The Woman and Her Seed

At the highest levels of government and industry, all the way down to the swimming pool, you will discover what seems to be an orchestrated effort to completely erase women and their influence in society.

I guess as a woman I shouldn’t be surprised. Men trying to dominate woman is nothing new. Look at almost every ancient culture, and you will find women and children being marginalized, their rights limited and voices diminished — but Christianity changed that.

As history will testify, the Christian belief in the equal dignity and worth of women began to influence the cultures that Christians found themselves in.

In so many ways, the second and third waves of feminism ought to be thanking the Church, instead of declaring war on the “Patriarchy” — because it was that very “Patriarchy” that ended the practices of polygamy and harlotry and demanded marriage between one man and one woman, demanded women be treated as equals in dignity and worth.

But the Patriarchy didn’t stop there. It put great demands upon the man.

The call of Christianity is a call to the heart of man to be heroic — and it is this heroic call that still is placed upon every man — to cherish, protect and uphold the dignity and rights of all women.

To be like Jesus, who came to serve — not to be served. It is a heroic call, indeed!

Have there been bad players in the Church who took a fundamentalist approach to women — one which refused to see wives as equal in dignity and worth, refused to see their insights and opinions as valuable, and set men up as unbearable taskmasters over their wives?

Yes, you could find such men — and sadly, still do — but Jesus’ clearly respected and loved women and saw them as essential in the story of salvation.

The teachings of the Church have always been clear on the dignity and worth of women — and as the centuries have moved on, that has only grown more evident and more substantiated with Church documents speaking to the role and rights of women in the world.

But that is another story for another day.

What the Church has solidified over the past centuries comes at a point when there is great need to explore the depth of the Feminine Genius and share the Good News.

Just this week, the government of Canada has changed birth certificates to read “Birthing Person” rather than Mother. In other words, Canada is trying to erase the word “Mother” from their language and from their lexicon.

In our own country, there are radical agendas trying to do the same. They want to take it one step further and eliminate the word “woman” and replace it with “bleeding person”. Why, you might ask?

Because the powers that be have this pesky thing called biology ruining the delusion that biological men can become biological women. So as not to offend, we now have been told to erase the word “woman” and replace it with “bleeding person”.

God bless those men! I sympathize with their struggle, but it is not merciful to perpetuate a lie. What fresh Hell have we found ourselves in when nobody is willing to say the difficult thing and offer the truth that will help set those men free?

All that aside, it brings up other questions. What if I don’t bleed or what if I don’t have a uterus? Am I no longer a woman? Of course not! Every single cell of a woman’s body is female and there is even great philosophical evidence to support the idea that femininity goes down to the very soul.

It serves as one explanation for why we will still maintain our “maleness” and “femaleness” in Heaven. Could it be that our very souls carry with them “maleness” or femaleness”. St. Edith Stein, JPII and even pre-Christian Greek Philosophers have put forward this idea of a feminine soul, and I tend to think it’s spot on.

It’s open for debate — but again, that’s another story for another day.

The truth is that there are bad players trying to reduce women to cogs in a wheel — easily replaced by the next “bleeding or birthing person”, — and if men and women of good will do not unite on this matter, then soon women will be silenced and erased.

Woman, wife, mother, sister and daughter of the King: all accurate nouns to describe me. I am not a “bleeding person”, I’m a WOMAN — and like all women, my voice matters and we can not stand by while bad players are trying to erase women and women’s voices from our culture.

I am also not a “birthing person”.  I am a MOTHER and as a mother, I am essential and irreplaceable to my kids and my husband and a lot of other people, too; so to the powers that be, I say, stop belittling my choices.

They matter to me and they ought to matter to you too — because women and mothers are essential and to try to erase them would be to try to erase the image of God in the world. It would be to try to erase the beautiful and unique complementarity that God intended for man and woman.

It would be a tragedy on so many levels.

We can not not support the erasing of women with demeaning terms that refuse to recognize we are women and we are mothers.

We have reached a crossroads, and if men and women of good will do not unite and speak up loudly on this one, I’m sorry to say we will see the implosion of society as we know it.

We can not stand by as biological males find new ways to dominate women — like recent swimming competitions in which a mediocre bio male swimmer decided to identify as a woman and swept the competition — we have to point out the hypocrisy of this!

Where are the feminists when the women they claim to fight for will be losing out on scholarships and kicked off of podiums in sporting competitions when bio males figure out they can win if they identify as a woman?

Where are the feminists when girls are being assaulted in bathrooms by biological males in skirts? Why are they standing by as their sisters are being abused?

Where are the men whose sisters and daughters will be growing up in a world where men have found the loophole to, yet again, dominate women and erase them from the public and private sphere?

I know I’m not alone on this. I know there are good men who will stand with us daughters, wives, mothers and sisters — and we simply can’t stand for the erasing of women and mothers from the public or private square.

Now is the time to say, “Enough is enough”. Now is the time to speak up and support women and mothers and daughters and sisters.

Now is the time to tell administrations and businesses, athletic associations and the powers that be, “You poked the bear, but if you continue to push, you will awaken a giant, and we will not stop until you stop. We will not budge. You budge.  Gauntlet thrown.“

This fight goes way all the way back to the Evil One Himself. He hates women. He hates their fruitfulness and their goodness and their ability to receive God in powerful ways. So don’t kid yourself, this fight matters!

That fight prophesied in Genesis 3:15 continues to this day. Yes, Jesus was that Seed — but for those of us who love Him and take Mary as our Mother, we, too are the seed that the devil is striking out at.

This is doubly true for women, because we are both woman and the seed of the woman — triply so for mothers — so make no mistake, there must be something that scares the Evil One about women and mothers, and therefore we have to stand in defense of women and mothers all the more firmly.

So much more could be said, but I guess I should leave it there for today.

“And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between thy seed and her Seed; He shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”

Genesis 3:15