 Good afternoon everyone. I'm Noel Mering. You're at the what is a man talk So if you're looking for a what a woman is you that's a different talk. I'm actually not even on this campus, so Hopefully you're in the right place When I was in college my father was great about taking me to conferences like this I had been a public school kid and had gone to an Protestant evangelical school called Westmont College in Santa Barbara It was sort of a compromise I think my dad realized as my sister and I were getting older that he needs to get serious about our formation because the public schools weren't quite for me as And he'd heard about Thomas Quaintus College in Santa Paula and my sister had gone there I was a little bit more Secular and I thought I wanted something that felt a little bit less Religious so he happened to go to dinner in Santa Barbara when he was visiting her one evening with my mom And he was in a very engaging person started talking to the waitress Can't come to find out she went to a school called Westmont College and He was very impressed by her knowledge of the Gospels and it stuck in his head that this was an alternative Should I balk at the idea of going to Thomas Quaintus College? I don't think he knew about Francis can at the time. Otherwise. I'm sure he would have tried to get me to come here Anyway from that small interaction f half happenstance at a restaurant I wound up going to Westmont College and meeting my husband and nothing happens outside of the providence of our Lord But I found out later that he was really concerned the whole time. I was there that I was gonna lose my faith Which I actually did for a while. I stopped going to mass and I don't know if he sensed that or if he just Just wanted to form help help with my formation. So we start going to conferences like this one at Notre Dame another one in Duarte, California with luminaries like father Joe Fesio Ronald MacArthur Charlie Rice many people like that Janet Smith and I was at one of those conferences I was at mass and I realized I could not receive because I'd not been living a Catholic life nor going to mass and I just started Weeping and it was striking to me how much the church helps us see The avenues to mercy in that way that I was forced to confront the life I was living because all of a sudden I understood that I was had separated myself So really formed me and brought me back to the faith and then Correspondingly my then-boyfriend now husband He was a Protestant and my dad used to write me letters and he say remember to pray the rosary And I remember Adam looking at that and saying what does he think's gonna happen? You're just gonna write recite off these rote prayers and then something's gonna happen. This is crazy and At one point when I realized I was gonna return to the Catholic faith I told him, you know, if if we're gonna continue I need to you need to figure out if you can become Catholic because I'd like to have a Catholic family and so Let me take a few months and figure this out meet with a priest. Anyway, he wound up taking it very seriously He's person of great integrity. I knew he would not convert just to marry me And he wound up really falling in love with the church and being struck by the fact that he had grown up in protest of something Of which he did not understand But yet he was aligning himself with the protest of it. So he has since laughed me and pray Well, we both pray daily rosary, but he became he's very devoted to his prayer life and It's funny to look back and see how far life has changed and how much he has grown in grace And is far better Catholic than I But it was really through the promptings of my father that I see so much in my life That I've benefited and come closer to our Lord I am a woman talking about the importance of masculinity and manhood and fatherhood But it's because I am the great great beneficiary of fatherhood in my life. It really has been pivotal to me Time and again, not only through my own father, but through spiritual fathers through mentors and now through my husband Who is an amazing father? And I look back and I think what was it that was so So effective I think in his fatherhood and for one thing he I think I think fathers in general Elicit a bit of awe right there's something commanding about a man a mother tends to be more There to receive her children to comfort them, but fathers sort of call us out of ourselves They inspire us to a mission. They're not as soft on us. They wanted their quicker to challenge us They're also are more commanding presence And so I think there was a combination of real reverence that I felt for him and odd that I experienced about him But that all the while I felt Utterly confident and in an unshaking way that my father delighted in me And it was that combination of the person that you revere also Personally knowing and loving you that I think is a nice window into who our Lord is right It gives you a sense that this person who kind of embodies the law the lot that lot that those boundaries are there not to prohibit you but actually to Lead you towards freedom that the person who loves you you can trust and you can sacrifice things for the sake of you know some sort of What might seem like a dictate But knowing who he is knowing who hands us those laws we can know and trust by the giver that he is there for the sake of our love And one of the things he