by Carrie Gress
The Anti-Mary Exposed
THE ANTI-MARY
EXPOSED
Rescuing the Culture From Toxic Femininity
Carrie Gress
TAN Books
Charlotte, North Carolina
Copyright © 2019 Carrie Gress
All rights reserved. With the exception of short excerpts used in critical review, no part of this work may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in any form whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible—Second Catholic Edition (Ignatius Edition), copyright © 2006 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture texts marked NABRE are taken from the New American Bible, revised edition © 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, D.C. and are used by permission of the copyright owner. All rights reserved. No part of the New American Bible may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
Scripture texts marked DV are taken from the Douay-Rheims.
Cover image: The Immaculate Conception, oil on canvas, (1767-1768), Giovannia Battista Tiepolo. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. Image collage by Caroline Green.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018966731
ISBN: 978-1-5051-1026-5
Published in the United States by
TAN Books
Charlotte, NC 28241
PO Box 410487
www.TANBooks.com
Printed in the United States of America
For my sisters, who have taught me the true
and beautiful meaning of sisterhood
Mary Boldy
Jill Faherty
Michelle Gress
Danielle Andrews
CONTENTS
Introduction
Part I The Long Battle
1 Erasing Mary
2 Satan’s Point of Entry: The Malcontent Heart
3 Goddess Worship Is Afoot
Part II Anti-Mary, Inc.
4 The Big Lie: Changing Human Nature
5 The Anti-Marian Architects
6 The New Matriarchy: Fashionable Dictators
Part III Mary, the Antidote
7 The True Mother
8 Fruit and Content
9 Understanding Mary’s Beauty
Part IV Modern Women and Mary
10 Imitating Mary
11 Six Ways to Combat the Anti-Mary
12 Helping the Walking Wounded
Appendix: Prayers to Combat the Anti-Mary
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
Women have been a mystery since Adam encountered Eve. But sometime over the last fifty years, a dark change has taken place in the lives of women and the men who love them. There is much confusion today about what it means to be a woman and even more confusion about how to treat them. The definitions of womanhood seem as numerous as there are people, with each woman trying to work out for herself who she is and how she ought to live her life. Meanwhile, men live in a constant state of shadowboxing, trying to stay in sync with the new progressive demands of womanhood.
Most of us, however, don’t know the full story of the battle lines drawn in the 1960s that form the backdrop of what women think about themselves today. It is a story that is told by the victors—as most history is—where the events of the last fifty years unfolded as something chic, empowering, glamorous, important, and progressive. Or so goes the narrative. The reality, however, is something quite different. The clues, dropped like crumbs, can be seen along the way, though hastily covered up so that few can see the full underbelly of the movement.
One such crumb came from the early 1970s. Twelve (not an insignificant number) highly educated, upper class women sat around a table in New York City and chanted this “litany” to express what they wanted to see happen in the world:
“Why are we here today?” the chairwoman asked.
“To make revolution,” they answered.
“What kind of revolution?” she replied.
“The Cultural Revolution,” they chanted.
“And how do we make Cultural Revolution?” she demanded.
“By destroying the American family!” they answered.
“How do we destroy the family?” she came back.
“By destroying the American Patriarch,” they cried exuberantly.
“And how do we destroy the American Patriarch?” she probed.
“By taking away his power!”
“How do we do that?”
“By destroying monogamy!” they shouted.
“How can we destroy monogamy?”
“By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution, abortion and homosexuality!” they resounded.1
These women had a very clear goal in mind and became the vanguard to what would become the women’s liberation movement. Among them, perhaps, there were those who doubted they would succeed, but for those of us looking back, we know they succeeded. What they wanted—to promote “promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution, abortion and homosexuality”—has come to pass quite thoroughly in our culture today.
How is it, then, that the women’s movement became such an unwieldy force that demolished so decisively the moral and social structures of American society? While many have suggested that it was “the sisterhood” that pulled radical feminists together, their grassroots effort cannot explain all of their success. The stories of the era tell of division and discord among second-wave feminist women and of heated debates over such things as Cosmopolitan’s exploitation of women, lesbianism, and the politics of the group’s leadership, which all threatened the project. That is, until they all found one topic to which they could hitch their wagons: abortion.
Sue Ellen Browder, author of Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement2 and former employee at Cosmopolitan, said that when she worked at the magazine, she regularly fabricated stories about fictional women known as the Cosmo Girl. “I could make her into anything I wanted her to be—a doctor, lawyer, judge, even a high-priced call girl—but there were two things she could not be if she was going to be glamorous, sophisticated, and cool: a virgin or a mother.”3
Second-wave feminism made it clear that children were the enemy, preventing women from fulfilling their dreams. Thus, abortion became a necessity and was legalized in 1973 as the Vietnam War was coming to an end. Fatalities of that war—58,220 US servicemen total—were quickly dwarfed by this new kind of killing, mothers killing their own children (sixty million and counting; three thousand daily in the US alone). Today, abortion is by far the leading cause of death in the United States annually, significantly outpacing heart disease and cancer. It kills more than the equivalent of total US fatalities in Vietnam every three weeks.
