Me, Myself, I

by Thomas A. Droleskey

The first feminist was named Eve. The knot of her prideful disobedience bound the human race to death. It was not until the New Eve's perfect fiat, made at the Annunciation, which feast we celebrate tomorrow, March 25, 2006, that Eve's knot was untied, making it possible for the Gates of Heaven that had been closed by Adam's sin to be re-opened when the New Adam, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity Who became Man in Our Lady's virginal and immaculate womb, redeemed us on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday. Our Lady untied the knot of Eve's prideful disobedience. Our Lord paid back the debt of sin by permitting Himself to be nailed to the wood of a tree in atonement for the first Adam's having stretched his hand out to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Pride has been the chief of the deadly sins from the time of the Fall from Grace in the Garden of Eden to the present. It will be with us until Our Lord comes in glory at the end of time to judge the living and the dead. Although Baptism wipes away Original Sin from our souls, flooding them with Baptismal Innocence, that is, the very inner life of the Blessed Trinity by means of sanctifying grace, we still suffer from the vestigial after-effects of Original Sin. That is, just as a physical disease or affliction can leave us disabled for the rest of our lives--or considerably weakened for a long period of time, so is it the case that Original Sin and each one of our own Actual Sins darkens our intellects and weakens our wills, inclining us all the more to sin. Each one of our sins makes it less possible for us to grow in virtue and to scale the heights of personal sanctity, passing from the Purgative Stage of the interior life through the Illuminative Stage to the Way of Perfection. We must be assiduous about making reparation for our sins by offering up all of the pains and sufferings and injustices and humiliations we suffer in this passing life--along with our prayers and whatever merits we earn for our performance of indulgenced acts--to be offered up to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart as her consecrated slaves. We are to die loving God as He has revealed Himself through His true Church more than we love ourselves and our disordered desires.

Contemporary feminism is but one expression of pride. It is an aspect of the narcissistic selfism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who once wrote that there was nothing more wonderful for him to experience than his own visage in a mirror. Rousseau's radical egalitarianism, which rejected all social distinctions based on nature and function founder in the Order of Creation and in the Order of Redemption, helped to bring forth the French Revolution and its assault upon all legitimately constituted authority in the Church and in the world. Women were taught that their place was besides the men at the barricades, that they were to be "liberated" from the responsibilities of home and hearth, especially those of child-rearing. The feminism of the French Revolution paved the way for the feminism of Bolshevism, characterized in pithy manner by Pope Pius XI in Divini Redemptoris on March 19, 1937:

Refusing to human life any sacred or spiritual character, such a doctrine logically 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. 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. Finally, the right of education is denied to parents, for it is conceived as the exclusive prerogative of the community, in whose name and by whose mandate alone parents may exercise this right.

Pope Pius XI's pungent analysis of Bolshevism's link to feminism demonstrates just how clearly the errors of Russia inform practically every single aspect of our own society. Women are convinced from their tenderest years that they must "do" something other than being a wife and a mother in order to fulfill themselves, in order to "empower" themselves. The responsibility for the education of children has been shifted out of the home to the day-care center before the ideological indoctrination that is public schooling. Children, being denied the natural love and attention that they expect to receive from their mothers, become virtual orphans who begin to look for love in all of the wrong places, coming to accept as absolute truths the ideological brainwashing their receive from the relativists and positivists and utilitarians who run day-care centers and who teach in the state-run detention centers known as public schools. Believe me, I saw the spiritual and emotional wreckage of the abandonment of children by mothers who went to work because they wanted to go to work in order to acquire power and prestige for themselves.

Obviously, the selfism that is at the foundation of feminism has influenced many men, who feel free to abandon their wives and families in order to live lives of unrepentant sin and selfishness. The contemporary feminism spawned by the French Revolution and its influence upon men received a tremendous impetus from the work of the penultimate selfist, Margaret Sanger, whose support of contraception made it possible for men and women to put themselves over the spiritual and temporal interests of their children, thus producing the Masonic dream of the broken family that would be cared for by the agencies of the State, which would shape the children according to their own secular agendas. Broken homes led to the feminization of poverty and to grave emotional problems for maladjusted children who, successively, had to learn to adapt to the step-father or the step mother and now have to learn how to adjust to situations where their "parents" are people steeped in unnatural perversion.

