August 2002 Print

Part 1A
Dr. Gyula Mago

Part 1A This Issue: Secular Feminism

Part 1B September: Definition of Feminism

Part 2 October: Religious Feminism

Feminism is the true expression of modern godlessness.
–Gertrud von Le Fort

PART IA: Secular Feminism

The Family

The family is a divinely instituted society, and marriage is not only an indissoluble contract, but also one of the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church. Unfortunately, in A.D. 2002 we have to spell out explicitly that the family–by divine decree–is made up of one man (the husband), one woman (the wife), and their children. This is because there is a war going on against the family, and one of the tools of secular society, hell-bent on destroying the family, is linguistic.¹ The world offers numerous definitions for the family, mutually contradictory, none of them important in itself, but from the multiplicity of definitions one is to conclude that the concept of the family is arbitrary, fluid, and can mean anything one wants. (For example, according to the World Book Encyclopedia "a family commonly means a group of related persons who share a home.")

On the sixth day of creation, one man and one woman were made directly by God, by forming the male body out of pre-existing matter, the female body out of the body of the first man, by creating out of nothing a soul for each, and then uniting soul to body as its form. God made only one man and one woman in this miraculous way; all others find their origin in descent from these two. By creating one man and one woman in the beginning, God

signified His will that marriage should come about between one man and one woman only. But He signifies His will continually by the remarkable and humanly inexplicable fact that the number of men and women remains always practically equal. With hardly any variation the number of boys and of girls born each year is the same. This peculiarity of nature, which cannot be influenced by man, also proclaims that the Lord and Creator of the world intended only one woman for each man.²

Jesus Christ refers to this specific beginning of man and woman as the basis of the distinctive, unchanging (i.e., non-evolving) nature of marriage (Mt. 19:4). The divine intention could not be more clear and unmistakable, and as a consequence, the family cannot be changed or redefined.

"The primary end of marriage is the procreation and education of children" (Canon 1013, Code of Canon Law). Romano Amerio explains:

Jesus gives the desire to generate offspring as the reason for the existence of marriage. He says that in Heaven "they will not take wives or husbands, because they will no longer die..." In this gospel passage both procreation and life together are relegated to the passing world of earthly reality....When mortal life ceases, procreation ceases, and when procreation ceases so does marriage.³

Pope Pius XII further clarifies the primary purpose:

This is the same for every marriage, even if without issue; as of every eye it can be said that it is intended and formed to see, even if, in abnormal cases, owing to special internal and external conditions, it will never be in a position to lead to visual perception.⁴

The secondary end of marriage is the mutual perfecting and fulfilling of the spouses, in the words of Pope Leo XIII:

...that the lives of husbands and wives might be made better and happier. This comes about in many ways: by their lightening each other's burdens through mutual help; by constant and faithful love; by having all their possessions in common; and by the heavenly grace which flows from the sacrament.⁵

The lofty goal is to bring forth children for the Church, "fellow citizens with the saints, and the domestics of God" (Eph. 2:19), ultimately to people Heaven with saints. A sublime dignity is offered to man and woman by this creative act which makes them, in the grand phrase of Pius XI, "the ministers of divine Omnipotence."⁶

 

Human Sexuality and Reproduction

And God created man to His own image, to the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. And God blessed them, saying: Increase and multiply, and fill the earth (Gen. 1:27).

But the Creator had to do more than just give the command: "Increase and multiply"!

The human being is more weak and helpless at birth than any other animal and in accordance with a general law of nature, the great complexity and richness of the child's constitution is accompanied by a corresponding degree of fragility; if it is to live and develop it must receive unremitting attention from its mother for a number of years, such care as she cannot properly give unless she has a husband to ensure her own support. When, having created a new life within the woman, the man builds a house to shelter them, tills a field to feed them and sharpens a sword to protect them, or does the equivalent of these things, then a family is in being. But there is a lot more to it than that, for it is the essential distinction of man from the beasts that his destiny is not fulfilled when his physical needs are provided for, biological requirements are not enough for his spiritual nature. The bringing-up of a child is much more than a matter of "raising"; it has to be educated in those practical and moral ideas which are its inheritance and help from the civilization in which it lives, and this is a long and hard task, almost impossible of success without a lasting and patient collaboration of the parents. We have only to look around us to see the increased moral and spiritual difficulties that beset children who have lost father or mother through death, and much the more when it is divorce that has broken up their natural home.⁷

