Everywhere we look today we see the order of creation under attack. Prominent on the political scene (1992) are the issues of homosexual “rights” and the “right” to abortion. Both of these evils attack the institution of marriage, the first in its perversion of the natural God-ordained relationship of conjugal love and the second in its denial unto bloody murder of the rights and
duties of parenthood. The proponents of homosexual “rights”, of abortion “rights”, of women’s “rights” and most lately, of children’s “rights”, have lost the natural sense of what is good and evil, right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate. They seek to equalize what is by nature unequal. They seek to overwhelm all objective standards of morality based on the order of creation and the natural law enunciated in the 10 Commandants with an exaltation of the desires and passions of
fallen human nature.

God created all things good, but when He gave man free will, He created the potentiality for evil. In other words, God has given to each of us an inestimable gift which we can use for our happiness and His glory or for our own ruin and the robbing of God of that glory He would have had in our eternal happiness. Of course, it is impossible to change the crested order of nature, but it is possible and sadly, quite common these day for us to refuse to conform to it.

Satan’s words to Eve remain the model for all temptations, and her response the model for all failures to resist. The temptation is always to disobey God’s commands, to violate the order He has established, and to choose to do our own will instead of His.

When we hear, time and time again, people protesting that they only want “equal rights” for homosexuals, or the “right” to choose an abortion, or the “right” to have any religion or no religion, they ‘re doing two things:

1) they are confusing rights with the freedom to act as one chooses; and
2) they’re refusing to recognize what reason itself naturally acknowledges, that some behaviors are in themselves good and to be practiced and others are in themselves evil and to be avoided.

No one has a right to offend God by sin or to break His Laws. Natural laws are written in our hearts and positive laws are given to us by the Church as Guardian and interpreter of divine revelation. No one has any right to violate the laws of God or of His Church, but we are all free to do so by reason of the free will given us by God as an essential part of our human nature.
Rights come from nature also, as does free will. Thus all men have a right to marry, to raise a family and to earn a wage sufficient for the support of that family. Thus, too, all children conceived in the womb have a right to be nurtured until the appropriate time arrives for their own self-sufficiency.

It must he said, too, that because of God’s command to Adam and Eve to “Increase and multiply” no human couple has the right to limit that increase by any unnatural means. Among unnatural means is the abstention from conjugal union at just those tines when God has provided for the fruitful intercourse of marriage. To do otherwise is to invert the ends of marriage, allowing
the end of sexual pleasure to usurp the end of procreation. There simply cannot be two equally primary ends: one must take precedence over the other. When this natural order is disrupted, the order of creation is attacked and violated just as gravely as by the use of an IUD or other device. In the last analysis it is saying to God: You don’t know what’s good for us, but we do; therefore, we will do our own will instead of Yours. It is also telling God that you can’t trust Him to provide for all the children He wills to send. It cultivates a contraceptive mentality leading to greater evils. When it comes to objective morality, there is simply no such thing as “this may not be good for you but it is good for me.” That kind of subjectivism is the great illusion of our times. Moral evils such as homosexual practices, abortion, birth control, and a woman’s exaltation over a man
or claiming equality with him are never good for anyone. They cannot be, because they are against the Will, and the Laws of God written in our hearts and spelled out by the positive laws of divine revelation interpreted by the Church.

Feminism is one of the great disorders of our time, and we can see its ugliness in all the others. That a woman has a “right” to control her own body is a cry born of feminism. That a woman chooses not to bear children as God has created her to do is an evil out of feminism. And that a woman should leave the home to enter the work place competing with men for high offices is
certainly a blatant disruption and denial of woman’s natural, normal place. In any consideration of the subject of feminism, Donna Steichen’s book, Ungodly Rage: The Hidden Face of Catholic Feminism (Ignatius, 1991) certainly deserves priority. I can best give an idea of the scope and depth of Mrs. Steichen’s work by going briefly through the Table of Contents with generous quotations.

In her Introduction, Mrs. Steichen tells us that Full-blown feminism is not a transient fad but a rival belief system pitted against ... those teachings which God has entrusted to His Church.... It is not a schism, for schism retains the Church’s doctrine while denying her authority. It is not a heresy, for heresy discards only a part of the truth – it is an apostasy to an alien religion. Unless its subversives are removed from the influential posts they currently hold, there will be no Catholic restoration in North America. (p. 27)

