by Carrie Gress
Cautionary Tales
Putting aside exorcists and the sensational, there is much more to ancient mythical stories than mere storytelling, as we saw in the last chapter. These stories have an important place for teaching us how we ought to live. The Lilith story told by the Jews in the Middle Ages was not meant to be a story of female triumph and empowerment, as many see it now. Instead, it was a cautionary tale of what happens when the proper authority of man over women is disrupted. Everyone loses under this arrangement, for reasons that we shall see in more depth in part 2.
So why is it that these types of stories have been so often repeated from time immemorial? Because the telling of these kinds of stories offers wisdom about how women can and should avoid becoming like Lilith, Jezebel, or Eve. They also help us to recognize the difference between men and women, that women have a different set of gifts to offer the world than men do.
These ancient scary stories were retold as collective wisdom about what not to do, but with the arrival of Christianity, the stories took on a new cast. No longer limited to scary storytelling, with the arrival of Christ and the Blessed Mother, men and women had role models to follow, not just demons to avoid. Cautionary tales no longer had to be about bad women, but transitioned into how to emulate good women, particularly, the greatest woman of all: Mary, the Mother of God. Both kinds of storytelling helped form cultures that understood—at the very least—the important of roles of men and women.
For many generations, as Christianity has grown more threadbare, folktales and myths are rarely told in their original teaching form. Western culture has been left without the wisdom of old once presented through the medium of story. The affect has been that women of the 1960s forward believed that they were doing something new, something revolutionary. Lacking any sort of collective memory about how they ought to live for peace and harmony, the result was to fall directly back into the hornet’s nest of problems that civilizations in the past warned against. In thinking that they were being wise and innovative, radical feminists and their daughters and granddaughters became the new women of folly.
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1Michael W. Chapman, “Number of Witches in US on the Rise, May Surpass 1.5 Million,” CNS News, November 16, 2018, https://www.cnsnews.com/blog/michael-w-chapman/number-witches-us-rise-may-outnumber-presbyterians.
2Elizabeth Gould Davis, The First Sex (Penguin, 1975), 35.
3Monique Wittig, quoted by Philip G. Davis, Goddess Unmasked (Spence Publishing, 1998), 53.
4Jennifer Aniston (@xjenniferanistonx), Instagram, January 2, 2017.
5Madonna, “Madonna is Nervous About Super Bowl Performance,” interview with Anderson Cooper, January 31, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMaMQoHpQyo.
6Erich Neumann, The Great Mother (Princeton University Press, 2015), 174.
7Janet Howe Gaines, “Lilith,” Biblical History Daily, March 15, 2018, https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/people-cultures-in-the-bible/people-in-the-bible/lilith/.
8Alastair Wickham, The Dead Roam the Earth (Penguin Books, 2012), 253.
9Chad Ripperger, email exchange with author, July and August 2018.
10Ibid.
11Ibid.
12Ibid.
13Ibid.
PART II
Anti-Mary, Inc.
CHAPTER 4
The Big Lie: Changing
Human Nature
“I don’t really view communism as a bad thing.”
—Whoopi Goldberg
In 1917, during one of Our Lady’s apparitions at Fatima, the three shepherd children were given a vision of hell. Our Lady warned that if people didn’t stop offending God, then another war would come. In reparation, Our Lady asked “for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of reparation on the First Saturdays.” She added, “If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church.”1
What, then, were the errors of Russia that she was referring to? Most of us think of Russian errors largely as communist and Marxist ideologies. This is generally correct, as Marxism is behind most of the ideologies we face today either openly or surreptitiously, be it communism, collectivism, or socialism. But could there be more to it than just that? Something deeper than Marx and his fellow comrades?
Russia’s Errors
In 1918, shortly after Our Lady’s prediction, Tsar Nicolas Romanov and his entire family were shot, bayonetted, and clubbed to death. Their bodies were dragged to a desolate forest, where they were further mutilated and finally thrown down a mineshaft. With the royal family gone, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, expanded his party’s controlling power over the expansive Russian Empire. Lenin made his intentions of massive cultural overhaul very plain:
We are … the real revolutionaries—yes, we are going to tear the whole thing down! We shall destroy and smash everything, ha-ha-ha, with the result that everything will be smashed to smithereens and fly off in all directions, and nothing will remain standing!
Yes, we are going to destroy everything, and on the ruins we will build our temple! It will be a temple for the happiness of all! But we shall destroy the entire bourgeoisie, and grind them to powder—ha-ha-ha—to powder. Remember that!2
Under the Soviet tyranny, private property became a thing of the past and the aristocracy was neutralized (or vaporized) by exile at the Gulag work camps. Their property was seized, their homes were divided up to share with strangers, or they were harassed until “charges” could be brought up justifying execution. For the commoners—the proletariat who were supposed to be the beneficiaries of Soviet collectivization—breadlines, hunger, and the unraveling of society became the new norm. The family was destroyed as all adults were forced to work, children were raised by others, and divorce was easily procured. The Orthodox Christian faith was erased as churches were converted into store houses and museums, or simply destroyed. When battering rams knocked down the iconic church of Our Lady of Kazan, loudspeakers blared, “You see, there is no God! We destroy the church of the so-called protectress of Russia and nothing happens!”
