The Trinity - Part 5

From Gil Bailie - click on this link to listen to part 5 of The Trinity.

Patriarchal Structures of Oppression: The Father



John W. Dixon: “Christians stubbornly clung to their language even when it could be said they didn't really understand it. Now when we are about to acquire the intellectual means for understanding the terminology, a failure of nerve has set in and we are abandoning the terminology." (e.g. Hell, judgment, the Trinity, the Father...)

The Feast of Joseph the Worker: The 'Gospel of Work' and our Contemporary Challenge

The following is a reflection from Deacon Keith Rournier as well as a good rebuttal to the worship of the things of man.

On this Feast of Joseph the Worker, let us seek the intercession of the Patron of the Universal Church and follow his example, recognizing that all human work participates in the workshop of Nazareth...

Indispensable Dads

MercatorNet tells and shows why science says it really takes a mom and a dad.

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.

Patron Saint of SFO King Louis IX of Francis

Saint Louis IX patron saint of the Secular Franciscan Order (See link and scroll down to 8.24)

The following is a spiritual testament to his son by St. Louis, King of France (1214-1270)

A just king rules the earth

My dearest son, my first instruction is that you should love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your strength. Without this there is no salvation. Keep yourself, my son, from everything that you know displeases God, that is to say, from every mortal sin. You should permit yourself to be tormented by every kind of martyrdom before you would allow yourself to commit a mortal sin.
If the Lord has permitted you to have some trial, bear it willingly and with gratitude, considering that it has happened for your good and that perhaps you well deserved it. If the Lord bestows upon you any kind of prosperity, thank him humbly and see that you become no worse for it, either through vain pride or anything else, because you ought not to oppose God or offend him in the matter of his gifts.
Listen to the divine office with pleasure and devotion. As long as you are in church, be careful not to let your eyes wander and not to speak empty words, but pray to the Lord devoutly, either aloud or with the interior prayer of the heart.
Be kindhearted to the poor, the unfortunate and the afflicted. Give them as much help and consolation as you can. Thank God for all the benefits he has bestowed upon you, that you may be worthy to receive greater. Be just to your subjects, swaying neither to right nor left, but holding the line of justice. Always side with the poor rather that with the rich, until you are certain of the truth. See that all your subjects live in justice and peace, but especially those who have ecclesiastical rank and who belong to religious orders.
Be devout and obedient to our mother the Church of Rome and the Supreme Pontiff as your spiritual father. Work to remove all sin from your land, particularly blasphemies and heresies.
In conclusion, dearest son, I give you every blessing that a loving father can give a son. May the three Persons of the Holy Trinity and all the saints protect you from every evil. And may the Lord give you the grace to do his will so that he may be served and honored through you, that in the next life we may together come to see him, love him and praise him unceasingly. Amen.
(read his Last Instructions to his eldest son Phillip by scrolling down at this LINK)

Louis never forgot his upbringing

His friend and biographer, the Sieur de Joinville, who accompanied him on his first crusade to the Holy Land, relates that the King once asked him, "What is God?" Joinville replied, "Sire, it is that which is so good that there can be nothing better." "Well," said the King, "now tell me, would You rather be a leper or commit a mortal sin?" The spectacle of the wretched lepers who wandered along the highways of medieval Europe might well have prompted a sensitive conscience to ask such a question. "I would rather commit thirty mortal sins," answered Joinville, in all candor, "than be a leper." Louis expostulated with him earnestly for making such a reply. "When a man dies," he said, "he is healed of leprosy in his body; but when a man who has committed a mortal sin dies he cannot know of a certainty that he has in his lifetime repented in such sort that God has forgiven him; wherefore he must stand in great fear lest that leprosy of sin last as long as God is in Paradise."
The Histoire de France (c. 1750) records that the saint showed that “it is not impossible to ally the majesty of the throne with the holiness of the Gospel, that without quitting the most exalted rank, one may practice the humiliations of penitence, that a really Christian king renders his greatness independent of events, and fears not to lose through adversity what prosperity could not have accorded him.”

To learn more on the Secular Franciscan Order (SFO) link to a previous post HERE.

Virtue of Patience

ht: Sean @ Blue Boar

Teaching Chivalry in the Daily Grind

Lydia McGrew at What's Wrong with the World asks, Will we be allowed to do anything for boys and men? The Franciscans of the Immaculate with their Summer Encampments and the year-round 24/7/365 work of Youth Apostles are seeking to answer her question in the strong, manly work and spirit of Saint John Bosco. (The priest pictured at the Youth Apostles Institute website is Fr John "Jack" Peterson, Director of YA and my personal catechist prior to my conversion.)

Chivalry isn't the clashing of broad swords and memorizing a code of chivalry alone; it is "doing the right thing," lovingly and cheerfully, in the daily grind. As, of course the Four Mass'keteers know.

