The order of charity

First, love of God; second, love of neighbor; our first neighbor, our parents
 
Honor your father and your mother,
that you may have a long life in the land the LORD your God is giving you (Ex 20,12 NABRE).
 
It is clear that the will of God is that after our love, honor and respect for Him we should honor, love and respect our parents. We owe them, in the very least, our life and – if we have been so blessed – we also owe them gratitude for having shared with us the knowledge and friendship with God.
 
We also should manifest some degree of honor and respect to all those whom God has entrusted with his authority. Here is paragraph 2199 from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
 
“The fourth commandment is addressed expressly to children in their relationship to their father and mother, because this relationship is the most universal. It likewise concerns the ties of kinship between members of the extended family. It requires honor, affection and gratitude toward elders and ancestors. Finally, it extends to the duties of pupils to teachers, employees to employers, subordinates to leaders, citizens to their country, and to those who administer or govern it. This commandment includes and presupposes the duties of parents, instructors, teachers, leaders, magistrates, those who govern, all who exercise authority over others or over a community of persons.”
 
It is important to point out that the fourth commandment does not explicitly use the word “love,” instead it speaks of a unique relationship, a special common unity of life and love based on, and protected by, honor. Saint John Paul II illuminates us with key implications on this point in his 1994 “Letter to Families,” section 15:
 
“The bond between ‘honor’ and ‘love’ is a deep one. Honor, at its very center, is connected with the virtue of justice, but the latter, for its part, cannot be explained fully without reference to love: the love of God and of one's neighbor. And, who is more of a neighbor than one's own family members, parents and children?”
 
To honor your father and your mother means that you hold them with deep regard or great respect, esteem, admiration, deference, appreciation or reverence. This is essential for family life. Once again, I quote Saint John Paul II’s “Letter to Families:”
 
“If the fourth commandment demands that honor should be shown to our father and mother, it also makes this demand out of concern for the good of the family. Precisely for this reason, however, it makes demands of the parents themselves. You parents, the divine precept seems to say, should act in such a way that your life will merit the honor (and the love) of your children! Do not let the divine command that you be honored fall into a moral vacuum! Ultimately, we are speaking of mutual honor. The commandment ‘honor your father and your mother’ indirectly tells parents: Honor your sons and your daughters. They deserve this because they are alive, because they are who they are, and this is true from the first moment of their conception. The fourth commandment then, by expressing the intimate bonds uniting the family, highlights the basis of its inner unity.”
 
Saint John Paul II’s words “Do not let the divine command that you be honored fall into a moral vacuum!” applies to parents and all those included in this commandment: “instructors, teachers, leaders, magistrates, those who govern, all who exercise authority over others or over a community of persons.”
 
We need to pray for our parents, living or deceased, and all those who exercise authority. May their lives be absent of moral vacuums that would only bring dishonor to them and disunity among us all.
 
God help them always, amen.