Fathers must make sure their wives and children are fed—before they take any food. Fathers must go without so that their wives and families can survive. This at least is the ideal and what fathers and their families must strive for. Our fathers need to be pious. They need to know they cannot do it alone and without God. They need to know that they must pray to the one true God for the strength they need to raise their families — or their families will die. It is that simple.
Nowadays modern men do not have to marry the women with whom they live. No vows, no commitments — no promises, no pledges. And since a father like that doesn’t even give his children his name —he doesn’t seem to owe them anything else either — pretty neat and pretty clean — and pretty selfish. No need for those kinds of fathers to pray — they only take care of themselves.
And then of course there are the modern men who did take vows once, but have decided to take up with someone else and abandon the family that God gave them. They say they do this for their personal happiness. A pious father who knows his duty does not worry about whether he is happy — but whether or not his wife and children are happy. Because they — not he — are all that count.
Modern understandings of men and marriage are not pious and therefore they make men that are neither manly nor fatherly. In order to be strong enough to support their wives, arm in arm, as the two of them raise their children, fathers must be prayerful. We need to see fathers on their knees praying the Mass, praying the rosary, receiving Holy Communion, going to confession. And when our men are traditionally pious, then they will be traditionally manly — full of duty and honor and responsibility — for the lives God has placed in their care.
I truly believe that when the men of a parish — or society for that matter — are the fathers they need to be, then the women of the parish can be the mothers that God has called them to be.
And lo and behold their children will know the happiness of a family with a father and mother and children all in sweet accord. They will know what it is like to have God calling the shots in their home. They will know what it is like to live in a real Catholic home. And there’s nothing happier than that.