did was he when I was growing up He was real intellectual and on Sunday afternoons. He would read Great big tomes on his living room chair and listen to classical music and I would go in you know As a 10 year old and curl up with a book just to be near him And I'd say what are you reading dad and he'd say I'm reading a book about private property And I say I'm reading dr. Seuss and then he would eventually start asking me questions Why do you think that private property is important? Here's what private property is this is why this is the alternative You know and then he would engage me in a conversation and at some sense that my opinion didn't really merit any listening to but As a loving father he freely gave it and it was very formative to me and I think helped me make better decisions in my life So when I would be in a relationship with someone who you know, didn't maybe really engage me at that type of conversation I'd realize that this isn't sort of the example. I have of male-female relationships And I think I had instinct to instinctual understanding and judgment about Who what I wanted in my own life because of the example that he set with me? He passed away last September and if I get emotional don't worry That's just a speaker trick to make you guys really feel bad for me and feel like this is a really moving talk I'm just kidding. I might get away, but I'm hoping not But he was 84 years old He died a very Catholic death surrounded by his 12 grandchildren his two daughters his two sons-in-law and his wife for 52 years And that experience in the months leading up to his death It was striking to me the beauty of masculinity at some point You know He had to be lifted and carried and moved to use the restroom or into a chair to the bed Sometimes in the middle of the night and at one point, you know Eventually my mom and I and my sister were not no longer physically able to do it And so my husband my nephew would come live with him or my Teenage sons would get up in the middle of night and go help pooba. We call them pooba I have dear dear priest friends who would drive Inconvenient distances to bring him to sacraments and to give him a pep talk and to do spiritual direction to with him Who are real fathers to me and fathers to many and they came a drop of a hat to help my father and it was incredibly moving But you know, I think that we have a hard time seeing the beauty of masculinity because we've been so Propagandized against it. So here's one small example a few months after his death my old our oldest daughter's a Boyfriend called my husband to ask for her hand in marriage and my husband who's usually very stoic He had to pause for about 30 seconds or a minute while he composed himself and then he gave his blessing And then he said asked him the only question he could think of after that, which was he just gently said Can you tell me a little bit about your prayer life? And it was really a strikingly fatherly moment to me and really capsulated. I think two primary attributes of fatherhood authority reverence, but that that authority is intimately connected to Holiness and to reverence in the the person with the authority There is a website called the plunge that I came across that was talking about this custom of asking for a father's blessing to marry The daughter and I just was curious doing some research for something. I was writing What people think of this custom because it seems almost anachronistic to our times And the writer was saying, you know, many women feel that this is of you know clinging to an old Custom that is rather misogynistic and the fact that it still persists is sort of mind-boggling And I think you know the fact that it still persists is only mind-boggling if we don't understand that there's any deeper meaning Behind such customs, but certain customs will always persist I think unless they break us down too deeply for example, you don't hear many feminists proposed wanting to propose to a man Why do you ask if ask a feminist that why do men propose? You know, that's it's so deep There's such a deep reason for that that women can't refuse the reality that they want to be proposed to now There are exceptions. I've heard of some women who say I propose to my man and aren't I liberated and that's good Okay, good for you But that's not catching on right and I think it's not catching on for a good reason The greatest privilege I think in life if you could call out one privilege is to have be fathered well And it's interesting for all the talk of privilege that we hear now about checking your privilege and look at your privilege And you better be quiet because of your privilege We don't hear a lot about the privilege of being fathered well and I think for good reason, you know When somebody says accuses you of having privilege now, it's an accusation They're not inviting you to reflect with gratitude about some blessing you have in your life They're asking you to to quiet down and impugn you with guilt You have this status in of a line in being in a collective way aligned with an oppressor class And so because of standpoint positionality The person who is more oppressed has more access to see and to say what is true And so it's a form of silencing and censoring people But real privilege should be something that we celebrate and are grateful for it shouldn't be something that becomes an accusation And I think