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by Jim Holman.
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To Turn Their Hearts to Their Children

THE MISSION OF ST. JOSEPH'S COVENANT KEEPERS

By Christopher Zehnder

The moment of crisis had come. After preaching a sermon on the indissolubility of marriage, what was he to do? "I realized that as a pastor I couldn't continue administering the Lord's Supper to those who were in unlawful marriages," he writes, several years later. "Giving communion to people unfaithful to their marriage covenants would be profaning the divine covenant." Refusing to give them communion, he knew, would also end his career as a Protestant minister. He vacillated. He sought to justify a compromise. But nothing would do. "I feared that God was passing by in a special way, and he was saying, 'Come now or never.'"

God called, Steve Wood followed. He chose a journey that would lead him away from Protestantism into the Catholic Church. Having resigned his ministry over his conviction that marriage is indissoluble, Wood began to look for a Christian denomination that upheld this teaching. After reading Pope John Paul II's The Role of the Christian Family in the Modern World, Wood became intrigued with the Catholic teaching on marriage and the family. Soon, he discovered that other Catholic teachings, as well, "have a clear scriptural basis" and "an incredibly strong witness in the earliest writings of the Church Fathers." On July 1, 1990, Wood and his family were received into the Catholic Church in a ceremony where, besides receiving Confirmation and the Eucharist, Wood and his wife renewed their marriage vows.

Having drawn him to the Church, the Catholic teaching on marriage and family became Wood's driving concern. In November 1991, Wood, along with Randal Terry and other pro-life leaders, attended the first Vatican-sponsored International Pro-Life Summit in Rome, where the pope received them in special audience. During the audience, says James Prusa, General Manager for Wood's Family Life Center, "the pope stated, in effect, that if we intended to put an end to abortion, we must first do something to buoy up the family. This hit Steve profoundly"--so profoundly that, in November 1992, he started the Family Life Center International to support families with the truths of the Faith.

The next two years saw Wood flying all over the country, speaking at marriage and family conferences. However, Wood began to notice, says Prusa, that his "audiences were predominately made up of women." How was he to draw in fathers and husbands?

It was the founding of the Protestant Evangelical group, Promise Keepers, that gave Wood his answer. The Promise Keepers emphasize that restoring men in their role as father and husband is the key to saving the family. Taking their example, Wood, in 1994, founded Saint Joseph's Covenant Keepers, says Prusa, "not merely to imitate what Promise Keepers were doing, but to utilize the Catholic Church and the figure of St. Joseph as the epitome of fatherhood, of what a humble leader should be within the family.

To the casual observer, St. Joseph's Covenant Keepers might appear a Catholic imitation of Promise Keepers; James Prusa himself admits that "we're pretty much in lock step with what Promise Keepers promotes."However, says Prusa, there is one critical difference between St. Joseph's Covenant Keepers and Promise Keepers--the Catholic Church. Says Prusa, "We could almost be viewed as Promise Keepers, only with an emphasis on Catholic teaching."

According to Prusa, this Catholic emphasis is most important. "You are greatly handicapped without the Sacraments, without the teaching authority of the Church in accomplishing what all this men's movement is about. We have the advantage, I think, because we turn to the Holy Family, we turn to the saints of the Church. We have an absolute treasure to draw upon for support."

Those who attended the Covenant Keepers men's conference this past October 4 at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa would have noticed the Catholic emphasis in the presentation of what are called the "Eight Commitments." "The Eight Commitments," says Prusa, "restate, in very practical terms, what the Church teaches on marriage and on being a husband, a father, and a man." They are the bases for keeping the covenant a man makes with his wife, his children, and with God in marriage.

In the first of these Eight Commitments, a man commits himself to affirm Christ's Lordship over his family by the enthronement of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the home, and through daily family prayer and Scripture reading. Such a home-based ritual as home enthronement is important, writes Steve Wood in his book Christian Fatherhood, not only as a means of entrusting one's family to Christ, but as a way of solidifying the man's role in the family: "Fathering does not come to men as naturally as mothering comes to women... Home-based spiritual traditions encourage fathers to become home-based spiritual leaders."

The Second Commitment is to be "loving leaders and heads of our families following the examples of St. Joseph in serving the Holy Family, and Christ's humble service to the Church, his mystical bride." While affirming the "perfect and complete equality between husbands and wives," this Second Commitment affirms that "husbands are called to be servant leaders within their families. The term for this role is 'headship.'" Wood defines headship as "the type of loving leadership exhibited by St. Joseph in serving the Blessed Virgin Mary and Jesus in the Holy Family."

