October 2005 Print

Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré, O.P.

 

It is a subject no one discusses: the meaning of woman's Fall, its "other side." I am going to show you what it consists of. The gaze of modern man is incapable of seeing any deeper than the physical aspect of woman. We can hardly blame him: everything today is organized to make him that way, even what used to be known as morals. With the Fall, Eve's beauty was reduced to the poverty of a merely physical expression, distributing passion (whiche explains the difficulties and crises in marriages).

"It was the serpent who tricked me." It is the admission of an emptiness in place of the mission which the woman had received, namely, to be queen. Remember the old expression from the French, "ma Dame"–"my Lady," an expression of majesty. Reduced to a state of slavery by her spirit led astray, woman drew the regard of God who did not disavow the original Beauty He had created. This beauty He would later find again in the magnificent face of Mary, yet He still saw in Eve as it were the reverse of beauty: the sense of pity, pity for what is not beautiful.

I have always noticed in the feminine temperament the horror of ugliness in all its forms, like an echo of the original source. This horror encompasses artistic, moral, and material ugliness. In this, woman reveals that, in spite of his victory, Satan never knows the reserves of virtue still remaining in what God has created. That splendid woman, who prefigured Mary, could not remain in the thought of God as a defeat. Satan, in his tragic beauty, has no notion of pity. And the pity of God overflows onto the heart of woman to draw her spirit toward a baptism of tears mingled with the blood of Christ, who is the Veritable Beauty.

God summoned woman to Calvary in many ways. Think, first, of the woman undefiled, His Mother. Consider also the fallen woman, Mary Magdalene. Again, there is Martha, the woman full of heart. Contemplate all of the women who were witness of the scene, beating their breast (Lk.13:20). These women were not themselves guilty. God summoned these women to Calvary so that they would be conscious of the profaned physical Beauty of the Son of God, an evocation of the profaned spiritual beauty of the nature of the first woman–ll with Mary as a witness.

These women united themselves in this way to the Passion of Christ, whose martyrdom was in the process of purifying the human spirit of all of the stains come by the fault of the first woman, to give it back its crystal and its dawn. Woman received there the mission to utilize her pity for Jesus by letting flow from her heart all of the modes of redemptive activity of which a woman is capable.

The spirit of woman, once it is regenerated, drinks at the fountainhead of her own heart all that she needs to be a woman. This includes the assurance born of her dignity as a woman, her audacity of devotion, her boldness of physical offering in reparation, her delicacy in resurrecting consciences, courages and audacities, her courage for helping a sinner climb to the highest sanctity, for rising back up in her sinful tatters, transformed into the armor of repentance and joy.

Who will carry off the victory? God or Satan? Sinful woman or woman victorious?

After having followed Satan, woman regenerated snatches the eternity of souls from his clutch. He is vanquished by the blood of the Son of Man and by the tears of His Mother, representing in herself all of the women who collaborate with the Savior by their pity coupled with the mercy of the Son of Man.

The modern world no longer has this sense of woman as responsible for pity on the world. It has turned her pity away from its object to turn it toward woman herself. Hence, we have "women's liberation." It becomes nearly impossible to make the world understand that Calvary is the only place where woman can rediscover her spirit exorcised of these malevolent currents. There does she draw the answers formed by the liberating slavery of Love, unacceptable to the deviated spirit of "women's liberation." The veritable love, for her, begins on Calvary. Outside of this love for others, for children to educate, for gift of self, for country, for the Church, there remains only the slavery of her body, within the lie of her manipulated intelligence.

Woman is either divinized or possessed: "It was the serpent who tricked me." It is by the intermediary of pity that God renders woman her dignity by making her rediscover her heart. Do you know what pity is? It is the manifestation of the mercy of God by the intermediary of a human spirit. St. Thomas tells us that pity is the greatest of the moral virtues.

It is pity that restores the human spirit in the three conditions without which it is not human. This is first done in the integrity of nature. Next, pity accomplishes its end by the welling of hope. Finally, pity restores the human spirit in the value of its merits.

Once woman becomes the proprietor of pity, she is capable of distributing it where human science cannot. For instance, she is capable of having pity on the helpless, such as devotion to the elderly. She has pity in the incomprehension of unrequited affection. She showers pity on the pretensions of minds wise in their own conceits, pity on weakness of health, toward the poor and timid, pity watching over others, in the essentially spiritual mission of bringing forward the deeper spiritual qualities in the motley crew of beggars that we are.

Throughout history, in fact, we always find a woman watching over the men. Remember Pentecost, and that extraordinary woman who guides the first steps of the Church, surrounded by fearful, anxious men. It was Mary who obtained from the Holy Spirit the gift of persevering to the end. Look at the history of the Church: Mary Magdalene, the great repentant, who gathers around herself hundreds of girls who, redeemed, refuse their carnal ugliness and become souls of absolute sanctification. Look at St. Scholastica, St. Clotilda, St. Genevieve, St. Elizabeth of Sweden, St. Joan of Arc, Jeanne Hachette, Louise de Marillac, Louise de Betigny, Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, and Theresa of Lisieux. They are stars among the stars, a luminous path tracing a light through the social night of the Church, of the homeland, of families and associations to awaken the sun whose memory woman conserves in her heart and which God first lit in her heart on Calvary by the intermediary of pity.

