Too Many Crises or Just One?
Let me begin with a story, that you may have heard before. It concerns a father and his son. This man and his son had suffered a great loss because the father’s wife, the mother of the family had died. So too had the eldest son. Now, it was only the father and the son left. As the family had been reduced to two from four, and to cope with the emptiness of their apartment, the father and the son shared now the same bedroom. Often during the night, the son would wake up and see his father kneeling in the dark, deep in prayer. This fatherly example of prayer made a deep impression on the son.
The boy was the young Karol Wojtyla, the future St John Paul II, and his father, Karol Snr, gave to him a witness of prayer and devotion that became for him the seed of his vocation to the priesthood. Without his father’s example, Karol Jnr perhaps may not have become a priest, a bishop and the Pope; and a saint.1
This same boy who became Pope and Saint wrote that the original sin of Adam and Eve was more than just wrong-doing. It was casting doubt, serious doubt, upon the gift and love of God. It was also man turning his back on the Father. “By casting doubt in his heart on the deepest meaning of the gift, that is, on love as the specific motive of creation and of the original covenant, man turns his back on God-Love, on the ‘Father’. He is some sense casts him from his heart.”2
Most of us, as Catholic men, know and acknowledge that there has been a crisis of masculinity for some decades now beginning with radical feminism, made worse by the confusion around gender in recent years, and many other social trends. We’ve heard the mainstream media applaud the possibility of births and marriages without men, and we’re well aware of the claim that masculinity is toxic. Likewise, we know of the claim that to be male and white is somehow to be privileged.
Now we have reputable sociologists talking of a boy crisis. It’s not just that girls have gained much-needed ground and boys have remained the same. But rather by every metric boys are declining in a dramatic way.3
Then there is the crisis of fatherhood, which St John Paul the Great mentioned in connection with original sin.
