If There's an Antichrist, What About an Antimary?

LEFT: Michelangelo, “The Fall of Adam and Eve and their Expulsion from the Garden” from the Sistine Chapel. RIGHT: Master of the Life of the Virgin, “Christ on the Cross with Mary, John and Mary Magdalene”, between 1465 and 1470.

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Carrie Gress, "If There's an Antichrist, What About an Antimary?" (National Catholic Register, January 27, 2017): No matter how strong the “spirit of antimary” may be, Mary still remains the most powerful woman in the world:

While researching my latest book, The Marian Option: God’s Solution to a Civilization in Crisis (Tan Books, May 2017), I was struck by a new theological concept. I kept running across the notion that Mary is the New Eve—an idea that goes back to the early Church Fathers. Mary as the New Eve is the female complement to Christ, the New Adam. In Scripture, St. John speaks of an antichrist as a man, but also as a movement that is present throughout history (1 John 4:3, 2 John 1:7). This got me thinking: if there is an antichrist, perhaps there is a female complement, an antimary?

What, then, would an antimary movement look like, exactly? Well, these women would not value children. They would be bawdy, vulgar, and angry. They would rage against the idea of anything resembling humble obedience or self-sacrifice for others. They would be petulant, shallow, catty, and overly sensuous. They would also be self-absorbed, manipulative, gossipy, anxious, and ambitious. In short, it would be everything that Mary is not.

While behavior like this has been put under a microscope because of the Women’s March on Washington, D.C., the trend of women-behaving-badly is nothing new. There is, however, ample evidence that we witnessing something, because of its massive scale, quite different from run-of-the-mill vice seen throughout history.

The treatment of motherhood is one of the first signs that we are dealing with a new movement. Mothers (both spiritual and biological) are a natural icon of Mary – to help others know who Mary is by their generosity, patience, compassion, peace, intuition, and ability to nurture souls. Mary’s love (and the love of mothers) offers one of the best images of what God’s love is like – unconditional, healing, and deeply personal.

The last few decades have witnessed the subtle erasing of the Marian icon in real women. First through the pill, then the advent of abortion, motherhood has been on the chopping block. Motherhood has become dispensable, to that point that today the broader culture doesn’t bat an eye when a child is adopted by two men.

Incarnation: why matter matters in theology

S.M. Hutchens, "Jesus Christ Come in the Flesh" (Touchstone, November 30, 2015):

If the old stories are true, what offends and angers Satan more than anything else is the act of God wherein spirit becomes incarnated.  He hated the creation of man not as a mere animal, but in no less than the image and likeness of God, who treacherously breathed the nephesh chayyah into this thing of dust.  The Serpent had his way with the first Adam in Eden, thinking to destroy him.  Most of all he hates the second Adam, that vessel of clay that has the spirit without measure, with whom he had his way at Calvary, once again thinking to destroy him, and through him all mankind.  The spirit clothed in flesh must be execrable filth to the rebellious who are in substance fastidiously pure spirit, and the Incarnation of God so inexplicable, so hateful, and so enraging, that they cannot bring themselves to confront it as reality, thus providing a way that their loyalties, and those of their followers, can be tested right through the veil of their deceit and self-representation as angels of light.  (Do not look for mere hatred of the West at the deepest spiritual stratum of Islam, but of what the West stands for in the offended mind of its Principalities.)

We can easily understand the old and rather simple heresies–Gnosticism, Docetism, and the like–where a denial was clear, but have difficulty seeing those of our own day because they are more subtle and indirect.  Classical liberal theology, for example, does not deny outright the Incarnation or the Passion or the bodily resurrection of the flesh of Jesus, but treats these as stories for those with a pre-scientific view of reality (that is, who believe they really happened), and regards these beliefs about the flesh of Christ not as referring to actual events with cosmic and eternal significance, but mere symbols of abstract virtues like hope, courage, patience and renewal.  To identify the articles of the Creed, however, as “pre-scientific” is another way of calling them false when presented as statements of historical truth. 

Likewise the egalitarians, in their preoccupation with the equality of the sexes, eliminate the cosmic and eternal significance of the sex of Christ by consistently emphasizing that it was his generic humanness and not his male humanness–that is, the actual flesh of his incarnation–that signifies, thus identifying their ideology as another Satanic attack on Jesus Christ come in the flesh.  Both egalitarianism and theological liberalism refuse to make the required positive confession of the whole truth of the reality.  The First Epistle of John tells us an actual denial is not necessary for identification of the spirit of Antichrist, only an inability or refusal to confess.  The most effective ways to do this require the assistance of religion.

If the old stories are true, what offends and angers Satan more than anything else is the act of God wherein spirit becomes incarnated.  He hated the creation of man not as a mere animal, but in no less than the image and likeness of God, who treacherously breathed the nephesh chayyah into this thing of dust.  The Serpent had his way with the first Adam in Eden, thinking to destroy him.  Most of all he hates the second Adam, that vessel of clay that has the spirit without measure, with whom he had his way at Calvary, once again thinking to destroy him, and through him all mankind.  The spirit clothed in flesh must be execrable filth to the rebellious who are in substance fastidiously pure spirit, and the Incarnation of God so inexplicable, so hateful, and so enraging, that they cannot bring themselves to confront it as reality, thus providing a way that their loyalties, and those of their followers, can be tested right through the veil of their deceit and self-representation as angels of light.  (Do not look for mere hatred of the West at the deepest spiritual stratum of Islam, but of what the West stands for in the offended mind of its Principalities.)