Is this "headship of the husband" an outmoded concept? Has not the authority model in marriage given way to the consensus model? James Prusa say, no: "When you start going through the encyclicals, [this teaching] is historical, traditional; it is certainly the teaching of the Church. Take the example of St. Joseph--who could argue over that type of headship? It's crystal clear. The angel appeared in a dream to St. Joseph. He didn't go to Our Lord, he didn't go to Mary. People can say, well, that was a different culture. With all due respect, I don't see where human nature has changed one iota."

"Most of the support for the headship of the husband," says Prusa, "comes from the wives. Wives want their husbands to step up to the plate in these matters. Mutual subjection, one to the other, is the perfection of love between man and woman, but every human organization needs to have some authority. The Church itself has authority."

Commitment Three, "Loving Our Wives All Our Lives," commits a man to fidelity to his wife. It is in light of this commitment, writes Wood, that the necessity of a Catholic men's movement, as opposed to a merely Christian one, becomes clear. Both Protestants and Catholics, he writes, need the Sacraments of Marriage, of the Eucharist, and of Reconciliation to carry out this commitment. On a more natural level, Wood argues that men, to strengthen their marriage bond, need to communicate with their wives. "A healthy marriage," he writes, is like a strong threefold cord. It has three indispensible bonds: physical, spiritual, and emotional. Men generally focus on the physical bond, while women typically concentrate on the emotional. The emotional bond is nourished and strengthened by communication."

Commitments Four and Five focus on the central role a father plays in the rearing and education of his children. Here, Wood argues that man's role is not merely to be the breadwinner; in fact, too much attention to making a living, as opposed to fathering, often leads to a child replacing his parents with his peers. Fathers, says Wood, must begin to "turn their hearts, minds, and life priorities toward the children." To do this, men must learn to "tithe" their time, by giving priority to the third commandment--"Remember the Sabbath Day."

Men, however, must provide for their families. Thus, the Seventh Commitment calls on men to provide such a living that their wives will not have to work outside the home. Often this step requires an entrusting to God of the family's finances. An important way of entrusting finances to God is tithing. "Tithing," writes Wood, "is giving God ten percent of our financial increases as a sign of our recognition of his Lordship over all our wealth." By recognizing God's ownership of our finances we guard against "a fixation on money and material possessions."

Protecting one's family is the theme of Commitment Eight. While speaking of a father's duty to protect his children's souls as well as their bodies, Wood extends the commitment to include the fatherless. "Besides protecting his own children, Christian fathers are called to help protect the unborn babies loved by God and yet threatened by abortion.... God is also father to the poor. That means that like the patriarch Job in the Old Testament we are to be fathers in assisting the poor, the widows, and the fatherless."

The first time the Covenant Keepers comes to a city, says Prusa, speakers go through these Eight Commitments in great detail, laying out with "a lot of definition and explanation, in very practical terms, what the teachings of the Church are. When we go back for a second time, then we can expand out; there are an infinite number of subjects that one can begin to address."

There is no "joining" Covenant Keepers. To be a Covenant Keeper one need simply keep the Eight Commitments. St. Joseph's Covenant Keepers, however, will lend a hand in this endeavor. "We provide a newsletter," says Prusa, "there is resource information to really focus men in a practical way so that they can fulfill those obligations of the covenant that they have with God." They also have a bookstore, and provide video and audio tapes for the family.

Prusa says he is not sure how many men's lives Covenant Keepers has affected. Their current mailing list is approaching 20,000, and they receive many testimonials from all over the country. The Covenant Keepers also receive, says Prusa, many letters from wives, asking for prayers for their families. It is women, says Prusa, who, in the majority of the cases, lead their their husbands to Covenant Keepers.

As for the recent Orange County conference, Prusa says "we were very pleased. The surveys we ran on the men were very insightful--we're going to be doing some real statistical analysis on them. It's obvious from the feedback [from the conference] that we'll be back, and hopefully in the very near future."

For more information on St. Joseph Covenant Keepers, write the Family Life Center International at P.O. Box 6060, Port Charlotte, FL 33949, or call (941) 764-7725; e-mail: sjck@sunline.net. SJCC also has a new web page: www.dads.org

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