What it takes to make men and boys flourish

Finding the Masculine Genius - Interview With English Professor Anthony Esolen

Q: From your study of ancient and medieval works, such as Dante, what remedies could be applied to the many relational ills that plague society, such as high divorce rates, low birthrates and high numbers of children born out of wedlock?

Esolen: A good question. People can learn from both the Catholic and the Protestant literature of the past an appreciation for the wonder of the body, and of the virtue of chaste love.

They can learn from Dante that the love of man and woman is a glorious motif in the symphony of love fashioned by him who moves the sun and the other stars.

From Torquato Tasso and Edmund Spenser they can learn that the typical sin against love, occasioned by unchastity, does not so much stoke the flame of desire as it dampens it, making both the heart and the mind feeble, ineffectual.

From Spenser they can learn that marriage is not a private matter -- one of our greatest and silliest errors -- but a deeply social bond that unites those two fascinatingly different sorts of creatures, man and woman, in such a way as to link them to the families who have gone before them and to the families that will be born from their love.
...
Maybe the most important thing they (the old poets) teach, though, is the delightfulness of the good: the lovely and modest woman -- Miranda in Shakespeare's "Tempest" -- and the brave and gentle young man -- Florizel in Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale."

Our children's imaginations now are a war zone, or what is left of fields and hills after the bombs have blasted them and the poison gas has infested them for 15 years.

Even fairy tales, those deeply Christian and incarnational folk parables of the West have been poisoned by feminist revisers.

So I guess I am saying that we will cure none of those ills, not one, unless we rediscover the virtue of purity, and we will not rediscover that virtue unless our imaginations are engaged by its beauty, and that from our childhoods.

Hope amid the ruins

The countryside of Tolkien and the south country of Belloc are gone. The workmen of Belbury are ubiquitous, slovenly, leering, and filthy-mouthed. The inns are torn down. The shrieking, bizarre foes of Christendom - and of Catholic truth - accost her relentlessly and gleefully, the darlings of mainstream media cameras.

Where is the place for men - and sons - to stand among the ruins?

At the Altar
And there, kneel,
Pledging fealty and fidelity
To the Once and Future
King of kings and Lord of lords.
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New Catholic Manliness

(A) funny thing happened on the way to a testosterone-free Church, beginning perhaps in the early 1980s: Following a trail blazed first by Evangelical Protestants, in what appears to be part of another historical correction, manly Catholicism — chastened and wiser — began to make a modest comeback. Let us look at some examples of Catholic manhood's counter-offensive, how it is manifesting itself in different areas of Church life, and what it may mean for its future.

"Where did it begin? Right in the bosom of the family," says Tarek Saab, founder of Lionheart Apparel ...

Read all of The New Catholic Manliness.

Fathers Day - Haul Him to Church

The New York Times had a nice, though odd, story the other day on a 13-year-old boy who's been dragging his dad to church. The father, Bob Sweeney, is a former Catholic monk who left the Xavierian order in the 1970s and later stopped attending church altogether.

"He probably just one day was watching a Mets game, said ‘I don't want to go to church' and just stopped going," his son, Ryan, says.

Ryan, on the other hand, "is a big reader, enjoys fantasy literature and has seen theories suggesting the world may end in 2013 due to the configuration of magnetic forces. In that case, he said, it would be nice to be on good terms with God."

Read all of Drag your Dad to church day.

Fr. Richard Neuhaus - Having The Courage to Decide

How is it that we have so many people, generation or 2 or 3, who simply have not the courage to decide?

Fr. Richard Neuhaus - Having the Courage to Be Manly

Their father ...

... behind this apparently so unapproachable farmer's son, who sent his children to daily Mass, lay concealed a frequently lonely yet basically always soft heart. He was a nourishing father in a double sense. For the primary spiritual care from which the children's vocations developed was his own; we may say today, it was a historic contribution.

"My brother was a server in the church," recounts Georg, "and I played the organ." They experienced all that as "quite normal, healthy, robust religious piety." Because of their father's seriousness and strictness, of course, the intimate relationship with God and Mother Church was not something considered secondary; rather, it was the central thing, the lifeblood of the family. Parents' notions of bringing up children frequently produce the opposite effect when they are applied with too great a rigor. It is obviously the secret of a loving heart when the father's attitude does not frighten off the children or nearly drive God right out of them but, rather, is attractive and constructive. "Religion was in a very manly and absolute way the fundamental theme of his life", is how his son describes him. And he adds, "We always sensed the goodness behind his strictness."

...

Their father made books available to his youngest child, too, first a child's prayerbook, then a children's missal, then a German-Latin "Schott" for children (song book), finally the Sunday "Schott", and eventually a complete daily missal. Joseph now saw worship as a "celebration." There were especially the "angel offices" on the cold, snowy winter days, which he loved. Or the Gethsemane devotions and the celebration of the Resurrection, with all the embellishments, the pictures, the music, the special drama, which made it possible to open the door to a world that usually remains hidden from man, hurried and distracted as he is.