We can easily understand the old and rather simple heresies–Gnosticism, Docetism, and the like–where a denial was clear, but have difficulty seeing those of our own day because they are more subtle and indirect.  Classical liberal theology, for example, does not deny outright the Incarnation or the Passion or the bodily resurrection of the flesh of Jesus, but treats these as stories for those with a pre-scientific view of reality (that is, who believe they really happened), and regards these beliefs about the flesh of Christ not as referring to actual events with cosmic and eternal significance, but mere symbols of abstract virtues like hope, courage, patience and renewal.  To identify the articles of the Creed, however, as “pre-scientific” is another way of calling them false when presented as statements of historical truth.

Likewise the egalitarians, in their preoccupation with the equality of the sexes, eliminate the cosmic and eternal significance of the sex of Christ by consistently emphasizing that it was his generic humanness and not his male humanness–that is, the actual flesh of his incarnation–that signifies, thus identifying their ideology as another Satanic attack on Jesus Christ come in the flesh.  Both egalitarianism and theological liberalism refuse to make the required positive confession of the whole truth of the reality.  The First Epistle of John tells us an actual denial is not necessary for identification of the spirit of Antichrist, only an inability or refusal to confess.  The most effective ways to do this require the assistance of religion.

- See more at: http://touchstonemag.com/merecomments/2015/11/jesus-christ-flesh-2/#sthash.7OouvMvS.dpuf

If the old stories are true, what offends and angers Satan more than anything else is the act of God wherein spirit becomes incarnated.  He hated the creation of man not as a mere animal, but in no less than the image and likeness of God, who treacherously breathed the nephesh chayyah into this thing of dust.  The Serpent had his way with the first Adam in Eden, thinking to destroy him.  Most of all he hates the second Adam, that vessel of clay that has the spirit without measure, with whom he had his way at Calvary, once again thinking to destroy him, and through him all mankind.  The spirit clothed in flesh must be execrable filth to the rebellious who are in substance fastidiously pure spirit, and the Incarnation of God so inexplicable, so hateful, and so enraging, that they cannot bring themselves to confront it as reality, thus providing a way that their loyalties, and those of their followers, can be tested right through the veil of their deceit and self-representation as angels of light.  (Do not look for mere hatred of the West at the deepest spiritual stratum of Islam, but of what the West stands for in the offended mind of its Principalities.)

We can easily understand the old and rather simple heresies–Gnosticism, Docetism, and the like–where a denial was clear, but have difficulty seeing those of our own day because they are more subtle and indirect.  Classical liberal theology, for example, does not deny outright the Incarnation or the Passion or the bodily resurrection of the flesh of Jesus, but treats these as stories for those with a pre-scientific view of reality (that is, who believe they really happened), and regards these beliefs about the flesh of Christ not as referring to actual events with cosmic and eternal significance, but mere symbols of abstract virtues like hope, courage, patience and renewal.  To identify the articles of the Creed, however, as “pre-scientific” is another way of calling them false when presented as statements of historical truth.

Likewise the egalitarians, in their preoccupation with the equality of the sexes, eliminate the cosmic and eternal significance of the sex of Christ by consistently emphasizing that it was his generic humanness and not his male humanness–that is, the actual flesh of his incarnation–that signifies, thus identifying their ideology as another Satanic attack on Jesus Christ come in the flesh.  Both egalitarianism and theological liberalism refuse to make the required positive confession of the whole truth of the reality.  The First Epistle of John tells us an actual denial is not necessary for identification of the spirit of Antichrist, only an inability or refusal to confess.  The most effective ways to do this require the assistance of religion.

- See more at: http://touchstonemag.com/merecomments/2015/11/jesus-christ-flesh-2/#sthash.7OouvMvS.dpufIf the old stories are true, what offends and angers Satan more than anything else is the act of God wherein spirit becomes incarnated.  He hated the creation of man not as a mere animal, but in no less than the image and likeness of God, who treacherously breathed the nephesh chayyah into this thing of dust.  The Serpent had his way with the first Adam in Eden, thinking to destroy him.  Most of all he hates the second Adam, that vessel of clay that has the spirit without measure, with whom he had his way at Calvary, once again thinking to destroy him, and through him all mankind.  The spirit clothed in flesh must be execrable filth to the rebellious who are in substance fastidiously pure spirit, and the Incarnation of God so inexplicable, so hateful, and so enraging, that they cannot bring themselves to confront it as reality, thus providing a way that their loyalties, and those of their followers, can be tested right through the veil of their deceit and self-representation as angels of light.  (Do not look for mere hatred of the West at the deepest spiritual stratum of Islam, but of what the West stands for in the offended mind of its Principalities.)