We are today in the century of violence, in other words, the century of the great weaknesses of instinct. We live in a world that seems strong and is only weakness, fear, helplessness, and capacity for anger. It little appreciates the pity that wells up from the heart.

What is the heart? It is the seat of the domestic virtues, those virtues which nobody mentions anymore, ever since the liberation of woman, ever since she is no longer concerned with what happens in the little house that is the cell of a religious, in the house that is the Christian home, in the big house that is the country, the immense house that is the Church. The domestic virtues are those virtues indispensable to the construction of the "house": the virtue of silence, of continuity in gift of self, of meticulousness in work, of presence in sacrifice, the virtue of duty of state above all. In summary, all of those virtues which repair the laziness of the spirit with all its ugliness of sensuality and wicked pleasure.

It is quite a task today making people understand that without the domestic virtues it is impossible to construct or to maintain a society. These virtues are what express true pity, and only in their practice is pity true. There is no need to invent anything; we only need to remind woman of the great liturgy of the domestic virtues. God placed a profundity in the heart of woman meant for that liturgy, the liturgy of the holy women on Calvary. Imagine what must have been the return from Calvary–what silence–those women seeing the Son of God paying for the fault of their mother Eve.

The first attitude to rediscover is to reassume one's post of positive, heroic, daily love, to reawaken on earth the memory of Calvary lived and meditated even to the birth of sanctity. Compare the history of the Church, of the holy women, of mothers who have held the line, the history of those who, in the single life, have lived virginity, source of strength, with the liberty and the liberation of woman, of which we have been the witness since 1900.

Do you want to know the endpoint of the great projects of women's liberation? It began with the sterility of her spiritual mission: she no longer had the time since she was snared by her professional ambition. Next came the sterility of the style of feminine attitudes: the amazon or the shrew, both losing any resemblance to feminine pity. Feminine style says a great deal about the heart of a woman and her spiritual culture. Then it was the sterility of the mind, incapable of realizing, in the abundance of her knowledge, that she had to remain a woman whatever she did. Finally, today we have the legalized sterility of woman's maternity.

On one hand the resurrection of woman's heart on Calvary and, on the other, a cascade of successive sterilities. Why these lifeless homes, these children without education, these juvenile delinquents, these young murderers? Because women are no longer preoccupied with the transfiguring domestic virtues. These children no longer know where to go. They have no more home.

We have intellectualized the life of the woman, whom Satan had led astray. It is not a question of cutting a woman off from knowledge and culture, but of remembering that her heart is responsible before all the world for that pity of which she is capable for saving, as Christ saved us on Calvary. The energies of the feminine heart, the energies of feminine decisions presuppose that woman is aware of her mystery. The law of the spirit is to be a mystery; a mystery of interiority, without exterior check, without need of an exterior life.

The beauty of the woman was the mystery of the spirit descended from heaven to help Adam reascend. In spite of Satan, in spite of the Fall, God has the last word and the Redeemer summons women by pities capable of engendering life. The law of the woman is life: the spiritual life, the life of the heart, the life of the body, the life of the mind, the life of initiatives. It is the woman who has charge over life. She has the mission to be queen by her pity for a world overrun by ugliness, for a leprous world.

The leprosy of the masses, the leprosy of the unreasonable materialism of the pagan mind, is fascinated with diagrams: laying out highways, plotting birth rates, etc. It is fascinated with dialectic: thesis and antithesis, but never a conclusion. It is fascinated with diagnostics and examinations even to the martyrdom of the sick brought to their grave by excess of experiments. It is fascinated with balance sheets without decisions. We are a pastiche of humanity walking addition by addition toward the final collapse of negative results.

Where is our character, our personality? Where is our conscience? Our sentiments, our prayers, our supernaturalized affections? Our victories over evil? We have a fearful disdain of direct, immediate and audacious action.

Where there are no more women, there is no more life in any domain. If there are no more women, there is no more devotion to Mary, there are no more priests, there is no more respect for mothers, there is no longer a "house," there are no more promises in hearts (only trial arrangements), and there is no longer a sense of feminine pride wreathed in the honor of an ardent, apostolic celibacy. Women today may be professors, doctors, nurses or secretaries, but woman has become incapable of watching over the spiritual life. When the disinterestedness of feminine devotion has disappeared, there remains only feminine selfishness, which is an abominable thing, productive of nothing.

The world is mad of a madness dressed up as success. The world is mad, for woman is driving it mad. She is driving everyone mad, so completely has she snuffed out the expression of beauty, lost by the profanation of sin. She has profaned her pity for the world. Who will have pity upon her?

She remains the source of life; she will pay in her eternity if she turns it into a source mannered like the coils of the serpent. We need to find women capable of pity, that is, of resurrecting the pre-eminent values of intelligence, faith, grace, enthusiasm, purity, and moral virtue. Pity for the world and pity for the Church: both of them stand in need of the pity of sanctified women.

 

Translated exclusively into English for Angelus Press and published in this language for the first time. Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré, O.P. (say: Sheave-ray') was ordained in 1930. He was an ardent Thomist, student of Scripture, retreat master, and friend of Archbishop Lefebvre. He died in 1984.