Feminism: Russia’s Deadly Weapon
Against the Family
Cornelia R. Ferreira, M.Sc.
As we know, Our Lady of Fatima warned that as long as the Collegial Consecration of Russia is not done, Russia would spread its errors around the world, causing persecution of the Church. When one thinks of persecution, one usually pictures something physically bloody, which of course is true with respect to Russia. However, persecution can also be spiritual, to kill the soul. This article is about the spiritual persecution carried out by Russia with the weapon known as feminism. It is a deadly error that has not been fought by the Church after the reign of Pius XII, who spent much of his pontificate battling against it.
Ultimately, the attack is by Satan. With the help of Communism, whose headquarters is Russia, he is using woman against the family. But why the family? Well, consider something Pope John Paul II said: “The Christian family is the first community called to announce the Gospel to the human person”.[1] Now, the Catholic Church is an army, the Church Militant. Her duty is to fight the enemy of men’s souls — Satan — by evangelizing the world, converting people from the kingdom of Satan to the Kingdom of Christ. Since the Christian family is the first instrument of evangelization, that means it is at the front of the Church’s army. The Pope also said, “Christian marriage and the Christian family build up the Church”[2] – i.e., the family continually adds fresh troops to the Church Militant. This is especially important in providing priestly and religious workers for Christ’s vineyard. As Pope Pius XII taught,
From the family founded according to the divine will on the legitimate union of man and woman, Christ and the universal Church draw the ministers and apostles of the Gospel, the priests and heralds who nourish the faithful and cross the seas to enlighten and save souls.”[3]
And in his encyclical On Christian Marriage, Arcanum, Pope Leo XIII noted Christ’s “command” that marriage is meant to increase not just the human race, but also the Church, “so that ‘a people might be born and brought up for the worship and religion of the true God and our Saviour Jesus Christ’.”[4]
Obviously then, the success of the family is crucial to the success of the Church’s mission. So if you want to prevent the transmission of the Gospel, then a fundamental strategy is to liquidate the Christian Catholic family. Satan thinks that if he can kill true family life, in which children are raised to fear and serve God, then the Church is finished. And as the Catholic Church and the Catholic family go, so does society, enabling Satan to finally rule the world.
Pope Pius XII observed,
The nation…has always drawn its strength, its increase, its honour from the healthy and virtuous family. If this is attacked in its religious and moral foundation, the way is open to the worst possible harm to social institutions, and to the nation itself.[5]
Lenin knew this, and declared: “Destroy the family, you destroy the country.”[6] By extension, destroy families around the world, and you abolish the existing social order.
Women and Children First
In 1880, Pope Leo stated that the Communists aimed to destroy Christian marriage, and if they succeeded, families and society would be driven into the “overthrow of order which is … the wicked aim of socialists and Communists.”[7] That’s what we’re in the midst of today: the transformation of the old Christian order into the anti-Christian new world order. The Communist Manifesto, published on February 21, 1848, declared war in the following terms:
• The Communist revolution … involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.
• Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion and all morality….
• Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order….
• their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.[8]
Pius XI, in his 1937 encyclical On Atheistic Communism, Divini Redemptoris, reported that Communist leaders openly boasted that their goal is “to destroy Christian civilization and the Christian religion by banishing every remembrance of them from the hearts of men, especially of the young”.[9] This “struggle against Christian civilization,” he said, “is directed from Moscow.”[10] For this struggle, the major weapon Satan put into the hands of Russian Communism is the one he first used successfully in the Garden of Eden. A modern-day Marxist notes, “It is no accident that women began the Russian Revolution of 1917 on International Women’s Day”.[11] This is a reference to the demonstrations and strikes by thousands of women on March 8th that was the first step in the Bolshevik Revolution.[12]
Pope Pius XI warned of what to expect if Russian Communism were allowed to flourish. He called “bolshevistic” Communism “the new gospel … offer[ed] [to] the world as the glad tidings of deliverance and salvation! It is a system full of errors and sophisms. It is in opposition both to reason and to divine Revelation. It subverts the social order, because it means the destruction of its foundations….”[13]
Well, the foundation of society is the family[14], and Communism’s effects on womanhood and the family can be seen in the characteristics of Communism that were exposed by Pope Pius XI; only by understanding these characteristics can one see how the crisis of faith and the crisis of marriage stem from Russia’s errors. These characteristics are as follows[15]:
• Communism … removes all the moral restraints that check the eruptions of blind impulse.
• … Communists hold the principle of absolute equality, rejecting all hierarchy and divinely-constituted authority, including the authority of parents….
• Refusing to human life any sacred or spiritual character, [Communism] makes of marriage and the family a purely artificial and civil institution, the outcome of a specific economic system. There exists no matrimonial bond of a juridico-moral nature that is not subject to the whim of the individual or of the collectivity. Naturally, therefore, the notion of an indissoluble marriage-tie is scouted [i.e., disdained].
• Communism is particularly characterized by the rejection of any link that binds woman to the family and the home, and her emancipation is proclaimed as a basic principle. She is withdrawn from the family and the care of her children, to be thrust instead into public life and collective production under the same conditions as man. The care of home and children then devolves upon the collectivity [i.e., upon organs of the State, such as public schools and daycare, all of which work against the authority of parents, furthering the Communist goal of absolute equality through class warfare].[16]
• … the right of education is denied to parents, for it is conceived as the exclusive prerogative of the community [i.e., the State], in whose name and by whose mandate alone parents may exercise this right.[17]
Based on these characteristics, clearly the West today is thoroughly Communist, because the foundation of society, the family, has been Communized through the corruption of women. These Communist characteristics are also characteristics of the women’s movement:
• Women have been emancipated from the home and family, in pursuance of self-fulfillment and a career.
• Increasingly, women are working under the same conditions as men. There are almost no more exclusively-male occupations, and women’s inclusion in them has led to their masculinization and a loss of the maternal instinct; at the same time, men are being feminized by role reversal and political correctness.