We can easily understand the old and rather simple heresies–Gnosticism, Docetism, and the like–where a denial was clear, but have difficulty seeing those of our own day because they are more subtle and indirect.  Classical liberal theology, for example, does not deny outright the Incarnation or the Passion or the bodily resurrection of the flesh of Jesus, but treats these as stories for those with a pre-scientific view of reality (that is, who believe they really happened), and regards these beliefs about the flesh of Christ not as referring to actual events with cosmic and eternal significance, but mere symbols of abstract virtues like hope, courage, patience and renewal.  To identify the articles of the Creed, however, as “pre-scientific” is another way of calling them false when presented as statements of historical truth.

Likewise the egalitarians, in their preoccupation with the equality of the sexes, eliminate the cosmic and eternal significance of the sex of Christ by consistently emphasizing that it was his generic humanness and not his male humanness–that is, the actual flesh of his incarnation–that signifies, thus identifying their ideology as another Satanic attack on Jesus Christ come in the flesh.  Both egalitarianism and theological liberalism refuse to make the required positive confession of the whole truth of the reality.  The First Epistle of John tells us an actual denial is not necessary for identification of the spirit of Antichrist, only an inability or refusal to confess.  The most effective ways to do this require the assistance of religion.

[Hat tip to JM]

"Mutual Submission" in John Paul II: G.C. Dilsaver's critical-constructive analysis

G.C. Dilsaver is the author of the fine book, The Three Marks of Manhood,(2010) with an Appendix on "Mutual Submission," which, according on one reader, "respectfully takes Pope John Paul to task for what he considers a failure to correctly exegete the Epistle to the Ephesians.

Dilsaver also has a fine earlier study entitled "Karol Wojtyla and the Patriarchal Hierarchy of the Family: His Exegetical Comment on Ephesians 5:21-33 and Genesis 3:16" (Christian Order, June/July, 2002), which I just came across today.

I know this issue is now considered "controversial," largely as a result of the feminist movement since the 1970s (rather than new exegetical discoveries, I would argue). Interesting, to say the least.

If you're looking ahead for birthday or Christmas gifts for appropriate friends and acquaintances, you might consider Dilsaver's gem along with Steven Goldberg's 1971 classic, The Inevitability of Patriarchy: Why the Biological Difference Between Men and Women Always Produces Male Domination.

[Hat tip to Sir A.S.]

Camille Paglia: some hard truths about gender

Camille Paglia, "It’s a Man’s World, And It Always Will Be" (Time, December 16, 2013):

If men are obsolete, then women will soon be extinct—unless we rush down that ominous Brave New World path where females will clone themselves by parthenogenesis, as famously do Komodo dragons, hammerhead sharks, and pit vipers.

A peevish, grudging rancor against men has been one of the most unpalatable and unjust features of second- and third-wave feminism. Men’s faults, failings and foibles have been seized on and magnified into gruesome bills of indictment. Ideologue professors at our leading universities indoctrinate impressionable undergraduates with carelessly fact-free theories alleging that gender is an arbitrary, oppressive fiction with no basis in biology.

Is it any wonder that so many high-achieving young women, despite all the happy talk about their academic success, find themselves in the early stages of their careers in chronic uncertainty or anxiety about their prospects for an emotionally fulfilled private life? When an educated culture routinely denigrates masculinity and manhood, then women will be perpetually stuck with boys, who have no incentive to mature or to honor their commitments. And without strong men as models to either embrace or (for dissident lesbians) to resist, women will never attain a centered and profound sense of themselves as women.

Read more >>

[Hat tip to JM]

"Neither virgin nor mother! - The problem with contemporary feminism

ON A WOMAN'S RIGHT TO BE A WOMAN

Why I Am a Feminist

By Cormac Burke

Msgr. Cormac Burke, a priest of the Opus Dei Prelature, is a former civil lawyer who served as a judge in the Roman Rota, the high court of the Church, from 1986 to 1999. Upon retirement he returned to Africa to teach at Strathmore University in Nairobi, Kenya. A prolific author, he has published more than one hundred articles in the fields of marriage, Church law, and theology. His best-known books include Covenanted Happiness, The Lawless People of God?, and Man and Values. His latest book, Marriage: Theological Perspectives, is scheduled for release later this year by The Catholic University of America Press. His website, www.cormacburke.or.ke, lists practically all his publications. This article is adapted from a presentation he gave at a conference co-sponsored by the Ethics & Public Policy Center and the Witherspoon Institute on March 8 in Washington, D.C. The following article, "Why I Am a Feminist," was published in the New Oxford Review (October, 2013), pp. 30-34, and is reproduce here by kind permission of New Oxford Review, 1069 Kains Ave., Berkeley, CA 94706.

Lest the title of this article cause confusion, let me begin by emphasizing that I am a feminist. My life as a feminist started at about the age of five, when I first began to admire my mother. And my feminism increased as I came to appreciate my sisters. At the time, I could not define the elements of that appreciation; but I did realize that there was something different about women and girls, and somehow I admired that something.