Bringing children not only into existence but to maturity in a manner consonant with the requirements of right reason is such an arduous and daunting task that the Creator had to motivate his creatures to propagate the human race by giving them the sexual passion, and by planting in the human heart a desire for parenthood. God purposefully attached the satisfaction of sex desire to the consequent process of procreation. Once man defies the divine intention by separating the two, he commits a grave sin against the natural law and the divine positive law. The sexual pleasure was meant by God to be the reward for the willingness to undertake the daunting task of having and properly raising children. So it is a violation of justice to seek a reward that one did not deserve.

This explains why the moral law is so strict concerning deliberate sins against chastity. One may be slightly intemperate, slightly dishonest, slightly untruthful, but no one can be slightly unchaste. A sin against the virtue of chastity, if fully deliberate, is always a mortal sin. This should not be surprising:

God is adamant that His plan for the creation of new human life shall not be twisted from His hand and distorted into an instrument to satisfy a perverse greed for pleasure and excitement.⁸

That is why seeking sex-pleasure for its own sake, viewing it as an end in itself, is an utter repudiation of the natural law, manifestly injurious to society, and the Catholic Church never ceased to speak out against it:

Since, therefore, the conjugal act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of children, those who exercising it deliberately frustrate its natural power and purpose, sin against nature, and commit a deed which is shameful and intrinsically vicious.⁹

Small wonder, therefore, if Holy Writ bears witness that the Divine Majesty regards with greatest detestation this horrible crime, and at times punished it with death. As St. Augustine notes, "Intercourse even with one's legitimate wife is unlawful and wicked where the conception of the offspring is prevented. Onan, the son of Juda, did this and the Lord killed him for it" (Gen. 38:8-10). The archangel Raphael spoke these words to Tobias:

Hear me and I will show thee who they are, over whom the devil can prevail. For they who in such manner receive matrimony as to shut God out from themselves and from their mind, and to give themselves to their lust, as the horse and mule, which have not understanding, over them the devil hath power (Tob. 6:16-17).

 

The Indissolubility of Marriage

Marriage deprived of its sacred character, and made dissoluble, leads to tragedy, a veritable curse. Divorce is a curse on man, a still greater curse on woman, but it is the most dreadful curse on the children of the marriage. The wife is being deprived of her dignity and the children are left without protection as to their interests and well-being. The human child needs both parents over a very long period of time, which is the main reason for the demand that marriage never be dissolved: "What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder" (Mt. 19:6).

Pope Pius XII explains:

The family is sacred; it is the cradle not only of children but also of the nation....Do not let the family be alienated or diverted from the high purpose assigned to it by God. God wills that husband and wife, in loyal fulfillment of their duties to one another and to the family, should in the home transmit to the next generation the torch of temporal life and with it spiritual and moral life, Christian life; and that within the family, under the care of their parents, there should grow up men of straight character, of upright behavior, to become valuable unspoiled members of the human race, manly in good or bad fortune, obedient to those who command them and to God. That is the will of the Creator.¹⁰

The comments by G. K.Chesterton on the difficulty of this are perceptive:

It might be expected that the Galilean teacher advanced ideas about marriage and the relation of the sexes natural to his Galilean environment, or conditioned by the time of Tiberius, but he did not. What he advanced was something quite different; something very difficult; but something no more difficult now than it was then...

We may think it an incredible and impossible ideal; but we cannot think it any more incredible and impossible than his contemporaries would have thought it. In other words, whatever else is true, it is not true that the controversy has been altered by time...