Peter Seewald captivates the reader on many different levels in his book Benedict XVI - An Intimate Portrait.

His portrayal of Joseph Ratzinger, Sr., Pope Benedict XVI's father I found most interesting and since we often talk about fatherhood I thought I would share a little of Seewald's research.

Lady Aramis gave the book to me for Christmas however I was unable to start in on it till after she read it for she became so taken by Pope Benedict XVI's story that she couldn't put it down - she has grown 100% in her admiration of him since reading the book. Those of the Roman Catholic faith will like it but those not may actually get more out of it. His is a great story.

7 Things Teenage Boys Need

WASHINGTON, D.C., JAN. 13, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Being the parent of an adolescent boy is legendary for its difficulty. But according to one priest who acts as a spiritual director and confessor for high school boys, just keeping in mind seven points can make for a better relationship with adolescent sons.

Legionary of Christ Father Michael Sliney suggests the following seven necessities for parents of adolescent boys:

1. Clear guidelines with reasonable consequences from a unified front; cutting slack but also holding boys accountable for their actions.
2. Reasonable explanations for the criteria, guidelines and decisions made by parents.
3. Avoiding hyper-analysis of boys' emotions and states of mind: avoiding "taking their temperature" too often.
4. Unconditional love with an emphasis on character and effort more than outcome: Encourage boys to live up to their potential while having reasonable expectations. To love them regardless of whether they make it into Harvard or become a star quarterback.
5. Authenticity, faith and fidelity should be reflected in parent's lifestyles.
6. Qualities of a dad: Manliness, temperance, making significant time for family, putting aside work, and being a reliable source of guidance.
7. Qualities of a mom: Emotional stability, selflessness, loving service and extreme patience.

Read the interview with Father Michael Sliney here.

Joseph of Nazareth Is a Single-Issue Evangelical -- It is Our Call To Be Like Joseph NOW!

tip to Justin Taylor

Russell Moore delivered a most prophetic messages on Joseph, the demon-fighter and patron saint of the Mass'keteers on October 16, 2008 at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. You can download it here. The title of the sermon was, "Joseph of Nazareth Is a Single-Issue Evangelical: The Father of Jesus, the Cries of the Helpless, and Change You Can Believe In" (Matt 2:13-23).

THIS IS A MUST HEAR SERMON - SORRY IT IS NOT IN HOMILY LENGTH, BUT IT IS AN AWESOME MESSAGE ON SAINT JOSEPH AND ALL FATHERS.

One of the most poignant sections of the sermon comes when Moore makes a comparison between “Christians” of a former generation who tolerated the lynching of African-Americans and “Christians” of this generation who tolerate the atrocity of abortion:

And many of them believe that it is missional to speak to people while blunting or silencing a witness about the life of children so that you can reach them with the gospel. . . Some will tell us there are many other issues: economics, global warming—issues I’m very concerned about too. Previous generations have said that as well. Previous generations of preachers have stood in the pulpit and preached until they were red in the face about card-playing and movie-going and tax-policy and personal morality and tobacco-smoking and a thousand other issues, but would not speak to the fact that there were African-American brothers and sisters of the Lord Jesus swinging in the trees! And there is judgment of God upon that. And there is here too.

Read more on the fruits of the Democratic candidate to understand what we are voting for in this upcoming election.

Remember it is all about LIFE! Don't get caught thinking overwise.

A Patron Saint for the 4Ms?

Aramis asked me who might be appropriate to ask to be our Patron Saint here at the 4Ms. Since it is the great Saint Jerome's Feast Day, I post this favorite image of him (above). But I don't think we'll ask him. My suggestion is someone near and dear to all of the original 3Ms, for fairly obvious reasons to Aramis, Porthos, and Athos.

Doug Barry Interview - Zenit

Doug Barry of Radix has been developing a camp for fathers and sons. This is an opportunity for teenage boys and their fathers to get away from the world's ideas of masculinity and the lies that go along with it and realize what God has always intended a man to be. RADIX Camp is about taking good young men and challenging them to become heroic.

Read all of Zenit's interview with Doug Barry, Becoming the Man God Made You to Be.

Churchgoing Men & Fathers

W. Bradford Wilcox opines at MercatorNet: Churchgoing men are not a hangover of the old patriarchy but a new breed who are closely connected to their families.

Heart of a Father

Childhood of Christ - Gerrit van Honthorst (The Hermitage)

In the Church we have the beautiful feasts of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, with the heart symbolizing the immense love of our Lord and His Blessed Mother for each one of us.

As Catholic husbands and fathers, we might also consider meditating on the heart of St. Joseph, the third member of the Holy Family. His heart is an apt symbol of the love he contributed to the mystery of the redemptive Incarnation that was unfolding under his watch. And now that same masculine vigilance and love, once focused on his beloved wife and the Christ child, is bestowed on each one of us, as he is universally invoked as the patron of the Catholic Church. [h/t: New Advent]

Read all of The Heart of a Father.