Then I entered into my teens, and girls entered into my life in a new way, a way that changed, and to some extent disturbed, my incipient feminism. I heard part of my reaction expressed not long ago in a mentoring session with a 14-year-old boy. He was from a good family background with the distinctive note that his five siblings were all boys. As we were ending our chat, I sensed there was still something on his mind, so I asked him, “What is it?”

He looked at me, and solemnly enunciated, “Girls!”

Slightly amused, I asked him, “What about girls?”

He looked at me again and answered quite slowly, “They puzzle me.”

I gave him a few possible clues to the puzzle but didn’t really try or want to solve it. I had had the same experience myself and thought it a good start to a healthy sexual outlook.

When I was a teenager I lived in a residential area on the outskirts of my hometown in Ireland. Three or four large families, with six, seven, or eight children, lived close by. As a result, my social life was spent in the company of fifteen or twenty boys and girls all in the 15-18 age range. I admired the girls I knew, and now and then imagined I might eventually marry this one or that. I admired them — and I respected them. They made themselves respected. “Bad” thoughts were directed elsewhere. One would feel ashamed to allow a bad thought toward a girl who inspires respect. Modesty, which was then not an unbecoming term, especially on the part of these girls, made purity easier — though never easy. It drew out a noble impulse which helped so much. In another recent mentoring session with a 16-year-old boy, I described, a little more at length, the atmosphere of my teenage social life. When I had finished, he observed, “I wish I had grown up in your times.”

Feminism vs. Femininity
Today, women in general are desired but are neither admired nor respected. Why? Because so many have forgotten — perhaps have never learned, have never been taught — the difference between wanting to be attractive and letting oneself be, or making oneself, provocative. They emphasize the animal fact of being female but ignore the human quality of being attractive. They know the power the female has over the male — consisting simply in a physical desire that looks for satisfaction — but they do not understand the power that the truly feminine woman has over a man, a power that inspires him, as only such a woman can inspire a man, to overcome his sensuality, learning to admire her and therefore to respect her.

If men have changed since I was young, it is because women have changed. Women themselves seem no longer to prize two fundamental features of femininity that are precisely those most capable of inspiring admiration and reverence in men: virginity and motherhood. And the consequences have been disastrous for both men and women.

Neither virgin nor mother! This seems to be the motto or battle-cry of radical feminism — or, should we say, its pathetic cynicism. Ask any radical feminist what she understands by the word feminine, and she will typically have no answer. Radical feminists don’t want women to be feminine, just as they don’t want men to be masculine. And that is why radical feminism, as opposed to the healthy feminism I learned as a child, is such a threat not only to women’s identity but to social relations as a whole.

Honeymoon over? Pro-abort feminists burn effigy of Pope in Argentina

"The Honeymoon is Over" (Rorate Caeli, November 26, 2013).

Advisory: disturbing and inappropriate images: "Quema del Papa" (Burning of the Pope).

Pope Francis writes, in Evangelii Gaudium:

Among the vulnerable for whom the Church wishes to care with particular love and concern are unborn children, the most defenceless and innocent among us. Nowadays efforts are made to deny them their human dignity and to do with them whatever one pleases, taking their lives and passing laws preventing anyone from standing in the way of this. Frequently, as a way of ridiculing the Church’s effort to defend their lives, attempts are made to present her position as ideological, obscurantist and conservative. Yet this defence of unborn life is closely linked to the defence of each and every other human right. It involves the conviction that a human being is always sacred and inviolable, in any situation and at every stage of development. Human beings are ends in themselves and never a means of resolving other problems. Once this conviction disappears, so do solid and lasting foundations for the defence of human rights, which would always be subject to the passing whims of the powers that be. Reason alone is sufficient to recognize the inviolable value of each single human life, but if we also look at the issue from the standpoint of faith, “every violation of the personal dignity of the human being cries out in vengeance to God and is an offence against the creator of the individual”.

Precisely because this involves the internal consistency of our message about the value of the human person, the Church cannot be expected to change her position on this question. I want to be completely honest in this regard. This is not something subject to alleged reforms or “modernizations”. It is not “progressive” to try to resolve problems by eliminating a human life.

Thomas Howard interviewed by Patrick Henry Reardon and David Mills

The Catholic Angler
An Interview with Thomas Howard

A longtime friend of Touchstone and himself a model of the “ecumenical orthodoxy” and “mere Christianity” we strive to represent, Professor Thomas Howard has brought many—Catholics as well as Evangelicals—to a deeper understanding of the treasures of the historic church through his writings and personal influence.

A graduate of Wheaton College and New York University, Professor Howard taught for many years at an Evangelical college until he became a Roman Catholic in 1985. From then on until his retirement he taught English at St. John’s Seminary College, the seminary of the archdiocese of Boston. 

