"Pope Francis Scolds Deadbeat Dads"

Article here. The title of the article is at least misleading and at most deliberately false and sensationalist. Mostly, it seems to me, Pope Francis is decrying the lack of paternal presence in children's lives. But it seems he's putting it all on dads and generally accusing men of selfishness or self pre-occupation. He never mentions the effects of easy divorce, feminism, misandry, and biased anti-male court systems on the distancing of men from their children in so many ways. And he's smart enough to know better. In short, he's doing the same thing his predecessors have done: playing up to the majority members of his church, who are female. Excerpt:

'“Particularly in Western culture,” he said, the father figure is “symbolically absent, missing and removed.”

At first, Francis explained, the absence of fathers “was perceived as a liberation: liberation from the father-master, from the father as a representative of the law that is imposed from the outside, from the father as a censor of the happiness of children and obstacle to the emancipation and autonomy of young people.”

In his weekly audience, the Pope recognized that in the past especially there were cases of authoritarian, overbearing fathers who didn’t respect the personal needs of their children. Now, however, “we have gone from one extreme to the other,” he said.

The real problem of our day, Francis said, “does not seem to be the intrusive presence of fathers anymore, but rather their absence and their inaction. Fathers are often so focused on themselves and on their work and sometimes on their individual accomplishments, that they can forget even the family, neglecting their children.”

As bishop of Buenos Aires, Francis reflected, “I felt the sense of orphanhood that many young people live today. And I would often ask dads whether they were playing with their children, if they had the courage and love to spend time with their children. And in most cases the answer wasn’t pretty: ‘I really can’t, because I have so much work.’ And the father was absent from that child who was growing up, not playing with him, and not spending time with him,” he said.

The Pope urged Christian communities to be more attentive to the presence of fathers. “The absence of the father figure in the lives of children and young people leaves gaps and scars that can be very serious,” he said. He also suggested that many times “the transgressions of children and adolescents can be attributed to this neglect, to missing examples and authoritative guides in their daily life, the lack of closeness and love on the part of fathers.”'