What happens, then, when you have generations of people that have willfully killed their own children through abortion? The medievals were against abortion because it takes an innocent life, but also because they knew it was mortally damaging to the human soul of those who engaged in it. It isn’t just a child that dies in an abortion, but something in the mother and the father and the whole family that dies as well.
As St. Thomas Aquinas said, bonum est diffusivum sui, the good spreads itself out. Similarly, evil spreads itself out. The grave evil of abortion has reached into every area of familial life and left society morally threadbare. Our news feed confirms this daily with headlines like “Abortion Activists Kill Baby Jesus in Graphic Abortion on Virgin Mary Outside Catholic Church,”4 “Colorado Woman Killed Newborn Baby and Tossed It on Neighbor’s Deck,”5 or Teen Vogue’s “Anal
Sex: What You Need to Know.” The layers of confusion, twisted thinking, decadence, sacrilege, and viciousness descend ever-deeper with each passing day. Rage, obscenity, sexual license, nudity, erasing of gender differences, and the cheapening of life have all become commonplace in the public square. Women haven’t just listed a bit to the wayward side of the moral compass; they shattered the compass. Almost overnight, our once pro-life culture became pro-lifestyle, returning to an epicurean paganism that embraces everything that feels good. Like a wildfire blowing through dry tinder, these dramatic changes burned through the lives of millions and millions of women, men, and children, with little to nothing to stop it.
Outside Influence
The scale and scope of the evil we see in our culture begs us to ask: could there be something behind this? Are there outside pressures, “like a roaring lion, seeking some one to devour” (1 Pt 5:8), that have been influencing humanity, particularly women, over the last five decades? Paul Kengor, in his book Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left has Sabotaged Family and Marriage, lays out the political and intellectual pieces that have led to the destruction of the family. He concludes at one point, however, when talking about the influence communists and progressives have had upon young people through universities, that there has to be more to the story than just rhetoric. “Why do people in our universities fall so easily for this vapid claptrap so contrary to their human nature?” he asks. “Their impressionable youth alone is not a sufficient explanation.”6 Kengor makes clear that the pieces just don’t add up to the sum of their parts—there must be more to it.
Bishop Robert Barron concludes something similar about the violence and dramatic loss of life in the twentieth century—the bloodiest century ever. The auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles says:
Look at the twentieth century, bloodiest on record, no question about that. The number of people killed for ideological purposes and warfare was the worst ever. Can you explain that entirely on psychological or political categories? It just seems comically inadequate to the reality. To say that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, et cetera. … are simply explicable politically or psychologically? I don’t know. There is something about the pervasiveness of violence and the destruction of life in the twentieth century that has all the marks of the Murderer from the beginning.7
Something beyond human vice, Bishop Barron concludes, must be behind the bloodshed of the twentieth century. The marks of the devil are all there: bloodshed, extinguishing of life, disunity, and confusion.
Upon reflection, seeing the demonic source behind the geopolitical death and destruction of the last century is relatively easy. But is there, similarly, a uniquely malevolent source promoting abortion and the new behavior that women have fallen into, wittingly or not? Just asking the question in this context almost forces the conclusion that there must be something more than simple human vice behind the fact that millions of women have betrayed the most sacred and fundamental of relationships, that of mother and child. The first two parts of this book provide the evidence and argument supporting that conclusion and reveal the hidden identity and manifestations of this insatiable anti-Marian spirit targeting women today.
The changes that we have seen over the last half-century go well beyond effective teaching, psychology, politics, and fancy marketing. Yes, all of these have played a role in influencing our culture, but there is most certainly another actor involved in the deconstruction of the family. Yes, like Bishop Barron sees in the twentieth century, the marks of extinguishing life, disunity, and confusion are there, but there is something new that seems to be pointed directly at the heart and soul of women. The attack has been directed at the very areas where women are able to reflect the love, goodness, and likeness of the Virgin Mary: in their virginity and motherhood.
In addition to the direct attack on the Virgin Mother and those who follow her model of womanhood, there has also been a significant rise in the occult and pagan goddess worship among women. Basic witchcraft items can now be purchased at places like Sephora and Target, and tarot card reading, astrologers, and psychics are common in our cities and smaller towns. National calls to put hexes upon politicians are no longer unusual, nor is children’s entertainment that engages in the subtler nuances of witchcraft. Even the 2018 Thanksgiving issue of the Washington Post Magazine prominently featured witchcraft and satanic rituals as normal avenues for those seeking meaning in life.8
In the wake of these cultural trends lie the powerful and heart-wrenching realities of those attached to women under the anti-Marian spell: husbands wondering what happened to their wives who have left them for a different life (or another woman), fathers wondering what has happened to their daughters, and children wondering what has happened to their mothers.