He has written several books, on both religious and literary subjects, beginning with Christ the Tiger, a sort of spiritual autobiography, in 1967. Since then he has written seven more books, including Evangelical Is Not Enough; Lead, Kindly Light, the story of his conversion to Catholicism; and most recently On Being Catholic. He has also written studies of the novels of Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis, notably The Achievement of C. S. Lewis and C. S. Lewis, Man of Letters. Ignatius Press, the publisher of On Being Catholic, also distributes a videotape series of 13 lectures by Professor Howard on “The Treasures of Catholicism.”

Professor Howard was interviewed by senior editors Patrick Henry Reardon and David Mills while at Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry to teach a weeklong course on the novels of C. S. Lewis. The interview has been edited for clarity and completeness, but the oral style has been retained.
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Touchstone: One of the things C. S. Lewis is now notable for is his intellectual dissent from, in a way his assault on, feminism. I mean not the ordination of women as in his essay “Priestesses in the Church?” but the feminist ideology in general.

Thomas Howard: That’s one of those questions that has to be chased all the way through the corpus of Lewis’s works, because, obviously, feminism as such was not then a major or articulate force. He wrote the essay “Priestesses in the Church?” because the question had surfaced in a mild Anglican sort of way, but there was nothing very imminent about it.

Lewis presents a view of reality at a polar extreme from the frame of mind that ends up demanding ordination of women as presbyters. Obviously, he believes in hierarchy, but it’s not a hierarchy of power, which seems to be the feminist understanding. The whole discussion of priestesses in the last thirty years has run along sociological and political lines, with theology dragged in, when necessary, from the sidelines and various attempts made to rewrite the Bible to show that St. Paul said you should ordain women as presbyters.

In Lewis, you get a vision of things—of everything—in which the whole question of masculine and feminine is a subdivision of tremendous, prior considerations that he understands to characterize the universe. Lewis felt that those categories are of the very stuff of the universe, prior to male and female. Male is the way masculinity exhibits itself under biological species or terms, and female is the way femininity manifests itself under biological species.

For him, hierarchy is obviously the way the dance is choreographed, or the way the map of the universe is drawn. He points out in one place that in a hierarchy one has the duty of obedience to those above one in the hierarchy and the duty of magnanimity and stewardship and noblesse oblige to those below one. I seriously doubt that Lewis would use the words “above” and “below” with respect to masculine and feminine, because they don’t apply. They’re the terms of people who can only think of a dance in terms of power—which makes for a pretty poor dance.
The locus classicus for his view of gender is, I think, the scene toward the end of Perelandra when Ransom sees the two eldila: Perelandra, who is feminine, and Malacandra, who is masculine. The feminine eldil, Perelandra, participates in equal majesty, dignity, authority, and so on, with the masculine figure, Malacandra, but she has a receptiveness, a nurturing side. All these words have become buzzwords now, but they weren’t when Lewis wrote them in the 1940s.

I think he would feel that it’s turning things upside down to try to come at the mystery of femininity and masculinity with a power glint in one’s eye, or with an egalitarian, calculating set of categories to try to even up the slices of the pie.

You see this mind in That Hideous Strength.

TH: There’s a sense in which the entire book That Hideous Strength is a document in the case. Jane Studdock is clearly deeply confused at the beginning of the book in her effort to avoid being thought of as “little wifey”—and who wants to be thought of as little wifey? Fairy Hardcastle calls her that.

But she doesn’t want to be identified with what she would think of as stereotypes, but which are actually archetypes, having to do with womanhood and being wife or mother, etc. She is an intellectual, she is writing her dissertation on John Donne’s “triumphant vindication of the body,” and yet poor Jane is a Gnostic without knowing it. She hasn’t got a clue about the vindication of the body. She doesn’t know that her body will turn out to be virtually Mark’s salvation, not just because he remembers her with lust or concupiscence in the toils of Belbury, but because it is her womanhood that stands with clarity and truth and good sense and resilience and toughness over against the bottomless deception and disintegration that is Belbury.

It is Jane embodied, not just the idea of Jane, not just Jane’s intellect—far from it—but Jane as his spouse that saves Mark. And, of course, the very last paragraph of the book is, in one sense, the beginning. We have now come up to the real beginning of the marriage. Mark is about to be saved. He has escaped hell, and Jane is to be his salvation.

Funeral march for LCWR assembly in St. Louis

Well, sort of. You have to appreciate Fr. Z's sense of humor, which is ... well, at least as twisted as my own: "An idea for the upcoming LCWR assembly in St. Louis" (WDTPRS, May 2, 2012):

She The People

Oh, those crazy dissenting women religious! Rome finally called dissent what it is, and Melinda Henneberger calls it an instructively-timed "crackdown!" But for the really entertaining aspects of the story, see the quotes fisked by Fr. Z, which, he warns "may make you a little stupider" for reading them!

The death of feminism

Why is it, do you think, that so many people appear to be more concerned about Rush Limbaugh's comments about Sandra Fluke (and Danica Patrick) than about what Fluke and Patrick themselves said?

Feminism began as a "women's liberation" movement. Women wanted government to remove legislation they considered repressive. They wanted government to get out of their private lives and bedrooms and to allow them to take responsibility for themselves and their bodies.