• The principles of absolute equality and the rejection of divinely-appointed hierarchy are harming marriage — and also the Church, as women demand ordination, seeing the priesthood as just a job that should be open to women.
• The collectivity is raising younger and younger children as their masculinized mothers are thrust into increasing the productivity of the State. State-operated schools are the norm in many areas of the world.
• Further, all moral restraint has been removed as Satan targets the family in its most vulnerable spot: the Church’s moral code, particularly the sixth and ninth Commandments. This is where the front line of the Church Militant is being breached because if you weaken morals, you weaken faith. Indeed, all the assaults on marriage and the family — divorce and re-marriage, cohabitation, perverse sexuality, sex education, artificial procreation, pornography, prostitution, family planning, abortion, unmarried motherhood — all these are assaults on the moral teachings of the Church. They constitute a spiritual persecution because they weaken the faith. Faith and morals are two sides of the coin of Christian religion; they cannot be separated. Immorality involves breaking the Commandments; and the Commandments underpin the Faith. In an approved apparation in Quito, Ecuador, in 1634, Our Lady prophesied this about the 19th and 20th centuries: “The precious light of the Faith will go out in souls because of the almost total moral corruption.”
Pope Leo XIII blamed the anathemized “baneful heresy” of divorce for the destruction of marriage, morality and society. This had happened in ancient Rome, and in more modern times, began, he said, with the Protestant Revolt and the French Revolution. Divorce, he showed, is the root of moral corruption.[18]
Pope Pius XII saw a connection between “the crisis of marriage” and woman’s loss of faith, morality and obedience to the teachings of the Church[19], whilst Pope Benedict, as Cardinal Ratzinger, asserted that “the crisis of morality” is “closely tied to that of woman and her role”.[20] Since it is particularly feminists, not all women, who lack faith, obedience and morality, and who have been re-defining woman’s role, it would seem that the two popes have laid the blame for today’s moral crisis on the feminist movement. A brief look at the history of feminism will bear them out. This history is taken from the writings of leading feminists, most of whom are professedly Catholic.
Marriage As Materialistic Class Warfare
Feminism’s beginnings lie in the political suffragette movement of the 19th century. By the turn of that century two branches of the feminist tree were developing: the first was secular and the second religious, spiritual or Christian feminism. Both branches were socialist and part of the Revolution from the beginning. That’s why we cannot divide feminism into benign vs. radical camps.
Religious feminism, which spread from Protestantism into Catholicism in the 20th century, adopted paganism for its spirituality. Feminists searched for historical precedents for women’s equality, and appropriated what they themselves admit were Germanic myths of a primitive universal matriarchal society. They imagined matriarchal society to be a “communal egalitarian society” where “woman existed as a free person whose labor and sexuality was at her own disposal.” So-called “patriarchy” with sexual restrictions then arose, which ended “matriarchal communism” and subjugated women. The leading American Catholic feminist, Rosemary Ruether, admitted that feminists actually lifted this matriarchal myth from Communism. Communist co-founder Friedrich Engels had “absorbed” the “romantic” anthropological theories into socialism.[21] This seduced women into the revolution against the Christian order.
Indeed, if you read the writings of Karl Marx, Engels and the anthropological works on which they drew, you see there the feminist ideology almost word for word. The two carrots dangled in front of women were equality of the sexes and economic independence, both promoted as social progress. Ruether said feminists had to join the “Socialist revolution” to escape from patriarchal subjugation. Besides ideological support, the Communist State provided them with a working example of a society in which women had full and equal employment with men, i.e., economic independence, which “was seen as the key to women’s liberation.”[22]
As seen, Pope Pius XI said Communism’s goal was to break woman’s ties to her family, and Ruether confirms that Communism’s main agenda has been to “integrate women into the work force,” making them “independent wage earners” and “equal partners” with men “on the job and within marriage.”[23] What she doesn’t mention is that this was because Marx wanted to abolish the family and make woman the slave of the State to boost productivity whilst destroying the Church at the same time.
The Communist Manifesto calls for the family to be abolished.[24] For its rationale, it applies both its class theories and its materialistic economic theories to the family. Communism sees the traditional family as embodying class distinctions, and as the foundation of a society based on class divisions. For a worldwide egalitarian collective, all unjust power structures have to be overthrown, and the family which arose with private property and patriarchy, is one of these “power structures.” Capitalism, characterized by private property and individual households, is the root of the oppression of women. Basing himself on ancient Greek civilization and mythology, Engels declared in his 1884 work titled The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,that the first form of class opposition was the development of “monogamous” marriage, meaning a marriage of unequals; and the first class oppression was “that of the female sex by the male.” The family with its role structures parallels and feeds the subjugation of the proletariat, the oppressed or working class, by the ruling capitalist or bourgeois class. This is how Engels put it:
The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife, and modern society is a mass composed of those individual families as its molecules…. Within the family [the husband] is the bourgeois, and the wife represents the proletariat.[25]
The Communist Manifesto declares, “[T]he first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class to win the battle of democracy [i.e., equality].”[26] Further, the Manifesto accuses the capitalist bourgeois husband of seeing his wife as “a mere instrument of production.”[27] Communism doesn’t have a problem with women as instruments of production; but it does have a problem with that instrument being in an individual family. “The proletariat,” says the Manifesto, is “to wrest … all capital from the bourgeoisie” and “to centralize all instruments of production” “in the hands of the State,” which the Manifesto defines as “the proletariat organized as the ruling class.” All this, says the Manifesto, is to increase “productive forces as rapidly as possible.”[28]
Hence, the emancipation of women is necessary to overthrow capitalism, and overthrowing capitalism is necessary for their emancipation. Applying class and economic theories to the family, Engels says that in order to create equality between husband and wife, “the first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry, and … this in turn demands the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society.” This new setup is what he calls the “proletarian family” or the “proletarian marriage,” meaning a marriage of equals, as opposed to the “monogamous family” of class divisions.[29] This Marxist idea became the foundation of the feminist movement. As expressed by French feminist Simone de Beauvoir, whose 1949 book, The Second Sex, became the feminist “bible,” only socially productive labour makes a man truly human, and so to be equal to man, the woman must not only join the work force, but even give up her femininity.[30
] The Communist Manifesto also accuses the bourgeois family of exploiting its other private property — children — and it calls for replacing home education by “social,” i.e., State education, in order “to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.”[31] In this “ruling class” we can place the Catholic Church as well. In 1889, Freemasonry — the parent of Communism — deemed that, in order to advance its universal socialist republic, freedom of thought and conscience of the children has to be developed systematically in the child at school and protected, as far as possible, against all disturbing influences, not only of the Church …, but also of the children’s own parents….[32]
Ruether proudly notes that the Communists set up State day-care; maternity leave; contraception and abortion; and they got rid of “patriarchal laws that discriminated against women in marriage and divorce.”[33] Engels explained that in the proletarian family with the working wife, “male supremacy” disappears, and the wife has “regained” her ancient right to institute divorce.[34] The provisions of the Marxist State are precisely the rights that feminists have been fighting for — and largely won — across the world.