To say that there is ample evidence for the argument contained in this book would be an understatement. Two years of research have provided story after story of the terrible things women are doing to themselves and to their husbands, children, and grandchildren: stories like the woman who stabbed her twenty-month-old granddaughter and then baked her in the oven, the protestors wearing t-shirts that say “Men Are Trash,” the baby gender reveal party that served red jelly-filled donuts to announce the parents’ decision to abort, pastors blessing abortion clinics, or Cate Blanchet’s announcement that her vagina is her moral compass. The examples are legion. We have largely grown numb to them, assuming that this is just abnormal behavior from women on the fringes of society. And yet these are not all done by the crazy, psychotic, or forgotten underbelly. These kinds of atrocities are often taking place and encouraged in some form in our homes, schools, hospitals, and even churches by normal and everyday women.
This book, although it engages in the heavy battles at hand, will not end with the anti-Mary having the last word. Gratefully, we have the real Mary who is present in the world, in our lives, and who is capable of the miraculous. With an unparalleled track record, our spiritual mother is far from distant, superficial, or saccharine. She is the true model of authentic femininity and offers us her assistance through all of life’s demands, struggles, frustrations, and tears. She brings clarity, healing, peace, joy, and grace wherever she is invited. She offers us the key to unlock the confusion about what it means to be women and what we need to do to find the true happiness that our souls crave.
____________________
1Mallory Millett, “Marxist Feminism’s Ruined Lives,” Front Page, September 1, 2014, http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/240037/marxist-feminisms-ruined-lives-mallory-millett.
2Sue Ellen Browder, Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2015).
3Sue Ellen Browder, phone conversation with author, August 14, 2018.
4Steven Ertelt, “Abortion Activist Kill Baby Jesus in Graphic Abortion on Virgin Mary Outside Catholic Church,” Life News, March 15, 2013, https://www.lifenews.com/2017/03/15/abortion-activists-kill-baby-jesus-in-graphic-abortion-on-virgin-mary-outside-catholic-church/.
5Katherine Lam, “Colorado Woman Killed Newborn Baby and Tossed It on Neighbor’s Deck,” Fox News, March 21, 2018, https://www.foxnews.com/us/colorado-woman-killed-newborn-baby-and-tossed-it-on-neighbors-deck-police-say.
6Paul Kengor, Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left has Sabotaged Family and Marriage (Washington, DC:WND Books, 2016), 138.
7Robert Barron, “Reflections on the Devil,” Word on Fire, video, July 25, 2012, https://www.wordonfire.org/resources/video/reflections-on-the-devil/248/.
8Kate Warren, “Spellbound,” Washington Post Magazine, November 18, 2018, 32–39.
PART I
The Long Battle
CHAPTER 1
Erasing Mary
“I will place enmity between you and the woman.”
—Genesis 3:15
“We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has gone through,” said the archbishop of Krakow, Karol Wojtyla, in 1
978. “I do not think that wide circles of American society or wide circles of the Christian community realize this fully.” The future pope continued somberly, “We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel versus the anti-Gospel.”1
Archbishop Wojtyla, by comparing the Church to an anti-Church and the Gospel to the anti-Gospel, was picking up on the ancient thread of Christ and the antichrist. Pulling on the thread of Genesis 3:15, the archbishop could have easily added to this list a confrontation between Mary and the anti-Mary. But just what would this be, and would it be related to Our Lady and culture today? The answer is intimately tied up with who Mary of Nazareth is.
Antichrist and Anti-Mary
The antichrist is an idea that dates back to the earliest Church. Most people associate it with a single person who is supposed to come at the end of the age. This specific antichrist is mentioned in several places in Scripture, by name or more generically, but particularly in St. John’s letters and St. Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians (see 1 Jn 2:18; 2 Thes 8–11).
St. John, writing in the first century, says, “Every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of antichrist, of which you heard that it was coming, and now it is in the world already” (1 Jn 4:3). Here, the apostle Jesus loved speaks of the antichrist as both an actual individual and also a general spirit. Elsewhere, St. John repeats his warning against a spirit contrary to Jesus: “Many deceivers have gone out into the world, men who will not acknowledge the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh; such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist” (2 Jn 1:7).
St. Paul, although he doesn’t use the word antichrist, also speaks of a spirit opposed to Christ. He warns those in the early Church, “I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ. For if someone comes and preaches another Jesus than the one we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you submit to it readily enough” (2 Cor 11:3–4). St. Paul, knowing how easy it is to fall into sin, warns against accepting this spirit opposed to Christ.