As I noted in No Exceptions to Catholicism, Not One, Ever two days ago, contraception is one of the key sociological elements that led to efforts to decriminalize baby-killing in the 1960s. Contraception has made it possible for married women of child-bearing years to "empower" themselves while they deny God's plain injunction:

Increase and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth. (Genesis 1:28)

Contraception has therefore made it possible for women of child-bearing years to enter the corporate world, which would not even exist if the world was organized according to the principles of Catholic Social Teaching, thus acquiring masculine characteristics of harshness and competitiveness that they pass down to whatever daughters they permit to enter the world. The entrance of large numbers of married women of child-bearing years into the workplace has made it more difficult for men, who are meant to be the principal breadwinners of their families, to discharge their responsibilities, forcing them to become wage slaves in menial jobs--and thus forcing, in so many instances, the wives of such men who want to stay at home to care for and to educate their children into the workplace so as to help support the family and to pay the confiscatory taxes that are imposed upon them by all levels of government. The family is thus wrecked by the selfist evils of Modernity, creating a world where "accidental" children can be dispatched because they do not "fit into" a mother's plans for her own "empowerment."  The now retired Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said this quite explicitly in the case of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey in 1992:

Abortion us customarily chosen as a unplanned response to the consequence of unplanned activity or to the failure of conventional birth control. . . . To eliminate the issue of reliance that easily, however, one would need to limit cognizable reliance to specific instances of sexual activity. But to do this would be simply to refuse the face the fact that for two decades of economic and social relationships, people have organized their intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail. The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.

Utilitarianism has become the yardstick by which the "developed" countries of the world measure the worth of one human life. Justice O'Connor, joined in the Casey case by Associate Justices Anthony Kennedy and David Souter, plainly demonstrated the consequences of contraception: the reduction of human conjugal intimacy to a cost/benefit analysis of access to "participation" in the economic life of the nation. In other words, Me, Myself, I.

Well, as is the case with the other multi-faceted and inter-related errors Russia in the world, which are really the anti-Incarnational errors of Modernity itself, feminism has influenced the Catholic Church in her human elements in the past forty years. The older orders of consecrated religious women have been devastated by feminism, promoted by the "psychological" approaches of Carl Jung and Karl Rogers. Dr. William Coulson, once a disciple of Karl Rogers, wrote an article in Latin Mass magazine about a dozen years ago now to explain how he helped to destroy the Immaculate Heart of Mary nuns by holding "group sessions" with the sisters to encourage them to express their grievances against one another. Dr. Coulson brought to the surface grudges that had been offered up throughout the course of the years but never entirely forgotten. Bitter enmities were thus created in convents, leaving some sisters in great emotional distress.

The influence of feminism in the world was such in the convents  of consecrated religious women that it was a short step from an emphasis on self, characterized by the abandonment of the traditional religious habit (in the name of "relating" better to the contemporary world, you understand), to the embrace of various aspects of so-called "New Age spirituality," including witchcraft itself. The evidence for this at this point is beyond refutation. All manner of pagan rituals, which the missionaries of the Church sought to eradicate whenever they encountered the peoples who practiced them to convert them to the true Faith and thus the true worship of the true God through the Immemorial Mass of Tradition, are now practiced in convents and universities and colleges and even in famous mission churches, such as Mission San Juan Capistrano, to the utter horror of Blessed Junipero Serra, who made many sacrifices to convert the native peoples of California from such demonic practices to the true Faith.

Feminism has also found an entry into the life by means of the Protestant notion of egalitarianism that is enshrined in the Novus Ordo Missae. The distinction fostered in the Immemorial Mass of Tradition and in each of the Eastern rites of the Catholic Church between the sanctuary and the nave of a church has been obliterated in most, although not all, diocesan churches and the chapels of religious men and women and the chapels of so-called Catholic colleges and universities. The sanctuary, which is the preserve of the priest, who acts in the person of the Chief Priest and Victim of every Mass, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, is meant to convey the timelessness of eternity itself. It is where the Sacrifice of the Cross is re-presented in an unbloody manner at the hands of a sacerdos, conveying also a foretaste of the eternal glories of Heaven itself.

