The Aching Heart of a Father

It was raining in Tupelo when I pulled the car into a gravel lot beside Elvis Presley’s childhood home.

It was 2018. I stepped inside, paid the fee, and my daughter Gabby and I began to wander through the shotgun house. There wasn’t much to see in the two-room home, and it was easy to tell that Gabby wanted to get back on the road. My detour idea was simply another way of slowing down the stretch of U.S. Highway 78 that would lead my daughter to her new life in Oxford, Mississippi. 

On our way out, I leaned over an area marked “Restricted Area,” stretched out my arm as far as I could, and lifted Vernon Presley’s bowler hat hanging from a nail on a wall. I popped it on my head, and began to sing Hound Dog.

The fee-collectors up front were displeased that the museum artifact had come to life atop a visitor’s head, but Gabby’s reaction was worth it when mortification dissolved into laughter. It marked the last real memory that we would share on our journey to Ole Miss, joining the still-discussed memory of the pact we took for Waffle House-only meals throughout the trip south. 

Last weekend, Gabrielle Maria Wells married Nathan Michael Stephens—a young man who, to me, feels like a still-undeserved answer to a father’s endless pleas to God to send a St. Joseph-like figure to his daughter.

The morning after the wedding—following a long night of celebration—I boarded a plane bound for Memphis with my 18-year-old daughter, Shannon. Like her older sister, she had fallen in love with the beauty and charm of Oxford while visiting Gabby a few times over the years. 

Now it was her turn. We were headed to freshman orientation, to help her prepare for classes in the fall.

Ache in the Chest

Most of us know the expression, “my heart dropped into my chest.” Until these past few weeks, I don’t remember experiencing it. Now, I know the sensation well. The expression of a “heart dropping” is remarkably accurate; the sensation is uncannily similar to the feeling that overtakes you while plummeting down the roller coaster’s steepest hill.

Gabby lived in my home until last week. Many times over the past three years, we would convene in her bedroom and talk about “fill in the blank.” As we carried on, I would often think to myself, “Man, it’s going to be tough when she moves out.”   

At around 1 a.m. last night, I returned from Mississippi. Before going to sleep, I opened the door to Gabby’s bedroom, knowing she wouldn’t be there. I abruptly found myself barely able to breathe. I remembered a moment from over the weekend, when I saw Gabby for the first time in her wedding gown. 

Asked to keep out of sight from the maddening crowd eager to see her emerge from the rear of the church, she was standing all alone in a corner of the vestibule. As the first notes of Canon in D played, and groomsmen and bridesmaids walked arm-and-arm down the aisle, I stood in front of my daughter, aware this was the last moment she was still Dad’s. 

She asked me what she had longed to know her entire life:

“Dad, do I look beautiful?”

As my heart collapsed, I said, “You are the world’s most beautiful bride.”

A few days later, I found my heart in my throat again at Ole Miss. After a meeting with parents of incoming freshmen, I walked into the Student Center and saw Shannon smiling and enjoying her time with four girls she hadn’t known prior to that day. Time is moving quickly.

But why this strange new heart-plummeting sensation? Why have I found myself with a soul suddenly split in two; with one half holding memories, the other a millstone of heavy-heartedness? I was born with an Irish soul, but have always been able to keep the melancholic and darker strains at arm’s length. 

Still,  why has this ache taken up residence inside me?

With Father’s Day this weekend, I’ve spent time reflecting on all the forward movement and the fact that my breath keeps catching in my throat. Mostly, I think it is happening for two reasons.

The first is natural: I am a dad who loves his children and has always wanted them close. Their presence has been one of my greatest joys—so seeing them step into lives that no longer revolve around our home has upended my internal apple cart. 

The second reason, however, is the one that matters. 

As Shannon and I made our way down the same red-dirt roads between Memphis and Oxford that Gabby and I once traveled—and after the country music had lost its power to entertain—thoughts rose in me like a last sunrise. These three days on the road would mark the last time Shannon and I would ever be this close again. 

Of course I’d use the time as a window of opportunity to offer what I’d hoped would land as fatherly wisdom, but my die as a father had been cast. I knew whatever advice I shared could be incommunicably unreceived by Shannon. God had generously provided me eighteen years to love and father her well. My time was up.

In that silence—and feeling the effects of the wedding the night before—I found myself confronting dark-edged questions that silence has a way of exhuming.

Had I been a good father for Shannon?

Where had I failed her—and how often, and by how much? Had small triumphs cohered into something lasting, or had they disintegrated into impermanence? Could my love for her as her father be measured by what it had cost me, or was it given lazily? Had I fought for her when it mattered, or was I a father who frequently yielded and called it good enough?

It is an unearned instinct for Catholic fathers to want to shape their daughters’ character, and work to lead her toward love for God and a desire to live an ordered and virtuous life. But did my plans to lead Shannon into maturity align with God’s plans—or did I go about it my way, without putting much consideration into God’s will for my daughter? 

The confluence of memory and conscience eventually brought me to the only question that ultimately mattered: Was I a father who had led Shannon toward heaven? The categorical, correct answer will be rendered on Judgment Day.

This, I believe, gets to the meat of why, of late, I’ve carried my heart in my throat. I could have done more; far more as a father for Gabby and Shannon. The ways are numerous, but each points to a single event—I could have sacrificed more for them, and given myself more fully to them. 

