Church Fathers The title usually given to the brightest male lights of the early Christian Church.
Influential and often learned Christian thinkers contributing to the formation of Church dogma, aspects of their writings are often cited as items of truth within the contemporary Roman Catholic Catechism.
The Church Fathers are considered exemplars of holiness and are usually beatified.
The study of their writings is generally known as Patristics, although the Church Fathers fall into two periods, the Apostolic and the Patristic.
Since the 17th-century the Apostolic Fathers have been designated as those who wrote just after the New Testament period, to include Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Hermas, Polycarp and Papias. This list also includes the anonymous writers of the Epistle of Barnabas, the Epistle to Diognetus, Clement and the Didache.
The Patristics wrote up to the 8th-century, to include Isidore of Seville (7th-century) and John of Damascus (8th- century).
Origen was too far into Platonism and ideas similar to reincarnation to be seen as a Church Father but his work continues to fascinate scholars.
Feminists point out that there are no real Church Mothers, perhaps because of the sexist environment existing in the early Christian era, this particular form of discrimination persisting, so they say, through the ages and still present in many contemporary religious and secular organizations.
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