The Feminist Religion
Now, the principle of absolute equality stems from the Masonic Illuminati who commissioned Marx and Engels to write the Communist Manifesto, which reflects Illuminati principles.[35] The Illuminati professed that the corruption of women was essential to destroy Catholicism.[36] Even the wars and revolutions that Masonry has fomented to engender its socialist new world order[37] have been used to corrupt women. In December 1917, Pope Benedict XV exposed this connection:
since the French Revolution men have worked hard to confine within ever narrower limits the Church’s influence for good, in the hope that finally this influence would no longer make itself felt in society….everything possible was done to snatch the woman from the maternal solicitude and the vigilance of the Church.
It is in fact amazing what the woman can do for the good of the human race, or for its ruin; if she should leave the common — [i.e., traditional] – road, both the civil and domestic orders are easily upset.
With the decline in religion, cultured women have lost their piety, also their sense of shame; many, in order to take up occupations ill-befitting their sex, took to imitating men; others abandoned the duties of the house-wife, for which they were fashioned, to cast themselves recklessly into the current of life.
And this is the source of that deplorable perversion of morals, which the disorder bred of the war [World War I] has multiplied and propagated beyond all belief.[38]
Pope Pius XII similarly indicted the Second World War. In 1947 he referred to “the devastating work done during the war, and after the war, toward the ruin of woman and of the family.”[39]
Now, for feminists, the bottom line is power. Jobs, careers or even ordination are not satisfactory enough. They want to control the world, making it the sinful matriarchal utopia that allegedly once existed. Recall that the Communist Manifesto called for the proletariat to become the ruling class. Ironically, seeking power has made feminists the useful idiots of Communist men! It was from Communist theories that feminist socialism emerged, says Ruether, “as part of a comprehensive view of social progress” that desired to “better” society and religion by supplanting Christian civilization with superior primitive values. Based on these values, she says, feminists “sought to render Western biblical and social history non-normative, a passing phase of a larger scheme of social development that looked back to earlier origins.”[40]
What spiritual feminists admired about matriarchal society was its belief in female divinity and the power associated with that divinity. Worship of the Mother Goddess was touted as “the golden age of human society that was overthrown by the regressive influence of … patriarchal religion” which “displaced an earlier era of women’s power.” Spiritual feminists thus “sought to revive the ancient matriarchal culture and religion” “as the more appropriate vehicle for female empowerment.” Nineteenth-century Protestant feminists taught Christianity is “the prime source of the oppression of women.” They declared emancipation is “impossible, unless the Bible is understood from a feminist perspective and repudiated as revelation.”[41]
Socialism became entwined with religious feminism through the Christian suffragettes. Christian socialists considered the all-male priesthood an affront to the notion of equality that they claimed had Scriptural justification. They interpreted Gal. 3:28 — “There does not exist among you … male or female. All of you are one in Christ Jesus” — as preaching human equality, rather than the spiritual equality of those who live in faith. This was their ammunition for demanding “institutional reform” to include women in the priesthood.[42] Women’s ordination became a justice and human-rights issue.
Religious feminism didn’t garner much support until after Vatican II, which opened the window to renewal, self-discovery and détente with Communism. In 1979, spiritual feminism became the self-proclaimed enemy of the Catholic Church by declaring that patriarchy “must be attacked with all the strategies at our command”. The first line of attack was to declare that women were “oppressed” by the Church and needed “liberation” from its patriarchy. “Patriarchy” is the feminist term for the authority of the Church; another word for it is “heirarchalism”. Their spirituality of liberation, feminists say, must replace “the spirituality of domination grounded in patriarchy and hierarchy.” A feminist “theology” was developed as a branch of liberation theology, espousing revolution to achieve social reform in the Church. Equality for Christian feminists means the attainment of powerful positions in the Church, total freedom in faith and morals, and autonomous control over their bodies, i.e., freedom to practise contraception, abortion and perverse sexuality. Class differences and heterosexism are considered expressions of the sin of “patriarchal sexism.”[43] “Sexism” is their word for the unequal treatment of women; it is the only sin and the “original sin,” says Ruether.[44]
Christian feminists taught that the Bible was not inspired by God, but was a collection of interpretations of “inexpressible truth[s],” written to justify patriarchal oppression. Tradition was seen as just “a series of human choices which may be imaginatively revoked.” Thus the very foundations of the Faith were attacked, viz., the revealed truth of Scripture and Tradition. They set about re-writing Scripture from their point of view, obtained from dreams and fantasies generated by Jungian psychology. This became their “Revelation,” their “word,” and highlighted their “divinity.” They also drew on heretical Gnostic writings and community life, occult witchcraft and paganism to develop a feminist theology and spirituality, liturgies and anti-sacraments.[45]
Religious feminism is clearly an heretical, syncretic and occult religion. It even has a name — WomanChurch or Women-Church — with priestesses “ordained” by the feminists. Whilst attending WomenChurch, many feminists also stay in the Catholic Church as the leaven of corruption in what they call a “missionary field.”[46]
European Catholic women had been demanding ordination since the 1930s. These demands increased with the ordination of Protestant women. Large numbers of Catholic women who studied in non-Catholic theological colleges and seminaries after the Council would have encountered these influences, as well as the Marxist World Council of Churches’ propaganda that the struggle against sexism is “an integral part of liberation theology” and the “Christian goal” should be “alliance with the Socialist cause, so that a world will be created from which, in accordance with Gal. 3:28, all discrimination will be banished.”[47]
In the face of the Church’s refusal to ordain women, the strategy became to place women in other liturgical roles, such as altar girls, readers and so-called “Eucharistic ministers”. It is hoped this will gradually engender a climate of acceptance for priestesses, especially when accompanied by consciousness-raising.
