Fathers of Saint Joseph – Meeting Notes [12th Sep]

Date: 8 August 2026

Location: St. Mary’s, Pope’s Quay, Cork

Opening Context

We began our meeting with a time of Adoration before reflecting together on the reading.

Liturgical Calendar

Taking place on the day of our meeting, we have the memorial of St Ailbe, Bishop, and the Most Holy Name of Mary. The remembrance of Mary’s holy name was particularly fitting for our reflection on marriage and family life.

The Holy Family with Saints Elizabeth, Zacharias, John the Baptist (and Francis?), Garofalo (Benvenuto Tisi), c. 1520–35. Oil on canvas, transferred from wood, 60.3 × 47.8 cm. The National Gallery, London, NG170. Image: National Gallery Images. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. No changes made. [https://www.nationalgalleryimages.co.uk/asset/1439/]

Reflection Reading

Book: LEAD: The Four Marks of Fatherly Greatness

Author: Devin Schadt

Pillar: Pillar 2 – Embrace Your Essence [Embracing Woman]

Reading 70: His and Her Four Complementary Needs

Pages: 185–186

In this reading, Devin Schadt presents four fundamental needs of husband and wife as complementary rather than competing. He describes a wife’s needs as being cherished for her beauty, experiencing emotional intimacy, being valued as her husband’s essential counterpart, and being received as a source of spiritual inspiration. These correspond to a husband’s needs to be respected for his strength, experience physical intimacy, have a real sense of mission, and serve as spiritual leader of his wife and family.

The deeper point is that marriage calls husband and wife to exist with and for one another. Schadt points to St Joseph, who embraced his vocation by receiving Mary and living for her and for God. For fathers, this means that leadership within the family begins not with control, but with understanding, vulnerability and learning to recognise and respond to the genuine needs of our wives.

Call to Action

Spend consistent time alone with your wife, listen attentively and ask what her heart truly desires, allowing vulnerability, patience and perseverance to deepen your understanding of one another.

Shared Thoughts from the Group

• Marriage can be demanding and intense. Because husband and wife live in such close proximity, tiredness, hunger and the pressures of daily life can easily influence disagreements.

• We reflected on the difference between an argument and a fight. An argument can be a genuine search for what is right and true, while a fight can become an aggressive defence of one’s own position.

• God gives us the children He calls us to parent. Every family and every father therefore has a particular calling and responsibility.

• From a Christian perspective, marriage is more than a partnership: it is a sacramental covenant. As husbands, this gives us a particular responsibility to care for and cherish a daughter of God.

Personal Reflections & Final Thought

Coming back to the beauty of Catholic wisdom, this understanding of marriage is one of the areas that has most challenged and attracted me. Coming from a Latin culture, I realised that my imagination of the relationship between man and woman had often emphasised romantic attraction and mutual benefit. We speak frequently about maintaining love within a relationship, but what we mean by love can sometimes be confused or imprecise.

The richness of the Greek vocabulary helps me to see some of these distinctions:

• Eros refers especially to passionate or desiring love;

• agape to self-giving love;

• philia to friendship;

• storge to natural or familial affection;

• philautia to self-love; and

• xenia to hospitality or guest-friendship. These distinctions are helpful because our single English word love can describe very different realities.

In my own journey, I have come to recognise how strongly eros can dominate our cultural imagination of love between man and woman. This does not make eros something bad. Rather, it raises the question of what happens to attraction and desire as love matures. An article by Russell M. Lawson for Catholic Exchange, drawing particularly on Benedict XVI’s Deus Caritas Est, helped me to think more clearly about this. The Greeks had already reflected deeply on desire, beauty, friendship and transcendence, but the Christian understanding of love brings these human experiences into a fuller vision shaped by revelation. (Catholic Exchange)

I am particularly amazed with the idea presented in the article, drawing on Benedict XVI, that the Christian answer is not simply “eros bad, agape good.” Rather, eros needs to mature, to be purified and increasingly joined to agape. Benedict describes this movement as love becoming less concerned with itself and increasingly seeking the happiness and good of the beloved. (Vatican) This is what connected the article so strongly with our reading for me. In marriage, my desire to be united with my wife cannot be separated from learning to give myself for her good. Perhaps this is part of what it means, in the language of the reading, to move beyond what I want from marriage and learn more deeply how to exist with her and for her.

References

Lawson, R.M. (2026) – Eros and Agape: The Greek Origins of Christian Love

Lawson, R.M. (2026) ‘Eros and Agape: The Greek Origins of Christian Love’, Catholic Exchange, 11 May. Eros and Agape: The Greek Origins of Christian Love (Accessed: 18 September 2026).

The article traces ideas of love through Greek poetry and philosophy, from Homer through Plato, Plutarch and later classical thought, showing that the ancient world had already wrestled with desire, beauty, conjugal love and the possibility that love could lead beyond the self. It then considers these ideas through the framework of Benedict XVI’s Deus Caritas Est. Its central insight is that Christianity does not simply discard eros in favour of agape. Human desire is capable of purification and transformation: eros, the love that desires and reaches towards the beloved, and agape, the love that gives itself for the beloved, find their proper fulfilment when united. (Catholic Exchange)

Benedict XVI (2005) – Deus Caritas Est

Benedict XVI (2005) Deus Caritas Est: Encyclical Letter on Christian Love. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 25 December. Deus Caritas Est – The Holy See (Accessed: 18 September 2026).

In Deus Caritas Est (“God Is Love”), Pope Benedict XVI explores the heart of Christian love, beginning with the truth that God loves us first. He explains that Christianity does not reject eros—human desire, attraction and longing—but calls it to be purified and united with agape, the self-giving love that seeks the good of the other. Mature love therefore moves beyond simply desiring another person towards giving oneself for the beloved. (Vatican)

Benedict shows that this love finds its fullest expression in Jesus Christ, particularly in the Cross and the Eucharist. Having first received God’s love, Christians are called to extend it to others: love of God and love of neighbour cannot be separated. The encyclical invites us to see Christian love not merely as a feeling or moral obligation, but as a lifelong transformation from receiving love to becoming capable of giving love. (Vatican)