Lynne asked questions about the fourth commandment, honoring your father and mother. I offered a brief response.
1. Father, can you kindly explain the fourth commandment in regards to parents who are abusive, not necessarily physically, but mentally or spiritually?
2. How does one actually honor such parents?
If parents are honored then they must be honorable. No one can be obliged to suffer abuse or to be party to sin. While the commandment urges obedience to parents, it also demands that parents should be moral and nurturing in their relations with offspring.
Originally the commandment was addressed more to adults than to parents. God let his people know that we have obligations to parents as they grow older. Just as they cared for us, we should look to their needs when time and sickness should reduce their resources and abilities.
Mental and spiritual abuse should be regarded seriously, just as we would visible physical abuse. However, parents are within their rights to demand upright moral behavior and proper religious formation of the young. As long as offspring live under the roof of their parents, there is a certain level of subservience to them. That is why adults move out and start their own lives. Similarly, elderly parents who live with their children may have to tolerate how things are done differently in their homes.
Filed under: Catholic, Commandments, Discipleship, Faith, Family, Morality, Religion |
Blogger Priest 
Hello Father Joe,
Thank you for your blog and for posting on this difficult and scarcely written subject. Every Father’s Day, I labor grievously over what must be my responsibilities to my abusive father. He was a violent drunk and drug addict who forced my pregnant mother and me to flee for our lives. I was only in elementary school. He guzzled up his sizeable inheritance so that my mother would be left abandoned, to raise two children alone with no help. This was a grueling task.
As an adult, I found him in an effort to establish a relationship. However, he lived in a state of self-created denial in which imagined himself as the innocent victim abandoned by us and deprived of his children. Of course, he evaded every effort my mother made to obtain child support. Indeed, he gladly signed away his parental rights and allowed us to be legally adopted by someone else so to be released from any financial obligation.
I understand that he was abused as a child and deprived of the opportunity to grow and develop as God intended. But quite frankly, it is more than taxing to pander to his immature egoic defense mechanisms whereby he projects and deflects blame onto his innocent victims. I am being revictimized by being forced to comfort him and to participate in his lies. Now in his elder years, he relentlessly peppers me with pleas to come live with me (or near me) because of his loneliness. However, he cannot afford to move near me. Presently he can maintain and care for himself in his current residence.
I appreciate that you pointed out that “The commandment does not say honor your parents only if you like them or if they are nice.” While failure to take care of one’s parents is a violation of divine positive law, I cannot imagine that God would expect a person like me to risk my marriage and family to provide any care to a father who did not care for me and caused irreparable harm to my mother and sibling.
Yes, I should pray for him and provide forgiveness. But this must come along with respectful correction and redirection to his accusatory and gaslighting moments of lashing out. I would not omit some friendly conversation when he is calmed down from his tangents, too. Is there a moral obligation to provide more? I know that I am subject to God’s law, but I cannot believe that He expects people like me to risk our lives to care for elderly parents if there is a way that they can be maintained without causing further harm to us.
Thanks to his selfish youth, my family of origin is all estranged. I haven’t seen my sibling, or highly sick and abusive mother who did terrible things to me for years because she is a danger to our family. But if she needed living assistance, I would provide whatever I could, because as horrible as she was, she still did the best that she could. She raised us by herself, even though it was a torment to everyone involved and she did great harm to us. She did not try to kill or abandon us. She did what she had to do to provide a home for us. I was there, and I saw how hard it was. I wish that the Church would publish some clear direction on this. I’m sorry if they have and I have missed it.
Hello Father Joe, I recently posted a lengthy question about honoring an alcoholic and drug addicted father. I used a new email address set up for the purpose of protecting my parents’ identities. I was just checking to see if you might have responded. I discovered that I might have been required to confirm my WordPress account as a prerequisite. If the question was too long or otherwise undesirable, I understand. Thank you.
For Joe
A situation where an adult is aware of parental and communal blasphemy. The adult is in deep Catholic spiritual formation. How to respond to the fourth commandment when blasphemy is committed against this adult? How does this sin relate to past, present and future prayer?
So, Fr, what if the parent deems himself as needing to be under the care of the child (wants to move in with the child) but continues his abusive behaviour? Does the 4th ask that we take in such a parent because of the obligation to care for them? Thanks, Father.
I should add that under this commandment parents can extend something of their authority to others. Thus, when children are placed in the charge of their school teachers, the students are obliged to behave and to take guidance from them just as they would from their parents. Insolence toward teachers, failure to pay attention in class and the failure to complete homework are violations of the fourth commandment.
From everything I have been told, a lack of good parenting does not give a free pass from the 4th commandment. One honors their parent(s) by praying for them.
Yes, if a parent is abusive, the child needs to understand that and if separation is needed – so be it. But ALWAYS continue to pray for conversion of bad parents.