Anyone objecting to the new Soviet “utopia” was sent, along with priests and aristocrats, to the Gulag, where an estimated forty to sixty million people perished from disease, malnourishment, exposure, torture, and execution.
At the heart of Marxist ideology was the goal to remake human nature and human society in such a way that everyone was equal—or the same—by trying to erase every natural or societal difference. Aristotle, millennia before, had warned against such foolishness: “The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.” While masquerading as healthy egalitarianism with ambitious goals for every comrade, the stratified Russian culture quickly became a country of two classes: those in power (with resources taken from others) and those not in power (with very few resources). Envy and power-seeking (and hunger) became the powerful emotions fueling Soviet communism. Within a decade, the Soviet economy was transformed from a fertile bread basket to an anemic display of what happens when no one owns anything.
Women’s liberation, the Bolsheviks believed, was completely tied to the success of communism. Russian revolutionary Inessa Armand emphasized this point in one pithy quote: “If women’s liberation is unthinkable without communism, then communism is unthinkable without women’s liberation.”3 It was imperative that the idea of motherhood was divorced from the reality of being a woman. The official party position was stated by Aleksandra Kollentai, the head of the Soviet “Women’s Department,” who said, “The shackles of the family, of the housework, of prostitution still weigh heavily on the working woman. Working women and peasant women can only rid themselves of this situation and achieve equality in life itself, and not just in law, if they put all their energies into making Russia a truly communist society.”4 The Bolsheviks severed the tie between motherhood and womanhood. These same ideas w
ould be echoed by the women’s liberation movement in the West several decades later.
The Soviets worked quickly to legalize abortion to make women equal to men, and then they put the women to work. As author Paul Kengor wrote, “You weren’t free to own a farm or factory or business or bank account or go to church or print your own newspaper, but if you wanted a divorce or abortion, the sky was the limit in Bolshevik Russia.”5 With abortion free and legal, it spread like wildfire among the population. In 1934, abortions outweighed live births by three to one. Only later, when the Soviets eventually realized their self-created birth-dearth was leading to massive demographic problems (much like China today), did policy changes come about that incentivized having children.
The Soviets, not content with their own borders, sought to take over neighboring countries. Though mostly thwarted before the Second World War, they were victorious in taking over numerous satellite countries as their spoils from the war, including Poland, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Latvia, Georgia, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia. Behind this new “Iron Curtain,” these once vibrant countries were stuffed into the gray ill-fitting militant uniform required by the Soviets. Faith was clandestine, friends turned on each other in an instant, and everyone—friend, foe, or family—was a “comrade.”
The Russian Revolution unleashed the idea that human nature is infinitely malleable and can be rearranged into perfect equality. People who lived under the Soviet shadow paid a horrendous price. Since nature (and all that is natural) manifests a great deal of inequality, Lenin et al had to tear it all down. The natural and the supernatural orders were the real obstacles that had to be destroyed. It is almost impossible to describe the widespread devastation these errors brought to the people of Russia and beyond. The scars are still readily apparent amid the people, the land, and the faith. Vicki Thorn, founder of Project Rachel, reports that one woman admitted having eighty abortions. Thorn, having never heard of such a high number, first had to consult a doctor to verify that such a number was even physically possible. Yes, the doctor said, and not as uncommon as one might think.
Russia’s Errors Spread
Ryszard Legutko, a Polish Member of the European Parliament and university professor, grew up under Soviet communism. He saw his beloved Krakow, the cultural capital of Poland, reduced to a dreary state of grey crumbling buildings—buildings that had once boasted of bright yellows, greens, and orange—while churches were left in disrepair and the infrastructure cracked underfoot. The rot of the city served, as much as anything, as a reminder of the spiritual rot growing in the souls of so many. Millions were poisoned by the communist ideology and were left in isolation, afraid of family and neighbor alike, fearing that any human contact with their comrades could be used against them by the government.
Legutko, like most Poles, was thrilled to see the fall of the Iron Curtain. He was enthralled by the freedom ushered into Poland by the West when the Soviets finally closed up what was left of the shop. As he watched Poland transition from the old communist way of doing things to adopt Western practices and ideas, he was left with a nagging question. How is it, he asked, that Poles who had been staunch Soviet “comrades” so quickly and smoothly transitioned into European liberals? Legutko wonders, in his book The Demon of Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, if the two projects were diametrically opposed, shouldn’t there have been more of struggle from one to the other.6 Legutko concludes that the reason the former communists easily leapt from one ideology to the next was that, at their core, they were actually the same ideology; both were committed to making a complete break with the past and with tradition, particularly the Church; both looked toward progress to lead to the perfect man, the perfect society; and both found ways to silence those who thwarted their goals, particularly through media control and “newspeak.” Both, at their core, were committed to changing human nature.