Involvement in these “ministries” is promoted as “improving the practice of one’s religion by sharing the responsibilities of worship equally with men.” Rewriting the Bible, using inclusive language, and rewriting liturgies to refer to “sisters” as well as “brothers” – all these are painted as improvements. But a Jewish feminist, Naomi Goldenberg, says those unaware of the feminist agenda “do not see such reforms as challenging the basic nature of Christianity,” but what they are requesting are “not minor alterations,” but “major departures from tradition” that will “shake [Christianity] at [its] roots.” She calls sexual equality a “heresy” and subtitles her book Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions.[48] Indeed, feminists say ordination is “only the tip of the iceberg”; once ordained, they intend to “subvert patriarchal styles and structures.”[49] Given the damage they’ve done so far, imagine what they could do once ordained!
Perverting The Maternal Instinct
The post-Vatican II experimentation in women’s religious orders provided the right soil for Christian feminism to spread into Catholicism through nuns, who were turned into feminist nuns or feminist ex-nuns.[50] Why target nuns? Probably because of their widespread influence in many areas of Catholicism (in spite of “patriarchy”).
Both mothers and nuns exercise great power in their spheres of influence through their maternity, the one physical, the other spiritual. Regarding mothers, Pope Benedict XV said, “In her home [the mother] is queen,” and even when away from the home, like a king away from his realm, she has her thoughts centered on its well-being.[51]
In his encyclical On Christian Marriage, Casti Connubii, Pius XI described the family as a body of which the husband is the head and the wife the heart, “and as he occupies the chief place in ruling, so she … ought to claim for herself the chief place in love.” Completely refuting feminist claims that the Church promotes the subjugation of wives, Pope Pius shows the high esteem the Church teaches husbands to have for their wives: “… in view of her most noble office as wife and mother and companion,” says the Pope, the woman’s subjection to her husband is not as a servant or a minor, so that she keeps her liberty and her dignity as a human person. She does not need to obey “her husband’s every request if not in harmony with right reason or with the dignity due to the wife.” He continues, “In fact, if the husband neglect his duty, it falls to the wife to take his place in directing the family. But the structure of the family …, established … by God, must always … be maintained intact.” Pope Pius calls the emancipation of women from her duties as companion and mother a “crime,” because it is an “exaggerated liberty which cares not for the good of the family.” The heart is only separated from the head “to the great detriment of the whole body and the proximate danger of ruin.”[52]
Pius XII also described the vital importance of the stay-at-home mother for the salvation of her children’s souls and the good of the Church and society. He said if St. Gregory the Great “could speak of the government of souls as the ‘art of arts,’ surely no art is more difficult and strenuous than that of fashioning the souls of children…. Fortunate the child whose mother stands by its cradle like a guardian angel to inspire and lead it in the path of goodness!” The Pope explained how mothers should educate and train the child, right through adolescence, illustrating their exalted status in the family and in the Church’s evangelizing mission.[53] This is precisely what the Masons and Communists have worked to destroy — and the guardian angels have deserted their post, neglecting the duties of their state in life.
Now, as the married woman is the heart of her family, so consecrated religious have always been esteemed as “a principal part” of the heart of the Church. Until the 1960s they had great influence in drawing souls to God and spreading His kingdom on earth through their many apostolates.[54] Corrupting these women in the heart of the Church, especially those involved in education and improving the conditions of the family, would be a major strike against Catholicism. Unfortunately, the religious orders were no match for consciousness-raising and other psychological tricks. Angry at being “pushed around by the patriarchal structure,” nuns became a major attacking force, so much so that feminists consider them “trendsetters for the modern women’s liberation movement.”[55]
Feminism has infiltrated Church bureaucracy, teaching and liturgy. By attending or teaching in seminaries and schools of theology, feminists have been converting priests and bishops. Their ideology is now mainstream. In order to proselytize the grassroots, they take every opportunity for consciousness-raising about women’s oppression and for spreading occultism through pseudo-Christian liturgies. No group is free from their agenda. But although they’ve gained vast territory, feminists are not satisfied because their only measure of equality is ordination.
