Soon the weekly RIPPP will change.  We will continue to offer the content, but as Fraternus launches the ability for small groups of men to form a Fraternus Squad, this content will be expanded to include them.  The good news is that it will be broader and better.

A Fraternus Squad is a group of men that have acknowledged one of the most basic but resisted truths of fatherhood: you can’t do it alone.  This is paradoxical for the simple reason that a “father” is a singular reality in a home, something that doesn’t sound like it should or can operate communally.  His authority and presence is unique, cannot be delegated or shared, and is truly the top of the hierarchy within the family.  He is the head.

So, then, why does fatherhood fail when it is alone?  The first reason is practical, that within the home a father has no comparison, no brother-in-arms to challenge him “man to man.”  Ask any good man if this is a necessary part of life – man to man lessons/corrections/communion – and the answer is yes.  Iron sharpening and all that.  From a mentoring perspective, a father is not complete unto himself.  I can tell you that you may feel some sense of readiness for fatherhood (or a complete sense of inadequacy), but when that baby is placed in your arms or that toddler starts disobeying or that adolescence shows a strange new interest in pretty girls, you realize how much you don’t know.  This is reasonable to our humanity, since matters of prudence (i.e. how to do life) is not in us by nature but comes, according to Aquinas, by way of “experience and instruction.”  Preferably you can receive instruction from the experienced.  And for that you need other men around.  As well as some ahead of you, you also need some beside you.  You need brothers.

But there’s also the social and public role of a father as initiator into the broader world.  In a natural or traditional family setting, a mother embodies within herself the inner life of the household, she really is almost like one with the home itself, its heart and queen.  Fatherhood is felt even in the youngest years of children as something “other,” as one who lives and exists around the home, even away from it, returning to it from adventure, war, work.  The motherly presence receives him from “the outside in,” so to speak.   She births the baby from within herself into the home itself.  Because of his “outsideness,” the father is the one that “births” the child out of the home into the broader society.  This isn’t to say he is the only one that leaves home or anything like that, merely that he plays a central and pivotal role in initiating children out of their childhood into the realm and world of adults.

So what? Well, do you really want your kid going from the safety of the home to the treacherous world of “society.”  Of course not.  Too many children are lost to the world because they lack the intermediary world of real, local culture and bonds.  Too many kids go from “good home” to “broad world” in one fell swoop, like being shipped off to college.  The “world” that children need to enter, and which they would have in the normal course of things throughout history, is the local community of the father.  We often think about “formation” in the terms of making sure our kids get all the right lessons and information before they face the challenges of life, but the most important thing we give them is actually the relationships that are necessary for healthy humanity, even faith.  In other words, our sons exit childhood by entering the brotherhood of men.  You don’t just need brothers around you as a father to encourage your fatherhood; you need them there to guide, mentor, initiate, correct, and love your children.  The father, as I said, is the bridge and initiator of that transition.

We all know how hard these bonds are today.  Our transient, busy, transactional, optional bonds are easily dispensed with if they materialize at all.  Something like “brotherhood” is hard to even imagine for many men.  Fraternus Chapters have been changing that for 17 years, and we look forward to seeing that change made available to more men willing to take the necessary step and start a Squad with other fathers.