(LifeSiteNews) — What is the biggest problem within Catholic marriages today? According to a traditional priest, it’s “effeminate” men.
By effeminate, he doesn’t mean a man who’s light in his loafers. He means a man who doesn’t spiritually lead his family, and so fails in his most important role.
Especially among traditional Catholics, much attention regarding marriage is given to the problems of feminism and wives’ call to submission. LifeSiteNews asked Father Adam Purdy, FSSPX, to what extent he sees feminism as a marital problem, versus the problem of overbearing husbands.
While he did not entirely dismiss either of these as real issues, he maintained that he sees much more often a “different problem” – that of men who are “weak,” “not virtuous,” and who don’t practice the virtue of religion, which is “the most important virtue for a husband and a father to have,” Purdy told LifeSiteNews.
This is the very crux of the marriage – because as the spiritual head of his family, it is the husband who is called to take the lead in his family’s practice of the faith.
What does exercizing the virtue of religion in the home look like for the husband (and father)? According to Purdy, setting a schedule in which “prayer and religion takes priority in the house” and leading his family in prayer are two major pillars of his spiritual headship.
“How often do we have situations where dad doesn’t pray with the family? Mom’s in charge of the rosary or mom’s in charge of morning prayers,” said Purdy, acknowledging that sometimes it may be necessary for mom to lead prayer when dad has to go out to work early, for example.
Fathers also don’t often ensure that prayer and religion are prioritized to begin with. “How many families don’t actually have a schedule? The only thing they have is dinner time, between five and six, and that’s it. Many families don’t say a family rosary,” Purdy noted.
It is critical that husbands make sure the family follows a rule of life, almost like that of a religious community, said Purdy. “There has to be a rule in the house, and most don’t have it. That’s the problem of the man.”
“How many families have silence? How many families have community prayer? How many families do reading? There are so many things that could be imitated from a monastery. But we’re listening to Mick Jagger on the way to school in the car. We’ve got the TV on at home all hours of the day,” observed Purdy.
He explained that fathers should take time out for activities that will help build the devotion of their family, the way a priest makes time for community activities like processions and picnics and formation talks, to foster the devotion of his flock.
More typically, religion ends up taking “a backseat to other things,” and this has bigger consequences than men realize, both for their own family and for society.
Most fundamentally, God is the true, deep, and lasting motivation to live a good – that is, virtuous – life. “How do you convince your children to be good if God isn’t the reason?” noted Fr. Purdy.
In addition, while God should take first place for His own sake, when He doesn’t come first, the result is a de facto disorder of priorities, in which other concerns become blown out of proportion and even secondary priorities may take a backseat to other interests, since religion directs and orders everything else.
Even more consequentially, the lack of proper order in a family does a disservice to society, because “the family is the building block of society,” and “You can’t build up society if you don’t have God first,” noted Purdy.
He pointed out that these men who have abdicated their spiritual headship are a product of our culture, which itself has “become effeminate” and “produces vice rather than virtue.”
Men’s neglect of their religious responsibility, then, also “merits eventually the scorn of the woman,” as well as her attempt to take over the religious leadership of the children “in spite of him,” which Purdy affirmed a woman must do if her husband is failing in that regard.
Authority goes hand-in-hand with servant leadership
The prior also talked about what the husband’s proper approach to his wife should look like, and touched on disordered attitudes about this that can be found in traditional communities.
“There is a lot of abuse of the idea of the authority of the husband,” said Fr. Purdy, noting that such abuses include the ideas that “The woman is my servant; the woman doesn’t speak; the woman does all the work; the woman has to just do what I say.”
He cited an example he has seen of a husband who looks at his wife as “more as a servant rather than a helpmate,” and “more as one to be told what to do rather than to mutually enhance each other.”
For a proper model of leadership, the husband should look to Jesus Christ, since as St. Paul said in a letter to the Ephesians, the husband is called to love his wife as Christ loved His Church.
“He laid out His life for His Church. He has compassion and mercy for His Church. He gives us all the means to do good and to succeed and to grow stronger in everything spiritually. He’s the lifeblood of his Church. The husband in a way has to be that,” Purdy told LifeSiteNews.
