Parents who are and others who are not
It is always striking when priests are called fathers. Perhaps it is the position of a church that assumes itself to be patriarchal in a society, in which some sectors see it as natural. But the word father distracts from what it really is, if it is used only metaphorically, even though many priests have children out there. I demonstrated it in several reports that I did in Italy and Spain about married priests.
But the word father was used by those married or married priests, from that patriarchal perspective, of the man who dominates from the tribe.
The Bible, with its Abrahams and its Moses, had taught them that. The idea has generated the detachment that deeply penetrates society and only the feminine struggle that is taking place is in a clearing that seeks to balance the contours.
But on this Father’s Day all those contours still shine and machismo in Mexico is still established by what we see in feminicide and attacks of all kinds against women. A lot is missing.
FATHER BROWN OF A CATHOLIC WRITER WHO BELIEVED IN PRIESTS
More than 50 novels about his character, Father Brown, launched the brilliant Gilbert Keith Chesterton into the world, carrying The Sword and the Cross, (Father Brown, complete stories Ediciones Encuentros 2017) without him ever telling us why he called him father. simple priest of his work.
The English writer made this priest famous in 1910 and followed him until 1935, when the traditional detective novel predominated, with Agatha Christie whose detective Hercule Poirot was also Catholic.
Singular in a country in which one of Luther’s main groups predominates, the Anglican Church. Poirot used his famous gray cells, that is, his brain, to solve crimes, but Father Brown was just as accurate starting from the most natural, appearances, what is exposed.
IN HIS LATE CATHOLICISM CHESTERTON WAS CLOSER TO KAFKA AND NIETZSCHE
With Chesterton, the United Kingdom has one of its great characters, without, of course, displacing Shakespeare, nor reaching the Nobel Prize like Bernard Shaw in 1928. But his work is just as read although it goes through stages of silence. Considered a writer, philosopher and journalist, his work and his characters predominated in a period of brilliance and aggression, the First World War and the approach of the second already in 1936, the year of his death.
And he wrote from his height of 1.93 and his weight of 130 kilos, a kind of giant who also expressed himself in his more than 80 books, including novels, stories, essays and various documents. Deep in his concepts, however, he was balanced in his beliefs, like some of his characters in The Man Who Was Thursday and the diligent character in The Man Who Knew Too Much and the Surprising in The Weird Business. And so he went from Anglican to a late Catholicism, which did not prevent him from approaching Niezstche and Kafka, H. Wells and other greats of the time, while he applied the beliefs of Thomas Aquinas. In his work, Father Brown, is a character who, without being a natural father, is one in different ways.
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