It is an ideal altogether outside time; difficult at any period, impossible at no period...¹¹

This timeless principle has been embraced even by some sociologists on practical grounds. Pitirim A. Sorokin (1889-1968), Russian-born American sociologist, may have been the last of his profession not only to recognize but also boldly proclaim the vital importance of the family and the terrible costs of repudiating marital and family ties. Although not a Christian, he also viewed marriage "as an all-embracing union of infinite richness which is, and should be, truly sacred and indissoluble."¹²He pointed out that only the family could both maintain order in society and shape the individual personality, and that even an illiterate mother, endowed with kindness and common sense, is a better moral educator of children than most of the highly trained educators of schools.

 

Authority in the Family

In the home the husband is the chief of the family and the head of the wife. The wife is subject to her husband and obeys him, not as a servant but as a companion. This is by explicit divine decree: "And thou shalt be under thy husband's power and he shall have dominion over thee" (Gen. 3:16). According to Genesis (2:21-22), woman is derived from man to take away his feeling of loneliness. Woman thus is second to man in creation. She is subject to man, but not because he is the end for which she exists. The end is the same for both: eternal life.

Of course, in our day the mention of authority conjures up images of despots. The fact that God intends man to represent authority in the home does not mean that God put him there as a tyrant, or that obedience of the wife is the obedience of a slave to a master, of an inferior to a superior, of a minor incapable of decision to an adult. His headship in no way detracts from her dignity as wife, mother and companion.¹³

But according to St. Augustine, human society should be served by those who rule it:

This is the origin of domestic peace, or the well-ordered concord of those in the family who rule and those who obey. For they who care for the rest rule–the husband the wife, the parents the children, the masters the servants; and they who are cared for obey–the women their husbands, the children their parents, the servants their masters. But in the family of the just man who lives by faith and is as yet a pilgrim journeying on to the celestial city, even those who rule serve those whom they seem to command; for they rule not from a love of power, but from a sense of the duty they owe to others–not because they are proud of authority, but because they love mercy.¹⁴

The relationship of husband and wife is that of Christ and His Church, the husband representing Christ and the wife the Church. "Let women be subject to their husbands, as to the Lord: because the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the Church" (Eph. 5:22-23). This thought plainly shows that a wife's obedience is not toward man, but toward Christ. A wife obeys her husband for Christ's sake. Therefore it is quite natural that she obeys him only in things that Christ approves and allows.¹⁵

[St. Paul's] words mean that order and domestic felicity cannot conform to the so-called "emancipation of women," whether the phrase is understood to mean physical or economic or social emancipation.

Physical emancipation would mean that a woman has the right to avoid the burdens that go with the dignity of wife and mother. Such a view Christianity condemns.

Economic emancipation would mean that a wife has the right to pursue an independent business career without her husband's knowledge and sanction, caring nothing for her family. Such a view Christianity condemns.

Social emancipation would consist in a woman's having the right to regard the realms of the home as too narrow, the right to neglect her domestic duties, to have no care of her husband and children, to engage rather in public affairs. Such a view Christianity cannot approve.

Where two people live together, one must lead, direct, we may even say "command." The family where this "commanding" and obedience are lacking will sooner or later disintegrate.¹⁶

The natural place in which women express their personalities is the family and their particular task is the bringing up of children. Work away from the home is a disorder to be corrected. The wages of the husbands ought to be such as not to force mothers to work away from the home, to the detriment of family life and the upbringing of children.¹⁷

The Holy Family is the model of the Catholic family, and in it every detail is of infinite significance. Almighty God Himself was the child in this family, subject to both of His parents. The Blessed Virgin Mary, the most holy Mother of God, the wife in this family was subject to her husband, St. Joseph, who had the God-given authority over both of them, although, in the order of grace, he was inferior to both of them. So authority primarily means responsibility, and has nothing to do with excellence, and certainly nothing to do with oppression or subjugation.

