FATHER’S DAY
SERMON
2020
Father John
A. Perricone
As with every mystery of our Catholic Faith, the Holy
Trinity is called a mystery not because it is like a riddle, but because it is
like an ocean. Divine mysteries are as incomprehensible
as trying to count all the stars of the universe, or the sands on earth. They are beyond our ken because their beauty,
truth and wonder is infinite, exceeding reason’s grasp. Even in the Beatific Vision the mysteries of
the Faith will never be entirely comprehended by men or angels, because their
intellects are created, and therefore limited.
All of eternity for the Blessed will be a series of new adventures into
the bowels of Love, one never like another.
Each one fuller, deeper and bursting with an ecstatic joy far grander
than the one before.
One of the ways to begin climbing near the edges of
the mystery of the Holy Trinity is to look at human fathers. They are faint echoes of the Trinity; traces
of Their ineffable beauty. St. Thomas
teaches: “bonum diffusivum est.” (good, of its very nature, pours itself out.) Since the Trinity is the Good Itself, Its
very nature is always pouring out Itself in love. Father eternally begets (pours out Itself)
the Son, and their infinite love spirates (pours out) the Holy Spirit. Yet this divine diffusion could not end there. Per
impossibile, or else God’s Divine Nature would be violated. So God then pours Himself out of Himself,
resulting in creation. In the words of
Fr. Edoard Hugon, the great Thomist and friend of Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange: “The
world (creation) is the first revelation of God, the first book where His
eternal ideas are printed, the first vestiges of His attributes, the image of
His beauty, the first echo of His voice.”
The apex of God’s material creation is man, but not man alone. Man is truly man only with and in another in
love (“It is not good for the man to be alone.”
Gen 2:18). The heights of human love are reached in the
nuptial union where the spouses pour themselves out to the other resulting in
the pouring forth of new life. This kind
of motion, intrinsic to the Holy Trinity, imprints Itself in a unique fashion
on fathers. As the Father begets the Son
in love, so fathers beget children in blessed union with their spouses. Fathers are intrinsically allied to the
Heavenly Father in the generation of new children. This alliance is irreparably betrayed when
man uses this generative faculty in any other way than the Father does. Just as the Father’s actions are always
fecund, so must every nuptial act of natural fathers. Just as the Father’s acts are always
overflowing with abundance, so must the marital acts of fathers result in
abundance of children. Our God is not a
God of carefully calculated limits, neither should earthly fathers be. If so, he ceases to be a man at all, and
deforms himself into a caricature of a man.
Natural fathers possess a special duty to uphold and
defend the natural order of things. They
are guardians of truth. The Trinity
bequeaths fathers a singular imitation of Their inner life, and expects them to
be on the front lines of exhibiting Their riches. Hence, the obligation of nurturing their own
families in the truth of God’s life.
Today this is a formidable task.
Navigating the heaving swells of secularism demands the courage of a
hundred armies and the savvy of a dozen Patton’s. As we have seen in the past few weeks, swarms
of militants will not rest until they have shredded every fabric of civility,
morality and Western Civilization. They must be met and scattered. First, by fathers. This is a part of their principal
vocation. Yes, they must furnish food,
shelter and security for their families.
However, all of that will be in vain if truth is permitted to die on the
vine. Where were the voices of the
millions of good fathers when political leaders, sports idols, Hollywood elites
and the Fortune 500 titans bowed to the Maoist venom of Black Lives Matter and
Antifa? Where was the million-man-march
of good fathers as Stalinists occupied actual sectors of our cities? Fathers, you are marked with the sign of the
Trinity. Where is your valor? What has become of your thirst for heroism? Before
the Holy Trinity, it is your solemn obligation to find it again.
Fathers, with all that the Trinity has blessed you, you
are invested by Them with even more.
Threaded into the very fiber of your being is an aching homesickness: a
homesickness for heaven. Never rest in
reminding your boys and girls of this homesickness. Even as they admire your success and wealth,
warn them that life is not about these, though important in their proper
place. Life is using all these things to
win heaven. Teach them that every hour
in the classroom, all the days in the library, all their struggles for good
grades are for one purpose: ad maiorem
Dei gloriam. Remind them of the
stirring exhortation of the seventeenth century Archbishop of Paris, Benigne
Bossuet, who exclaimed from the pulpit of Notre Dame: “Woe to the knowledge
that does not turn to loving God!” Tell
your children that Christ Crucified matters above all things. They will not believe you unless they see you
acting day in and day out with this primacy of purpose. When you become lukewarm, they will become
bad. To your horror, they will become
the heirs of the children looting stores and tearing down our nation.
On this Fathers’ Day, the Trinity and Holy Church begs
you to be true fathers. Only when you
execute that role will our lost world find its way back to God. Your virile example will teach other men to
be men again, and resist the cowardly retreat we have seen on full display
these past few weeks. Let ring in your
minds the warning of Shakespeare in Julius Caesar: “Before a coward
dies, he dies a thousand deaths.” Make
your campaign to take captive the debased ideas that have brought our beloved
America to her knees, and chain them in cages.
Then drag your conquest to the throne of Christ the King and present it
as the booty of your brave war for Him.
Fathers, be the standard bearers of the Blessed
Trinity. Though you are not that Mystery, you bear
the royal mark of that Mystery. Heavy responsibilities
lay upon your shoulders. Don’t fear
them. The Blessed Trinity expects you to
make Their echoes heard to every corner of the earth.
We wait to see the mark you make. More importantly, God waits.
