In reflecting upon the marks of the holy fathers of the church (which are the marks of the church applied to the individual), we see a further application: that being the catechetical nature of fatherhood; primarily with regard to the officers of the church, such as deacons, priests, and bishops but also with an eye toward home and family life. There is here a connection between the four marks of the Church as a collective whole and the four qualifying marks for the Fathers of the Church. Seeing this, I sought to understand more deeply how it is that those who hold office in the church, ought to not only be individuals within the church, but also to have within themselves the nature and qualities of the church, that they themselves be those who have been formed by the church as well as those who form others in and for the church. That is, not merely representatives of the church, but manifestations of what the church is, within their own individual selves, in a manner both active and alive. That is to say, that those who are deemed to be these things by the Church are not these things because the Church deemed them so, but they were deemed to be so because they are those things. Yet what they are, they are because the church made them so. Yet still, they are those things and have been made into those things, that they might in turn pass this on to those who come after them. This is what our bishops, priests, and deacons ought to strive to be and do. Those who seek the truth, holiness, unity, and the trans formative grace of God through the church, and receive it in full, but also those who then, transformed by these things and into these things, then pass them on to others after them..
“The Church,” then, though a collective and corporate entity, comes into the concrete experience in the human life through the individual. In this way then, I learned the theology of the corporate and collective body of Christ through my spiritual father in my local parish, and from my biological father in the home, and from the Fathers of the Church in their books. In these individuals then, we see the Church, which is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, in the individuals who are of this same nature. They are, in this sense, to the collective and corporate church, what the church is to the Kingdom of Heaven. That is, a manifestation of the greater kingdom.
In this way also, we ought to thus be drawn back to the echoing nature of catechesis. As one teaches another, he makes another teacher. For it is that a particular “Father”, be he a priest, a biological father, or a Church Father, in that he has these four things in himself, teaches us, forms us, and shapes us for the good, in our spiritual life. Yet it was their fathers before them who shaped them. And so it is that there is always a “Father” of the church that made a particular father into the father that he is. For every Polycarp, there is an Apostle John. And for every Polycarp there is an Irenaeus. So also it is not without the early Fathers that we have come to have the latter Fathers. And not without the Latter Fathers that we now find ourselves with the newer saints that they inspired with their lives, witnesses, and theological writings. This is so with the Fathers of the Church, with the priestly fathers of every parish, and the domestic fathers of every household. Fathers make fathers, saints make saints, and Christians make Christians.