 

Educating the Children

Pope Pius XI in his encyclical On the Christian Education of Youth clearly states that education belongs proportionately to the family, the Church and civil society, since it includes religious, moral, physical and civic education. But the role of the family is primary, and the parents have a right to educate their children which is prior to that of the state, as the Pope explains:

The family therefore holds directly from the Creator the mission and hence the right to educate the offspring, a right inalienable, because inseparably joined to the strict obligation, a right anterior to any right whatever of civil society and of the State; ...the State should respect the inherent rights of the Church and of the family concerning Christian education....Accordingly, unjust and unlawful is any monopoly, educational or scholastic, which physically or morally forces families to make use of government schools, contrary to the dictates of their Christian conscience.¹⁸

Even the Universal Declaration of Human Rights¹⁹ acknowledges this. Its Article 26 contains the statement: "Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children."

 

The War Against the Family

Not to get confused in the present war of words over the family, we repeat the Catholic assumptions: the family is made up of one man, one woman, and their children. They all understand their divine mission, obey the Ten Commandments, and consider the family a sacred institution. The family is anterior to the state. The state should assist the family, but should not threaten its existence.²⁰ The secular assumptions are very different: the family is made up of selfish, depraved, "self-defining" individuals who merely look after their own interests, and each of whom has to be restrained by state laws not to harm or corrupt the others.

In 1880, the encyclical Arcanum Divinae (On Christian Marriage] of Pope Leo XIII states:

Now, those who deny that marriage is holy, and who relegate it, stripped of all holiness, among the class of common secular things, uproot thereby the foundations of nature, not only resisting the designs of Providence, but, so far as they can, destroying the order that God has ordained. No one, therefore, should wonder if from such insane and impious attempts there spring up a crop of evils pernicious in the highest degree both to the salvation of souls and to the safety of the commonweal.²¹

The "insane and impious" attempts to destroy the divine institution of family started with the Protestant revolt, primarily with Protestantism allowing divorce, and these attempts have been gathering speed ever since, promoted chiefly by Masonry and by the ideas of the French Revolution. In France, for example, the French Revolution legalized divorce the first time in 1792. Louis de Bonald (1754-1840), a Catholic philosopher, argued the case against divorce after the revolution so convincingly²² that France again abolished divorce in 1816, not to be reinstated until 1884.

An important factor in the war against the family has been Marxism, since it always advocated abolishing private property, abolishing the family, and abolishing religion. The ideas related to the family were stated most completely by Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) in his book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. About the future of the family he said:

With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the individual family ceases to be an economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of children become a public affair; society looks after all children equally, whether they are born in or out of wedlock.

The Bolsheviks tried to implement these ideas when they first came into power in Soviet Russia. Igor Shafarevich in The Socialist Phenomenon describes the devastating effects on families.²³

The same goal was pursued in the West under the influence of Freemasonry, at a slower pace but with greater sophistication. The vast arsenal of methods used to undermine and abolish the family includes, in addition to the legalization of divorce, not paying family wages, taxation penalizing large families, promoting contraception, legalizing abortion, sterilization, collectivized child-rearing (day-care centers), the overall undermining of sexual morality by encouraging extramarital sex, pornography, immodesty in every aspect of modern life, making women dress and look like men ("unisex" grooming and clothing), and the militant promotion of homosexuality.

A crucial part is the compulsory public education of the children, from which all mention of true religion and absolute moral standards have been banished. (Already in 1929 Chesterton noted: "The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their common sense," Illustrated London News, Sept. 7, 1929.) Instead, it prominently includes sex education of children, and implants ideas in young people against the family. Babette Francis describes Australia in 1990:

Euphemistic terminology such as "non-sexist guidelines" imposed on text books and curricula conceals a massive campaign of thought control and censorship to eliminate the traditional family. Indeed the dismantling of "sex roles" has virtually superseded the transmission of information as the aim of the classroom.²⁴

The conflict between the family and the State concerning the education of the children always accompanied the war against the family. The enemies of the family always asserted that the right to educate children resides immediately and directly with civil authority:

The principle was asserted in all its boldness as early as the French Revolution. "Children belong to the Republic before they belong to their parents," cried Danton. "The fatherland," pontificated Robespierre, "has the right and duty to rear its children; it cannot commit this trust to family pride or to private prejudices...."

