Dear Vladimir Spyridonovich Putin:
With Father's Day approaching, it occurred to me to congratulate you. You always want your children to reach very high, to be able to admire their achievements, to see them grow and mature into independent, self-sufficient men and women.
His son Vladimir, the Russian president, has certainly shown no limits to his self-sufficiency. He has gone as high as he can in everything he has set his mind to, and now he has taken a giant step towards making human history.
Everyone is talking about him today and many will continue to talk about him for many years to come in history classes - if at the end of all that he has put together there is any trace of the human species left on the planet.
I cannot judge you for the sins of your child. Many parents strive to guide their offspring on the right path and do not succeed, and the Lord has already warned us against the custom of blaming parents for the faults of their children (Jn 9:3).
Moreover, because I am unable to judge him, I cannot even judge him, because judgment belongs only to God. But I can take advantage of the cruel war he has started in Ukraine to reflect with you and with the readers of this humble father of a family, on what it means to be one, to value the responsibility of parents in educating not only great characters, but great people.
A father is, above all, an example, a reference figure, a mirror in which to look at oneself. Children learn by imitation, so the first way to educate one's offspring is to educate oneself. How do we treat others? What is our attitude towards life? What are our priorities?
That is why an authoritarian father is a failure, because he treats the weak with contempt. That is why an absent father who neglects education is a failure, because he leaves his children orphaned, forcing them to look for references in the first person who crosses their path.
Many parents project their own life onto their children, wanting to fulfill in them the dreams they did not achieve or not to repeat the mistakes they made; and what they achieve is to kidnap them, preventing them from living the life they have been given, independent of their own.
A good father should be proud, not because his children look like him or think like him, but because he sees them acting with wisdom and discernment, even if they contradict him.
A good father is affectionate with his children, but is capable of repressing his affections in order to be able to continue telling them the truth and correcting them, without humiliating them, when they stray.
A good father has the wisdom in his heart not to try to be friends with his children, who demand that he fulfill his paternal vocation.
A good father does not direct his children towards idols that promise happiness and return destruction: money, power, fame, position....
A good father is, in short, one who from his weakness tries to give the best to his children without looking for himself; that is why he teaches them that the only good father is God.
We Christian fathers explain that in the Lord's Prayer is the key to peace and social justice, because by proclaiming that He is the father of each and every one of us, we are saying that Spaniards, Russians, Ukrainians, Chinese and Americans are brothers and sisters.
Dear Vladimir. I hope that on earth you did your best to be a good father and that today you are already resting with God. In that hope, today I ask you for a prayer for your son. May we still have time to straighten out the crooked.
Journalist. Graduate in Communication Sciences and Bachelor in Religious Sciences. He works in the Diocesan Delegation of Media in Malaga. His numerous "threads" on Twitter about faith and daily life have a great popularity.
