From Francis, lessons on being a good father

By John P. McNamee

Father's Day. I am off to Sunday Mass aware of the cynicism long growing in me. The melancholy Irish inheritance that W.B. Yeats called an abiding sense of tragedy.

At Mass with many others, I expect little by way of the homily. Today, a delight from the Franciscan friar presiding. Right off, he mentioned he would speak about two different kinds of fathering: patriarchy and the holy father.

The friar was both delighted and apprehensive when the new Jesuit pope chose the name Francis. "Boy, he is asking for trouble if he follows through on that."

Then a papal encyclical on the environment and the economy, with St. Francis and his "Canticle of Creation" as a theme: Blessed be my Lord for Brother Sun and Sister Moon, air, water, soil, flowers, trees as our siblings, not our servants.

The friar went off on patriarchy: misuse, abuse, pollution, exhaustion of the Earth, its beauty, and the living things that share the world with us. He invoked brutal examples of a fathering based on power.

The remote island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean: indigenous people, there for 2,000 years, exiled because the United States needed the place for a strategic air base.

Or Bikini Atoll, again native people sent into exile because we needed test grounds for nuclear bombs. Because we are the patriarch, the boss, the father.

The friar remarked that he never cries, but that the encyclical of Pope Francis, using the hymn of St. Francis, brought him to tears or at least moist eyes. I too will read this encyclical at least in joy, perhaps in tears.

A note of my own to the friar's words: the rumor that in creating this encyclical, Pope Francis sought the help of a Brazilian Franciscan, eloquent on the environment, who left the priesthood in response to the censure of his work.

Imagine. Asking help from someone many would call a prodigal son. That's the kind of fathering we should celebrate. Viva il Papa.