Now we have Fluke testifying before Big Brother in behalf of an HHS mandate that would coerce Georgetown University and other similar institutions, in violation of their conscience, to pay for medical coverage for abortion, sterilization, and contraception.

Now it's a free country. There is nothing preventing anyone from purchasing contraceptives if they like, many of them quite inexpensively as one can see at any local drugstore. Fluke suggests, however, that her concern is on behalf of those such as herself and other students at Georgetown who find the out-of-pocket costs for contraceptives "untenable burdens" during their tenure as students. She cites a figure of $3000.00 as the cost of birth control over the years a student is enrolled in Georgetown, and appeals to the Jesuit motto of the institution (cura personalis, or "care of the whole person") as a reason why Georgetown should consider contraceptives a health entitlement in order to meet student "medical needs" and not to "impede [their] academic success."

Fluke cites the example of morally uncontroversial non-contraceptive use contraceptives in the treatment of polycystic ovarian syndrome. But an allowance for such use hardly calls for a "universal" mandate. But as others have noted, only a fool would deny that the primary purpose of contraceptive drugs and devices is to make sex “worry free” by detaching the procreative act from procreation. Even assuming that Fluke herself were an icon of chastity and virtue, her description of the "crushing demand" for contraceptive and reproductive "services," the "untenable burdens" such expenses impose on students, and her promotion of such services as a health entitlement suggest little more than a thinly-veiled attempt to garner contraceptive coverage for the purpose of facilitating sexual promiscuity and a morally irresponsible lifestyle.

And then what about what President Obama said in his phone call to Fluke? That her parents should feel proud of her? A Georgetown law student who complains that she and other students can't foot the $3000.00 bill that contraceptives would cost over the course of their law-student careers? "Proud"? Nobody finds that a tad odd?

One thinks of Chesterton:

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered ... it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone...

But what we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.... The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.

And so we are offended by tiny words with concrete references, like the inclusive use of "man" in the above paragraph, and substitute hypostatized abstract nouns like "humanity." We are offended by those hard small words with specific denotative definitions, like "heretic," "apostate," and "prostitute" -- because they strike us as harsh and unfeeling -- and we substitute loosey-goosey terms for their benign connotative values, like "liberal-minded," "progressive," and "free-spirited" instead.

It reminds me of my years in the American South where the term "Christian" used to be employed to connote more-or-less the same thing as "decent citizen," regardless of what the person believed or how he (no, I'm not using the damned plural, "they") lived. Modernity has tied people's minds up like pretzels, so that they refer to third person singulars as third person plurals, and a young woman living like a 'ho' can be told that her parents should be "proud" of her.

"Freedom" used to mean, among other things, freedom from sin, vice, and corruption. Today it has come to mean freedom to embrace sin, vice, and corruption. What once was called the "bondage of the will" now is called "free self-expression."

Today we have become so open-minded, it seems, that we have forgotten what it is to think. "Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out," warned Chesterton; "the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid."

[Hat tip to Zachary Mabee for image; and to B.S.O and D.O. for precision in details.]

Related: Fr. John Zuhlsdorff comments:

"I read that Rush Limbaugh apologized for what he called the activist from Georgetown who wants taxpayers to pay for her contraceptives.

"I am sure that Nancy Pelosi will now apologize to other members of the House whom she accused of trying to kill women."

Why feminism now diminishes men

Our correspondent at large just sent us a link to "Why feminism is sexist" (Sacramentum Vitae, September 3, 2011) by Mike L., adding the following remarks:

My fight was with a female who is a Democrat, a Journalist, and a Christian with a big heart. All her life she thinks she has been dealt the lesser hand. It has always been a man's world, and we can't do too much to encourage and help women. Women make less. Women were forced to quit careers to have children. Women leaders would mean far fewer world wars. Women clerics would mean less weirdness over sex. And so on. And so on.

I would send it on to her, except I don't think it would solve anything, simply reopen the arguments. In my book it all comes down to whether you chose to resent or to embrace the differences in the genders. And the more you embrace them, the more those who are not as blessed with the 'gender distinctives' will feel marginalized. A tough situation.

Maybe I should have been Amish!

Anyway, I would have entitled the piece

"Why Feminism Now Diminishes Men"

One choice quote:

Friedrich Nietzsche explained as follows why he opposed "equality" for women: "Women will never be satisfied with mere equality. The war between the sexes is eternal, and peace can only come with victory and the total subordination of men." In its time, that witticism was merely flippant. But no longer is it merely flippant.

Enjoy.

Kreeft on feminism

Marvin Olasky, interviewing Peter Kreeft in "Dangerous Waves" (World magazine, July 17, 2010), asks How do you define feminism?, and Kreeft answers:

The heresy that women and men are not fundamentally different and that women ought to be as much like men as possible, especially as selfish and aggressive as possible. The two most ridiculous errors about men and women are unisexism and male chauvinism. The unisex feminist says that women and men are not different in value, therefore they're not different in nature. The male chauvinist says that men and women are different in nature, therefore they're different in value.

[Hat tip to J.M.]

