A Father’s Legacy

When I was a boy, I had a subscription to Sports Illustrated magazine. I have always enjoyed following and playing sports, and have probably spent way too much time reading about my favorite teams over the years. Once a year, there would be a number of pages in the middle of the SI magazine dedicated to showing scantily clad women in bathing suits. I wasn’t sure what the “swimsuit issue” had to do with sports, but I didn’t worry about it too much either. In any case, I never saw those pages because, to my chagrin, my father would tear out the bathing beauty pages before I could get my hands on the magazine. (Nowadays, a whole issue is dedicated to swimsuits and customers can choose to not receive the issue.)

At the time, I didn’t appreciate my father’s annual interventions. (Okay, that’s an understatement!) Later, I came to realize that my father was only doing what every father should do: he was trying to guard and preserve my purity. Back then, before computers and the internet, his task was not so difficult. Today, parents have a much more difficult time protecting their children’s innocence from harmful images, pornography and from indecent dressing and unchaste behaviors.

Tearing out pages from the swimsuit issue of SI magazine was just one way my father taught me about purity. My father taught me through the way he always treated my mother with much love and respect. I remember a father saying to me one time that the best gift he could give to his children was to love their mother. Clearly, my father loved and respected my mother. I am not saying my parents never had any disagreements. I’m sure they did from time to time. But, when they did, their discussions were conducted almost always at a time and place to which we twelve children were not privy.

Another time I remember that my father taught me about my sense of self and respect for my body was the summer before my senior year of high school. That summer, I had been growing a mustache. I had grown it the whole summer so by late August, you could almost see the fuzz over my upper lip from ten feet away. In other words, it was not a very thick, or even visible, mustache. My father took me aside and told me that I was not going to have the mustache when I would have my senior picture taken at the beginning of the school year. Again, I was more than a little upset that I couldn’t keep the mustache. After all, it was my body, I should be able to do what I wanted with it!

With hindsight, I am glad my father rescued me from that mustache. I would have been the target of a lot of jokes over the decades that followed when friends and family viewed my senior photo. And, needless to say, I have come to realize that my body is a gift from God and my parents and I can’t just do whatever I want with it.

As a priest who has the charge of overseeing the physical, spiritual and emotional well-being of other priests, I often ask my brother priests if they are taking care of themselves. I ask them (and myself):

Are you praying Mass and the breviary every day? Are you spending time regularly in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament? Are you taking your day off? Are you exercising? Are you seeing your confessor regularly? Are you happy?

To be sure, when priests fall in the area of purity, it is often because these basic practices fall by the wayside.

My father, who passed away in June 2011 after 92 fruitful years, taught me how to be a Father and a man. One of the cards I received after my father’s passing was from a priest friend who wrote: “A son doesn’t really become a man until he loses his father.” I am grateful that my father, in his gentle, manly way, taught me about manhood and purity.