The Church's Opposition: Hiding in Plain Sight

The Catholic Thing

By Carrie Gress Resentment is a powerful thing. Marxist revolutionaries have fostered it in the heart of followers for over a century. Few are aware that envy and resentment are also at the heart of the feminist ideology. I've written previously about the power of the "Gospel of Discontent." Most believe feminism was some kind of spontaneous cultural spark necessary to recognize the humanity of women, unaware of its highly effective grooming first by socialists, then communists, and finally the New Left. The Marxists saw the ease with which they could manipulate the emotions of women to be a highly effective force for their communist revolution. Betty Friedan, credited with founding feminism's second wave with The Feminine Mystique, isn't widely known for her Marxist roots. I chronicle these in my book, The End of Woman, but it is thoroughly detailed by her friend Daniel Horowitz in Betty Friedan and the Making of "The Feminine Mystique." Friedan, like other feminists before her, particularly Margaret Sanger, was a master of hiding her real intentions. Friedan hid well her radical past. Sanger, decades before Friedan, learned from her lover, sexual radical Havelock Ellis, the importance of appearing as normal as possible. For example, Ellis advised Sanger to stop talking about abortion and to present herself as a devoted mother as she pushed for birth control. Meanwhile, behind their benign facades, both women stirred up discontent in women everywhere to promote their radical leftist agendas. Women took the bait. And not just secular women. Today, Catholic women contracept and abort at roughly the same rates as the rest of the population, despite the Catholic Church's steadfast prohibition of both. What shouldn't be surprising is that the main issues the Church faces today are related to women's fertility: contraception, abortion, IVF, and surrogacy, as well as to the wider problems facing the family: divorce, porn, and even homosexuality. Fatima visionary Sr. Lucia's warning that the final battle between the Church and Satan would be about the family rings truer today than ever before. Friedan's success inside Catholicism has had significant help from women inside the Church for several reasons. First, feminism has a built-in capacity to silence men, particularly those who are part of a patriarchy. Few priests or bishops want to split hairs about the role of women today when they know they will quickly be accused of wanting women to be doormats and married to wife-beating husbands. The left has been highly effective in crafting a vision of what those who oppose feminism look like, and few are up for the battle against that caricature. In light of this seemingly defenseless position, women who have adopted feminist tenets have become comfortable pushing their feminist vision because of the assurance that men - clergy, husbands, fathers, colleagues - won't push back. Second, there has long been a popular effort to blend Catholicism with feminism. Its lifeblood is the solitary mention Pope John Paul II made in Veritatis Splendor about "a new feminism," aided by the general belief that feminism is simply a movement to help women. Most are unaware that its corrosive philosophical roots are decidedly anti-Catholic. Anyone who has read Elizabeth Cady Stanton's anti-Christian Woman's Bible, Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex, or Kate Millett's Sexual Politics would be hard-pressed to say these foundational feminist texts have anything in common with the Polish pope's The Dignity of Woman. Feminism's broad appeal has created an army of those willing to fight for it everywhere, even in our churches. As the Gospel of Discontent and the Gospel of Christ battle it out, women wield the social advantage. Their resentment-driven desire to claim victimhood and, therefore, a special unspoken dispensation from the demands of family life, has created an internal kind of Marxist flywheel. The Marxists no longer have to fight the Church from the o...