 Fathers and brothers, it's great to be back with you. Just got some wonderful stuff to go over this afternoon. Wonderful material from God's word as we continue to reflect on divine fatherhood. God is Father. And you know, just to start off with, I wanna give a little followup from my morning's talk. We're talking about, of course, God as Father in other religions, which is surprisingly uncommon, actually far more uncommon than is usually thought. One religion that I didn't discuss was Judaism. And I'd like to say, just to give a few statistics, a little information about God as Father in the Old Testament and then in modern Judaism. So God is called Father in the Old Testament, about 15 times. And those 15 instances split roughly half between covenantal references to the Mosaic covenant where God was Father of the people of Israel by virtue of the covenant that he made with him at Mount Sinai, because remember, a covenant establishes a family relationship, right? So it's calling God Father was a covenantal term for the Mosaic covenant. And then about the other half of the times that he's called Father, it's in reference to the Davidic covenant, where David and his heirs were sons of God because of the covenant that God had established with David. So most of those instances where God is called Father in the Old Testament, about 15 times as I said, are covenantal references. And then there's another about a dozen times where although the title Father is not used of God, language of Fatherhood is used or statements are made that imply that God is Father, like the people of Israel are called the children of the Lord or something like that. And that's about another dozen times. So there are some references to God as Father in the Old Testament, but they're uncommon, relatively sparse, tend to be covenantal, okay? And metaphorical. Now when you get into the New Testament, the situation is dramatically different, okay? God is referred to as Father, okay? 100 times in the Gospel of John alone, okay? And 65 times in the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, so in the first four books of the New Testament, 165 occurrences calling God Father only 15 times in the Old Testament. So it's a real sea change. And of course, as Christ reveals a new covenant and reveals the Father to us, we begin to understand that calling God Father is not a metaphor, okay? It's not an analogy taken from human experience and placed on God, okay? But actually the reality is precisely the reverse. God is the essence of Fatherhood and that gets imaged in human reality, okay? So we call God Father as Catholic Christians essentially. You know, he is Father in his essence. It's not a metaphor. And you'll find even Protestant Christians are separated brethren saying that it's just a metaphor. Oh no, it's not, okay? Not in reference to Christ, certainly, as God is Father from all eternity with reference to the only begotten Son. But even with ourselves, since the spirit is given, we actually become, as 2 Peter 1, 4 says, partakers of the divine nature, okay? So our essence has changed and we become children of God in a more ontological and essential sense than simply in the Old Testament, in a legal sense when a covenant was made, okay? Our natures are changed in order that we become children of God. And so St. Paul will say in Ephesians 3.15 that all Fatherhood is named from God the Father. You don't always see it in the English translation because sometimes they'll translate the word Fatherhood as family and there's reasons for that. But I think that the best translation is Fatherhood. All Fatherhood flows from God the Father. So when we speak of God as Father, it's much more robust. We're speaking about God's essence from all eternity, not simply using a metaphor. Well, and I should say in modern Judaism, God continues to be called Father, but a good Jewish theologian will insist it's only metaphor. We don't mean it in the sense that Christians do. We don't mean in this realistic sense that Christians do with their Trinitarian doctrine, et cetera. Okay, but for this afternoon, what we wanna look at is the teaching on spiritual Fatherhood that we see from St. Paul, drawing largely from his second letter to Timothy. And this second letter to Timothy, as well as the first letter in Titus, are very dear to me. They've been very influential in my own spiritual development. During the four years that I was a Protestant pastor, I made it a habit of taking one day off each month and going away to a local convent, ironically in light of subsequent events in my life, went away to a Dominican convent that was in the city where I was doing urban ministry. It's on the outskirts of town and the convent sadly was mostly empty. As you've probably witnessed in other places. And most of the nuns were retired and just a few active ones. And so they had all these rooms in the convent. And one of the ways that they were making use of this enormous space that they had was they would offer for a very small fee a day away in prayer. So you could get a room in the convent and you could stay there and just be silent and pray, make use of the chapel, et cetera. So I would do that. I had no particular connection with Catholicism but it was a lot cheaper than getting a hotel room and it was a place of way and conducive. So I would go away one day a month and I would pray and fast and on that day I would read all the pastoral epistles and I'd work through First Timothy, Second Timothy and Titus and just try to rekindle my pastoral fervor by listening again to St. Paul's instructions to these young pastors, Timothy and Titus. And one of the things that's striking about these letters that Paul sent to these men is the strong theme of spiritual paternity or spiritual fatherhood that runs through these pastoral letters. And so our first point really is that spiritual fatherhood reiterates the father-son relationship of the trinity. See what St. Paul was experiencing in his own life, vis-a-vis Timothy and Titus in his relationship with them is he was replicating the image of God the Father and begetting these spiritual sons who were in his image and then projected his life, his teaching and his doctrine, that is to say St. Paul's, to these places where he sent them. And we see this already at the beginning of the letters, Second Timothy, one, one. Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God according to the promise of the life which is in Christ Jesus, to Timothy, my beloved child. And we see that phrase, beloved child, it should make us think of the other instances of the use of this adjective, beloved, that we have seen in the New Testament, okay? Like at the baptism and the transfiguration, this is my beloved son, okay? So as the father sent his beloved son into the world, St. Paul is sending his beloved child, Timothy, out to minister in Ephesus and he blesses him grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. And we see this theme of Paul sending his spiritual son in other of Paul's epistles as well. In 1 Corinthians, he's rebuking them. In chapter four, he says, I do not write this to make you ashamed but to admonish you as my beloved children. For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel. Let's stop there for just a minute and observe this really robust language of spiritual fatherhood that St. Paul is using to the congregation of Corinth. And you know, I try to point this out to my students. We get criticized because we refer to priests as father, right? And we'll be challenged on that and Matthew will be cited the passage called No Man on Earth, Father, okay? So every time I go through the New Testament with my students, we stop and we dwell on this. And I give them a list of about the 25 times in the New Testament that father is used as a spiritual title, okay? With reference to one of the apostles. And here are good examples where Paul is calling himself the father of the Corinthians in a spiritual sense. And if you flip over the outline to the back on the bottom of page two, we had there my favorite example of the use of the term father in a spiritual sense in the New Testament. And that's from the first epistle of John, chapter two, 12 through 14. St. John says, I am writing to you little children because your sins are forgiven for his sake. I am writing to you fathers because you know him who is from the beginning. I am writing to you young men because you have overcome the evil one. And a few verses later in John's repetitious style, he virtually repeats this trifecta to these different groups in the church to which he's writing. Now one of the interesting things about this passage here verses 12 through 14 is that most scholars agree he's not literally just writing to the five and six year olds, okay? You, your sins are forgiven for his sake. And for all you men who have biological children, you know, you've known him who is from the beginning and the men between ages 16 and 26, okay? I write to you because you overcome the evil one. Now the consensus among scholars at first John is these are representing spiritual groups in the church at different levels of spiritual maturity. And one argument and the one that I think is right is that little children are really a reference to the catechumens, okay? The young men to those in mysticogy who've received the sacraments but are continuing instruction into the mysteries. And then the fathers to whom he's writing are the presbuteroi of the congregation from which we get priests, okay? So the first instance of calling priest father I believe, okay, is in the scripture itself, okay? In first John, okay? These are the presbuteroi. I'm writing to you fathers, okay? And it's from an apostle. Can't knock down prove that, but it's in agreement with a good deal of consensus scholarship. They just don't, they don't dot all the, the Protestant scholars don't put all the dots together to draw the conclusion that it's the presbuteroi here who are be calling, being called a father. So let's get back now to our, to St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians on the front of our handout. He says, I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel. I urge you then be imitators of me, this theme of imitation. We're gonna take this up in a few moments all by itself. But then verse 17, he says, Therefore I sent to you Timothy, my beloved and faithful child in the Lord to remind you of my ways in Christ as I teach them everywhere in every church. In this relationship between father, between St. Paul's father and Timothy has sent son. Look at how the language that's being used here is so similar to things that we see in the gospel of John, like John 20, 21. Jesus said to them again, peace be with you as the father has sent me, even so I send you. So as Christ has sent from the father, Christ himself sends the apostles. Now Paul as an apostle is reiterating this Trinitarian dynamic by sending Timothy as his son to represent and convey his love to his spiritual children. And you can see that as well. We won't read the passage, but from the high priestly prayer in John 17, he refers to himself again and again as the one sent from the father, the son sent from the father. So we're gonna be talking about spiritual paternity this afternoon, the process of beginning spiritual sons, so to speak, in our image. And it really comes down to discipleship as we're going to discuss. But the process of spiritual discipleship, which we also discussed last