In the Organizational Behavior Course (outstanding! 1980s Rutgers MBA program) I learned that every social system depends upon a dyad of contrasting higher status authorities: one challenging and disciplinary, the other affirming and supportive. A high school will have a tough, no-nonsense dean of discipline, along with a compassionate guidance counselor or nurse. Their roles are distinct; both essential; they need not compete. In business, your boss should be tough; your union shop steward supportive; even if their personalities pull in opposite directions. We learned of (Philippine?) culture in which biological fathers are unconditionally loving, but the uncles (brothers of mother) very strict. In a family where parents are adequately stern, grandparents are free to be affectionate without restraint (I know this well from personal experience.)
Wary of offensive stereotypes of the masculine/feminine, we defy political correctness in describing the one as paternal and the other maternal. To be clear, very often the woman is stern and rigorous; the man accepting and welcoming. My wife did far more disciplining than I did: she recalls that she would report misbehavior to me on my return from work and I would calmly respond "That doesn't sound so bad to me." In the Catholic girls high school I was a soft disciplinarian; so was the big, strong male Vice-Principal in charge of discipline; but the religious sister Principal was tough. I have known a number of such tough sisters over the years in Catholic education. Such is a paternal love, without being unfeminine; as my fathering had a maternal flavor without becoming unmanly.
This distinction is culturally specified but rooted deeply in human biology: the mother receives the seed, carries the embryo, nurses and comforts the infant, and is created (chemically, neurologically, psychologically, spiritually) to bond closely to the child. The father is distant, representative of the external, objective world, and oriented to autonomy, independence, agency, accountability, competition, law, tradition, authority, and order. This general binary allows, of course, for wide diversity and individuality.
Systems will adjust to imbalance: a weak father elicits a stern mother; weakness on the part of both parents may evoke firmness from grandparents. Students in a high school without the nurse or counselor may find support in a sympathetic gym teacher or their peers.
Communities, religions and organizations can become systemically imbalanced. Islam, with polygamy and Jihad, is inordinately masculine and oppressive of the feminine. Catholicism in its true form, as a patriarchy, is balanced by devotion to Mary, Queen of Angels and Saints, holy-humble-pure "Mother-Matriarch." The military, the mob, NFL football are all necessarily masculine. The fire department is better off masculine. In my experience, police work benefits from women (as when our residence for women is visited by the police.)
A wholesome family requires the paternal/maternal balance, but this can take a million different shapes. Often, in the absence of a father, another or a series of father-figures compensate: uncles, brothers, cousins, teachers, priests, coaches. Similarly in the absence of the mother. I would suspect that in same-sex parenting there tends to such a specialization and contrast in roles, just as the couple mimics the male/female (active/receptive) dyad in sexual intercourse.
The defining crisis of the West is the demise of the masculine as paternal: strong but gentle, confident but tender, authoritative and protective, humble but magnanimous, clear, certain, steadfast, patient, chaste, courageous, attentive, sober, calm, generous, loyal. The woman and the family, abandoned (literally or emotionally-spiritually) must adapt. Notwithstanding the preternatural resiliency, strength and generosity of the feminine/maternal, the adaptation tends to disorder.
So we have: a faux-feminism aping toxic machismo in promiscuity-abortion-careerism; resentment and distrust of the masculine; an emergent matriarchy in which young women are vastly outperforming men; androgyny as the loss of the masculine/feminine as dyadic form of the human person; and masculinity tending to either violence or weakness.
Notwithstanding the iconic paternity of both John Paul and Benedict, our Catholic Church has suffered this crisis since the Vatican Council but it has been exasperated by the pontificate of Francis. In his person we find pronounced maternal impulses: to welcome, affirm, comfort those suffering, marginalized or stigmatized. These are themselves, of course, very good; necessary for every father-figure. The problem comes when they are not balanced by paternal instincts. The pope has asked his theological commission to "demasculinize" the Church. Here he manifests clearly the toxic antipathy to virility that is eviscerating our culture and Church. He despises: military, business, borders, dogma, law, traditional liturgies, the demanding Catholic sexual ethic restated by John Paul, conservative clergy, capital punishment, the doctrine of hell (sometimes), "backwardness" (a synonym for tradition?), hierarchical authority (which he replaces with "synodality"), clarity and certainty in thought.
His pontificate has been an anxious, overregulating, smothering "matriarchy." Like a controlling, dysfunctional mother, he has dictatorially, without consultation with the episcopacy or Tradition:
- repressed the Latin mass rather than allowing it to thrive with all the weeds and wheat;
- proscribed capital punishment, secure borders, and fossil energy rather than leaving these complex issues in the hands of the competent, lay authorities;
- entirely destroyed the John Paul Institute in Rome.
His most confusing, polarizing and dysfunctional act is Fiducia Supplicans on the blessing of homosexual couples. He has recently again reiterated that the blessing is for the persons, not the union. This is nonsensical: it is evident that a blessing or prayer is always available to anyone, whatever their sin, if requested humbly. Imagine: I am an Uber driver and get talking with my rider who is on his way to rob a bank. We like each other and share our Catholic faith. He is anxious and disoriented and asks, meekly, for a prayer. No I do not condemn him! I pull to the side and pray quietly: for his safety, for his conversion, for the safety of everyone in the bank should he continue on this path. If he is robbing my bank of over 40 years, Wells Fargo, I will not worry about them; they are worth $180,000,000,000 and are probably protected by insurance and the FDIC so what's a couple of hundred thousand $ to them?
Praying and blessing for a Catholic is like breathing; like flying is to a bird; like swimming is to a fish. We cannot bless evil or sin; we renounce that. But WHY REGULATE IT? Let it be. As a baptized, confirmed Catholic I am free to bless wherever I want: always for the good and against the bad. I don't need a rule, a regulation, a didactic instruction.
It is evident that the Fiducia declaration springs from a disordered motherly impulse to make practitioners of homosexuality feel welcome and affirmed by at least minimizing its gravity and removing the stigma if not legitimizing it entirely. This embrace of "the gay" is a further retreat from Catholic traditions of virility as paternity, chastity, fidelity, and fecundity.
Here we see the overregulating, smothering "bad-motherly" papacy at its worse. Instead of exercising the Petrine ministry to confirm, in clarity-certainty-unity, the Church, he has provoked explosive centrifugal forces: progressives defying his explicit instructions in one direction, conservatives openly rejecting the document in the other, and an indecisive middle affirming the literal statement but ignoring its obvious intent and consequences. We have a Church in confusion and disunity. We are fatherless.
But...this too will pass! We are blessed with the legacy left by John Paul and Benedict. Theirs is a refreshing and rejuvenating preservation of our Faith. We can stand, with virile virtue, all of us men and women, upon this endowment. They were giants who stood upon the shoulders of giants. We do well to stand now in our turn upon their shoulders: leaning into the maternal love...holy, pure, tender, beautiful, loving...of Mary our Mother and into the Fatherhood of God radiant in his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
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