Your Father Figure: The One Thing Impacting How We See God, Family, Country

Every challenge starts with our first relationships

Your relationship with your earthly father completely shapes how you see your Heavenly Father and all authority figures: God, family, and country.

We see broken relationships all around us: Growing numbers of people losing faith in God, their family, and their nation. They are connected.

It begins in their home: The percentage of children growing up without a father living in their home doubled between 1970 and 1980. The United States has the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent led homes.

Faith in our fathers, families, country, and God are connected

• The one key factor famous atheist leaders have in common? Their bad relationships with their human fathers made them roll their eyes in disgust at our prayers to our Heavenly Father.
• Even among devout Catholics, people who tell upsetting stories about broken families or scary fathers seem more comfortable talking about Jesus than God the Father. One broken relationship impacts others.
• Research in 2016 found people most comfortable with a strong father figure were most likely to like Donald Trump, while people haunted by fathers were most likely to dislike him.
• More than 100 years ago, psychologists developed “the Father Complex,’’ to explain “fear, defiance, and disbelief of the father.” Throughout the summer, anti-government rioters tore down or desecrated statues of historical leaders, religious icons, and America’s “founding fathers.’’
• Anti-Catholicism often centers on attacks on the pope. But as theologian Scott Hahn explains, “The Pope is not a tyrant, an authoritarian know-it-all, or a magician who can concoct a new revelation to satisfy all parties. He is a father figure that Christ has established over the family that He has purchased with His own Blood.’’

Christianity is all about family: The Father and His children

“We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures; we are the sum of the Father’s love for us and our real capacity to become the image of his Son,’’ St. John Paul the Great said.

Like father, like son? St. John Paul the Great learned about fatherhood from an ideal father (John Paul’s parents are now going through the canonization process toward sainthood). He recalled:

“Day after day I was able to observe the austere way in which he lived. By profession he was a soldier and, after my mother’s death, his life became one of constant prayer. Sometimes I would wake up during the night and find my father on his knees, just as I would always see him kneeling in the parish church. We never spoke about a vocation to the priesthood, but his example was in a way my first seminary, a kind of domestic seminary.”

The family is the domestic church

The family is, in fact, called “the domestic church,’’ with your father, mother, and children being a smaller replica of the Mother Church, the Bride of Jesus Christ.

The first broken relationship in history was between the Father and His children, Adam and Eve. So the Father sent His son, Jesus, as the bridge to heal the divide.

We heal our own brokenness with fathers, father figures, and all other people by calling on Jesus to help heal our broken hearts.

A top 10 list: The commandments are in order of priority

The first three of the 10 Commandments, written in order of priority, focus first on God and our duty to Him. Fourth on the list is honoring the mother and father, who made our lives possible. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches:

“Observing the fourth commandment brings its reward: ‘Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the LORD your God gives you.’ Respecting this commandment provides, along with spiritual fruits, temporal fruits of peace and prosperity. Conversely, failure to observe it brings great harm to communities and to individuals.’’ CCC 2200.

Every family needs a father, Pope Francis says, someone to — a father who shares in his family’s joy and pain, sharing wisdom, offering guidance and love. That, of course, is exactly what we seek from God the Father, who is love and truth itself.

“In revealing and in reliving on earth the very fatherhood of God, a man is called upon to ensure the harmonious and united development of all the members of the family,’’ John Paul added.

“The family is the original cell of social life. It is the natural society in which husband and wife are called to give themselves in love and in the gift of life. Authority, stability, and a life of relationships within the family constitute the foundations for freedom, security, and fraternity within society. The family is the community in which, from childhood, one can learn moral values, begin to honor God, and make good use of freedom. Family life is an initiation into life in society.’’ CCC 2207.