The masterpiece of love is Christ poured out fully upon the Cross. For Catholic fathers, the image carries particular force. Each is aware that his children awaken each morning into an expanding Babylon, where they are forced to wade through a world covered in darkness and lies.

Perhaps in the Reagan years, Dads could once afford a few more weekend tailgates, another round of golf, or the camaraderie of twice-a-month poker games. There is nothing inherently sinful or wrong with respites for fathers who faithfully sacrifice each day to provide for his family. 

Those days are dead, though—and have been dead for a while.

A recent survey revealed that more than one-third of Americans believe that humanity and the world is approaching its end. I imagine most Catholic dads find polls like these both unsurprising and unconcerning; part of his vocation is to lead his children to see the day of their death as the happiest day of their life. 

Fatherlessness

Before dawn on a summer morning eight years ago, I wrote a letter to priests reeling from the revelations published by The Washington Post about former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s abuse. Few could have foreseen that, beginning that day—June 20, 2018—a stream of disclosures about corruption, abuse, concealment, and betrayal in the Catholic Church would pour forth like Old Testament plagues. 

As a former journalist, I began to investigate what made 2018 the darkest year in the history of the American Catholic Church. It was Fatherlessness. A dark strain of sin, old boy ways, secrets, opulent lifestyles, and a clergy epidemic of not-my-business rationalizations on secret lives of evil had been permitted in the Church for decades. 

These conversations with several dozen clergy members, exorcists, formators, theologians, and faithful laity during that long Church wintertime led to a best-selling book, The Priests We Need to Save the Church. Since its release in 2019, it has been read by many thousands of clergy and faithful Catholics worldwide. It is God’s work that a washed-up sportswriter could write a book about authentic fatherhood that found its way into seminaries on four continents.

Since then, I have written three more books and numberless articles on true fatherhood, and of what strong and holy men—from in the past and today—resemble. It is all very simple; the essence of man is to embrace victimhood. Although this dying way is stamped indelibly into his soul, it is sorely and insufficiently underused. 

Still, most men understand it is his burden and role to always put himself last, and to sacrifice his comforts for the souls in his custody, and even for those who are outside of it.

The Holy Spirit has used my writings on fatherhood to convict the hearts of many hundreds of priests and men in a manner I never could have imagined. These are just a few of the ways God worked:

• Several young men have contacted me to say my writing on fatherhood encouraged them to enter seminary.

• Dozens of generous readers have purchased cartons of The Priests We Need and other books and have shipped them into seminaries, dioceses, into priest retreats, and have given them as gifts to parishioners.
• One summer, a soul-reader and exorcist, Monsignor John Esseff, handed out copies of The Priests We Need to every seminarian at the Institute of Priestly Formation in Omaha.


The Important Part

Alas, we have arrived at the reason Crisis has permitted me to share on this Father’s Day weekend. If you remember nothing about what you’ve read, please try to remember this: Immediately after the release of The Priests We Need, clergy from across the globe began to contact me, and over and over, they explained how my thoughts on fatherhood, victimhood and masculine heroism—and the stories I wrote about the titans, priest-saints, hermits, martyrs and modern-day priestly heroes—shook them to the core. 

Some admitted that the message of fatherhood had flattened them, where they had become humiliated by the realization of allowing a bachelorhood-like existence into their priesthood.  

Mostly, priests just said that the shot in the arm was good for their soul. The first note came from England: 

“Your book was a very challenging read, that pushed, needled and cajoled me in the right direction. As a priest, I’ve read a vast array of books and I have been hungry for something that pushed me harder in the direction of Jesus. Sadly, there are so many books (and so much teaching) on the importance of protecting ‘days off’, of being ‘resilient’ (read lazy) and simply ‘being’. Your book has been a true gift. … I read much of it whilst on retreat last week at the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham here in England – I told all my fellow priests about it and have shared it. More importantly – I hope they read it!”

Days later, an email from a vocations director in the Midwest came: 

“Thank you for writing such a profound book about the true nature of the priesthood. It was deeply inspirational for me. God has certainly called you to be a voice of reform for the good of the Church.”

In this season of transition in my life, my many written pleas for spiritual fatherhood have turned inward. And I wonder: How often did I refuse to break my body on the Cross of the poured-out love demanded of a father? I keep asking whether I’ve lived the calling I have written so often about—whether I was the dad my daughters and son rightly deserved.

Again, the answer will be made clear at my Judgement. 

I suspect I am not unlike millions of other serious-minded Catholic fathers today, who are confronted with raising children in an age marked by a culture increasingly determined to redefine morality. Every minute of our children’s childhood will be lived in the shadow of aggressive secularism, distractions, broadening technological advances, and the haunting unknown of AI.

All the while, bishops and clergy seem reluctant to address the very real demons that assault our children each day. Perhaps it is that they too infrequently consider Catholic fathers who work all day, come home to engage with their family for a few hours before sleep, and each day confront the tension of raising children in the midst of a whirlwind. 

As bishops have pivoted to enter more deeply into what is often called “a synodal Church”, Catholic fathers who marry off a daughter and send another to college will be left alone. As the Church has abandoned its prophetic voice, and too often has steered to a more accommodating and congenial approach with the world—rather than confronting it—Catholic fathers simply must pull back on comforts. Pick your poison; tailgates, card games, golf outings, nights with the boys in the bar—it all must go, or at least the lion’s share must be forfeited.

Why do I urge this? Because the lump in my throat tells me to.