Chapter One, “From Convent to Coven” is mainly an account of a conference held in 1985 on “Women and Spirituality.” Whenever you see advertised these days a specifically feminine spirituality, you may be reasonably certain that it is a form of “goddess worship” (the feminine goddess within) replete with wiccan (witchcraft) rituals (circle dancing, incantations, etc.) and
“Women Church” defiantly replacing, in the demented psyches of these poor souls, the “patriarchal” Church and Deity, God as Father. Subsequent chapters deal with “The Daughters of Lilith” and “Eve Reconsidered”, being mainly accounts of meetings wherein those foolish enough to participate have their consciousness raised, a genteel way of saying their passions stirred to fever pitch – the “ungodly rage” of Mrs. Steichen’s title.  Chapter Four, “The Journey Within”, is perhaps the most instructive. Here Mrs. Steichen devotes several pages to an exposition of evolutionary-process-theology, the motivating force of Modernism, Liberalism, and more recently, Liberation Theology – all intrinsic to the feminist ideology. Some twenty pages are given to the life and work of Matthew Fox, OP., inventor of the infamous pan-entheist (God within) “creation centered spirituality”, darling of the male-hating feminists, and consort of the witch, Starhawk. Here is an excellent summary at the beginning of Chapter Four (pp. 193-194):

Proverbially, the late decades of a century are marked by strange currents of thought. As the dark twentieth century moves toward its close, the distinguishing characteristic of religious thought is self-absorption. Among America’s educated elites, including Catholic elites, religion is now understood as a symbol for personal opinion, faith as a metaphor for imagination,
mysticism as altered consciousness however achieved: meditation on the self, sensory deprivation, hallucinatory drugs, vigorous exercise or standing on one’s head. The religious impulse is turned many from the transcendent Creator to center on subjective consciousness as the source of spiritual truth, the principle of moral judgment, the object of veneration and service and the explanation for the resistance of traditional belief among the simple peasantry. Every man is his own god and every woman her own goddess – little interest is shown in questions of ontological truth; many believe there is no truth, and the rest behave as though they agree. Accordingly, individual feelings outweigh intellectual and moral criteria, and it is to emotion rather than to objective truth that public debate is directed.

On that landscape, within the province of the modernist theological scholarship that defines religion as a psychological phenomenon, implicitly gnostic religious feminism overlaps an explicitly gnostic New Age movement. That broadly fashionable form of spiritualism displays, in textbook purity, the gnostic characteristics of despair with present society, and the vision of a
transformed global order, including a New World Religion of naturally altered consciousness. Flourishing at a cultural point where superstition, pop-psychology and scientific speculation intersect, the New Age movement is a manifestation of the same revolutionary rejection of monotheism and Christianity found in goddess feminism. Indeed, its ingredients, including
spiritualism, fanatic environmentalism, zeal for abortion, sexual permissiveness and leftist politics, are almost entirely interchangeable with that phenomenon. And so, we see clearly that Catholic feminism is not an isolated or even containable thought and behavior pattern. It is part and parcel of the global New Age World Order, Satanic in its origins, in its processes, and in its ends.

Chapters Five and Six, “The Domino Effect” and “Marching Through the Institutions” contain more information about individuals and organizations. We might mention in particular the notorious Rosemary Reuther and the Women’s Ordination Conference (WOC). About this latter it is very useful to know that while … it has members who wanted to be priests, the organizers’ thrust from the beginning has not been toward women’s ordinations but toward reinterpreting both priesthood and sacraments as expressions of community power ... Thus, from the outset, WOC’s goal was to proclaim and act on a theology of declericalized priesthood and symbolic sacraments.” (p. 347) In other words, unisex and a neutered clergy. And what of the bishops in all this revolutionary activity? By their permissiveness and even, in some cases, outright encouragement, they
… prolong the existence of a pathological movement, ultimately doomed but capable of wreaking enormous havoc during its death convulsions. Most bishops ignore even the grossest revolutionary deviations, saving their denunciations for ‘fundamentalists’ internal and external.(p. 350)

Mrs. Steichen’s final chapter, “From the Catacombs” contains a defense of the basic doctrines of the Faith which feminism attacks most specifically, namely, the doctrine of Creation, the Temptation and Fall, Original Sin and our inheritance of its consequences. Matthew Fox’s book Original Blessing is in obvious defiance of these truths of Faith. The very widespread moral corruption evident in today’s world points to a spirit of lawlessness that inevitably conjures up the image of the “man of sin” who is the man of lawlessness – the AntiChrist. St. Paul described most accurately the willing blindness of men who
thus prepare the coming of the “son of perdition” … in all seduction of iniquity ... because they receive not the love of the truth that they might be saved. Therefore, God shall send them the operation [literally strong force or energy] of error to
believe lying. (2 Thess. 2:9-10) Surely there will be an Anti-Mary to accompany or to herald the AntiChrist. Granted that
AntiChrist will he an individual man, as all the Fathers teach, and feminism is a movement, still I believe this movement manifests a spirit so antithetical to Our Blessed Lady that it deserves, in its iniquity, to be compared with the AntiChrist himself.
St. Louis de Montfort says early in his treatise on True Devotion to Mary:

If then, as is certain, the knowledge and the Kingdom of Jesus Christ are to come into the world, they will be but a necessary consequence of the knowledge and the kingdom of the most holy Virgin Mary, who brought Him into the world the first time, and will make His second advent full of splendor. Just as the Age of Mary will be the heralding of Our Lord’s Second Coming, may we, must we, not see the feminist movement as some kind of heralding of the AntiChrist? So it seems to me, for all that Our Blessed Mother is and teaches us is opposed by the perversions of this so-called “feminist spirituality.” Our Lady told Sister Faustina (in the 1930’s) that the virtues most pleasing to her are: “Humility, humility, and again humility; purity, and the love of God.” These are her own virtues, those which constitute her consummate perfection and make of her God’s new Eden, His never-to-be-violated Paradise, forever Immaculate Daughter, Mother and Spouse.

