Our Father who art in Rome.

read earlier today here that St. Augustine (354 - 430 A.D.) only used the term "Father" when addressing the Bishop of Rome.  This is interesting, given the fact that all Catholic priests are today called fathers.  Protestants are often fans of Augustine, but they are even more often critics of Catholicism's insistence upon papal primacy and the need for the Church's unity to be expressed by a unified government.  How reconcilable is a predilection for the Church Fathers with non-Catholic Christianity?  I am guessing not very, but I need to read more of these strange ancient ones to say so with any authority.  One thing's for sure though, the cheap and purely argument from Matthew 23:9 that Catholics are defying the will of God by calling their priests "Father" is bunk, for several reasons.

The verse goes thus: "And do not call anyone on earth 'father,' for you have one Father, and he is in heaven."   But if we look at the context of the verse, Jesus is having to deal with the Pharisees who are so puffed up with their own importance that they have failed to recognize their Messiah.  As Sebastian Fama notes, we have to take this context into account as well as this verse by Paul:

"I do not write this to make you ashamed, but to admonish you as my beloved children. For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the Gospel" (1 Corinthians 4:14-15).

Fama also notes that if you follow this unsound Protestant logic, we cannot call our ministers pastors ( pastor = Latin wordfor "shepherd") since Christ also said "I am the good shepherd.  I know my own and my own know me, as the Father knows me and I know the Father, and I lay down my life for the sheep. And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will heed my voice. So there shall be one flock, one shepherd." John 10:14-16  If there's only one shepherd, we shouldn't be calling others shepherds, eh?

Furthermore, if we take Christ too literally, following this logic to its end rather than stopping with the conclusion "Catholicism Are Bad," we will see that it would also imply we cannot call our physical fathers "Father" or refer to them as such either.  That could make legal documentation of your parentage very difficult indeed.

No, we need to look at the context, and realize that Christ is saying we should not place importance in titles except in so far as they help us to know our heavenly Father better.

And so I come to the conclusion that I should learn about these ancient Church Fathers as (among other things) one way to know my heavenly Father through his saints.