year, this is really based on the model of who God is, the Trinitarian begetting of the son from the father, the sending of the son into the world to convey the love and the image of the father to the father's children. And so we want to be conformed to that as well. And secondly, spiritual fatherhood is a begetting more like divine fatherhood than biological fatherhood is. And let's just read a little bit more from 2 Timothy, this first chapter, where St. Paul reminds Timothy about, was probably his ordination at the hands of Paul. St. Paul says, hence I remind you, Timothy, to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands, probably his reception of holy orders. For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power and love and self-control. Isn't that a beautiful verse? We could spend the rest of the afternoon just unpacking verse seven and talking about the spirit of power, love and self-control, not of fearfulness and the necessity of boldness in the age in which we live. But this is a reference we can understand to a kind of spiritual begetting that St. Paul performed over against Timothy through the laying on of hands by St. Paul, who as an apostle had the plenitude of holy orders, the font of the Episcopacy, okay? He begets Timothy as a spiritual son and fellow partaker of this authority that's been placed on Paul, this authority of holy orders. And that begetting that Paul performed over against Timothy of course was not a sexual begetting, okay? It was by the word and by the spirit, okay? And that's how God begets. God begets through the word and the spirit, not in a physical manner, not in a biological manner, not in a gendered or sexual manner, but God begets through a creative act through His word and spirit, the two that proceed from the Father. When we look at passages in the Old Testament about the fatherhood of God, one of the passages that's often overlooked is Genesis 1.26, then God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness that they may have dominion. And of course a lot of ink has been spilled by theologians and philosophers in the course of church history over what does it mean that we're in the image and the likeness of God? But the scriptures themselves provide an explanation, at least a partial explanation for what this language means. Just a few chapters later in Genesis 5.3 where it refers to Adam's fatherhood of Seth, it says when Adam had lived 130 years, he became a father of a son in his likeness and after his image and named him Seth. There we get the language of image and likeness and here it describes the relationship of the son, Seth, to his father, Adam. Aha, so image and likeness is the language of sonship. So taking that back to Genesis 1.26, we realize that there was a filial or suddenly relationship between God and Adam at the beginning, if you ask the question, well, at what point did Adam become a child of God? The church fathers would have placed it at the point at which the breath of life was breathed into his nostrils in Genesis 2.7, then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground but his inanimate body is not yet in the image and likeness but then breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being and the fathers understood this breath of life to be a reference to the Holy Spirit in filling the soul of Adam and making him a son of God and this breath of life, this partaking of the Holy Spirit was lost through sin and then the rest of salvation history becomes a drama of coming once again to share in that spirit, to have the breath of life and this is why the outpouring of the spirit at the end of the gospels and in Acts at Pentecost, this is such a fulfillment because it recreates us and restores to humanity this image and likeness that we have not had since the fall in the garden but getting back to our point, God begets through a creative act of word and spirit in particular through the gift of his spirit he creates spiritual children, he grants us his own nature. So in baptism we're born as children of God because at baptism we receive the Holy Spirit and become again as Peter says, partakers of the divine nature and so it's so important when we're educating congregations, when we're educating students, we're educating people in the faith, take care that we not use the term child of God too loosely, okay, that yes, there is an appropriate way to use the term children of God, it can be used metaphorically to refer to human beings as creatures and the fathers in St. Thomas refer to all human beings as children of God either in spay or in ray, okay, in spay is Latin for in hope, okay, so that means potential children of God, right, or in ray, that would refer to baptized persons. So if you use the term, you know, all people are children of God, yeah, we can use that long as we qualify it in spay or in ray, okay, potentially or actually, okay, but without baptism we're only potentially children of God, this is the uniqueness of the Christian message and huge groups of humanity, including all Muslims, would not appreciate the title children of God apply to them because they do not, that's blasphemy, okay, Allah does not have children, okay, and for other large groups, okay, you know, God is just the force as we talked earlier and so it doesn't really make sense to talk about being children of God. We just in a very sanguine way, we just think we're gonna apply this all over, but it's very important that we teach the Catholic laity. The great privilege of divine affiliation, the great privilege of being a child of God which comes to us through baptism, you know, Saint John, the apostle, he never lost his enthusiasm for this reality, okay, for this reality of being a child of God and you see