The obliteration of the distinction between the sanctuary and the nave of the church, symbolized by the removal of the altar rail and the design of newer church buildings (and the wreckovation of older ones) to convey a sense of egalitarianism between the sacerdotal, hierarchical priesthood of the ordained priest and the common priesthood of the members of the lay faithful that they have by means of their Baptism to unite their prayers and intentions with those of the alter Christus during the Mass. Once the preserve of the priest--and those who were given special permission by the Church to serve as the extension of his consecrated hands, which are the hands of Christ Himself during the Mass, the sanctuary has been invaded by an influx of lay people, including women, thus creating a sense of the Faith that is contrary to what Our Lord Himself instituted and is very powerfully symbolic of the prevailing heresies of egalitarianism and feminism in the midst of the world.

Women, frequently attired in clothing befitting men and/or in immodest clothing, have been invited to serve as lectors and extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist. Virtual "concelebrations" have taken place, sometimes at the encouragement of bishops themselves, with women, dressed in albs, standing around a priest as he attempts to consecrate bread and wine into the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of the Divine Redeemer. And women have been permitted for twelve years now to serve at the altar, thereby making "legitimate" an abuse that existed in many places in the United States and the world prior to Pope John Paul II's granting permission for this abominable novelty in April of 1994. The feminization of the sanctuary was thus made complete, which is when I, who worked with one bishop and several prominent "conservative" priests to try to stop the "permission" from being granted, understood that any reform of the Novus Ordo Missae was useless. It bred the novelties I believed, quite wrongly could be "stopped" and "reversed."

Why are altar girls wrong? Because one who serves at the altar serves, as noted above, an extension of the hands of the priest, who acts in persona Christi. Our Lord came as a male. He was made incarnate as a man, a male, in Our Lady's virginal and immaculate womb by the power of the Holy Ghost at the Annunciation. Those who serve as the altar must therefore be men, males. It this that simple. And the Church has preferred that young boys, symbolic of Our Lord's virginity and the pure nature of the Sacrifice He made of Himself to the Father in Spirit and in Truth on the wood of the Holy Cross, serve at the altar in order to foster vocations to the Holy Priesthood. Men of any age may serve, true. However, the Church, traditionally, has preferred young boys so that the priesthood they serve in the sanctuary may be perpetuated.

The Novus Ordo Missae creates an atmosphere that is not conducive to the honor and glory that are due the Blessed Trinity and conveys images that reinforce the trends of the day rather than uplifting our souls to the love Our Lord exhibited on the wood of the Holy Cross and to the glories of Heaven itself. Leaving aside the matter of the deficient, Protestantized Collects and the false representations made by members of the Consilium that planned this synthetic concoction, which have been reviewed in GIRM Warfare and in endless articles on this site, placing our children anywhere near the Cranmer "table" and the proliferation of lay men and women into the sanctuary during the offering Holy Mass is injurious to their immortal souls.

The Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer, who founded the Society of John Mary Vianney in Campos, Brazil, wrote about the harm of the Novus Ordo Missae to Pope Paul VI in 1969 before its implementation:

After a close examination of the Novus Ordo Missae, which will enter into use on November 30 next, and after having prayed and reflected a great deal, I consider that it is my duty, as a Catholic priest and bishop, to lay before Your Holiness my anguish of conscience, and to formulate, with the piety and confidence that a son owes to the Vicar of Christ, the following request.

The Novus Ordo Missae shows, by its omissions, and by the changes that it has brought to the Ordinary of the Mass, as well as by a good number of the general rules that describe the understanding and nature of the new Missal in its essential points, that it does not express, as it ought to do the theology of the Holy Sacrifice as established by the Holy Council of Trent in its XXII session. The teaching of the simple catechism cannot overcome this fact. I attach below the reasons that, in my opinion, justify this conclusion.

The pastoral reasons that could, perhaps, be invoked, initially, in favor of the new structure of the Mass, cannot make us forget the doctrinal arguments that point in the opposite direction. Furthermore, they do not seem to be reasonable. The changes that prepared the Novus Ordo have not helped to bring about an increase in the Faith and the piety of the faithful. To the contrary, they remain very disturbed, with a confusion that the Novus Ordo has increased, for it has encouraged the idea that nothing is unchangeable in the Holy Church, not even the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

Moreover, as I indicate in the attached reasons, the Novus Ordo not only fails to inspire fervor, but to the contrary, diminishes the Faith in central truths of the Catholic life, such as the Real Presence of Jesus in the Most Holy Sacrament, the reality of the propitiatory Sacrifice, the hierarchical Priesthood.