Surprise! Femi-nuns Find Themselves Under the Microscope?

by Pieter Vree
The increasing number of Catholics who have been calling for the Vatican to exert more influence on the Catholic Church in the U.S. are about to get their wish.

No sooner had the ink dried on our May 2009 New Oxford Note "Song of the Boo-Birds" about the now-underway apostolic visitation of U.S. women's religious orders that it was announced that the Holy See is preparing an additional investigation of consecrated women in the U.S.

As detailed in that New Oxford Note, the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life (CICLSAL) was directed by Pope Benedict XVI to "look into the quality of life" at the general and provincial houses and centers of initial formation of women religious in the U.S. This visitation, led by the Rev. Mother Mary Claire Millea, will take an estimated two years to complete.

The new investigation, by contrast, has been placed under the purview of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), which will make a "doctrinal assessment" of the tenor and content of various addresses given at the annual assemblies of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR). The LCWR is the nation's largest organization of administrators of women's religious orders, claiming over 1,500 members, who together represent around 95 percent of the 58,000 women religious in the U.S. No small potatoes. The LCWR also happens to be the bastion of leftist feminism in the U.S. Catholic Church. The LCWR's mission statement includes this choice line: "Developing models for initiating and strengthening relationships with groups concerned with the needs of society, thereby maximizing the potential of the conference for effecting change." One of the LCWR's stated purposes is "collaborating in Catholic church and societal efforts that influence systemic change." Judging by this chirping about "change," one could easily conclude that the LCWR fancies itself the political body of the institutional revolution in religious life since Vatican II.

That a national leadership conference should be the subject of a doctrinal inquiry by the Holy See is "virtually unprecedented," says the always informative Vatican insider John L. Allen Jr. (National Catholic Reporter, May 1), because such tasks are commonly left to the competence of national bishops' conferences. Moreover, that the CDF, the highest doctrinal office in the Church, is spearheading the investigation — as opposed to the CICLSAL, which has jurisdiction over religious orders — suggests that Rome has grave concerns about the theological currents emanating from the LCWR's assemblies. Here is one instance in which Benedict's curious selection of William Cardinal Levada as prefect of the CDF will be of benefit: The American cardinal should have no trouble decoding "nuance" in the LCWR material to be scrutinized.

With three investigations concurrently underway — U.S. women's religious orders, the Legion of Christ (see the preceding New Oxford Note), and the LCWR — no one can say that the Vatican is sitting on its collective hands these days. Indeed, Rome has been a hotbed of activity of late.

The LCWR was apprised of the CDF's intent to investigate in a letter from Cardinal Levada dated February 20 and received March 10. He wrote that the investigation became necessary when, at their 2001 annual meeting, the CDF instructed the LCWR to "report on the initiatives taken or planned" to promote three areas of doctrinal concern: the CDF's 1986 "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons"; Pope John Paul II's 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacer­dotalis, which reiterated Church teaching on the all-male priesthood; and the CDF's 2001 declaration Dominus Iesus, which emphasized the uniqueness of the Catholic Church in the economy of salvation. Evidently, in the ensuing eight years, the report was never submitted. In his letter, Cardinal Levada wrote, "Given both the tenor and doctrinal content of various addresses given at the annual assemblies of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious in the intervening years, this Dicastery can only conclude that the problems which had motivated its request in 2001 continue to be present."

After consulting with Franc Cardinal Rodé, prefect of the CICLSAL, Cardinal Levada decided it was time to take action. He tapped Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo, Ohio, a member of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Doctrine, to lead the inquiry. Cardinal Rodé will assist Cardinal Levada in determining what measures will be necessary once Bishop Blair submits his completed report. (No timetable has been given.)

Donna Steichen, author of Ungodly Rage: The Hidden Face of Catholic Feminism, the groundbreaking 1991 exposé of U.S. women's religious orders, said in an interview with LifeSiteNews.com (Apr. 22) that she welcomes the CDF's inquiry, but that it's "at least 30 years behind the need." Steichen also pointed out that "the [religious] communities involved [in the LCWR] have almost completed their suicides, and they know it, and it gives them pause for thought."

The shaky future of women's religious orders in the U.S. was the theme of the keynote address at the LCWR's 2007 annual conference. Titled "A Marginal Life: Pursuing Holiness in the 21st Century" [PDF] and delivered by Sinsinawa Dominican Sister Laurie Brink, this talk "aroused particular concern" at the CDF, reports Jack Smith, editor of The Catholic Key, the official newspaper of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph. In her discussion of the decline of women's religious congregations in modern times, Sr. Brink identified four possible future paths for struggling congregations. The "dynamic option," she said, "involves moving beyond the Church, even beyond Jesus." This is the path chosen by what she termed the "sojourning" congregation. This type of congregation "is no longer ecclesiastical. It has grown beyond the bounds of institutional religion. Its search for the Holy may have begun rooted in Jesus as the Christ, but deep reflection, study and prayer have opened it up to the spirit of the Holy in all of creation." Sr. Brink continued, "Ecclesiastical authorities no longer fit this congregation, which in most respects is Post-Christian." Why post-Christian? Because "Jesus is not the only son of God. Salvation is not limited to Christians."