the reason why we don't want to talk about being fathered well and family structure as a form of privilege Even though it's undeniably the greatest leg up you can give a person beyond skin color beyond socio-economic class having them have a happy ordered United family is setting them up for life in a way that no other privilege as effectively does But they don't want to talk about that right because it's not really family formation is actually a obstacle to revolution It's not an aid to revolution and also I think because family formation is one thing that we could Theoretically encourage in every group of people. It's transcends race. It transcends socio-economic class It transcends all these categories. It's accessible to everyone So it's a real solution and I don't think a real solution is what is being desired by the woke etiology So do we want to privilege people then we should support family formation family life When I finished writing awake not woke I immediately wanted to write a book about fatherhood But I also immediately wanted to never write another book again It's hard to have a lot of fire under your belly to write books But there's obvious reasons right writing about the woke movement led me to think so much about fatherhood No surprise that we have spent decades of smashing the patriarchy and now look around to see a raised and ravaged landscape of fatherless homes all the statistics surrounding this are bad statistics that lead to the or that illuminate both cause of this this social social pathology, but also the repercussions so young men who grew up without their biological father are more than twice With their biological father are more than twice as likely to graduate from college by their late 20s compared to those raised without now Going to college is actually unless it's someplace like franciscan. Maybe not a great thing I wouldn't advise people in this day and age to go to just any college You want to go to a good one, but it is a harbinger of some stability and success of the future Young men who did not grow up with their biological father are significantly more likely to be idle in their mid 20s Young men who did not grow up with their father in the home are about twice as likely likely to have spent time in jail around age 30 Now these are of course just statistics and utterly not deterministic of any particular person Nor should they be taken as such, but they do signify something Pope Benedict said in 2000 that the crisis of today is the crisis of fatherhood But we have this modern inability to see the beauty of fatherhood There was a criticism when we published our first theology poem book that a review we got a review I think it was something in the periodical in the UK and there was a really interesting criticism of something I'd written in there that I thought was significant I'd written in one chapter about the dynamics of husband and wife and I referenced some experience of when we have six children And so I spent a lot of years pregnant and nursing and Dealing with baby blues and then bouncing back and then pregnant again And you know you're really in the thick of it when you're having a lot of small children toddlers and all this and I have this real really particular memory of my husband coming home And I was just floundering you know And I knew born and toddler and everyone's crying at the same time And he came walked in the door with a bag of groceries under his arm took the baby with his other arm Goes in the kitchen pours me a glass of wine and starts making dinner And I just remember staring at him with googly eyes just being like this is the most heroic image of manhood I've ever seen in my life and I wrote about that and the woman who was Reviewing the book said you know, she highlighted that anecdote and she said isn't this kind of a little pathetic Like yeah, your husband can make you dinner. That's not that great. That's not that heroic like of course he should Why are you highlighting this as though it's so heroic? And I thought you know the time imagine if the roles were reversed if a man was writing about Loving his wife because she came up after after he had a hard day of work and gave him a sweet chick kiss on the cheek and you know Brought him a beer or some small gesture and what if another man said how pathetic of course your wife should come up and give You a sweet kiss on the cheek and hand you a beer obviously We would never accept that coming from a man But for some reason we accept that sort of criticism coming from women and I think that that's significant How ungrateful how ungrateful and ignorant of real love can we be? Love and heroism is in the small things of the day far more than the grand gestures and anyone who's been married for a while Contestified of that or anyone who hasn't been married for a while, but has loving good friendships relationships connections We don't see these human realities rightly because we're so conditioned to see them antagonistically and I think we've been conditioned this way and for a very specific purpose a Few days after my dad's death I went over to my mom's house and we were going through his books and his things and I happened to see a book I'd read when I was probably 22 years old called witness by Whitaker chambers. Have you guys anyone read that book? Yeah, it's great. It's a great read and my adult daughter was there and I hand