It is not at all pleasant, then, to dwell upon the Anti-Mary feminists. But it may serve as a warning to us all, poor banished children of Eve that we are. St. Louis de Montfort says that Satan fears Mary even more than God Himself, in a sense,
because her humility so debases and enrages his pride. The foundation vices of feminism all stem from pride. They begin with discontent and resentment and end in apostasy. “Consciousness raising” is a major technique for, ostensibly, making people more aware of certain perceived ills to be corrected and moving them to take action. There never have been lacking sources of information for those who really want to know what’s going on, nor motivation for those who wish to do something constructive.

But “consciousness-raising” is propaganda and brain-washing. Randy England (The Unicorn in the Sanctuary, Trinity, 1990) says The feminist’s dominant mode of operation is to create discontent. They foster frustration, resentment and delusions of persecution by the “unjust patriarchal structures” in the Church, while simultaneously extending the promise of the goddess within. To some the appeal to power and pride is irresistible, the old beliefs lose their grip, and hell signs up another tenant. Satan is indeed the Sower of discord. I have seen good old Sisters adopt this feminist attitude of resentment over the “oppression of women” in the Church just by sheer force of hearing about it constantly and by peer pressure. Living in a religious community is very dangerous these days.

And it all has nothing to do with “equal pay for working women”. For over 150 years women religious were not only content but happy to spend themselves in exhausting labor for love of the Church and souls to be saved for God. The discontent and resentment being stirred up in them now is the work of the Devil. My own mother worked as a secretary from the 1920’s until her death in 1959, and I never heard in all my life one word from her about oppression of men or an unfair salary. She supported us both with all that we needed and her employers had nothing but praise for her. She was the best secretary they’d ever had. It was unfortunate that she had to work; but she never lost one iota of her God-given femininity because of it. She never aspired to be more then her nature required her to be – a helper to men. She was not a Catholic. It is not at all insignificant that devotion to Our Lady decreases in the exact proportion that feminist attitudes increase. Feminists will often claim to have devotion to Mary, but it is not a true devotion nor is it supernatural. They have stripped Our Lady of all her divine prerogatives and doubt is often cast upon her Immaculate Purity – all in the name of making her more imitable. What hypocrisy!
 

Rosemary Reuther, infamous now for her dictum that she stays in the Church only to change it (like Teilhard de Chardin who said the same thing) also typifies the logical conclusion towards which feminism tends, which is an open paganism. She is quoted as saying of her conversation with a nun, I could hardly tell her that my devotion to Mary was something less than my devotion to some far more powerful females that I knew: Isis, Athena, and Artemis!
Could one imagine a more impudent, back-handed slap at Our Blessed Mother’s humility and purity? Nor could a soul possessed by a legion of demons have spoken more contemptibly. Another feminist “philosopher” highlights the feminist’s hatred for God Himself: I imagined women functioning as rabbis, priests and ministers... wearing clerical garb and performing clerical duties and suddenly I saw a problem. How could women represent a male god? God is going to change... We women are going to bring an end to God. ... we will be the end of Him. We will change the world so much that He won’t fit in any more.
 

Jesus Christ cannot symbolize the liberation of women... Feminists have to leave Christ and Bible behind them. (Steichen, Ungodly Rage) That’s pretty radical stuff, but these women mean business – just as surely as their master Satan does. It becomes more and more evident now in 1992 that women are seeking their ends of “liberation” and ultimate domination through the political processes. It is well known amongst those who have studied her writings, that Hilary Clinton has a feminist agenda that will see feminine power unprecedented should her husband win the election. But it will not be a power
anything like that of Mary. It will be quite the opposite; it will be an anti-Mary. The New Age is upon us and all around us. Not a day goes by that we don’t hear something of its voice on the radio or see its image on the television. Whet is the answer? What is the remedy?

Mary, our Mother and our Queen. As Solange Hertz has so eloquently written:

To be with Her is to be with Christ. ... to Her the second Resurrection, that of the Church, has been entrusted. Standing ever faithfully at the foot of the cross She shares Christ's ostracism in death as She shared His exclusion from the inn at His birth. ...
Mary is already what the Church has yet to be in the fullness of Her being. ... She is the personal symbol of the Church…
Mary alone is eternally and completely faithful to God. ... She alone can show us how to obey God perfectly despite the most flagrant abuses of authority. As she guided Her children through the Passion of Her Son, so now she will guide them through the Passion of His Church. Satan’s hour will turn out to be Mary’s.