St. Joseph Covenant Keepers call on the father for faith

Fathers carry a powerful potential for faith within the family

Fr. Michael Lightner

By VIRGINIA BATTISTE
Special to the WCR
Calgary

It is dads who carry the greatest influence in determining whether a child will embrace the faith of their parents, says the founder of St. Joseph Covenant Keepers.

Steve Wood, founder of Family Life Center that sponsors St. Joseph Covenant Keepers, said after speaking at a number of family life conferences, he realized men were noticeably absent.

He began to research the impact of the role of the father on the life of the family and faith development.

A spiritual ocean

"I feel like I discovered water, thinking it was a stream and it is an ocean: there is so much to fatherhood," Wood said.

Establishing St. Joseph's Covenant Keepers was his response.

Wood, from Greenville, S.C., and a former Protestant minister who found a spiritual home within the Catholic Church, started the Catholic men's organization a dozen years ago.

Its goal, and that of his website, www.dads.org, is to fulfill the mandate declared by the prophet Malachi to "turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers."

"For lots of guys this becomes a big awakening - seeing how right relationship with God as Father influences their earthly fatherhood." Steve Wood

Men need to understand their responsibility includes nurturing their children into knowing and experiencing God as a loving Father, he said.

The perception men have of their earthly fathers will impact their view of their heavenly Father, which, in turn, will impact how they themselves father their own children, Wood said.

More than half the men who attend the conferences have a serious "father wound" from the failure of their earthly fathers to father them appropriately and positively, he said.

Until that is tended to and healed through prayer, forgiveness and reconciliation, the men themselves will struggle in their role to father positively, he said. They will also struggle with their perception of their heavenly Father and have difficulty relating to God and establishing a relationship with him.

"For lots of guys this becomes a big awakening - seeing how right relationship with God as Father influences their earthly fatherhood."

Begins with the Father

According to Wood, the Catechism of the Catholic Church has it right. It begins with the Father, proclaiming that knowing the Father is the key to knowing Jesus. Many people have missed the fact that the purpose in life is to know, love and serve God. They are pursuing many other things instead of a life of faith.

Father Michael Lightner, who pastors a parish in the Milwaukee area, also spoke at the conference.

Lightner said he knew firsthand what it meant to pursue the things the world offers.

Sex and drugs

As a young man playing college football, he was on his way to the pros. But he had also been lured into the things that accompany the lifestyle, including alcohol and drug addiction and womanizing.

His mother, a tour guide to Medjugorje, did the only thing she knew to address the addictions - she invited him to Medjugorje where he experienced a dramatic conversion in the sacrament of Reconciliation, he said. On a subsequent trip he surrendered to the call to enter the seminary.

The priest directed the men to use prayer to fight temptations in their lives. He encouraged them to use the name of Jesus, even speaking it out loud, as a tool to overcome the challenges of sexual temptation and pornography that plague them in our society.

Men, he said, are prone to rely on themselves too much instead of letting God help them. Providing a simple tool like prayer, and the powerful name of Jesus, gives them something they can use. As they practise the discipline of prayer, they will discover a change in their thought life and how they live in relation to God.

The God Squad

About 250 men attended the Covenant Keepers 10th annual conference in Calgary March 16-17. The God Squad, a group of active and retired Catholic Calgary police officers, brought St. Joseph Covenant Keepers to Calgary.

According to Shaun Lynn, one of the organizers, the conference takes place on the weekend nearest the feast day of St. Joseph, and relies on the intercession of St. Joseph for its success. Organizers offer the novena to St. Joseph and, he said, he has never let them down.

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