her I was like Oh, you should read this book. It's excellent. You'd love it and she opens it up She said mom and she passes over to me and it has this Inscription that I don't remember at all from my father and he you know from 20 something years ago And he had written my dearest Noel when you have a chance Please read this book the story of a great man who sought God first in communism and then in Christianity It is the spiritual odyssey of our age that journey from communism to Christianity And I think he was right on you know right right on I'm sure I had no idea when he I first read that inscription It's like okay communism whatever And I've read the book and loved it and thought it was fascinating, but it you know, it wasn't until the last probably five or six years I really understood that how much that is an accurate statement Angles who was Karl Marx's? benefactor and writing partner He wrote a lot about how men should be targeted men needed to become Tom cats They which was the language of the time for saying licentious that they needed to be free free lovers Right, which was handy for him because he really wanted a lot of available women I hardly probably need to recount the depictions in Hollywood of men as either weak or oppressive domineering Fundamentalist preachers or something horrifyingly oppressing their underutilized wives The way that men have been targeted has been for a reason and I think that the reason is that for a radical ideology to persist You have to disabuse people of any idea that there's a stable human nature And so one of the goals of the woke movement is the same goal as every totalitarian movement that's preceded it Which is we need to remake the human person into his opposite. So men need to become weak Women become hardened right they become calloused because I think women have a Nature that is too valuable and vulnerable to endure the traumas of the sexual revolution And so they erect a hard shell around themselves because they don't have a good man protecting them But they we I think we see a lot of soft men and a lot of weak hardened women oftentimes in the in the mainstream culture and then Children are defined and remained to their opposite because they are innocent their innocence is often stripped from them Their innocence is left vulnerable to a culture that actually wants to prey on them And so this has been happening for decades and with unsurprising results And it's always shocking to me that people still can just not along when someone says Rolls their eyes and says something bad about the patriarchy only I think a demonic Confusion could convince people that this landscape where we need something Few things more than good fathers can look on that landscape and say decry the patriarchy, right? We need more fatherhood not less So I my title my talk was a play on the what is a woman and I think that was a genius question It first started seeing it at women's marches and then you know where conservatives would ask that of people It didn't I don't think it's originally with Matt Walsh. It was a video I think that's went viral But then we even saw at a supreme that a Supreme Court justice Nominee was unable to answer that simple question. What is a woman and then of course Matt Walsh is brilliant documentary So obviously this is connected that's connected to the transgender movement that we don't know how to define what a woman is And there's obvious absurdities that have come from that But I think there really is a deeper destabilization that has long preceded this that the sexual revolution has promised that There's no deeper meaning to our bodies I think we somewhat it to it that if there's no deeper meaning to our bodies There's not really any deeper meaning to ourselves, right if my body doesn't matter then I don't know why I would matter Simone de Beauvoir Writing in the middle of the last century wrote that we are incarcerated in our bodies that we are basically women are basically imprisoned by their body and That freedom for us would be to be defying our body and you can really see the seeds of transgender movement in that statement Just this week the New York Times had a headline that the maternal instinct is a construct invented by men All these little messages, right that are constantly prodding us to Deny the fact that there's any meaning to our bodies or any meaning to us as men and women And you can see how this gives rise to great confusion About women in particular, but it also does the same thing to men For if we are saying that women do not need a man if a man women need men like a fish needs a bicycle Well, then men are redefined because we actually are made to need each other And if we know if one sex no longer needs the other then there's something that's being remade about the others were redefined about the other as well So this is not surprising again. The revolution always targets human nature So I want to talk about how masculinity is capsulated by two things in particular One is reverence and the other is the need to protect the innocent And I'm gonna clear my throat first of all and say I'm not saying that men and women have separate virtues that there are Certain virtues that only men can have or can strive for and only women can have or strive for that's not true Both human are human beings and have the full range of virtues available to them But there's a different