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Today is international men’s day, the concept of which I am very suspicious. My gender has problems: low self-esteem, violence, addiction, uncertainty about what it means to be male. But many of us are resistant to therapy, and the self-pitying man is almost as unattractive as the muscle-bound influencer shouting at me to drink protein on Instagram. Like a lot of men, I don’t like talking about being a man. I don’t much enjoy talking at all. It’s striking that in one of the best ads for the Christmas season - that’s for John Lewis - the male characters say nothing. A son doesn’t know how to talk to his dad. He buys his dad an LP. His dad hugs him. Neither expresses themselves vocally, they don’t have to because actions say it all. Likewise the most prominent dad in the Bible, besides God, is completely silent. This is Joseph, the father of Jesus, whose greatest virtue is his patience. Here is a man who discovers that his fiancé, Mary, is pregnant, and not only accepts the explanation that God was responsible, he raises the child as his own. We never hear Joseph speak in the gospels, instead he is given a series of assurances or commands from God - take Mary as your wife, take your family to Egypt - and he wordlessly obeys. I suspect some of the online influencers who promote a return to traditional, rugged masculinity might regard Joseph as the ultimate cuckold, devoid of self-respect, barely a man. How wrong they’d be. Joseph’s silence doesn’t denote a lack of thought - we’re told he considered divorce - but a confident faith. To quote Pope Benedict, he said a silent but echoing “yes” to God - and by so doing, to his wife, to a baby and to responsibility. Such accumulated duties are, like wrinkles and grey hair, proof that we have lived. I’m convinced that gender is not defined solely by what we are - our biology - but what we do, and this is what gives femininity or masculinity its moral quality. When someone says “man up”, they typically mean the very opposite of juvenile or sexist or “toxic” behaviour. They mean be strong so you can be a rock for others. Be courageous, so you can dare to do the right thing. In my Catholic tradition, most ministers are called to celibacy and, so, cannot have children. Yet we call priests father, just as monks are brothers. And when we speak of a brotherhood of man, this is not to exclude our sisters, of course, but to extend the definition of family to the whole of humanity. In so far as it is a project to love others, being a man is truly an international endeavour.