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ROME, January 28, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Pope Francis criticized fathers who are “symbolically absent” from their families in his Wednesday general audience today, saying an obsession with work is causing “deviancies” in children and adults.

“Fathers are so focused on themselves, on their work and at times their personal fulfillment, that they even forget their families, leaving children and the young to their own devices,” he said.

This can cause “wounds that can be very serious” for children, “due to this lack of examples and authoritative guidance in their everyday life, to this lack of closeness and love from their fathers.”

The word “father,” the pontiff said, is “universal” and “known to all.” It is “dear to us as Christians, more than any other, as it is the name with which Jesus taught us to call God.” Fatherhood, he said, is “a fundamental relationship that is real and ancient as the history of mankind.”

But now, in western societies, this ideal is not being met by fathers who are “symbolically absent,” the pope said, and who fail to give their children the necessary guidance. “We have reached the point of affirming that ours would be a ‘society without fathers’.”

This absence, he said, was at first called “a form of liberation, freedom from the father-master.” The role of the father was associated with “a law imposed from the outside,” with the father seen as “the censor of the happiness of his children.”

The pope said, “Indeed, in the past in some cases authoritarianism, indeed even oppression reigned in some homes: parents who treated their children like servants, who did not respect the personal needs of their growth, fathers who did not help them to embark on their path in freedom, to assume their own responsibilities for building their future and that of society.”

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But since the overthrow of the traditional models of the family, “we have passed from one extreme to the other,” Francis said. In our times, the “invasive presence of fathers,” has been replaced with a new kind of absence.

This new kind of failure of the fathers in their lives, the pope said, can be blamed for the “deviances of children and adolescents.”

“The feeling of orphanhood experienced by many young people is more profound than we might think. They are orphans in their families because their fathers are often absent, also physically, from the home, but above all because when they are present, they do not act like fathers.”

Such men, he said, “do not speak with their children, they do not give their children, by their example accompanied by words, those principles, those values, those rules for life that the young need in the same way as they need bread.”

Francis added that at next Wednesday’s audience he will focus on “the beauty of paternity.” He explained the reason for his negativity today, saying, “I have chosen to begin with the darkness in order to reach the light.”