his enthusiasm coming across in his first epistle, you know, oh what love the Father has shown to us that we should be called children of God and that is what we are, he says, and if he had exclamation points in Greek, he would have put three or four or five of them after that and that is what we are, but there was no punctuation, so you have to read between the lines to get the enthusiasm that the love, oh what love that we should be called this and this is what we are, this is amazing, this is mind blowing, not simply covenantal although that, not simply metaphorical although that, but in reality because the gift of the spirit making us partakers of the divine nature. So getting back to the point here, God creates through a creative, excuse me, God begets through a creative act, he begets through his spirit and word and so the kind of spiritual paternity that you fathers exercise in the church when you baptize an infant or adult and call down the spirit through your word acting in persona Christi, that is more truly like God's fatherhood than my biological fatherhood of my eight children, okay? God begets in that way, he establishes his fatherhood in that way and so we have to understand that this spiritual fatherhood is a profound sharing in God's nature. It is not that we experience biological fatherhood as human beings and then export that into heaven and by metaphor apply that to God, rather the reality of fatherhood exists in God and being a natural father, biological father, is that kind of sort of like it a little bit? It's an image of that but different in ways. So let's flip over the outline and move on to our third point. Spiritual fatherhood, spiritual paternity means replicating ourselves by offering an example to be imitated by spiritual sons and throughout the pastoral epistles, the theme of imitation is very strong. We see this in 2 Timothy 1.13. Paul says to Timothy, follow the pattern of the sound words which you have heard from me in the faith and love which are in Christ Jesus. Guard the truth that has been entrusted to you by the Holy Spirit who dwells within us. Much richness there but look at the beginning there, follow the pattern. Okay, follow the pattern. And a little bit later in 2 Timothy, there's an even stronger statement about imitation. We find that in 2 Timothy 3.10. Now you have observed, he says, my teaching, my conduct, my aim in life, my faith, my patience, my love, my steadfastness, my persecutions, my sufferings, what befell me at Antioch, at Iconium and at Lystra, what persecutions I endured. So that's a lot to observe. There's a lot of things that Terry's been on the road with Paul for a long time. You've observed all this, okay? Yet from all of them the Lord rescued me. So let's start with that point. One of the things that we notice here is Timothy spent a lot of time with Paul and Paul was completely transparent with Timothy. We see this in 3.10 here. Paul was an open book, okay? He says that to Timothy, you've seen everything about me. You've seen my virtues, my persecutions, you've seen what I've undergone, you've seen the manner of my ministry, you've observed it all, okay? And this was part of Paul's paternity toward Timothy. And where is Paul getting this? Well, he may have gotten it right from our Lord, who spent three years walking around the land of Israel with the 12, lying on the ground sleeping with him. The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head and they're traveling around, eating with the apostles, teaching, teaching the crowds and their presence, on the job training, okay? The Sermon on the Mount is on the job training. 12 are gathered around watching the master preach, picking up his style, picking up his points, learning how to do this, okay? So our Lord was an open book for the apostles. And if we expect to raise up spiritual sons in our own ministry, we're gonna have to be transparent with some other men. We're gonna have to offer ourselves as models to be followed. And that's demanding, of course, on all of us, because I think most of us appreciate our privacy, don't we? We like, you know, being in the public eye is exhausting. We want those moments of downtime. We want those moments away. And yeah, there's legitimacy to that. We even see that in the gospels where our Lord calls the 12 away from ministry and says, let's get away. Let's take the boat across the lake and rest awhile, okay? That's important. But nonetheless, the process of spiritual paternity cannot take place unless we really offer ourselves as an example to be followed by spiritual sons. And we can't be an example if we don't let other men get to know us. And if we don't have sufficient time that our lifestyle ever becomes apparent to them. So what does this mean? I believe we're being called in this crisis of our modern culture, crisis of the church, okay? To raise up disciples. Every one of us needs to replicate ourselves, but that self-replication modeled on the paternity of the father to the son, okay? Is going to involve a sharing of ourselves, which is gonna be painful because we're finite beings. The father shares himself completely with the son, right? And the son shares himself with the father and the self that they share is the Holy Spirit. But there's a total self-gift with the father and the son in the Holy Trinity. That is possible because they are divine persons to give the gift of self as a finite human person is a death to self. We can't give it and still retain it. And so there's a kind of self-death that takes place by the gift of self. And so imitating the Trinity by self-giving love is painful for us human men, but we're being called to lay down our lives to give that gift of self. And one of the ways in which we give ourselves