Generation, Priesthood, and the Nature of Fatherhood

During the COVID lockdowns in 2020, I found myself spending more time with my son (then one-and-a-half) than I had before. One day, as I collected my notes for a reading group on Anna Karenina, I suddenly noticed two things. First, the most significant thing in my life—the thing that gave the most but also required the most from me—was my relationship with my son. Second, I had never been invited to reflect on that relationship in a theological or philosophical way. I had written papers on friendship and read books on sexual ethics. But at no point in twelve years of higher education had I been asked to give serious thought to fatherhood and what it would mean for me, and now it had become the dominant force of my world. In honor of Father’s Day, I want to offer some reflections on what I’ve come to learn that fatherhood is about. First, fatherhood is about generation. Second, fatherhood is about priesthood.  

In the Summa Theologiae I q. 33, in his treatise on the Trinity, Thomas Aquinas considers the Father and the particular properties of the Father. In a. 2, Thomas writes:  

The proper name of any person signifies that whereby the person is distinguished from all other persons. For as body and soul belong to the nature of man, so to the concept of this particular man belong this particular soul and this particular body; and by these is this particular man distinguished from all other men. Now it is paternity which distinguishes the person of the Father from all other persons. Hence this name ‘Father,’ whereby paternity is signified, is the proper name of the person of the Father. 

And the heart of that paternity is the Father being a principle for or generating the other persons of the Trinity, the Son and the Spirit.  

Aquinas goes on to argue that because the Father and Son are ontologically one, they manifest perfectly the idea of paternity and filiation. Here he is echoing Ephesians 3:14–15: “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name.” In the Latin Vulgate, the word here translated as family is paternitas, fatherhood, and in Greek it is patria, which can mean both family and fatherhood. Thus, our fatherhood has a share in God’s fatherhood, and God’s fatherhood is grounded in giving the other persons of the Trinity their being.  

We see God’s fatherhood in Genesis 1 as well, where it is exercised in creation. The great Dominican preacher Meister Eckhart writes of creation as an ebullitio, a boiling over or a bubbling over of the love of God. This eternal generation of the Son and Spirit and the love and relationship they share “boils over” into the generation of other beings that can participate in but be distinct from the divine being. We human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, and God’s first words to Adam and Eve are “be fruitful and multiply.” Part of our being in the image and likeness of God is our capacity for generation, and for generation out of a union of love. To put it more succinctly, God made men to beget new life and thereby share in his fatherhood. 

I want to underscore this because it is radically different from our dominant culture. I vividly remember a poster for Planned Parenthood that I saw in college on an acquaintance’s dorm room wall. Rows of condoms in all the colors of the rainbow cascaded down, and underneath it said, “Life is sexually transmitted.” The implication was clear: human life was like a STD, at least potentially. In stark contrast to that, Scripture and Christian faith teach us that our capacity for generating new life is good and a gift—yes, a gift to handle with care and prudence, but part of our being like God. It is constitutive of our humanity, not a mistake or a disease or something we can simply thwart, unplug, or ignore without consequence. 

Hence in his apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio, St. John Paul II writes: 

According to the plan of God, marriage is the foundation of the wider community of the family, since the very institution of marriage and conjugal love are ordained to the procreation and education of children, in whom they find their crowning. In its most profound reality, love is essentially a gift; and conjugal love, while leading the spouses to the reciprocal “knowledge” which makes them “one flesh,” does not end with the couple, because it makes them capable of the greatest possible gift, the gift by which they become cooperators with God for giving life to a new human person. Thus the couple, while giving themselves to one another, give not just themselves but also the reality of children, who are a living reflection of their love, a permanent sign of conjugal unity and a living and inseparable synthesis of their being a father and a mother. When they become parents, spouses receive from God the gift of a new responsibility. Their parental love is called to become for the children the visible sign of the very love of God, “from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.” 

Here John Paul II underscores another important aspect of fatherhood: since your fatherhood takes its name from God’s fatherhood, the love of parents—especially the love of a father—becomes a visible sign of the love of God. In other words, a good father shows his wife and his children what God’s love looks like. As John Paul II puts it later, a father reveals and relives on earth “the very fatherhood of God.” 