way that I think that they can inhabit them and one thing I occurred to me Recently, it's that if you think about st. Joseph and our lady they were both chased right? They both had the virtue of chastity But when you think about it with st. Joseph Don't you see it as a sign of his strength and with our lady if you see it as a sign of her goodness her purity Right same virtue, but they they exist differently in the in the different sexes But the differences also certainly do imply some distinctions in action I remember when my sons who are now grown-ups when they were young They're both altar servers and at our parish. There's only boy altar servers I know that's not as usual now It's more common to have boys and girls But it really struck me why that's so important because they would go to you know put on They would go learn how to serve mass It would arrive early. They would get to know the priests. They would learn all of their rubrics And it felt like they they had some reverence for what they were doing even if they didn't fully understand it They knew that they were seeing a window into something that was particular about them as future men And I think if it had been girls and boys, it would have just seemed like another kid thing You know not so much something that was calling forth something out of them So we need to think of these sort of examples of this where we kind of break through that matrix and see what really is happening there Okay, so reverence and protection of innocence I think both are Targeted because they in men because both are an obstacle to revolution Reverence points us to meaning and higher things that make us less compliant and I'll talk about that in a little bit and fear and That sort of reverence instills in us a fear of God that keeps us from being afraid of everything else There's a parrot or irony there that if we lose the fear of God, we gain the fear of everything else I'm afraid of losing my life losing my livelihood losing human respect Of course fear of God is not a panacea for those types of fears They can exist but it puts them in a right the appropriate context, right? If you rightly order your fears fearing God can free you from all those other fears And being less compliant being having your fears rightly ordered keep makes you less able to be manipulated less compliant to a solitary regime Secondly innocence is targeted because it indicates that there is a measure for our behavior Innocence when we're confronted with somebody really innocent or a child There's a goodness there that can maybe cause us to look at ourselves. Maybe experience a bit of shame Maybe what make us want to strive for something higher? All of this is an obstacle particularly to the second one to queer theory which identifies liberation with Transgression and so must seek ever broadening boundaries to cross and social taboos to defy So I'll start with reverence and then talk about protection of innocence and then and then we can do a Q&A I Could have said authority instead of reverence, but I want to use reverence because for one thing I think there's a knee-jerk reaction people have just because of how much propaganda has happened with the word authority where they Can kind of recoil at that word or think about it as something that it isn't probably not in this crowd But still I think it's helpful to really think of it as a connected intimately with reverence I Think we oftentimes think of authority as just power, right? So I know this really wonderful Christian, but very progressive grandmother and she and her husband the grandmother the grandfather They are both very intentional and engaged grandparents and they play similarly. They discipline similarly They really interact with the grandchildren in very similar ways Despite him being grandpa and her being grandma and one time and talking to me. She was marveling. She said it's so bizarre They're so small but even at this age when he walks into the room There's an authority there that I just don't have that they they stop what they're doing or they listen to him or something And you know, I just thought well, it's it's he's got a deeper voice He's got a more commanding presence that there's just physical realities that I think are supposed to point us to something But those those are aspects of male power that have to be cultivated into true authority There was an excellent podcast I was listening to the priest of Opus Dei and he made this point that was so I thought was so Excellent for parents. He said when your kids are young you have all power and not really any authority as your kids get older It in re-inverts itself So as your kids get older you start your power becomes less and less But your authority if you're doing things well should grow and grow, right? And by finally you have adult children and you don't live any power for their life anymore Nor should you try to exert that sort of control, but if you've done it. Well, if you've you know worked on your own virtue There's an authority that you have that they will still listen to you Maybe when things maybe they don't want to come to you first for advice But at some point they will when things are really in crisis and and they'll be an authority that you have that is actually really powerful and I think fathers the male the way that men are designed have that immediate Communicate that immediate authority, but