I hereby accomplish an imperious duty in conscience by demanding, humbly and respectfully, that Your Holiness might deign, by a positive act that eliminates every doubt, to authorize us to continue using the Ordo Missae of Saint Pius V, whose effectiveness in bringing about the spread of Holy Church and an increase in the fervor of priests and faithful has been proven, as Your Holiness reminded us with so much unction.

I am convinced that Your Holiness’s fatherly kindness will bring to an end the perplexities that have risen in my heart of a priest and bishop.

Prostrate at Your Holiness’ feet, in humble obedience and filial piety, I implore you Apostolic Benediction.

The chief exorcist of Rome, Father Gabriele Amorth, noted in a 30 Days interview last year that the new Rite of Baptism and the new Rite of Exorcism suffer from the same problems as the Novus Ordo Missae: a sense of the Faith that is decidedly not Catholic:

The Second Vatican Council asked that some texts be revised. Disobeying this command, they set about re-writing them completely with no thought for the danger of making things worse instead of better. So many rites came off badly from this mania to throw out the old and start from scratch, as if the Church to date had always conned us and as if only now the time had at last come of the great geniuses, the supertheologians, the super-biblists and the super-liturgists who know what the right thing is for the Church. This is a lie: the last Council simply asked that the texts be revised, not destroyed. The Rite of Exorcism, for example, should have been corrected, not re-written. It contained prayers born of 12 centuries of experience. Before cancelling prayers which are so old and which proved for centuries to be so effective, we should think long and hard. But they did not. All of us exorcists in trying out the prayers of the new ad interim Rite have proved that they are totally ineffective. But then again, the Rite of Baptism of children came off worse, too. It was totally re-worked so that exorcism against Satan has been all but eliminated. Yet, this always had such great importance for the Church that it was called the exorcism minor. Paul VI also publicly protested against this new Rite. The new Rite of Benediction is not as good now. I read every line of it, all of its 1,200 pages and every reference has been removed to the fact that the Lord must protect us from Satan and the angels must protect us from attack by the Devil. They removed all the prayers for the benediction of homes and schools. Everything used to be blessed and protected but, today, we have no further protection from the Devil. We no longer have any defences or even prayers against him. Jesus himself taught us a prayer of deliverance in the Our Father: ‘Deliver us from the Evil One’, ‘Deliver us from Satan’. This has been erroneously translated so that we pray: ‘Deliver us from evil’. The inference is generic evil whose origin we know nothing about. Yet, the evil we were taught how to fight by Our Lord Jesus Christ is a real person – Satan.

The proliferation of lay men and women into the sanctuary offenses the sensus Fidei, which is an offense to God Who has given us the Faith. Our Lady did not seek to "empower" herself. As the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen noted, if anyone was worthy to say "Hoc est Enim Corpus Meam" it was Our Lady. Who else gave Our Lord His Sacred Humanity but Our Lady? The very Body and Blood that was united hypostatically to His Sacred Humanity at the moment of the Incarnation came from Our Lady's body and blood. She accepted in humility God's Holy Will, being ready to suffer intense pains as her Divine Son paid back in the Sacred Humanity with which she clothed Him the blood debt of sin that was owed to Him in His Infinity as God. She was not, however, present at the Last Supper when the Apostles, including Judas Iscariot, were ordained to the fullness of the priesthood that is the episcopate.

Our Lady was ready to accept the Sword of Sorrow, prophesied by the aged Simeon when she as purified in the Temple, seven times as the price of becoming the Mother of God and our own mother by means of her participating perfectly in her Divine Son's Redemptive Act on the wood of the Holy Cross. God exalted Our Lady by preserving her from all stain of Original and Actual sin at the moment of her conception and thus choosing her for His own Mother and to be our Co-Redemptrix, the Mediatrix of all graces. She did not exalt herself. Our Lady's humility and self-denial is thus the model for all women, not the empowerment and self-aggrandizement sought by feminists. Our Lady's humility and spirit of self-denial inspired the great women saints in the history of the Church. Look at Saint Bernadette Soubirous or Saint Catherine Laboure for any trace or hint of a desire for "empowerment." Indeed, Saint Catherine Laboure's incorrupt body stiffened when an effort was made to "modernize" her habit in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, making impossible for the feminists to change her traditional habit. Neither great visionary was concerned about having any other role to play in the Church than to serve her humbly doing menial things for the honor and glory of God. How Pope Benedict XVI would do well to consider the lives of these great saints rather than pander to feminism's false spirit by seeking find ways to "include" women more in the liturgical life of the Catholic Church.