And, in fact, Christ exemplified servant-leadership, with an attitude not that He is above certain tasks, but that says, “I’m going to be there with you. I’m going to be doing the same work that you’re doing. I’m also going to be getting my hands dirty.”
“That’s our Lord. A father has to be the same,” said Purdy. In so doing, he should seek to “alleviate some of the burden of his wife,” and not refuse certain household tasks because they are the woman’s domain.
“A lot of marriages don’t work because the man, when he comes home from work, he doesn’t realize” the burden of his wife, who has “been with five kids for 10 hours and is about ready to cry and pull her hair out at the same time.”
Purdy told LifeSiteNews how his father instilled in him and his siblings the attitude that one should seek to please one’s wife, by, for example, cleaning the house well together while his mom was away from home.
“How many guys are like that today? Not a lot,” Purdy noted.
A husband also demonstrates his love of his wife through simply giving her his time and attention. “I think that a woman thrives on recognition and acknowledgement and gratitude and honor and respect… every woman would like to know that she’s appreciated, that she’s loved. That her husband looks to spend time with her. And you see men that just don’t do that very well. They will come home and turn on a TV, and don’t even pay attention to their kids. It’s a failure, big time,” said Purdy.
This will foster his wife’s own love and support for her husband. She should seek to build him up, and never berate or belittle him which, according to Purdy, is the “worst thing a woman can do in an argument with her husband.” A wife is called most especially to practice the virtue of charity in her marriage, with both her husband and children, Father noted.
While it does not excuse the sins or faults of a wife, ultimately, the authority of the husband means that in a sense, the marriage starts with him.
“I put the burden of success in a marriage on the shoulders of the man, because he’s supposed to be the mind,” said Purdy. “He’s supposed to be able to calculate what it is that I can deliver to my spouse so that she will be the most. She will be in her glory. And if he does that, she does go into her glory. But when she’s in her glory, she turns it back to him. It’s like – for lack of a better word – a give and take.”
Building up a marriage
Both husband and wife can overcome the weaknesses of their temperament, Fr. Purdy stressed, although they first have to have the attitude that they can change.
“How did St. Francis de Sales go from a very fiery-tempered man into one recognized as the most meek? He controlled himself. He had self-discipline. He had reflection and self-knowledge. He had prayer and the grace of God.”
“And because people don’t have prayer lives, they cannot overcome the weaknesses of their temperament. And since they cannot overcome the weaknesses of their temperament, they don’t know how to treat each other. They lack virtue. They don’t know how to make the other thrive. Instead there’s like a selfishness that’s inherent in the whole thing,” said Purdy.
Through such prayer, reflection, and the grace of God, people can overcome not only their temperamental weaknesses, but generational sins.
For those who are concerned about a spouse or children that have fallen away from the faith or are in the process of doing so, Purdy advised prayer: “God is the one who touches the soul and any movement towards God is going to start from a movement of His grace, and those graces need to be earned.”
Finding a spouse
Fr. Purdy encouraged Catholics in search of a spouse to start by looking for a fellow Catholic who takes their faith seriously, without operating under the idea that they can convert someone in the process of courting them.
They should look for qualities that they find to be admirable in their own parents, and then they should spend time with the families of those they are courting. Purdy discouraged the typically “very shallow” approach of young people in which they focus on good looks in a potential partner, and advised instead to “seek after prudence and good counsel in who it is that you choose.”
The mystical significance of and inspiration for marriage
Both husband and wife can ultimately draw their inspiration from the knowledge that their marriage is a sign of the bond between Christ and His Bride the Church, and recall the admonitions of St. Paul:
Being subject one to another, in the fear of Christ. Let women be subject to their husbands, as to the Lord: Because the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church. He is the saviour of his body. Therefore as the church is subject to Christ, so also let the wives be to their husbands in all things. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ also loved the church, and delivered himself up for it: That he might sanctify it, cleansing it by the laver of water in the word of life: That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy, and without blemish. So also ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife, loveth himself. For no man ever hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, as also Christ doth the church: Because we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones.