In comparing the two ideologies, Legutko further explains their commonalities:
By becoming a member of a communist and liberal-democratic society, man rejects a vast share of loyalties and commitments that until not long ago shackled him, in particular those that were imposed on him through the tutelage of religion, social morality, and tradition. He feels renewed and strong and therefore has nothing but pity toward those miserable ones who continue to be attached to long-outdated rules and who succumb to the bondage of unreasonable restraints.
But there is one obligation from which he cannot be relieved: for a communist, communism, and for a liberal democrat, liberal democracy. These obligations are non-negotiable. Others can be ignored.7
The false premise animating both ideologies is that human nature can be changed. Progress toward a utopian goal is measured by how many people have taken on this new human nature. Their belief is that once the process is complete, and this new nature is assumed by all, then there will be worldwide happiness. Until then, “we have to break a few eggs.” The only foreseeable solution from their viewpoint is contained in an unwavering adherence to the party. Should ideological faults be exposed (like famine, misery, chaos, etc.), blame is pinned on the fact that the ideology hasn’t been embraced by everyone. “It only works if everyone does it,” is their false argument.
The Sadness of Demons
Legutko’s insight about the effort to change human nature isn’t just limited to contemporary ideologies but has a much longer history. In writing about demons, St. Thomas Aquinas says, “Now it is evident that the demons would wish many things not to be, which are, and others to be, which are not: for, out of envy, they would wish others to be damned, who are saved” (I, Q64.3). Among their sufferings, the demons have a type of eternal sadness because they cannot change human nature. Psychologist Fr. Mike Driscoll says, “Demons are forever unhappy … because they want God’s creation to be different than it is, and they will never succeed in changing it to their liking.”8
It is curious, then, to consider that this eternal sadness of demons is connected with their desire to change human nature. It is not surprising that the ideologies emanating from “Russia’s errors” also have this same fundamental thrust toward changing human nature. This perversion of human nature is at the heart of the errors Our Lady talked about at Fatima.
The errors of Russia, which have spread well beyond her borders, are ultimately that they try to do what the devil desires: change human nature. But this cannot be done. Thus, the demons are sad in the face of the impossible task, and those infected with Russia’s errors rage and destroy everything that isn’t to their liking, as seen in the anti-Marian spirit.
The Errors Go Viral
The errors Our Lady alluded to aren’t exclusive to Russia and Europe. The promises of the Russian Revolution—that human nature can be changed—melted seamlessly into the promises of the sexual revolution. Americans have widely adopted the notion that human nature is infinitely malleable, that a mother, for example, could willingly and pridefully kill her own child, that spouses could forsake each other with the expectation that there will be no consequences to themselves or their children, or that men could lie with each other and expect an open embrace from all and sundry. From the 1960s on, each of these erroneous concepts aimed at appeasing the desires of the human heart have failed miserably to serve the individual, the family, or the wider common good.
It is no accident that the ideology of Soviet communism blended comfortably with the egalitarianism of the sexual revolution. French intellectual and author of The Second Sex Simon Beauvoir considered one of the real triumphs of Soviet Russia to be women’s liberation from menial tasks at home. Radical feminist Shulamith Firestone took it one step further when she wrote feverishly about eliminating gender differences. “The end goal of the feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.”9 The thrust behind feminist ideology is that in order for m
en and women to have equal treatment, they must become exactly the same. Any sort of difference must be overlooked. We have to ignore the fact that women have babies and are physically weaker on the whole than men. We have to ignore the fact that transgendered men who transition to women are really not women, and we have to ignore the fact that there is no physical way that two men can have a baby, even if they feel entitled to parenthood and at any cost. Like communism before it, all differences in reality must be overlooked to conform to the ideological narrative.
Radical feminism regularly promotes the “nature can be changed” lie, with celebrities proclaiming that gender equality is the “emergency of our time” that must be addressed with frantic (and vulgar) urgency. Their breathless exhortations are littered with the same type of newspeak used in the Soviet Union. Words and expressions such as pro-choice, a woman’s right to choose, reproductive rights, termination of pregnancy, clump of cells, product of conception, anti-abortion, and anti-choice all cover up the reality of which they speak. Such false realities have misled many, including an article in Elle that expressed shock over an ultrasound image that looked more like a real baby than fetuses do in an “actual” pregnancy (because they are thought to just be a clump of cells).
Our infinitely changing human nature has made both men and women obsolete. Men have become unnecessary and even the enemy because “the future is female.” Of course, in reality, there won’t be an exclusively female future—whatever that might mean—unless they mean that the usual method of achieving pregnancy is abandoned and that only little girls are born through innovative scientific means. And yet, somehow, there seems to be the impression that this could happen and that it would be a good thing. Elsewhere, women have become unnecessary because of the “changes” in nature. Among homosexual men, including those embedded in the Church, women are superfluous. For homosexuals, clerics and otherwise, the complementarity of male and female is outmoded or unimportant for society to function properly. Women are as useful to homosexuals as “a bicycle is to a fish.”10