"Do Not Blush About His Bride, The Holy Church"

Blessed Charles de Foucault, notoriously a lover of women in his sinful youth, gives us these striking words in today's Magnificat meditation. The Church..first and foremost, always and everywhere...is a Woman, is uber-hyper-mega-super-sublimely Feminine. The Church is Bride of Christ, our Mother, and at the same time a Whore. To know and understand the Church, you must know and understand femininity in its mysterious depth. Root problem of so much of our Church's depravity and superficiality: denial, fear, ignorance, disgust and flight from The Feminine.

In his classic, must-read Flight from FemininityKarl Stern showed how the unhappy philosophical legacy of enlightenment rationalism flowed, strikingly in Descartes and the rest, from a disparagement of the feminine as intuitive, empathetic, mystical, nurturing and a obsession with a toxic, unbalanced masculinity of certainty, clarity, proof, power and control.

Our Church has similarly suffered from a clerical, immaturely masculine theology that is in flight from the feminine. Our clergy is masculine and men come, only with difficulty and much time, to an understanding and appreciation of femininity. So, to the degree that our priests are immature, they fail to know the Church. To think theologically, "with the Church" there are two necessities: love of prayer and love of women. Both are essential. Both are in short supply.

Why is it so difficult for men to understand women? First, they are so different...so, so, so different. The adolescent male psyche is crazy with desire for woman but has not the faintest clue about the interiority of a woman. This takes many years to achieve and normally requires a happy marriage, daughers or daughter-surrogates, chaste feminine friendships, as well as prior grounding in sound mothering and a network of sisters-cousins-aunts-grandmothers. Not all men have benefited from such. Secondly, all of us retain a largely unconscious resentment-rage against the "bad mother" who frustrated, contradicted, punished us in early childhood. Thirdly, our libidinal craving for the feminine is, randomly, out of control and carries with it fear, shame, guilt, frustration and sadness. Forthly, some men fail in the oedipal passage and remain enmeshed in the maternal, as "momma's boys" or homo/metro-sexuals and incapable of wholesome desire and appreciation.

And so, it is the lack of EROS, of tenderness, delight, reverence, delight in the feminine that underlies Catholicism's clericalism, moralism, legalism, dogmatism, ritualism...not to mention its pedophia, misogyny, and general sterility.

Women themselves intuitively understand the femininity of the Church as they live, love, breath and pray in and with her. The few women I have known who advocate for women priests themselves evidence a feeling of discomfort with their own sexuality. I recall a marvelous sister of charity, a real servant of the poor here in Jersey City, a talented and idealistic woman, who resented that "her feminine organs kept her from the priesthood." I was shocked and saddened by her disparagement of her own sacred womanliness. A woman with a wholesome sense of her bridal-maternal-sororial sublimity surrenders herself effortlessly into the Marian depth of the Church.

Arguably, the great accomplishment of resourcement and communio theology...DeLubac, Balthasar, John Paul, Ratzinger...is the recovery of the erotic, the nuptial, the sublimity of masculinity-femininity as a radiance of the love of Christ the Bridegroom for His Bride, sometimes prostitute, our Mother the Church.

Let us not blush for her!