Pope Pius XI, in his encyclical on Communism, told us that Communism is opposed to reason and divine Revelation. As we’ve seen, by repudiating Revelation, Christian feminism has played a great part in today’s crisis of faith. Now let’s look at its contribution to the crisis of morals, which stems from its opposition to reason and the natural law. For this, let’s return to the secular feminist branch, which after several decades of quiet was given new impetus by secular humanist Betty Friedan’s consciousness-raising 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique.[56]
Clearly Marxist, it claimed women had been brainwashed into seeing the “sexual roles” of wife and mother as the only desirable goals for them. Friedan made “housewife” a derogatory term. She was influenced by Abraham Maslow, a leader of the human potentiality movement which sees individuals evolving into gods and independent of the authority of governments or religion. Friedan wanted “a drastic reshaping of the cultural image of femininity” because the existing culture did not permit women to “gratify their basic need to grow and fulfil their potentialities as human beings, a need which is not solely defined by their sexual role.”[57]
Friedan was a signer of the second Humanist Manifesto. Secular humanism is just Communism made palatable for the West. Its Manifesto, which calls for a new world order, states that our “ultimate goal should be the fulfillment of the potential for growth in each human personality,” free of “traditional moral codes” and an “outmoded faith” in “a prayer-hearing God.” It pours scorn on the Ten Commandments. It demands “freedom of choice” and the right to birth control, abortion, divorce and all types of “sexual exploration.”[58]
Feminism replaced the Christian concept of womanhood and motherhood with the Communist model promoted by Friedan and others. Friedan was disturbed by early marriages and the larger families being raised by housewives, so she founded the National Organization for Women to lead the humanist fight for “freedom of choice” in morality, and for getting married women out of the home and into the work force, in order to reduce the birth rate. She was following Engels, who, as I mentioned earlier, promoted work outside the home as the key feature of women’s liberation. Child-care “expert” Dr. Benjamin Spock, another secular humanist, chimed in with his propaganda that Russian children, whose working mothers had other purposes in their lives beside motherhood, were emotionally more stable and adjusted than American children “whose full-time mothers do nothing but worry about them.”[59] Well, the women took the bait, got other purposes into their lives — and the overthrow of civilization has proceeded at supersonic speed — as Pope Benedict XV predicted it would.
Attacking the religious underpinnings of the traditional family, Friedan accused priests, rabbis and ministers of “prejudice” because the “housewife image … is enshrined in the canons of their religion … and in their church’s dogmatic definitions of marriage and motherhood.”[60] The Catholic Church was the chief target of feminism. Secular feminists were unable to make inroads into the Church, however, until the post-conciliar renewal brought socialistic religious feminism to life. Feminists within the Church aligned themselves with their secular sisters who had espoused the Marxist vision of womanhood that fuelled the secular liberation movement. Sharing their humanist goals, spiritual feminists started demanding “equality of opportunity” in the Church and autonomy in morality. The Catholic Church’s uncompromising stand on sexual morality only intensified their charges of “oppression.”[61]
Communist Matriarchy Destroys Morality
These charges received their intellectual fuel from anthropological theories adopted by Marx and Engels as well as from mythology. Merlin Stone’s 1978 book, When God was a Woman[62], asserted that Christianity is part of an ancient conspiracy to use religion to justify male supremacy. Her theories justify the feminist rejection of Christianity and its moral code. Ruether and Stone promulgated the idea that the universe was created by the goddess Isis, who has various other names, such as Gaia or Mother Earth. The original religion was set up to worship the goddess. Male deities were usually just her consorts.
For feminists, goddess-worshipping societies provide an important model in which women owned businesses and property. They subscribe to the Marxist depiction of egalitarian matriarchal society as “primitive communism.” Further, society was “matrilineal,” with children named after their mothers and inheritance through the female line because the biological father was unknown due to “sexually autonomous” women and group marriage, i.e., any number of partners. All children were legitimate and regarded as everyone’s children and brought up by the collectivity.[63] Aren’t we getting back to matriarchal society today, with unmarried mothers having children by different men, and with the community, i.e., the State, looking after these children?
In her book, Stone writes that the goddess was the “patroness of sexual pleasure,” temples were houses for the “sacred sexual customs of the female religion,” and the unmarried mother was “worshipped.” Adultery, she says, was “glorified” and divorce and abortion easily obtained.[64]
Somewhere along the line, according to Stone and Marxist theory, the matriarchal paradise was invaded by races who worshipped male deities which they presented as superior to the goddesses of the conquered lands. Their “patriarchal” religion, family system and form of government gradually wiped out matriarchy. The Hebrews and then the Christians completed the subjugation of women, as a class system ruled by men developed in religious and secular life. So feminists reject the Bible and Christianity as devised by men to “maintain a male-dominated society.” Now, as St. Paul outlined in Romans, Chapter 1, rejecting Revelation and the natural law produces spiritual blindness and the loss of morals. So feminists, in their blindness, rationalized immorality as follows: if Christianity is a religion devised by scheming men, then the Decalogue can – and should – be rejected. Christian sexual ethics are only tools for men to control women’s bodies. Indeed, Ruether defines patriarchy as “the subordination of women’s bodies, sexuality and reproduction to male ownership and control.”[65]
The suppression of women’s paganism is equated with the suppression of women’s rights to “reproductive self-determination” and sexual autonomy, which supposedly had helped women to be independent. But the rejection of Christian morality by a small minority of women could not change the social order. It was only after feminism aligned itself with the Marxist revolution that it could change laws hindering sexual autonomy and its economic benefits.[66]
The Masonic-Communist tenet of absolute equality provided the theoretical foundation for the feminist destruction of morality. This false presumption of absolute equality ignores “the distinctive qualities which nature has bestowed on each sex”[67] and “the necessary hierarchy in the society of the family,”[68] which only “wilful blindness” or a “disastrous” and “utopian” attitude can ignore, said Pius XII.[69]
In The Ratzinger Report, Cardinal Ratzinger said this presumption entailed the rejection of the God-given roles for men and women inscribed in the laws of nature and the rupture of the “indissoluble bond between sexuality and motherhood.”[70] But, since “the language of nature is also the language of morality,”[71] women’s rejection of the natural law for atheistic, pagan ideals of womanhood has produced a worldwide crisis of morality.
