Honoring Women
One
Our Lady as Chaste Virgin and Mother
Our Lady is the supreme model for all Christians. Jesus is fully human, but He is a divine person. Mary is the only perfect human person and in that respect, she is a unique model for all of us. But as a woman, she is particularly a sign of the beauty and goodness of femininity. Elizabeth highlights Mary’s blessed femininity when she says, “Blessed are you among women.”
Now what feminine qualities does the Church highlight in praising and celebrating Mary?
Clearly, there are two of them: Mary is a chaste virgin and Mary is a mother.
And we can never appreciate Mary, and we can never appreciate women unless we appreciate these two sublime perfections.
Two
Denying the Value of These Feminine Qualities
Decent men, men of honor and depth and even the smallest degree of reflection have always been mystified and filled with admiration for the feminine perfections of chastity and motherhood. Men admire chastity precisely because men tend to be very poor at sexual self-mastery and because women tend to be better at it, men admire a woman’s chaste self-mastery the way weak people admire great strength.
And, of course, any man who hasn’t descended below the level of an ape admires motherhood, because motherhood is an utterly foreign mystery, perhaps the greatest of all natural human mysteries.
Motherhood is the place where the most beautiful things this life has to offer converge: love, self-sacrifice, self-gift. The beauty of womanhood launching and sustaining the miracle of something utterly new and good in the world.
No wonder the honor of the greatest created person, Our Lady, is connected to the honor of the greatest glories of women: the strength of chastity and the miracle of motherhood. And no wonder that as devotion to Our Lady has waned over the centuries, so has the cultural appreciation of chastity and motherhood.
And no wonder if, when these two perfections are devalued, women have become confused about where their value lies.
Three
Women wanting to be like men
When a society devalues chastity and motherhood, it will be women who suffer. These supreme feminine perfections, as exemplified by Our Lady, help highlight the beauty and contribution of women to the human, and even supernatural, experience. But in a society that mocks chastity, or sees motherhood as a refuge for failures, in that society, women themselves will become devalued.
In which case, women will, in desperation, seek to prove their worth by trying to imitate men. And, by the way, the men they try to imitate will be pretty low-caliber men. Women will imitate these men by abandoning chastity and attacking their own fertility, so as not to be burdened with motherhood.
It’s been pointed out that when Satan first came to tempt the woman, he brought her an apple, and said, “If you eat this, you can become like God.” But when Satan came to tempt the woman of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, he brought her the pill, and said, “If you eat this, you can become like men.”
This is what secular feminism has done. In the name of “liberating” women, it has attacked the feminine perfections on which the whole human race depends. And women, by trying to imitate low-grade men, have not been true to themselves. And have not become happy.
Four
Emphasizing Bodily, not Personal Differences
When chastity and motherhood are attacked, women are devalued. Sometimes they try to get their sense of worth back by trying to imitate men, as we said.
But it also often happens that when the qualities that set women apart from men on the personal level are devalued, women seek to highlight the qualities that set them apart from men on the physical level.
In other words, instead of cultivating their qualities as women, they dress in such a way as to highlight their qualities as females. Put it simply, they wear sexually provocative clothing that draws attention to female biology. But, unfortunately, drawing public attention to female biology is the exact opposite of cultivating appreciation for chastity and motherhood.
Getting men to focus on enjoying your female biology is not going to lead them to celebrate chastity, and it’s not going to give them a high regard for the long-term, quiet, and self-sacrificial beauty of motherhood and family life.
So we have to choose, all of us, men and women. Will we publicly celebrate and focus on female biology or feminine perfection?
Because we can’t emphasize both.
Five
Bring Our Lady back
The fact is, only if we really cultivate a devotion to Our Lady will we be able to get over this lust that has us all in its grip.
Only if they cultivate a devotion to Our Lady will men be able to look at women purely, non-reductively, and see their beauty in a way that fully admires the goods of chastity and motherhood. Only if they cultivate a devotion to Our Lady will women be able to celebrate the gifts God has given them, instead of buying into and even exacerbating the typical masculine distractions of superficiality and lust.
Mother of God, Chaste Virgin, you who are blessed among women, give us the grace to honor in every woman those qualities by which you exemplify the perfection of our humanity. Amen.