it has to be cultivated right and I think the way it's cultivated is through reverence through masculine reverence Which is not really different than feminine reverence. It's just reverence, but it contributes to that authority I think in a way that's really integral So and I think that speaks to what I experienced with my father that I had that reverence for him But it was coupled with great personal love and I think that that is the power of the father So There's an etymological Connection between authority and authenticity that I think can be illuminating so the word authentic is from the Greek authenticos Meaning original genuine principle and from Authenties one acting on his own authority So God as the author of all being is the only one whose authority is not derivative right for the rest of us If we have any authority, it's we're it's from something above us It must be rooted in some way in something above so an Author or teacher has gained a superior knowledge to which he is subject to a police officer has authority of office and is constricted by law You can see a think of other examples There's a commission for an officer in the army that comes from above and Hold and holds him to certain standards So in other words everyone with authority has to revere something There's something above him that's holding holding him to a line and that makes sense, right? If anyone of us who's not God tried to have authority without being reverent or beholden to anything above That would quickly turn into corruption. That's that Lord Acton quote absolute power corrupts absolutely Now if you think about this authority connected with authenticity Authenticity is a real buzzword today. You hear it about a lot with people's behavior and social media Like if someone's got a really authentic social media personality It means, you know that they're just showing like all their messy house and you know They're being really sincere online and what have you but authenticity actually has an ideological Use as well that to be authentic Now is to be authentic to be true to yourself like to be authentic to your own will So as Catholics, we would say that there is something that's important about authenticity akin to sincerity that we're not performing Before people were not trying to look good, but secretly we're persisting in a whole host of sins that we're not Struggling against or striving to overcome There's an authenticity a sincerity that we're called to as Catholics Which means, you know first and foremost that we are sincere with our Lord and our prayer life But also that we're sincere in the confessional and that we're opening up and being transparent about the lives that we're living This is true authenticity that I think is connected to our striving to make us more live in more proximity to our author before the modern woke movement and if the phrase expressive individualism is a really key phrase to understand what is happening with regard to particularly the idea that our will is reigning supreme So that there is not a law above us, but rather what I the more distinctively and transgressively I can identify my identity and the more I can live that out and express that into the world the more authentic than I'm being to myself. I'm being more true to myself and so you can think about Immediately see who is the authority in your life is the authority God or is the authority your will and The irony is that once you make your own self your authority You're gonna become quickly enslaved, right? You're not actually gonna become free and so they're gonna become another authority that's gonna take that place and It's usually the state you can see when morality declines the state has to step in and that grows and grows When social pathologies run amok So you can see that the irony is that when we give up true authority We become more compliant to authoritarianism and I think we've seen that a lot in the last few years in particular Okay, so power without reverence becomes corrupt and that corruption feeds the rejection of authority wholesale Over the last couple years. I've often heard people say what happened to the question authority generation You know in the 60s. I think it was Timothy Leary coined this phrase question authority And I think that you know, we thought On the surface, okay Well, people are just questioning corruption, maybe you know the Vietnam War or maybe the corruption of certain politicians But I don't think that that was the deeper reason of the question authority movement I think the idea was not that we are questioning particular corruption in order to reestablish right authority I think it was a wholesale rejection of the concept of authority at all Cultural revolution is not a rejection of a particular as much as it is a rejection of a whole So it isn't this old book that we destroy but the reverence for old books generally It's not that saint statue or that Cultural hero statue that we want to throw paint on or remove and revile the memory of it's the concept of sanctity or heroism generally, right and I think this is directed off to that, you know marble and bronze paper and text But it's also an authority itself most particularly through the role of fatherhood both human and divine And what will fill the void when we have broken down all those statues and villainized the heroes and sneered at tradition and Deconstructed