Once again, a blessed solemnity of the Trinity, and, on a more secular level, although in a connected way, a happy Fathers’ Day to all those who exercise that charism of paternity, whether biological or spiritual, which should include all men. All fatherhood should be in the image of God the Father, the source and principle of the Trinity, pure love and communion, willing only the ‘good’ of the other.
I may soon have something to say about the paternal role of bishops, in the light of the kerfuffle concerning the newly-consecrated Archbishop Michael Mulhall, and his distancing himself from the anti-‘gay pride’ message of one of his priests, but not today. I will have to mull that over, so to speak, for there is more this than may meet the eye.
And, on that note, a faithful reader – yes, fittingly, my own dear Dad over breakfast this morning – noticed I made a quasi-Freudian slip in my reflection on Luther Katherine von Bora, and how Luther helped find ‘wives’ for her and all her companions once they had escaped the convent. Of course, he helped to find them husbands, in those self-identified-pre-alphabet-soup of acronym days. For whatever other disorders and confusions reigned in the sixteenth century, to say nothing of the subsequent centuries until our own, at least men were men, women were women, and wives and husbands more or less knew their role. Would that we could go back so such basic and rather obvious sanity.