Despite its commercial contamination, what we celebrate next Sunday acquires a significance that could yet provoke its suppression. Father's Day will this year be marked by demonstrations around the world against the escalating marginalisation of manhood at the insistence of one of the most poisonous ideologies the world has seen, writes John Waters.
But its importance goes beyond this, touching on the essence of what Western society, having lived for 40 years through a revolution against authority, is becoming.
It is unfashionable to argue that there is an essence of good authority, whose loss promises incalculable damage for the society we bequeath our children.
Of course, the term "good authority" is a tautology: there is no other kind. Saddam had power, but not authority, which always acts in the interests of the greater good and otherwise ceases to be identifiable as authority.
A working definition of authority might be: the capacity to endure unpopularity in the interest of good.
Its traditional custodian was the four-million-year-old Great Father, whom industrialisation contrived to destroy by removing him from the home and making his quasi-magical powers invisible.
It was not, as Robert Bly has observed, a premeditated killing: "Industrial circumstances took the father to a place where his sons and daughters could no longer watch him ... as he fumbled incompetently with hoes, bolts, saws, shed doors, plows, wagons. His incompetence left holes or gaps where the sons and daughters could do better."
A core quality of the Great Father was a willingness to be resented. Collective growth requires individual renunciation, in turn requiring a strong, safe, generous agent to act as buffer and punchbag.
In Ireland in recent decades, we have denounced and caricatured the founding fathers of the State, in particular the lean, sombre figure of de Valera.
But how startling the contrast, in character and appearance, between Dev and his contemporaries and the affable acrobats who play at leadership today.
The word "patriarchy" conveys a sense that the State created itself in the image of the father. It was tough, straight, straight-talking and demanding of its citizens, did not waste energy in communication, but made clear, in a minimalist way, what its expectations were.
But, in recent times we have witnessed a baneful feminisation of the State, which now resembles mother more than father.
Now it is tolerant, indulgent, talkative, given to explaining itself in detail and longing to be liked.
Its legal system, which previously inserted qualities of mercy and mitigation in the wake of the verdict, now factors them in at the outset on the basis of prejudice and caprice.
If we wish to understand why men are being attacked on all sides - in the media, the family courts, the education syllabus - we need look no further than the insistence residing in true manhood that certain values matter, are indivisible and cannot be jettisoned without appalling consequences for, yes, mankind.
In the consciousness of humanity there are three layers of fatherhood: God the Father, the State Father and the Great Father. All three have been killed off by Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones, Gay Byrne and Nell McCafferty, and nobody has offered a coherent concept of what should follow.
As Alexander Mitscherlich has written, the father as a force for good has been exiled. The result? "A gigantic army of rival, envious siblings", with no time for glory, effort, justice, greatness, duty, patriotism; content with consumer durables, victimology, celebrity and slight forms of freedom.
In the post-father society, there is nothing at which to target our anger, which turns inward against ourselves. The role of stoical, authoritarian receptor for society's anger and outrage represented an imperative which has been no more replaced than have the positive values of father-organised society, like security, order and fair play.
Moreover, since there is no longer a father to stand rock-solid while we pummel his greatcoat, to calm us with a pat on the head and a stern admonition to go away and be better, our anger destroys everything, regardless of virtue.
The paradox is that men, by surrendering their greatcoats, have benefited themselves little and their societies nothing. Man/father stands accused, pummelled, denigrated, no longer on account of his greatness but because he is weak and refuses to carry the burden of society's grievance.
Modern man takes literally the attacks on his power and assists his attackers in dismantling it, when in reality what is demanded from him is that he return to what he was. He pleads with his tormentors: "Look! I'm a nice guy."
Neither he nor his attackers understand why this ejaculation causes them to pummel him the more.