Filial Devotion

The commandment, “Honor your father and your mother” is a consequence of the general law of charity and love for one’s neighbor, for one cannot love one’s neighbor without loving one’s father and mother; however, the term honor includes an added duty in this regard: filial devotion. In this way, God wanted to show that to love, one must add respect, consideration, submission and acquiescence, which implies the obligation to fulfill toward them in an even stricter manner all that charity requires us to do for our neighbor. This duty naturally extends to the individuals who take the place of one’s  father and mother, and who have even more merit because their devotion  is less obligatory. God always severely punishes all violations of this commandment.

Honoring  our  father and  mother  does not  only entail respecting them;  it  also means assisting them  in  their  need, providing for their rest in old age, and surrounding them with the care they took of us in our childhood.

True filial devotion is displayed especially when parents are lacking in resources. Do persons really fulfill this commandment if they think they have done a great thing for having given their parents only what is necessary for them not to die of hunger, while they deprive themselves  of nothing? Or  if they relegate them to the worst rooms in the house so that they are not left out on the street, while reserving for their own use what is best and most comfortable?  Such parents can even consider themselves fortunate when this is not done out of ill will and if they are not made to pay for it for the rest of their lives by being put in charge of the housework! Is this the time of their lives when old and weak parents are to be servants of their younger and stronger children? Did their mother make them pay for her milk when they were in the cradle? Did she count the times she watched over them when they were ill or the steps she took to provide them with what they needed? No, children do not owe their poor parents only what is strictly necessary, but also all the sweet little extras possible, in token of the thoughtfulness and the loving care that represent the interest on what they themselves have received from them, the payment of a sacred debt. This is the only filial devotion accepted by God.

Woe, therefore, to those who forget what they owe to the ones who supported them in their weakness, who, besides their physical life gave them moral life also, and who often imposed harsh privations on themselves in order to ensure their well-being. Woe to such ingrates, for they themselves will be punished with ingratitude and abandonment; they will be struck in their dearest affections, sometimes in their current life, but certainly in another, when they themselves will bear what they made others bear.

It is true that some parents do not recognize their duties and are not what they should be for their children; however, it is for God to punish them and not their children. It is not the children’s place to reproach their parents, because they themselves perhaps deserve it to be this way. If charity establishes as a law repaying evil with good, being indulgent toward the imperfections of others, not speaking ill of one’s neighbor, forgetting and forgiving wrongs and even loving one’s enemies, how much more do these obligations apply regarding one’s parents! Hence, children must take as their rule of conduct toward their parents all Jesus’ precepts concerning one’s neighbor, and tell themselves that every behavior that would be reprehensible toward strangers would be even more so toward their parents, and that what may be merely a wrong in the former instance may become a crime in the latter, because to the lack of charity one adds ingratitude.