Many attempts have been made to define the feminine, and more recently, the masculine genius. Naturally, this is difficult enough in the contemporary context, so fraught is it with the dualism between the body and the spirit. By contrast, if we begin by looking at the human organism as a whole, we can actually study the physical body and find in it a deeper meaning since “the body and the body alone … makes visible the invisible.”

Our reproductive organs are for being and fully becoming a man and a father and being and fully becoming a woman and a mother. But if those organs are used as pleasure toys, then we forget what they are really for and so we deny and block out being mothers and fathers and we therefore forget what it really means to be men and women.

Masculinity is essentially and inherently tied to fatherhood. Fatherhood is not an option for a man. It is a requirement. Fatherhood is the purpose for which God created man.

Everything we’ve been taught about what it means to be a successful man, about achieving status, authority and riches is turned on its head by this otherworldly defendant: “If my kingship were of this world”, he says, “my servants would fight that I might not be handed over to the Jews; but my kingship is not from the world”.

Anecdotally, it seems that the traditional Mass attracts proportionately more men than modern forms of the Mass. Why is it that Catholic lay men in particular are drawn to the traditional Mass? What is there about its form that appeals to Catholic men of our time?

Why is it that men are created to be fathers? Pope St John Paul II tells us in 'Familiaris Consortio' that human fatherhood is meant to reveal and relive on earth the very fatherhood of God.