This brings me to the second characteristic of fatherhood: fatherhood is about priesthood. I mean this in the sense that we are all called and empowered to participate in the priesthood of Christ by our baptism, and those of us in the lay life have been called to sanctify the world through our acts of charity and preaching of the gospel. In the Catholic Church, emphasizing this work of the laity is one of the great contributions of Vatican II. But already in the Summa contra Gentiles, we find Thomas Aquinas reflecting on how mothers and fathers are called to participate in the priestly work of Christ. 

At the beginning of his discussion of the sacraments in Book IV, he writes:  

For some propagate and conserve the spiritual life in an only spiritual ministry, and this belongs to the sacrament of orders; and some in a ministry that is simultaneously bodily and spiritual, which takes place in the sacrament of matrimony where a man and woman come together to beget offspring and to rear them in divine worship.  

Here Thomas clearly distinguishes between the work of a spiritual father and the work of a natural father, while clearly identifying both as priestly work: work that sanctifies the world, offers it to God, and brings souls to him. Again, fatherhood is not just about generating children but forming them so that their lives are directed to the worship of God.  

In this regard, John Paul II underlines the importance of family prayer:  

The concrete example and living witness of parents is fundamental and irreplaceable in educating their children to pray. Only by praying together with their children can a father and mother—exercising their royal priesthood—penetrate the innermost depths of their children’s hearts and leave an impression that the future events in their lives will not be able to efface.  

This sounds beautiful in practice and, as most parents know, can be messy in everyday life. Our weekly family rosary involves clutching for moments of recollection between endless questions about what bead we are on and constant exhortations to stop swinging or stretching the rosary, to sit down, to behave like we’re praying, etc. For reasons unknown to both my wife and me, I seem constitutionally incapable of knowing what mystery comes next. When we discussed this once with our pastor, he reminded us of that valuable maxim of both the athletic life and the spiritual life: a messy win is still a win. Prayer—like so many other aspects of family life—requires taking those messy wins whenever we can, in the hope that a foundation of real love and piety is nonetheless being laid down.  

As you know, one of the defining characteristics of a priest in most religions is that he offers sacrifices. And the priesthood of a father entails offering sacrifices constantly, for the sake of your wife and the sake of your children. The journalist Jonathan Last writes that 

 the primary effect of children is to take things from you. It begins with sleep, time, and dignity and then expands over the years to include serenity, sanity, and a great deal of money. I am making an observation here, not complaining. It’s just what they do. In that way, children are like the aging process itself: an exercise in letting go of the ancillary parts of your existence until you are stripped bare, and what remains is your elemental center. Your soul. I’m told Jews see something of this in the Suffering Servant songs in Isaiah. Christians know it as the Way of the Cross. A consultant from McKinsey would call it addition by subtraction. 

The vocation of fatherhood, when lived well, is an ascetic one in which you learn to put the needs of others before your own, to choose for their good instead of your pleasure or benefit. Reflecting on this same theme, John Paul II writes: “Spouses are therefore the permanent reminder to the Church of what happened on the Cross; they are for one another and for the children witnesses to the salvation in which the sacrament makes them sharers.” 

Let me close with one more reflection. There are two troubling voices that young men can find very attractive at present. One says that family is an unjust burden, a commitment and responsibility that keeps you from having fun, living your best life, and having endless brunches. This side can also see family as an unjust structure ruled over by dominating men, inherently connected to patriarchy. Another voice, perhaps in reaction to this, says that real masculinity is a matter of exchanging weakness and pleasure-seeking for strength and domination—that real manhood involves a kind of hypermasculinity or embracing an uncompromising and rigorous view of gender roles as an antidote to modernity. Both of these are assertions of pride and not humility. They are vicious extremes and actually not life-giving.  

Catholic men are called to follow the Lord Jesus, to live not lives of domination that demand submission from others but lives where their strength and talent are offered in self-sacrifice for those God has given them to serve. The virtuous mean between those extremes is the Way of the Cross, the path by which you find your life in losing it, the way by which you enter into joys you didn’t know existed on the far side of burdens you didn’t know you could bear. That is the path of holiness to which Sts. Thomas and John Paul II call us, the path by which Christ calls us to share in his fatherhood and in his priesthood for the salvation of our own souls and those of our wives and children.  

An earlier version of this article was given as a retreat talk for the Thomistic Institute at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC. 

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