If this is the path women's congregations have chosen for themselves, it's no wonder they're dying off. Who's ever heard of a "post-Christian" vocation? Sojourning is the suicidal option.

But Sr. Brink seems to indicate that this indeed was the path chosen by a great many communities after Vatican II, and her description reads like a laundry list of heresies and errors:

• "When religious communities embraced the spirit of renewal in the 1970s, they took seriously that the world was no longer the enemy, that a sense of ecumenism required encountering the holy 'other,' and that the God of Jesus might well be the God of Moses and the God of Mohammed…." Here we have the error of restricted indifferentism, which Pope Gregory XVI called "rotten," a "base opinion," and "a prolific cause of evils."
  
  
• "The emergence of the women's movement with its concomitant critique of religion invited women everywhere to use a hermeneutical lens of suspicion when reading the androcentric Scriptures and the texts of the Tradition. With a new lens, women also began to see the divine within nature, the value and importance of the cosmos, and that the emerging new cosmology encouraged their spirituality and fed their souls." Here we have a warped feminist reading of the foundational aspects of the Church, as well as pantheism, which was condemned by Pope Pius IX in his "Syllabus of Errors."
  
  
• "Who's to say that the movement beyond Christ is not, in reality, a movement into the very heart of God? A movement the ecclesiastical system would not recognize…. But a whole new way that is also not Catholic Religious Life. The Benedictine Women of Madison are the most current example I can name. Their commitment to ecumenism leads them beyond the exclusivity of the Catholic Church into a new inclusivity, where all manner of seeking God is welcomed. They are certainly religious women, but they are no longer women religious as it is defined by the Roman Catholic Church. They choose as a congregation to step outside the Church in order to step into a greater sense of holiness." Here we have a clear-cut case of willful apostasy on the part of a religious congregation that has chosen to turn away from the light of the Catholic faith. This, surely, is the unhappy end of the "sojourning" congregation: the casting of oneself into outer darkness.

St. Paul said that the Gospel of Christ "is veiled only to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ" (2 Cor. 4:4). It is no coincidence that an embrace of worldly ideologies blinds one's mind to the glory of the Gospel of Christ, leading to death — even the death of entire religious congregations.

Are we witnessing the death throes of an ill-conceived revolution gone horribly awry? Hilary White reported for LifeSiteNews.com (Aug. 8, 2008) that the "ideologies of radical feminism that infiltrated the women's orders represented by LCWR have been shown to be instrumental in the collapse of women's vocations. While thousands left their orders in the 1960s and 1970s, the number of young women applying to enter the LCWR communities dropped to nearly nothing and has not significantly increased." Sr. Brink too recognizes that "death" is the "default mode" of religious congregations whose "self-image is stuck in the 1970s." These she calls "zombie congregations."

Ah, but the outlook isn't all doom and despair. Donna Steichen insists that the "future clearly lies with the new and reformed young orders of, one might say, 'primitive' observance" — i.e., congregations that practice a markedly more orthodox Catholic faith. Many of these new orders belong to a smaller, newer umbrella organization, the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious, which was given canonical status by the Vatican in 1995, and is viewed as the levelheaded "conservative" counterpart to the fatal liberal wackiness of the LCWR. As one would expect, the LCWR is openly hostile to these upstart congregations. Sr. Brink accuses them of "making choices that a generation ago would have been anathema to their members," such as putting the habit back on and catering to "seemingly conservative young adults." But, Sr. Brink admits, such congregations "are flourishing."

One of the reasons John Allen gives for the CDF's "unusual" sponsorship of the doctrinal inquiry is that since 1959 the LCWR has also had canonical status as an official entity of the Church. Therefore, the CDF has the capacity to issue "official recommendations or mandates" to the LCWR, whereas the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops can only offer "non-binding guidance." The CDF also has the ability to alter or revoke the LCWR's canonical status. "The implied threat," Allen suggests, is that the Vatican could leave the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious as "the lone official representative of women religious in the United States."

This outcome, however remote, would accord well with Pope Benedict XVI's concept of "evangelical pruning" of institutions in the Church whose Catholic identity has been compromised. When he was elected Pope, much was made of this quote from an interview published in the 1997 Ignatius title Salt of the Earth: "Maybe we are facing a new and different kind of epoch in the Church's history, where Christianity will again be characterized more by the mustard seed, where it will exist in small, seemingly insignificant groups that nonetheless live an intense struggle against evil and bring good into the world — that let God in."

If something along the lines of the marginalization or the abolition of the LCWR were to come to pass, then we would be able to stand up and say we have witnessed the full blooming of the Ratzinger papacy.

[The foregoing article by New Oxford Review editor Peter Vree, "Surprise! Femi-nuns Find Themselves Under the Microscope?," was originally published as a New Oxford Note in New Oxford Review (June 2009), pp. 18-20, and is reproduced here by kind permission of New Oxford Review, 1069 Kains Ave., Berkeley, CA 94706.]