is by sharing our life, sharing our teaching, our conduct, our aim, our faith, our patience, our love, our steadfastness, in a special way, in particular, with other men as we try to raise up sons. So this is calling us to a kind of a transparency. And also it's demanding because it calls us to high standards if we're really gonna be an open book to spiritual sons. We can't reserve little pockets in our life for pet sins, okay, for moral failings of a lesser nature. It's calling us to sainthood, it's calling us to holiness. And I testify as a natural father, I am an example to my sons whether I'm trying to be or not. And one of the things that I've learned, I have now eight children, my oldest is 20, my youngest is two. And so I'm finishing my fatherly course in some ways with my 20-year-old. And I'm still just beginning it with the two-year-old. And one of the advantages is I hope to do better. It's some way, that is to say, I hope to do some things that I've failed my older children with with my younger children by learning some things from my mistakes. And one of the things I did not recognize as a young father, which is how much I would be imitated. In fact, parts of my life that I didn't want to be imitated, okay. Start coming back to me like, where did you learn that language? Where did you pick up that habit? So as I see these, I see character qualities of myself cropping up in my older children and beginning to realize things of myself as they mirror back to me who I am. On a more innocuous example, I was listening to one of my sons' talk. We were having a conversation a couple of years ago and he was interjecting, okay, every other sentence. Such and such and such and such, okay. So such and such and such and such, okay. Like, you know, that's kind of obnoxious. Where did you pick up that habit? Then I'm listening to my class lectures. I got the headphones on. I recorded MP3 of my class lectures. Dang. Every three sentences I got, okay. Okay. So I wasn't even aware that I had this habit, this verbal habit, and here it's being reflected back to me by my children. So whether we want to or not, we're going to be examples. That's the nature of fatherhood. Was that a little bird? Don't know what that was. Okay. So we need to embrace this, be transparent. It's calling us to a high standard because everything that we do will be seen and will be imitated by spiritual sons. So let's move on now to our fourth point here. Spiritual fatherhood means the intentional cultivation of spiritual descendants. Another way of speaking about discipleship. So we see in 2 Timothy chapter two, verse one here. You then, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. And what you have heard from me before many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also. Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. So this is a very famous verse, very significant for the modeling of ministry. We may have talked about this last year, but it's worth going back to and looking at. So in verse two, what you have heard from me before many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also. We have four generations of spiritual paternity here. We have Saint Paul, what you have heard from me. So me, that's Paul himself. And then what you've heard from me and what he's, that's being transmitted to Timothy. So you is Timothy. And this transmission of the deposit of faith that's going from Paul to Timothy is taking place in the presence of many witnesses. So we have all these bystanders, okay? We've got the rest of the church as this transmission of the faith is taking place. And this also is the model that we see in the gospels as our Lord goes around the land of Israel teaching the gospel, showing the apostles how to do it and the crowds are the many witnesses as they are learning. And then he says, entrust this also to faithful men. So the faithful men are Timothy's own spiritual sons. These faithful men who will in turn be able to teach others, have their own spiritual sons. So we have four generations of spiritual paternity being referred to here. And so we see, it's often believed that Second Timothy was one of the last writings of Saint Paul as he, because he speaks about coming to the end of his course and he has a sense that his death is near and there's some passages in Second Timothy that have an air of melancholy about them as Paul sees his death looming. But we see Saint Paul establishing the principles and the system for the transmission of the deposit of faith beyond his lifetime into future generations in the model of the Lord himself. And this is what we're all being called to do. We read on the internet, we read in the newspapers, we see what's going on in the culture, we sense a sea change, we sense a growing hostility, we sense this growing secularization. Question is what do I do, what do I do? The answer is raise up disciples. Amen, amen, raise up disciples. This is how the church has gotten through persecution in the past. This is what took place under communism, under the atheistic persecution that the church in the east had to undergo. You know, maybe some of you have read the biography of Saint John Paul II by George Weigel, big book, Witness to Hope, okay? Great book, great spiritual reading. I worked through it several years ago for spiritual reading. But along with the example of John Paul II himself, one of the most inspiring figures that I found in that whole biography was actually Cardinal Sapieja, okay, the Polish Cardinal during the Nazi occupation who was leading the underground seminary that John Paul II was involved in and what a man Cardinal Sapieja was. But for our purposes today, I mean we could go into just the remarkable giftedness of this man and the remarkable