RSSThe president of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum (one heart) on Jan. 23 expressed concern that weakened masculinity around the world prevents people from grasping Jesus´ teaching on the heavenly Father.
 |
| Pontifical Council Cor Unum president Cardinal Paul Josef Cordes speaks on factors leading to the diminishing role of males today and its implications for acceptance of God´s fatherhood, after the pontifical University of Santo Tomas in Manila conferred on him an honorary doctorate in Sacred Theology on Jan. 23. |
“Today, the self-understanding of manhood, and especially fatherhood, is in crisis,” said Cardinal Paul Josef Cordes, pointing to the feminist movement, psycho-social theories and erroneous citations of the Bible as contributing to this.
Bishops, priests, Religious and lay faculty, students and guests made up his audience in the auditorium of Thomas Aquinas Research Complex at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila. The German cardinal, who heads the pontifical council responsible for orienting and coordinating Church charitable efforts, spoke after officials of the pontifical university conferred an honorary doctorate in sacred theology on him.
The 74-year-old prelate cited reports and surveys documenting “weakened male identity.”
One of his references, a Catholic Charities report, estimates 24 million children in the United States live in a home without a father. According to Cardinal Cordes, that figure was 10 million in the 1960s.
The report found that compared to boys who live with their father, boys from fatherless homes are twice as likely to end up in prison. They are also more likely to drop out or be expelled from school, and account for 63 percent of youth suicides and 90 percent of youths who run away from home, it said.
U.S. laws also “undermine the role of the father,” the cardinal maintained, citing legislation allowing “gay so-called parents” to adopt children and the 2008 Human Fertilization and Embryology Act, which enables single women to conceive children through artificial methods.
In Europe, he said, recent trends also “work to diminish masculinity.” He described a research paper published by the Council of Europe in 1998 that indicated male leaders and fathers have “become more like women and mothers” in behavior, including becoming “sweeter.”
Cardinal Cordes cautioned that “flexibility of the sexes” in children´s education should not suggest that male identity is merely a product of a culture or consequence of social circumstances.
The Vatican official maintained that fundamental change in the understanding of authority has been happening since 19th-century agrarian societies began shifting, leading eventually to the modern computer-driven generations. Feminism drove changes in the basic relation between the sexes, he added.
Freudian psychoanalysis also came in for criticism, with the cardinal saying its “mistaken forms of parental relations” are adopted by teachers and writers today, especially in relation to “patriarchal slavery.”
Even religious leaders contribute to confusion, Cardinal Cordes said. Without naming anyone, he noted that a declaration from a conference a Scripture scholar had organized in Rome on the encounter between Christians and Muslims proclaimed: “Your God, my God.”
This is “puzzling,” according to the cardinal, because the fatherhood of God is rejected totally in Islam, which believes incarnation is an error. “In the Qur´an, Allah has 90 diverse names that describe his greatness and essence, but he is never invoked as ´Father,´” he said.
 |
| From left to right, German Ambassador Christian-Ludwig Weber-Lortsch, Pontifical University of Santo Tomas Rector Father Rolando dela Rosa, Pontifical Council Cor Unum president Cardinal Paul Josef Cordes and Cor Unum consultor Henrietta de Villa, after the university conferred an honorary doctorate in Sacred Theology on Cardinal Cordes Jan. 23 in Manila. |
He cautioned against “abuse of biblical citation,” especially in international interreligious prayer gatherings.
Instead, Cardinal Cordes offered Jesus Christ´s relationship with God the Father as a model for father-son relationships. Jesus spoke with God as a child, in a simple way, intimate and familiar, he said. In his view, “abba,” which the cardinal translated as “papa” or “dear daddy” in today´s language, reveals the most affectionate center of Jesus´ relationship with God.
However, he also stressed the role of the father as the person who orients and directs the child and contributes to its growth in goodness even when it causes the child discomfort or unpleasantness. Men who are not necessarily biological fathers perform that spiritual fathering role in developing children in ethics and values, he explained.
At the reception following the ceremony, he described his own father as a cinema owner and “good cook.” He told UCA News, “My mother had more to do with raising me, but my father was involved in disciplining and orienting me.”
From his father´s dealings with people who came to the cinema, he said, he learned “to be open to different kinds of people, but to be discerning.”
END
Share
Twitter