Thus, the decision by the Most Reverend Paul Loverde, the Bishop of Arlington, Virginia, whose persecution of Father James Haley is well known, to permit altar girls in his diocese at the same time he gave "permission" for two indult Masses in his diocese comes as no surprise. It had long been known that the Diocese of Arlington, which is not as "conservative" as its reputation, would make this diabolical trade-off. Loverde's predecessor, the late Bishop John Keating, forbade both altar girls and the Mass of Tradition. It was simply a matter of time before the trade-off was made by his predecessor. Thus it is that "permission" has been granted for that which we need no permission at all, the Mass of Tradition, in two places, Front Royal and Alexandria, Virginia, on Sundays only while altar girls may be used in whatever parishes in the Diocese of Arlington that want them (some priests, I am informed, have stated already that they will not have altar girls in their parishes in the Diocese of Arlington). The Mass of Tradition, which was offered in a sanctuary that was the reserve of the priest and those other males chosen to be the extension of Christ's hands, is placed on a level of equality with a novelty that has further destroyed the sensus fidei and it thus offensive to God as it enshrines the diabolical spirit of feminism itself.

The "indult" offering of the Traditional Latin Mass, though it makes concessions to the unjust and illicit conditions imposed on its offering by the Holy See in October of 1984 that fly in the face of the binding nature of Pope Saint Pius V's Quo Primum, might serve as a "bridge" for the priests who offer it and the faithful who assist at it in the Diocese of Arlington to find their way to the fullness of Tradition without compromise at Saint Athanasius Church in Vienna Virginia. It is there that the Mass is offered according to the fullness of the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church before the pre-revolutionary changes that were made in November of 1955 and went into effect in 1956, in Vienna, Virginia, offered by Father Ronald Ringrose. Perhaps some of those who will be introduced to Tradition for the first time (or re-introduced to it after a long time) will find their way to Saint Athanasius, where the fullness of the worship due God and the fullness of the Catholic Faith are offered without compromise to Catholics. How tragic it is that the Mass of Tradition, limited to two places once a month, must be linked to a novelty that demeans women while it reaffirms the feminization of the sanctuary and the emasculation of the priesthood, as Father James McLucas wrote about eight years ago in Latin Mass magazine three years before he became that journal's editor-in-chief.

Ironically, the solution for the seepage of feminism into the Catholic Church rests in the Successor of Saint Peter obeying a women, that is, the Blessed Mother herself. The Holy Father can put an end to the spread of all of the errors of Russia, which are the anti-Incarnational errors of Modernity, by simply consecrating Russia to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart with all of the world's bishops. Obedience to Our Lady's Fatima Message will produce submissiveness and humility in the souls of Catholic women everywhere, who will want at that point to wear their chapel veils as a symbol of their own subordination to the Our Lord, who is the Spouse of His Mystical Bride, Holy Mother Church. There will be no more talk of "empowerment" and "ministry." There will be no more talk of "Me, Myself, I." There will only be talk of imitating Our Lady, who said, "Be it done unto Me according to Thy Word."

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Scholastica, pray for us.

Saint Monica, pray for us.

Saint Barbara, pray for us.

Saint Brigid of Kildare, pray for us.

Saint Bridget of Sweden, pray for us.

Saint Bibiana, pray for us.

Saint Lucy, pray for us.

Saint Agnes, pray for us.

Saint Agatha, pray for us.

Saint Catherine of Sweden, pray for us.

Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, pray for us.

Saint Elizabeth of Portugal, pray for us.

Saint Catherine Laboure, pray for us.

Saint Bernardette Soubirous, pray for us.

Saint Maria Goretta, pray for us.

Saint Juliana Falconeri, pray for us.

Saint Margaret of Scotland, pray for us.

Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, pray for us.

Saint Catherine of Alexandria, pray for us.

Saint Therese Lisieux, pray for us.

Saint Teresa of Avila, pray for us.

Saint Rose of Lima, pray for us.

Saint Rose Philippine Duchesne, pray for us.

Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, pray for us.

Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, pray for us.

Saint Genevieve, pray for us.

Saint Veronica, pray for us.

Saint Clare of Assisi, pray for us.

Saint Louise de Marillac, pray for us.

Saint Jane Frances de Chantal, pray for us.

Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, pray for us.

Blessed Jacinta, pray for us.

Blessed Francisco, pray for us.

Sister Lucia, pray for us.