Interestingly, religious feminists found a precedent for ignoring gender differences in Gnosticism. The Gnostics adopted the pagan belief in an androgynous male-female God and androgynous human beings. The difference between the sexes was considered a limitation to be overcome. Apocryphal Gnostic gospels claimed that Christ said to get rid of sexual differences to enter heaven.[72] Well, as Cardinal Ratzinger observed, today there is surgery to “liberate” those who, wanting to escape from “the slavery of nature,” “demand the right to be male or female at one’s will….”[73]
And for feminists who consider it “unjust” that only women give birth, he remarked that science now enables “the fatal rupture between sexuality and procreation,” giving us “procreation without sexuality”[74] (think, in vitro fertilization and surrogate motherhood). This produces the idea “that every form of sexuality is equivalent”. And as the Cardinal pointed out, pleasure becomes the only point of sexuality and thus a “right”.[75] As we know, what St. Paul calls a chastisement of God in Romans 1 is now inscribed as a “right” in laws that sanction homosexuality. So-called homosexual “marriages” are given the same social benefits as the traditional family. Perversity, including “trans-genderism” (to coin a word) is being added to sex education. Cardinal Ratzinger also observed, “Fecundity separated from marriage … turns from being a blessing … [to] a threat to … the ‘individual’s right to happiness’”. So institutionalized abortion “becomes another ‘right’”.[76] Clearly Communism has succeeded in overthrowing the Christian social order through feminism.
In 1876, Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore put the crusade for “women’s rights so-called,” in the same category as “moral shams,” “pious frauds” and “socialistic schemes which are so often undertaken … ostensibly in the name of religion and morality, but which … are subversive of morality and order, which are the offspring of fanaticism, and serve as a mask to hide the most debasing passions.”[77]
The Immaculate Heart of Mary
Feminism has attacked not only the religious and moral foundations of the family, the basic unit of society, but also the dignity and nature of woman herself. Pope Pius XI warned, “… if the woman descends from her truly regal throne to which she has been raised within … the home by means of the Gospel, she will soon be reduced to the old state of slavery (if not in appearance, certainly in reality) and become as among the pagans the mere instrument of man.”[78] This has happened.
It has always been the teaching of the Church, as expressed by Popes Leo XIII and Pius XII, that men and women are images of God and therefore of equal dignity, possessing the same rights for reciprocal affection and the interchange of duties; what is unlawful for women is unlawful for men also; and, says Pius XII, “it is impossible to uphold that the woman is in any way inferior.” “She is called … to collaborate with the man in the propagation and development of the human race,” and God has granted her “gifts of inestimable value” to carry out her “immense responsibilites” in “transmitting … the most intimate dispositions of soul, and qualities of the spiritual and moral orders which determine character.” These qualities are also an “indispensable contribution” to “social and cultural life,” and any civilization that has denigrated women by “misunderstanding” or “excluding” these qualities, has been “condemned” to “sterility and decline”.[79] Today we’re in the midst not of the decline, but of the fall of Western civilization.
The trouble with the feminists is that along with their faith they also lost their devotion to Mary. Rosemary Ruether has stated that her devotion to Mary “was somewhat less” than her devotion “to some far more powerful females”: the goddesses Isis, Athena and Artemis.[80] This proud blasphemous attitude has been the downfall of women. History shows that chivalry and respect for women flourished when men had a tender and filial devotion to Our Lady.
As the English scholar Jack Scarisbrick notes, prior to the Protestant Revolt in England, Mary had a prominent place in English religious life. This “tempered male authority and … asserted the dignity of womanhood.”[81] As Catholic history notes, because of the great devotion to Our Lady during feudal times and the Middle Ages, women of those days were held in greater esteem than in pagan Greece and Rome.[82] What do we have today? As women’s power increases, so do disrespect for them and assaults on women and children.
In 1941, Pius XII noted that, in Roman times, “women … fled disdainfully from the duties of motherhood, to give themselves rather to occupations, and to play a part till then reserved to men alone…. [D]ivorces multiplied, the family began to disintegrate, and womanly affections and behaviour deviated from the straight path of virtue…”. Christ came “to restore what paganism had overthrown” and to give us “the Christian concept of matrimony which St. Paul taught to his disciples.” The Pope lamented, “[In] our age there is blowing the ill wind of a rebirth of paganism.”[83]
Pope Pius said only God can solve the problems related to the role of woman, but He manifests Himself only to the humble and obedient. It is Mary, our supreme model in humility and obedience, who can direct the efforts to restore true values.[84] Pope Pius exclaimed:
If life reveals to what depths of vice and degradation woman can at times descend, Mary shows to what heights she can climb, in and through Christ, even to ascending above all other creatures. What civilization, what religion has ever raised to such heights the ideal of womanhood, or exalted it to such perfection? Modern humanism, laicism, Marxist propaganda … non-Christian cults, have nothing to offer which can even be compared with this vision … so glorious and so humble, so transcendent and [yet] so easily accessible.[85]God has twice confirmed publicly Pope Pius’ teaching that Mary is meant to lead the fight against the Revolution. The Mother of God appeared to the humble, uneducated Bernadette of Lourdes, whose family was pious, but very poor, exactly ten years (to the month) after the publication of The Communist Manifesto and a series of Communist uprisings across Europe.[86] As our model and Commander-in-Chief, she titled herself The Immaculate Conception, indicating our weapons: purity and obedience. St. Maximilian Kolbe said the title “Immaculate” refers not only to Mary’s absolute purity, but also to her perfect obedience. He founded the Militia Immaculatae to fight the Masons and other enemies of the Church by fostering in minds and hearts a sharing in her perfect obedience.[87]
The second time God sent Our Lady was at Fatima, just months before Russia became the launching pad for Communism’s destruction of Christian civilization. Lenin, the founder of the Bolsheviks who took over Russia, said, “I don’t care what becomes of Russia. To hell with it. All this is only the road to a World Revolution.”[88] Our Commander-in-Chief, who titled herself The Lady of the Rosary, greatly cares for Russia. She promised to save “that poor nation” through its Collegial Consecration to her Immaculate Heart. Consecration to Our Lady makes one Her property and She does not let the devil drag Her property to hell. The conversion of Russia will destroy the Masonic-Communist world order and will be the greatest public triumph of Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart. Our Lady has been disobeyed for over eighty years — and the triumph of Russia is evident all around us.
