by Carrie Gress
Because of the familiarity Christians have with a notion of an antichrist, it isn’t a stretch to comprehend an anti-Church or an anti-Gospel. Even the term anti-apostle was adopted by the Soviet Communists for their secret infiltration of agents into seminaries to corrupt the Church from the inside out.2 Adding the idea of an “anti-Mary” to this list makes sense for several reasons.
First, we know that Our Lady brings a unique spirit into the world as the Mother of God. She is the anti-Eve. Her yes reversed the curse that Adam and Eve brought to humanity through Original Sin. Mary’s fiat reverses Eve’s rejection of God and his will for humanity. “As a woman brought humanity under the power of Satan,” one theologian, echoing early Church Father St. Irenaeus, explained, “God would liberate humanity with the cooperation of a woman.”3
Second, the potential of an anti-Mary is related to Mary’s status as the New Eve. If Christ is the New Adam and Mary the New Eve, it makes sense to consider that an antichrist could have a female complement.4 Yes, there is potential that this anti-Mary could be a specific individual, but there is also the possibility for there to be an anti-Marian spirit that animates an entire movement and the individuals engaged in it.
Another significant reason for suggesting that an anti-Marian spirit has gripped our culture is because of the overwhelming evidence that women are suffering the punishment St. Paul foretold to the Thessalonians. St. Paul describes a lawless one who will come and deceive many because “they refused to love the truth and so be saved. Therefore God send upon them a strong delusion, to make them believe what is false” (2 Thes 2:9–12). In essence, what St. Paul is warning against are those who come to deceive others. People not attached to the truth of Christ will live with strong delusions, believing what is false. This is precisely the kind of delusion that has bewitched so many contemporary women to willingly fall in line with the anti-Marian spirit of our age. The abortion numbers are telling: never in history have mothers been so willing to kill their own children. As St. Paul warned, it is fair to say that some “cunning serpent” has made its way into the hearts of women and led them very far astray.
The Longest Battle
There is yet another reason to consider a high-pitched conflict between Mary and an anti-Mary: the battle between “the Woman” in Scripture and the serpent. The standoff between Satan and Mary straddles Scripture like bookends; the primordial struggle between them started in Genesis and ends in Revelation.
In Genesis, after the fall of Eve, we read, “I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel” (Gen. 3:15 DV). Here God is speaking to the serpent, Satan, to declare the chasm that exists between those that follow “the woman” and those who follow him.
This enmity returns at the end of Scripture, in Revelation:
A great sign appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars; she was with child and she cried out in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery. And another sign appeared in heaven; behold, a great red dragon. … And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to bear a child, that he might devour her child when she brought it forth; she brought forth a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne (Rv 12:1–5).
When Scripture speaks of Satan’s demise in this confrontation, it does so in a Marian context. Pope St. John Paul II noted in his encyclical Redemptoris Mater that Mary is “located in the center itself of the enmity.”5 Of course, Mary’s Son is the principal victor, but he does so, explicitly, as her Son. So important is this mother/son relationship that St. Irenaeus concludes, “The enemy would not have been justly conquered unless it had been a man [made] of a woman who conquered him.”6
Mary’s centrality in the battle between God and Satan gives her a unique status among the saints. Dante spoke of her special role to disperse God’s graces to humanity in his Divine Comedy: “We venerate Mary with all the impetus of our hearts, of our affections, of our desires. That is how he wants it, he who established that we receive everything by means of Mary.” Dante’s faith in Mary’s role is confirmed by the saints. St. Jacinta, one of the seers of Our Lady at Fatima, told her cousin Lucia, “Tell everyone that God concedes his graces by means of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. They should ask for them from her.”7 And St. John Paul affirms that, while she has a subordinate role to Christ, Mary’s mediation “shares in the one unique source that is the mediation of Christ himself.” He continues:
This role is at the same time special and extraordinary. It flows from her divine motherhood and can be understood and lived in faith only on the basis of the full truth of this motherhood. Since by virtue of divine election Mary is the earthly Mother of the Father’s consubstantial Son and his “generous companion” in the work of redemption “she is a mother to us in the order of grace.” This role constitutes a real dimension of her presence in the saving mystery of Christ and the Church.8
Mary’s place in the order of grace also elevates her significance in direct battle with demons. When commanded by priests during exorcisms, demons testify to the rage they feel toward Mary, a mere human with such an exalted position. As an exorcist attests, “The cooperation of Mary in the victory of God over the demons humiliates them more than if God defeated them alone. To be defeated by God through a cooperation of a human creature, inferior by nature yet Immaculate, greatly humiliates their bloated pride.”9 For this reason, during exorcisms, “demons are often angrier and more furious in Mary’s regard than that of God himself.”10
The great battle between Mary and the devil plays out daily on our screens and the pages of magazines, in our marriages and bedrooms, in abortion clinics and doctors’ offices, on sports fields, in schools and shopping malls, and everywhere else women have to make choices about how they will live their lives and care (or not care) for those around them. The lines couldn’t be starker. But like Eve before them, so many women have unwittingly fallen into the dragon’s trap. Simply treading water with the rest of the culture and the social cues from the media elite, more often than not, most women have never stopped to consider the full implications of their decisions: the eternal ramifications of aborting a child, contracepting, or nurturing narcissism in their own souls.
