University President John Garvey’s June column for Catholic News Service, “The wisdom of calling God our Father,” was published.
Our last 11 grandchildren in a row have been girls, so I’ve gotten careful about asserting claims of male prerogative. But this Father’s Day got me thinking about how we talk to God. Pope Francis recently reminded us, in one of his general audiences, that “when the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, he taught them to call God Our Father.”
And so we do. We say the Our Father in our morning and evening prayers, in the Communion rite at Mass, six times in the rosary. But how do we square this with another truth we all acknowledge? We are made in God’s image, not he in ours. God, the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “is neither man nor woman. God is pure spirit in which there is no place for the difference between the sexes.”
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