Our Lady of Fatima promised the world would have peace with the conversion of Russia, which will destroy all the satanic forces of Communism. A major sign that Communism is dead will be the collapse of feminism and the flowering of true Catholic womanhood, working for the restoration and spread of the Christian order. In 1919, Pope Benedict XV spoke of the “pressing need for the apostolate of the woman” in education and the betterment of the family for the good of society. He exclaimed:
It was said that the faithfulness of a woman brought back to the path of justice the husband who had gone astray: ‘the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the believing wife’ (1 Cor. 7:14). May it soon be possible to repeat of the whole of society that it returned to the path of salvation through the example, the teaching, through the mission of the Catholic woman.[89]
Pius XII called on Catholic women and girls to “clean” and “heal” the “great wound” in human society caused by Communism and materialism, and under God’s guidance, to restore “the unity of order” in which every element of society is given its rightful place, with God occupying the “very first” place. In this “stability of order,” he said, the world will disover the peace it ardently desires.[90]
Recall that in 1917, Pope Benedict XV blamed women’s abandonment of their family duties for upsetting the civil and domestic orders. Addressing his concern, Our Lady of Fatima’s plan for peace called for fidelity to the duties of one’s state in life. She also stressed the daily Rosary.
Seeking peace during World War I, Pope Benedict XV inserted the invocation, “Queen of Peace, pray for us” in the Litany of Loreto. Significantly, in this time of diabolical attack on the family, Pope John Paul II inserted the title Queen of the Family between Queen of the Most Holy Rosary and Queen of Peace. On his recent visit to Malta, Pope Benedict XVI mentioned this act of his predecessor and asked us to pray to Mary under the title Queen of the Family when seeking heavenly help for our loved ones.[91]
We have Our Lady’s promise that peace and order will be restored when the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the conqueror of all heresies[92], reigns triumphant over a world restored to purity and obedience to the will of its Creator. But she made clear this would happen only after we all do our part. Let us not look upon this as a chore, but as an inestimable privilege: a sweet invitation to help destroy the forces of Satan, save millions of souls, and bring about the triumph of Our Blessed Mother as Queen of Heaven and Earth.
ENDNOTES
1. Pope John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio, 22 November 1981, no. 2 (emphasis added).
2. Ibid., no. 15.
3. Allocution, 25 March 1942, in The Woman in the Modern World, ed. The Monks of Solesmes (Boston: Daughters of St. Paul, 1959), p. 88 (emphasis added).
4. Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical On Christian Marriage Arcanum, 10 February 1880, no. 10.
5. Allocution, 24 April 1943, Woman in the Modern World, p. 106.
6. Posted at quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quotes_by/vladimir+ilyich+lenin.
7. Leo XIII, nos. 13, 32. Note that in paragraph 13 and its accompanying footnote, the Pope also lists some early Socialist/Communist groups, the St.-Simonians, Fourierists and Phalansterians, who are mentioned in The Communist Manifesto: see Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, with an Introduction by William P. Fall (Belmont, Mass.: American Opinion, 1974), pp. 32, 34 (chap. 3 of the Manifesto itself).
8. Pages 24 (chap. 2), 36 (chap. 4).
9. Pope Pius XI, Encyclical On Atheistic Communism Divini Redemptoris, 19 March 1937, no. 19.
10. Ibid., no. 5.
11. Rob Sewell, “The Origins of Women’s Oppression,” 5 September 2001, www.marxist.com/origins-womens-oppression.htm (emphasis added).
12. See marxists.org/glossary/events/w/o.htm; internationalwomensday.com/about.asp.
13. Pius XI, no. 14 (emphases added).
14. Cf. Pius XII, Allocution, 21 October 1945, Woman in the Modern World, p. 127.
15. Pius XI, nos. 10-11 (emphases added).
16. Cf. ibid., no. 9 (emphases added).
17. Ibid., no. 11 (emphasis added).
18. Leo XIII, nos. 27-33 (emphasis added); Trent, sess. xxiv, can. 5, 7 (cited ibid., no. 33).
19. Cf. his letter to German women, 6 November 1953, Woman in the Modern World, p. 222.
20. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger with Vittorio Messori, The Ratzinger Report, trans. Salvator Attanasio and Graham Harrison (San Franciso: Ignatius Press, 1985), p. 93.
21. Cornelia R. Ferreira, “The Destructive Forces Behind Religious Feminism,” in Feminism v. Mankind, ed. Christine M. Kelly (Wicken, Milton Keynes, UK: Family Publications, 1990), p. 53. Cf. Sewell, ibid.
22. Cornelia R. Ferreira, “Isis and the Crisis of Morality,” in The Enemy Within: Radical Feminism in the Christian Churches, ed. Christine M. Kelly (Wicken, Milton Keynes, UK: Family Publications, 1992), p. 61.
23. Ibid.
24. Page 22 (chap. 2).
25. Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, trans. Alick West (1942), rev. (n.d.), chap. 2, sect. 4, posted at marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch02d.htm; cf. Father Manfred Hauke, Women in the Priesthood?, trans. David Kipp (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), pp. 30-31.
26. Page 24 (chap. 2).
27. Page 22.
28. Page 24 (emphases added).
29. Engels, ibid.; cf. Sewell, ibid.
30. Hauke, pp. 31, 35-36.
31. Page 22. For the “most advanced countries,” the Manifesto also stipulates “Free education for all children in public schools”: page 25 (chap. 2).
32. The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), s.v. “Masonry,” by Fr. Hermann Gruber (emphasis added).
33. Ferreira, “Isis”.
34. Engels, ibid.
35. Fall, pp. xviii-xx; cf. José María Cardinal Caro y Rodríguez, The Mystery of Freemasonry Unveiled, 2d ed. (Santiago: Society of the Good Press, 1957; reprint ed. Hawthorne, Calif.: Christian Book Club of America, 1971), pp. 181-82.
