Where Are Our Men?

“The crisis of fatherhood we are living today is an element, perhaps the most important, threatening man in his humanity. The dissolution of fatherhood and motherhood is linked to the dissolution of our being sons and daughters.”

These words of Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) recognizes the misunderstanding of true masculinity and femininity in today’s culture and the its possible origins. A LOT of women are suffering abuse, neglect, and loneliness; relationships often end in hurt and betrayal; in the Catholic world alone, a comment often made is that there are many beautiful and holy women around but few good men pursuing them. Why is that? Where have our men gone, men who are courageous in modeling themselves after the Lord’s own heart?

Givenness, self-sacrificial love, protection and reverence — these are all traits women look for in men. They want to be guarded and protected by the men they love, to feel free and secure in the love they prove by the way they live their lives for them. But in modern times, with the confusion of what is male and female, of in vitro fertilization and sperm donation, the purpose of a masculine nature is devalued, disoriented. How can a man come to know what it means to give of himself, to love and protect the woman he loves when all around him is the message of efficiency and advantage, even over life itself?

John Paul II points out that then Eve was placed before Adam, He “gave to man the womanhood of the woman,” in other words, a special responsibility was given to the man to protect and revered the feminine beauty of the woman, the mutual awe and reciprocal love between the two of them. Not just in the conjugal life of a married couple, but in all aspects of the marriage there is a giving and receiving, a deeper learning of the gift the other is. “Woman is given to man so that he can understand himself, and reciprocally man is given to woman for the same end.” However, it starts with the man; it was man before whom the woman was placed, before whom she was created and to whom she was given. Men MUST see in women not the object of their pleasure and lost desires, but the key to understanding their own vocation as men; “In creating woman, in bringing her to man, God opened man’s heart to an awareness of gift, givenness. ‘She is from me and for me; through her I can become a gift because she herself is a gift for me.’” These insights of John Paul II is what should motivate men to BE MEN for women, and it is also with this realization that husbands can make that gift of self in the conjugal act — after all, it is the man who gives an overflow of himself to the woman in sexual intercourse. The woman invites the man to grow to his full potential in manhood, in fatherhood, in his role as protector of her dignity of motherhood, of womanhood. Concupiscence will always be a constant battle, the war between love and use, but confidence comes from the Redemption of Christ, in which “man receives anew his own maleness, femaleness, his capacity to be for the other, his capacity to be in mutual communion.” In the Paschal Mystery, God “re-gave” man the beauty and mystery of the first Creation. 

So men, women need you! The Church and society needs you to be both active and passive in your lives as men, active in welcoming the humble transformations that trials in life bring and effort in learning, and passive in allowing the gaze of innocence and love in the eyes of the woman to open your heart to the purifying gaze of God the Father.