The Anti-Marian Appearance
If there is, indeed, an anti-Marian spirit, what might it look like? Well, a woman in its grip would not value children. She would be bawdy, vulgar, and angry. She would rage against the idea of anything resembling humble obedience or self-sacrifice for others. She would be petulant, shallow, catty, and overly sensuous. She would also be self-absorbed, manipulative, gossipy, anxious, and self-servingly ambitious. In short, she would be everything that Mary is not. She would bristle especially at the idea of being a virgin or a mother.
Women have always desired equality and respect, but our current culture isn’t seeking it through the grace of Mary; rather, the culture seeks this equality and respect through the vices of Machiavelli: rage, intimidation, tantrums, bullying, raw emotion, and absence of logic. It is this aggressive impulse—this toxic femininity—that finds pride in calling oneself “nasty,” feels empowered by dressing as a vagina, belittles men, and sees the (tragically ironic) need to drop civility so that civility can somehow return again.
The devil knows that all these marks of the anti-Mary—rage, indignation, vulgarity, and pride—short-circuit a woman’s greatest gifts: wisdom, prudence, patience, unflappable peace, intuition, her ability to weave together the fabric of society, and her capacity for a deep and fulfilling relationship with God. Instead, the father of lies promises power, fame, fortune, and sterile, fleeting pleasures.
A striking clue that all these things we witness in abundance today are at odds with God’s plan for women is that, for all the so-called progress women have made, there is precious little evidence that any of it has actuall
y made women happier. Divorce rates are still staggering, with 70 percent initiated by women; suicide rates are soaring; drug and alcohol abuse is unprecedented; STDs, particularly among women, are at epidemic levels, and depression and anxiety are everywhere. Women are not getting happier, just more medicated.
Another clue that all these claims to simple undifferentiated equality are fictitious arises in times of crisis. In disasters, such as hurricanes or mass shootings, it is predominantly men who man the boats to rescue those in need or offer their bodies to protect women from the spray of bullets. In dire situations, for all the talk of equality, the heroic nature of men cannot be suppressed. Women certainly can be, and often are, but their true heroism is usually expressed in ways more in keeping with their nature: in imitating Mary rather than men.
No Moms, No Mary
The treatment of motherhood over the last fifty years is one of the first signs that we are dealing with a radically new movement. Mothers (both spiritual and biological) are a natural icon of Mary. A mother helps others know who Mary is by her generosity, kindness, patience, compassion, peace, intuition, and ability to nurture souls. Mary’s love (and the love of mothers) offers one of the best images of what God’s love is like—unconditional, healing, safe, and deeply personal.
The last few decades have witnessed the subtle erasing of the Marian icon in real women. First, through the pill, followed by the advent of legalized abortion, motherhood has been on the chopping block along with childhood. Motherhood has become dispensable to the point that today the broader culture doesn’t bat an eye when a child is adopted by two men.
Every culture until ours has known how critical a mother is (even in her imperfection) to nurture a child to healthy adulthood and spiritual maturity. No culture can renew itself without spiritual maturity. Yes, there are many people who have lost their mothers for one reason or another, but most would agree that, truly, there are few things as tragic. Such sad realities only strengthen the argument that children need mothers rather than diminish their importance.
In the ’60s, Betty Friedan argued that mothers were over-nurturing their children and that heading to work would prevent us from smothering them. Germaine Greer said that childbearing “was never intended to be as time-consuming and self-conscious a process as it is. One of the deepest evils in our society is tyrannical nurturance.”11 These women might be happy to know that we now spend 50 percent less time with our children than we did five decades ago. Yet the late, great Kate O’Beirne reports, “By every available measure, including school achievement and the incidence of delinquency, depression, sexual promiscuity, suicide, and substance abuse, the well-being of American children has declined in recent decades.”12 It can be no accident that we are witnessing unprecedented emotional and mental trauma and brokenness in every segment of our population because motherhood has been so devalued and neglected. As economist James Tooley described it, “We’ve swapped a society where women could be full-time mothers—a role many found fulfilling and satisfying—for one that fuels consumerism and clogs our roads with second cars on the drive to school, where spoiled children, buried under mountains of toys they can’t be bothered to play with, watch suggestive TV shows in their lonely bedrooms. And we have this partly because the equality feminists force us to believe that motherhood was parasitic, the housewife a leech.”13
The move to make mothers into leeches and unleash our children from over-nurturing has, like many of the presumptuous platitudes of radical feminism, turned out to be entirely wrong.
Dignity’s Source
If one were to ask where the radical notion that women are equal to men came from, where do you suppose we would find our answer? It didn’t come from the Greeks: Aristotle and others called us “deformed males.” It didn’t come from Judaism: though given some status, a broad movement to promote the dignity of woman never materialized, and the practice of polygamy remained. Asian religions, such as Buddhism or Hinduism, didn’t start it. And it certainly hasn’t come from Islam.