36. Cardinal Rodríguez, p. 237.
37. Fall, pp. xviii-xix; Catholic Encyclopedia, ibid.
38. Pope Benedict XV, Letter Natalis trecentesimi, 27 December 1917, Woman in the Modern World, p. 27 (emphases added).
39. Allocution, 11 September 1947, ibid., p. 163.
40. Ferreira, “Destructive Forces.”
41. Ibid. (emphasis added).
42. Ibid.
43. Cornelia R. Ferreira, The Feminist Agenda Within the Catholic Church (Toronto: Life Ethics Centre, 1987), pp. 4, 6, 9; id., The Emerging Feminist Religion (Toronto: Life Ethics Centre, 1989), note 47.
44. Babette Francis, “From Convent to Coven,” The Enemy Within, p. 115.
45. Ferreira, Feminist Agenda, pp. 4-5, 7-11. 46. Ibid., pp. 7-8.
47. Ferreira, “Destructive Forces”; Hauke, pp. 51-54.
48. Ferreira, Emerging Feminist Religion, pp. 4-5, 8 (emphasis added); Naomi R. Goldenberg, Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), pp. 4-5.
49. Pat Taylor, “Goddesses of their own Making,” Enemy Within, p. 107.
50. Cf. William Marra, “‘We Overcame their Traditions, we Overcame their Faith’,” The Latin Mass, January-February 1994, p. 14; Ratzinger Report, pp. 99-102; Hauke, pp. 60-62.
51. Allocution, 21 October 1919, Woman in the Modern World, p. 28.
52. Pope Pius XI, Encyclical On Christian Marriage Casti Connubii, 31 December 1930, nos. 27-29, 74 (emphases added).
53. Allocution, 26 October 1941, Woman in the Modern World, p. 70 (emphases added).
54. Father John G. Arintero, OP, The Mystical Evolution in the Development and Vitality of the Church, trans. Father Jordan Aumann, OP, 2 vols. (n.p.: B. Herder, 1949; reprint ed., Rockford, Ill.: Tan Books and Publishers, 1978), 1:313; cf. Pius XII, Allocution, 29 September 1957, Woman in the Modern World, p. 297.
55. Ferreira, Feminist Agenda, pp. 6-7; id., “Destructive Forces”; Marra, ibid.; Hauke, pp. 62-63.
56. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell Publishing Co. Inc., 1963).
57. Ferreira, “Destructive Forces”; Friedan, pp. 69, 351.
58. Paul Kurtz, ed., Humanist Manifestos I and II (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1973), pp. 13-14, 18-19, 21-23.
59. Ferreira, Emerging Feminist Religion, p. 2.
60. Friedan, pp. 338-39.
61. Ferreira, “Destructive Forces”.
62. Merlin Stone, When God was a Woman (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978).
63. Ferreira, “Isis”; Sewell, ibid.; Engels, ibid.
64. Ferreira, ibid.
65. Ibid.; cf. Sewell, ibid.; cf. Engels, ibid; cf. August Bebel, Woman and Socialism (1879), trans. Meta L. Stern (Hebe); reprint ed. (New York: Socialist Literature Co., 1910), posted at marxists.org/archive/bebel/1879/woman-socialism/index.htm. Bebel (Introduction) stated: “The Socialist Party is the only one that has made the full equality of women, their liberation from every form of dependence and oppression, an integral part of its program; not for reasons of propaganda, but from necessity. For there can be no liberation of mankind without social independence and equality of the sexes.”
66. Ferreira, “Isis”; id., “Destructive Forces”.
67. Pius XII, Allocution, 21 October 1945, Woman in the Modern World, p. 127.
68. Analytical Index, ibid., p. 22.
69. Pius XII, ibid.
70. Cardinal Ratzinger, pp. 84, 95.
71. Ibid., pp. 97-98.
72. Hauke, pp. 159-61, 251, 404-5.
73. Cardinal Ratzinger, p. 95.
74. Ibid., pp. 84, 95.
75. Ibid., p. 85.
76. Ibid., pp. 85-86.
77. James Cardinal Gibbons, The Faith of Our Fathers (Baltimore: The John Murphy Company, 1876; reprint ed., Rockford, Ill.: Tan Books and Publishers, 1980), p. 60.
78. Pius XI, Casti Connubii,no. 75.
79. Leo XIII, nos. 11, 14; Pius XII, Allocution, 29 September 1957. Cf. Pius XI, nos. 27-29, 76.
80. Christine Kelly and Valerie Riches, “The Bishops’ Dilemma,” Enemy Within, p. 13.
81. John Saward, “Thanks for the Feminine,” ibid., p. 124 (emphasis added).
82. Msgr. Edmund J. Goebel, Father Thomas J. Quigley, John E. O’Loughlin, Our Old World Background (River Forest, Ill.: Laidlaw Brothers, 1959), p. 224; cf. Pius XII, Allocution, 10 September 1941, Woman in the Modern World,p. 62.
83. Pius XII, ibid.
84. Allocution, 26 January 1956, ibid., p. 250.
85. Allocution, 29 September 1957.
86. Fall, pp. xviii-xix.
87. Ferreira, “Isis”.
88. Cited in “Communists: The Battle Over the Tomb,” Time, 24 April 1964. Also see quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quotes_by/vladimir+ilyich+lenin.
89. Allocution, 21 October 1919.
90. Allocution, 14 April 1939, Woman in the Modern World, p. 43.
91. “Pope Benedict XV Demands World Peace (May 5, 1917),” fatima.org/essentials/facts/PopeBenXV.asp; Father Matthew R. Mauriello, “Queen of Families,” campus.udayton.edu/mary/meditations/Feb98.html; Pope Benedict XVI, remarks at the Regina Cæli in Malta, April 18, 2010, www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/angelus/2010/documents/hf_ben-xvi_reg_20100418_floriana_en.html.
92. This title comes from the Divine Office. See Msgr. Joseph Clifford Fenton, “Our Lady and the Extirpation of Heresy,” in In Praise of Our Blessed Mother, ed. Msgr. Joseph Clifford Fenton and Father Edmond Darvil Benard (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1952), p. 231; cf. Cardinal Ratzinger, p. 105.
Article Homepage: Feminism: Russia’s Deadly Weapon Against the Family
