection between attacks on the fatherhood of God and the decline of human fatherhood? Pope John Paul II thought so, writing in his 1995 book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, “Original sin attempts ... to abolish fatherhood ... leaving man only with a sense of the master/slave relationship.”

Read all here.