Crisis of Fatherhood Heart of Present Crisis --Ratzinger

Wherever human fatherhood has disappeared, God can no longer be expressed or thought of. God has not died, but in human beings something has totally died that is a necessary condition for God's existence in the world. The crisis of fatherhood which we are living through today constitutes the heart of the human crisis that is threatening us. Where fatherhood no longer appears as anything other than a biological accident without human recourse, or where it appears as a tyranny to be rejected, we find a wound deep in the very fiber of human existence. To be fully human we need a father in the true sense of the word, the way the father has appeared through faith. Being a father means to have responsibility toward another person. It does not mean that the father should dominate the other person but should convey to him or to her true freedom. A father's love should not seek to take possession of another, and yet should not confirm the other person's remaining just as he or she was "on arrival," pretending that this is being done for the sake of liberty. This love wants the other to find his or her most personal truth, which is in his or her creator. This manner of being a father is possible, of course, only on condition that we accept the idea of ourselves as children. To consent to Jesus' statement that "...one is your Father, who is in heaven" (Matt. 23:9) is an internal condition needed for men to be capable of being fathers in a good sense--not in dominion over others but in a spirit of responsibility toward the truth, a responsibility freely devoted to God and which can thus give unselfishly to another his liberty for God in whom we find our being.

Joseph Ratzinger, The God of Jesus Christ, Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1970, 22.


"The worship of human power is about ninety per cent of the religion of about ninety percent of the present generation of mankind. Shall we succeed in shaking it off? And if we remain enslaved to it, whither will it lead us?"
From the Arnold Toynbee introduction in Christopher Dawson, The God's of Revolution, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1972, xi.


"The greatest among you is the one who serves the rest." Cf. Matthew 23:11; 18:5; 20:27; Mark 9:34.