Veneration of Women

At contention between God and Satan is the status of femininity. Two millenia ago, in the Assumption and Coronation, God exalted a poor, humble, fleshly, mortal woman, mother of a tortured and executed mendicant preacher, to be Queen of heaven and earth, of all the angels and saints. From eternity He intended this. In doing so, he exalted all women, precisely in their fleshly femininity, not in spite of it or in disregard of it. In a Saturday mass communion antiphon we pray: "Blessed be the womb of the Virgin Mary, that bore the son of the Eternal Father." Attend: it is the feminine body, precisely in its sexuality, that is the carnal temple of God's holy presence! Tradition has it that the brightest and greatest of angels, Lucifer, father of lies, his pride fully inflamed, flew into a rage on hearing that he would defer to a weak, fleshly woman and proclaimed his everlasting "Non Serviam." Since then, his obsession is to degrade women, as women, especially in their flesh. Our Scripture starts with the assault upon Eve and God's promise (the "proto-evangelium" or "first gospel") that a woman would crush the head of the serpent; it ends in Revelation with assault of the Beast upon woman and child and the final nuptial triumph of the Bride and her Bridegroom-Lamb. It is crystal clear: veneration of women comes from heaven ("Blessed are you among women"). The meaning, mission and identity of masculinity is precisely to emulate God in honoring, cherishing, protecting and delighting in the woman and her child. Degradation of femininity comes straight from the pits of hell: rape, pornography, honor-killings, abuse and gender-or-sex-based profanity as well as misogyny in its more subtle forms. Words which express contempt for women, particularly in their body, clearly carry a demonic origin and intent. The exalted, glorified feminine body of Mary in heaven unveils, unequivocally, the eminently sacred nature of the specifically feminine body, especially in those sacred areas associated with the conception and nurture of children and the marital love act. Such exaltation of woman has characterized Catholicism from its inception ("Son, behold your Mother"): consider the iconic, artistic representations of our Lady including the Madonna and Child and the Pieta. Unfortunately, this veneration has been too frequently obscured by clericalism, chauvinism, unrecognized masculine insecurity and the consequential fear, dread and incomprehension of femininity. Femininity is experienced by the male with fear and trembling: fascination, obsessive attraction, incomprehension, annoyance, adulation, and most importantly, as a reminder of his own mortality, finitude, and vulnerability. Woman reminds the male that he came from flesh, that he is and was dependent upon a mother, that he is deeply incomplete and desperately desirous of "another," and that as flesh he is marked already for death. Unconnected with God our Father, the source of all life, temporal and eternal, the feminine becomes for the man an affliction, a scandal, a curse, an object of fear, dread, rage and contempt. In other words, unconnected with the Father, the male inexorably conspires with Satan in his contempt for women. The feminism that gripped our culture in the 1970s was misguided in its reaction against male misogyny in that it failed to deeply recognize and honor femininity, but attempted to deconstruct gender difference in favor of a neutralized, homogeneous androgyny. Feminism as we know it is largely a contempt for femininity in that it denies that there is anything special and sacred about women: we have sports journalists in men's locker rooms and women in combat and we construe that as "equal rights." Unconsciously, it has mimicked the perverse male disregard for femininity by leveling the two sexes into a uniform, sterile, neutral and abstract "personhood" that is actually a version of selfish, non-paternal masculinity at its worst: abortion, sterile intercourse, autonomy, careerism, envious clericalism ("we want the power of the priesthood too"), and incomprehension, if not disparagement, of the real meaning of gender as filial, fraternal, sororial, spousal, maternal and paternal. We Catholic men, on the other hand, have the unbounded Joy and Honor of emulating St. Joseph as he cherished his Woman and her child, in humility, reverence, chastity, obedience, quiet and courage. St. Joseph, Pray for Us!