ST JOACHIM - FATHER OF OUR LADY - A GUIDE TO CATHOLIC MASCULINITY

ST JOACHIM –FEAST DAY 16 AUGUST - FATHER OF OUR LADY

A GUIDE TO SPOUSAL LOVE AND CATHOLIC MASCULINITY

St Joachim, the father of Our Lady, must stand as a model for spousal love and fatherhood. Granted, he was gifted with advantages over and above the normal parent, being blessed with a daughter completely free of original sin and who lived her whole life free from sin. Granted too, we know little about him, aside from the fact that he was married to St Anne. This being so, his feast day is one which can serve as a mechanism to ponder the nature of Catholic fatherhood, Catholic marriage and the love of a husband for his wife, together with a consideration of Catholic masculinity – a big subject.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church provides that “[t]he entire Christian life bears the mark of the spousal love of Christ and the Church.” (1617). Kevin Wells, in his book, “The Priests we need to Save the Church”, (Sophia Press, at p. 125), spoke of his uncle, a priest, in exhorting newly wedded couples to develop their prayer lives, saying, in his wedding homily :

“I beg you, I beg you-get down on your knees each night as husband and wife and beg God to teach you how to love…Then one day-pray ten, twenty, even fifty years from now-you’ll look back on this day that’s so filled with love, and you’ll say in amazement, ‘How little we actually knew of love on our wedding day.’”

What is Catholic spousal love? Who is the Catholic man? We can start off with the famous passage of St Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians (5:22-32), that is used by feminists to sum up the patriarchal and oppressive Catholic view of women,

“22: Let women be subject to their husbands, as to the Lord:

23: Because the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the Head of the Church. He is the Saviour of His body.

24: Therefore as the Church is subject to Christ, so also let the wives be to their husbands in all things.

25: Husbands love your wives, as Christ loved the Church and delivered Himself up for it:

26: That He might sanctify it, cleansing it by the laver of water in the word of life:

27: That He might present it to Himself a glorious Church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.

28: So also ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself.

29: For no man ever hated his own flesh; but nourish it and cherish it, as also Christ doth the Church:

30: Because we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones.

31: For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife and they shall be two in one flesh.

32: This is a great sacrament; but I speak in Christ and in the Church. Nevertheless let every one of you in particular love his wife as himself: and let the wife fear her husband.”

Does the Catholic wife truly have to “fear” her husband, submitting to an authoritarian tyrant? Or is the passage one which reflects a viewpoint from which we have departed, to be discarded along with other unfashionable ideas?

For a culture informed by protestantism and disconnected from the context of Christ as the bridegroom of the Catholic Church, the passage above is hard to comprehend. For the modern mind in which the relationship between husband and wife is portrayed as a competition for power, the idea of a wife “fearing” or “subjected” to her husband in any way is seen as primitive - it is, in fact, peremptorily dismissed, for to consider the context in which it is placed, or to contemplate its meaning in any depth, would entail implicit validation of the sacramentality of marriage, and a corresponding recallibration of the convenient doctrines to which the modern mind subscribes.

Indeed, it is generally ignored that St Paul himself makes reference to the fact that the love of Christ, as the bridegroom, was such that He willingly gave up his life for His Church.

Brandt Pitre, in his book, “Jesus the Bridegroom”, (Image (2018), at pp. 3 and 19), observed that St Paul “saw the passion and death of Christ as the fulfillment of the God of Israel’s eternal plan to wed himself to humankind in an everlasting marital covenant…Salvation is not just about the forgiveness of sins. Salvation is ultimately about union with God – the bridegroom wants his bride to know him intimately, in a spiritual marriage that is not only faithful and fruitful but everlasting. “

In Jewish tradition, the wedding of God and Israel was consummated by sacrifice and worship. As such, the consummation of the new covenant, that of Jesus Christ, with His people, is one which has been sealed by sacrifice, as a wedding in which Christ is united with His Church. Brandt Pitre points out that the Jewish bridegroom was not only dressed as a priest (ibid., at p. 106), he was also crowned, (ibid., at p. 102). St Augustine described the crucifixion in the following terms:

“Like a bridegroom Christ went forth from his nuptial chamber…He came even to the marriage-bed of the cross, and there, ascending it, He consummated a marriage. And when He sensed the creature sighing in her breath, He surrendered Himself to torment for His bride in a communication of love” (Augustine, Sermo Suppositus, 120:3; Brandt Pitre, ibid., at p. 93).

The Epistle of St Paul was explained by St John Chrysostom, in his Homily on Ephesians 20:5:25, as follows:

“If you take the premise that your wife should submit to you as the Church submits to Christ, then you should also take the same kind of careful thought for her that Christ takes for the Church. Even if you must offer your own life for her, you must not refuse. Even if you must undergo countless struggles on her behalf and have all kinds of things to endure and suffer, you must not refuse. Even if you suffer all this you still have not done as much as Christ has for the Church. For you are already married when you act this way, whereas Christ is acting for one who has rejected and hated Him. So just as he, when she was rejecting, hating spurning and nagging him, brought her to trust Him by His great solicitude, not by threatening, lording it over her or intimidating her or anything like that, so you must also act towards your wife. Even if you see her looking down on you, nagging and despising you, you will be able to win her over with your great love and affection for her.”

Thus the Catholic husband was told by St Paul, in the first century AD and St John Chrysostomon, in the 4th Century AD, to act with a selfless love for his spouse, to conform himself, as much as possible, to the wise and gentle love of Christ – a love in which, yes, the man is the head, and where the woman does submit, but within a context of mutual respect and love which entails a complete giving of self, thereby exceeding anything that could possibly exist in the demands made by the modern feminist movement, where the marriage landscape is viewed as a battleground and where power is jealously guarded. That is how the ideal of Catholic masculinity was defined by the Catholic Church one thousand nine hundred years before feminism.

FATHERHOOD

In the post-sexual revolution culture, fatherlessness has revealed itself to be a major issue in the community in general and, in particular, in the black community. In 1961, 75-77% of black households in the United States were two-parent households. Today the percentage is 24%. Conservative black spokespeople such as Allen West and Candace Owens believe that the primary disadvantage suffered by the black community is fatherlessness. The consequences of fatherlessness are profound to the child: Seven out of ten high school drop-outs are fatherless. Girls are twice as likely to be obese without a father present in the home, and four times more likely to have a teenage pregnancy. Boys are twice as likely to commit suicide if there is no father in the home.

The identity of a man as a father is sacrifice. If a father refuses to engage – to clean up the 3am vomit, to love his children’s mother, to guide his children’s souls in prayer, to watch his children’s sport and to attend their concerts, then he is, at the least, a lukewarm father. Kevin Wells observed that, in being a good and loving parent, there is a form of martyrdom to the self that is required. (ibid. at p. 145). In this respect, a father’s activities flow from his identity, his vocation as a person who has promised his life for his children’s sake. “When a parent grasps this, then the sacrifices and self-gift take on a new light and make sense; love makes the sacrifice not only possible but even joyful.” (Kevin Wells, ibid., at p. 52).

Sometimes this means really taking up your cross – it means standing up for principles and setting parameters that cut across the message of the world-to give the message that your children do not want to hear from you. To stand up for truth can be a cross, a sacrifice. But it must be embraced, as a cross borne with love.