persecutions and courage that he showed. But he succeeded in running an underground seminary even under Nazi and then communist persecution where he was ensuring the continuity of the Polish church by engaging in discipleship and begetting spiritual sons even under this oppression. And that's what we're being called to do. We're being called, I'm being called to do it as a lay Bible teacher, the spirit is heavily speaking down to me, John, replicate yourself, replicate yourself. Find young men that wanna go into biblical studies, encourage them, train them, et cetera, share yourself with them. The spirit is saying that to me all the time. I feel that urgency. And for you as priests, the spirit is calling on you. Find those young men to raise them up and foster their vocations. And in other ways as well, where you look for may depend on the ministry that you're given. And I cannot answer that for any of you in particular but this is something that each of us needs to go before the Father and pray, pray Lord, who can I disciple? What are my gifts? What are my opportunities? Who are you placing in my life that I can beget? Okay, that might mean older men in the congregation. It might mean younger priests who are early in their priesthood. It might mean high schoolers that you can get together for a kind of dead theologian society kind of thing and foster the priesthood in them on Saturday morning. Maybe you're in touch with a campus ministry where you have access and natural opportunities to go after some college men and foster their vocations or at least become their spiritual director and train them and maybe some of them will have vocation to the priesthood. Others won't but at least you'll be forming them to be natural fathers and spiritual fathers of their own sons. Different opportunities may present themselves to all of us. We have to discern that. What are the opportunities that we have? Who do I relate to naturally and within the ministry that I've been given by God and by the bishop or by the ordinary, what opportunities do I have? But then within those opportunities, within that context that we've been given, we have to spiritually procreate. We cannot mass produce disciples. Cannot get a big group and grind the crank. Ptoom, out they pop, we grind the crank. It's not working. We've had huge numbers in the past. You know, it doesn't really produce holiness. Holiness and discipleship is communicated through personal relationship, through spiritual paternity. You know, I could talk about my own life and probably all of you have stories that you could tell as well about the men who were spiritual fathers to you. In high school, my youth pastor took me aside with three others out of the youth group. We had the larger youth group and then he took three guys out and he met with us and he taught us how to pray and he taught us how to read the Bible devotionally, kind of what we would call lexiodivina and he shared his life with us. So he met week after week. You know, we'd go out to eat somewhere. This was in Hawaii. Go out for Korean food, Korean barbecue. We'd talk, you know, he would take us to his home and he was transparent with us and we saw him and he showed us things that we could imitate and then he would give us some responsibility within the high school youth group. So what he was doing was trying to transmit the faith in the presence of witnesses. These other members of the youth group and then there was these guys that he was discipling. He made a profound impact and I would attribute my own vocation back to to his initiative in my life and then later in college, my college chaplain invited me to what we would think of as a formation group. It was based on the writings of John Calvin. I would never recommend that but despite it all, the Holy Spirit is able to hit straight shots with crooked sticks and through a lot of Calvin's venom and personal dysfunction, something of the true Catholic was actually communicated through his writings to us and that was formative for me and then later in ministry, a pastoral mentor who with whom I would meet weekly, sorry, not weekly, monthly to talk about issues in ministry, had a profound impact, then the man who later became my sponsor when I came into the Catholic Church who shared a lot of his life for just a brief period. We only had a year that we overlapped to the University of Notre Dame but he shared so much of his life with me at that time and even though he was three years younger which is always an embarrassment to me but he really exercised spiritual paternity on me. I was 30 and he was 27, something like that but he really gave me so much in that year and then sponsored me into the Church and then afterwards as a young Catholic Bible scholar, an older scholar has just been very helpful in my life, setting an example for me in Catholic biblical scholarship and so it's really through these personal relationships that I can see God having guided myself and I'm sure all of you men could share similar stories where different men exercise spiritual paternity and we need to be intentional about this. We need to raise up a new generation and it may be small and there's a lot of dead wood in the Church, there's not a lot of nominalism in the Church. We all know that a couple of weeks ago some Gallup poll came out and showed a three percentage shrinkage of those self-identified Catholics in America. I thought about it first, I thought, oh that's disappointing, then I thought about it again and I'm like, I'm glad they're not calling themselves Catholics anymore, okay? That's been a real problem, okay? People calling themselves Catholics, not going to mass, okay? And not living the faith, not understanding the faith. Okay, that's clarifying