This Sunday we will be celebrating Father’s Day. That seems natural enough since we celebrated Mother’s Day last month. The celebration serves as an appropriate complement so that we honor both parents. Still, the celebration of Father’s Day, and therefore of fatherhood itself, takes on an increasing importance and even urgency in our time and our society.
 

For those of us who have been blessed with loving and engaged dads, we know how much they meant to us and to the family. We take this opportunity to say how grateful we are to our fathers for all of those days of heading out the door to work. We are grateful for the often taken-for-granted reality that we lived in a family provided for, sometimes partly, sometimes wholly, by our fathers. Maybe we also recall his return home at the end of the day or after his shift, and the time he gave to the kids. It made his day longer, but that was what family was all about. Maybe with mom or maybe by himself, dad was at the games, the recitals, or just driving to pick up and transport the kids. Perhaps it seems idealistic in this time when a rising number of marriages end in divorce and so many children are born outside of wedlock. But when the role of the father is not well and truly lived, the result is too often that an heroic burden is borne by mothers without the benefit of dad’s presence and contribution.
 

This celebration is not just a moment to thank our fathers. It is a time to reflect upon and pray about the very meaning of fatherhood and its contribution to God’s plan for the family. Just as Mother’s Day celebrated that essential and invaluable role of mom, this Sunday we recall that God intended fathers to have a role in the family and in our lives.
 

In a special way, dads need to be involved in the faith lives of their children. The value for children of going to Mass with their dad, of learning and living religious values with their father has an enormous and lasting effect on them. What a tremendous impact there is when dad (and mom) accompany the children to church to receive the sacrament of reconciliation.
 

Father’s Day is also an occasion to reach out to our young men who one day will be fathers. We need to teach them and impress upon them that fatherhood is an act of responsibility. Fatherhood is a part of God’s plan for marriage. Our young men need to be formed so that they will be responsible husbands and fathers. That needs to be renewed as both a moral and a societal value.
 

Jesus revealed to us the care and love of his heavenly Father who is faithful, demanding, loving and generous. May all of our earthly fathers be a reflection of God the Father.
 

Thanks dads, and you are in our prayers!