Bucharin, presenting the case for communism, has stated that: "...society possesses an original and fundamental right to the education of children....We must accordingly reject without compromise and brush aside the claim of parents to impart through family education their narrow views to the mind of their offspring.²⁵

Once women were beginning to be forced to work for wages, and were forced to compete with men, the issue of just wages has arisen, leading to what was called the "woman problem."²⁶ This problem was greatly exacerbated by the fact that Protestantism abolished all religious orders, thereby greatly increasing the number of women who had to earn their own living.

The teaching of Christ on the nobility of freely chosen virginity as contrasted with marriage, to the embracing of which the chosen of both sexes are invited (Mt. 19:29), was an important part of Catholicism. By this doctrine the female sex in particular was placed in an independence of man unthought of before. The religious life granted the unmarried woman value and importance without man; and, what is more, the virgin who renounces marriage from religious motives acquires precedence above the married woman and enlarges the circle of her motherly influence upon society. Elisabeth Gnauck-Kuehne says truly: "The esteem of virginity is the true emancipation of woman in the literal sense."²⁷

Protestantism, by abolishing the religious orders and encouraging divorce caused an enormous damage to society, and prepared the ground for what we today call feminism.

 

[So ends Part 1A. Part IB is promised for September 2002 which will help us define "Feminism."]

 

Dr. Gyula Mago was born in 1938 in Hungary and brought up a Catholic. He lived under Communist rule for 20 years. Dr. Mago obtained his Ph.D. from Cambridge University, England, in 1970, and was a professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1970-1999). He presently lives in retirement in Durham, NC, and assists at the Latin Mass at Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in Raleigh, NC. There he presides over the meetings of the League of the Kingship of Christ.

 

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1. Bryce J. Christensen, "Redefining Family: War over a Word," in Utopia Against the Family (Ignatius Press, 1990).

2. TihamerToth, The Christian Family (Herder, 1941), p. 101.

3. Romano Amerio, Iota Unum: A Study of Changes in the Catholic Church (Sarto House, 1996), p. 661.

4. M. Chinigo, ed., The Pope Speaks: The Teachings ofPope Pius XII (Pantheon, 1957), p. 26.

5. Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae (On Christian Marriage), February 10, 1880.

6. Pius XI, Casti Connubii (On Christian Marriage), December 31, 1930.

7. Pierre Henry Simon, "Marriage and Society," in Body and Spirit (Longmans, Green and Co., 1939).

8. Leo J. Trese, The Faith Explained (Fides, 1959), p. 264.

9. Pius XI, Casti Connubii.

10. Piux XII, Plea to Warring Nations, Radio Message to the Entire World, May 13, 1942.

11. G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (Hodder and Stoughton, 1925), pp. 220-223 passim.

12. Bryce Christensen, Sorokin: Prophet of Family Decay (Rockford Institute Center on the Family in America, 1993).

13. George A. Kelly, The Catholic Marriage Manual (Random House, 1958), pp. 6-7.

14. St. Augustine, The City of God, XIX, 14.

15. Toth, The Christian Family, p. 139.

16. Ibid., p. l38.

17. Amerio, Iota Unum, p. 210.

18. Pius XI, Divini Illius Magistri (On the Christian Education of Youth), December 31, 1929.

19. United Nations, 1948.

20. Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (Condition of the Working Classes) May 15, 1891.

21. Leo XIII, Arcanum Divinae.

22. Louis Bonald, On Divorce (Transaction Publishers, 1992).

23. Igor Shafarevich, The Socialist Phenomenon (Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 243-248.

24. C. M. Kelly, ed., Feminism v. Mankind (Family Publications, 1990), pp. 19-20.

25.  S. M. Krason, and R. J. D'Agostino, eds., Parental Rights (Christendom College Press, 1988), pp. 15-17.

26. The Catholic Encyclopedia, (1912) s.v. "Woman."

27. Ibid.