the lines, okay? It's clarifying the lines, now we can get back to the work of evangelism so there can be something good about that. But we've seen that and there has been a lot of bad formation, there's been a lot of lack of discipleship, there has been a lot of cranking the crank and trying to mass produce Christians and so we should not be surprised if for the next several decades we see constriction in these numbers from Gallup poll or some other polling agency. But we need to start the growth, we need the green growth and that's going to come through discipling spiritual sons and God's calling each one of us to do that in our own place and when we do that, we need to do so as a gentle teacher and this is my last point, point five here. The spiritual father is a gentle teacher. We see in 2 Timothy 2, 24, St. Paul giving advice to a spiritual son. He says, the Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome but kindly to everyone, an apt teacher for bearing. Correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant that they will repent and come to know the truth and it's interesting to compare this instruction about spiritual fatherhood to Timothy with St. Paul's instruction to natural fathers in Ephesians 6 where he says, fathers do not provoke your children to anger which is very similar to talking about being for bearing, right, to Timothy. But bring them up in the discipline and the instruction of the Lord which is calling on natural fathers to be instructors, another way of saying being teachers and to discipline which is another way of speaking of correcting, okay. But the correction should take place in with gentleness. So really the instructions from Paul to both kinds of fathers are very similar in calling us to be gentle teachers. But willing to correct, willing to correct. And this is the middle row between the false dichotomy, the false option that's often given to us as instructors in the faith. And that's, you know, you can either be father milk toast or father drill sergeant, you know. And so you don't wanna be so heavy handed, right. So that means you should let everything slide, okay. False dichotomy, false options, okay. Or vice versa, oh you don't wanna be so easy going so you need to lay down the law, okay. No, what are we being called to do? Gentle teachers, right down the middle. Does not mean we let everything slide. It means when there's abuses or false doctrine in the congregation, in the classroom, et cetera, that we correct it. But we do that with gentleness. But that we teach the faith, okay. An apt teacher, yes an apt celebrator of the sacraments but also an apt teacher of what the sacraments mean. So taking those opportunities and Saint, I was gonna say Saint Francis, I'm always doing this, Pope Francis, okay. Pope Francis, you know, in the joy of the gospel and in many of other of his writings has been encouraging spiritual fathers to take advantage of the homily. He spends a long time in a joy of the gospel talking about the homily and taking advantage of the homily for the use of teaching, okay. Neither too long nor too short, but instructing the people in sound doctrine. So a gentle, a gentle teacher, neither laying down the law nor letting everything slide, teaching the truth in love, not provoking to anger but raising up our spiritual children with the discipline and the instruction of the Lord. It's a tall order, okay. It's a tall order, this spiritual paternity, okay. Sharing our lives with other men, letting them see us as we really are but then living up to the standard that when they see us as we really are, there's gonna be something there to imitate, okay. That means we can't take breaks from holiness. We can't, you know, oh man, it's 11 o'clock. Gonna put St. Hood on the shelf here, you know. Kick back, okay. Can't do it. Being the open book, the ones that can be imitated and spending enough time with people, okay. That other men can follow our example. That's a sacrifice, that's a death to self. That is a death to self. And then being intentional about forming them and thinking not only about them but are these guys gonna be competent to get others and continue this transmission so that whatever happens politically in America or what happens worldwide in the international scene, we're gonna, the deposit of faith is gonna go forward through me, down through others. This is a tall order, okay. But we're not in this by ourselves. This is humanly impossible but we're not left with our human resources. Why? Because we're the sons of the father. And guess what? He shared his nature with us, okay. He's infilled us with his spirit, his spirit of spiritual begetting, okay. Through the son, okay. That is shared with us. So we share in Christ's sonship. And so the father is not doing us injustice by calling us to a superhuman task because he's given a superhuman power. Let's go to him in prayer in the name of the father and the son and the Holy Spirit, amen. Heavenly Father, we ask that we don't ask for the power because you've given it to us through the sacraments, through baptism, through confirmation, through holy orders. You have given us the authority in the power of the Holy Spirit to perform superhuman feats, to perform the greater works. Lord, we don't pray for the power which we know that we've been given. We pray that you enliven in us the faith to take advantage of it and to raise up a generation of spiritual sons that your church may flourish, may withstand all assaults on her dignity. And when the time is right, grow like wildfire once again, like the apostolic age, like the age of the early fathers. Grant that this may be, this is our prayer through Jesus Christ in the name of the father and son, the Holy Spirit, amen. Amen.