Pope Francis pulled off his kid gloves Wednesday, denouncing in the strongest terms what he called a “society without fathers.”
“Particularly in Western culture,” he said, the father figure is “symbolically absent, missing and removed.”
At first, Francis explained, the absence of fathers “was perceived as a liberation: liberation from the father-master, from the father as a representative of the law that is imposed from the outside, from the father as a censor of the happiness of children and obstacle to the emancipation and autonomy of young people.”...