for the father and divorced ourselves from the author Again, it won't be the freedom that comes from fear of God, but the perpetual fear of everything else So we sneer at authority. I think because we don't have a proper understanding of what it is and how it is connected to reverence All right, so the second one is the protection of the innocent There is a great where's a great homily I was Able to hear recently in Pasadena, California from really good priest named father Gonzalez And he was talking about the story of the image of the Good Shepherd and particularly how it's been depicted in artwork And if you think about any image you've seen of the Good Shepherd what immediately comes to mind It's usually our lord with maybe a sheep on his shoulders and he's in a bucolic field and he's petting sheep And everything looks really lovely and peaceful and comforting It comforts us it doesn't necessarily inspire us to reverence unless you know We have our own internal reverence that we are bringing to it but his point was that the the reality of a shepherd was not Bucolic image of sweetness a saccharine, you know sort of Image of our Lord. It was actually the role of the shepherd was a harrowing life He had to ward off fight off predators with nothing more than a staff At night the sheepfold did not have a door or a gate usually And so a shepherd every night would round the sheep up into the sheepfold and then lay his body down at the opening Literally and figuratively laying his life down for the sake of his flock And I think that there's a reason why you know, we prefer the saccharine image Although I think more and more we want the real image, right? We want to see what the role of the shepherd is and what that means for us What that means for fathers and what that means for priests? And I think that we see that that is what the world needs and The reason why the shepherd is targeted the reason why fathers are targeted and the reason why the shepherds image is targeted is because There are people who want access to the sheep And I think we're seeing that more and more that there are ways in which the young are being increasingly targeted for corruption and without men to defend them I think that they will be easy prey and Without good priests going to spiritual battle for them I think they will be easy prey and the flocks will be easy prey sometimes when I watch good holy priests serving at mass Processing in what have you I just think they are going to battle right now. It feels like battle. It doesn't feel it doesn't feel like Just what's happening on the surface You see you you can get a deeper window into the spiritual battle in the world that they are really fighting as they approach the altar All right, and honestly the forces against the innocent They just don't stand a chance without that simple and intense life of the spiritual life That is exemplified in the mass and exemplified in our prayers So devaluing fatherhood leads to all sorts of social pathologies that are too obvious to list Again, men become hard soft women become hardened and children suffer the most of all and when I say that men become soft There's an interesting dynamic there, too, that I think we need to see through Which is when you talk about masculinity in this culture today I think oftentimes, you know, if somebody says well a strong man, he's you know, I don't know a football player or a CEO or a really wealthy person or Maybe a successful politician or you know the sort of cliches of masculinity Father Chad Ripperger makes a great point that you know Oftentimes you take that successful football player off the field and you try to just take his Phone or his internet away from a few for like a week He'll feel collapse like a baby because he's so you know enslaved to certain things St. Thomas Aquinas defines emasculation as being unwilling to endure What is pleasurable for the sake of what is arduous In other words the emasculated man is not necessarily a pale wimpy guy who doesn't work out and isn't It doesn't have a good job or something the emasculated man is also the powerful football player or the rock star The CEO that anyone who is not living a life of virtue But less we grow cynical there are men who take seriously the call to fatherhood both biological and spiritual and Do not take seriously the propaganda that they are little more than doltz or despots They don't sit passively in a field while technology and its attending addictions ravage their children Nor do they shrug as their teenage daughters splash sexy selfies online or while their sons while away their time with video games or pornography They know that the strong man is the holy man and that good fatherhood has nothing to do with seeking power and Everything to do with perseverance and prayer There's real evil and human hearts as well as prowling about the world looking for someone to devour and If we lose that understanding then we lose the distinctively protective mission of a father and the conviction that there's any such thing as Innocence worth protecting at all Cultural revolutionaries target the shepherd because they want access to the sheep Good fathers know this and know what's at stake in this life and that the green pastures can come in the next We can turn to our lady hope and handmade of the Lord and ask for her intercession and have great hope from that Okay, thank you so much