Nineteenth-century scholar William Lecky (a non-Catholic) gives us the answer: “No longer the slave or toy of man, no longer associated only with ideas of degradation and of sensuality, woman rose, in the person of the Virgin Mother, into a new sphere, and became the object of reverential homage, of which antiquity has no conception. … A new type of character was called into being; a new kind of admiration was fostered. Into a harsh and ignorant and benighted age, this ideal type infused a conception of gentleness and purity, unknown to the proudest civilizations of the past.”14
Sadly, few in our culture know that they owe a debt of gratitude to Catholicism for the notion that women are equal to men. Throughout the gospels, Christ treated women with dignity, and over the centuries veneration of the Virgin Mary further developed the notion that women are equal to men.
It might seem that equality among men and women is obvious, a simple intuition any thinking person would have. But if so, why didn’t any other religious movement see it? Because it was Mary who turned the sins of Eve upside down and allowed this now-commonplace notion to take root. Christianity, though largely abandoned by secular culture, remains the source for this profound insight.
The anti-Mary, then, is a sophisticated and aloof sort of slavery, where nothing is too evil or too bad to try, but also where every effort is made to erase the naturally imprinted icon of Our Lady stamped into the body and soul of every woman. More than anything, however, the anti-Marian woman does not know that she is loved passionately and deeply by a heavenly Father, a Father who wants nothing more than to meet the deepest desires of her heart and who delights in her as his child, his creation, his unique and unrepeatable daughter.
Culture and society started with women and followed her cues. The hands that rocked the cradle formed the future. Even in the days of foraging, women, because of their physical needs and the needs of children, remained at the hearth, where men would return with food to supply their tribes. But this spark of civilization didn’t stop there; it continued to evolve into more and more sophisticated versions. Archbishop Fulton Sheen speaks of the role women play in the ascent of culture: “Culture derives from woman—for had she not taught her children to talk, the great spiritual values of the world would not have passed from generation to generation. After nourishing the substance of the body to which she gave birth, she then nourishes the child with the substance of her mind. As guardian of the values of the spirit, as protectress of the mortality of the young, she preserves culture, which deals with purposes and ends, while man upholds civilization, which deals only with means.”15
Culture ascended to new levels with the arrival of Our Lady. Slowly but steadily, Catholic culture became saturated with the idea of Mary as the model for Christian womanhood. She also became the inspiration for Christian manhood across Europe. Art historian Sir Kenneth Clark remarked that Mary “taught a race of tough and ruthless barbarians the virtues of tenderness and compassion.”16
“If we were to lose Mary,” Pope Pius X explained, “the world would wholly decay. Virtue would disappear, especially holy purity and virginity, connubial love and fidelity. The mystical river through which God’s graces flow to us would dry up. The brightest star would disappear from heaven, and darkness would take its place.”17 While it may have been difficult to image this at the time of the pope’s writing in the early twentieth century, it isn’t any longer. Indeed, most evidence indicates clearly that we are living in this darkness.
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1Karol Wojtyla, “Bicentennial talk given in the United States,” in C. John McCloskey, “The Final Confrontation,” The Catholic Thing, June 1, 2014, https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2014/06/01/the-final-confrontation/.
2Marie Carre, AA-1025: Memoirs of the Communist Infiltration into the Church (Charlotte: TAN Books, 2009).
3Francesco Bamonte, The Virgin Mary and the Devil in Exorcisms (Paoline, 2014), 37. Here Fr. Bamonte is following the great St. Irenaeus, who wrote,
“As the human race was subjected to death through [the act of] a virgin, so was it saved by a virgin, and thus the disobedience of one virgin was precisely balanced by the obedience of another.” St. Irenaeus, “Against Heresies,” ed. Cyril Richardson, Early Christian Fathers (New York: Collier Books, 1970), Book V, 19.
4There are several uses of the term “antimary” published online prior to my own independent use of the word.
5Pope St. John Paul II, Redemptoris Mater, March 25, 1987, no. 11.
6St. Irenaeus, “Against Heresies,” Book V, 31.
7Bramonte, Virgin Mary and Exorcisms, 99.
8John Paul II, Redemptoris Mater, no. 38
9Bramonte, Virgin Mary and Exorcisms, 37.
10Bramonte, Virgin Mary and Exorcisms, 37.
11This quote and several others from Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer, and other radical feminists are sourced from several different places online.
12Kate O’Beirne, Women Who Make the World Worse (New York: Sentinel, 2006), xxii.
13James Tooley, The Miseducation of Women (Chicago: Ivan R, 2003), 192.
14William Lecky, History of Rationalism, vol. 1 (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1866), 234–35.
15Fulton J. Sheen, The World’s First Love, 2nd Edition (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010), 188–89.
16Kenneth Clark, Civilization, DVD series, BBC Production, 2006.
17Quoted in Josef Cardinal Mindszenty, The Face of the Heavenly Mother (New York: Philosophical Library, 1951), 83.