Catholic Replies
Q. I am a high school student who has been hearing from a teacher about how women like the late Betty Friedan did so much to free women from being “stay-at-home mothers” so they could fulfill themselves in the workplace. How true is this? — Z.M., Massachusetts.
A. Not true at all. In his excellent new book Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, Professor Anthony Esolen explained why in a chapter entitled “Restoring Womanhood: Building Homes, not Houses.”
Among other things, he said that “when Betty Friedan, a communist ideologue posing as an ordinary American wife and mother, wrote The Feminine Mystique, she did not argue that women did not have pretty much the same opportunities that men had for education and employment. She argued that despite those opportunities, women had been hoodwinked into believing that life at home was more fulfilling and were therefore bored out of their minds” (p. 124).
Esolen continued by saying that “this is now the way of the world. If someone talks about ‘economic opportunities for women,’ he or she is not talking about the health and prosperity of the household, but about what money you make for yourself. Even the phrase ‘stay-at-home mom’ is patronizing and faintly derogatory, like ‘stick-in-the mud mom’ or ‘sit in the corner mom.’ Do we talk about a ‘chained-to-the-desk mom’ or a ‘stuck-in-traffic mom’ or a ‘languishing-in-meetings mom’?”
He said that “to do fifty things in one day for which you alone are responsible, for the immediate good of the people you love, is deemed easy, trivial, beneath the dignity of a rational person, but to push memoranda written in legal patois from one bureaucratic office to another, at great public expense and for no clear benefit to the common good, now that is the life. Chesterton put it well when he said that the work of a mother is not small, but vast. A teacher would bring to fifty children the arithmetical rule of three, and though that is an interesting thing, it is but small and limited. The mother brings to one child the whole universe. That is no sentimentality. It is exactly true” (pp. 124-125).
What we must do, said Esolen, is “rid ourselves of the feminist spite that pretends to despise the woman of many talents and many tasks in the home, preferring the specialist who amputates and cauterizes and does one thing well, for herself primarily and sometimes even at the expense of the family.
“I said ‘pretends to despise’ advisedly; envies would have been nearer the mark. Women themselves can testify to this; they know the looks they receive from a certain sort of woman as they mount the steps of the bus with three small children skipping along after. Imagine the most human place in your experience, the one that is warmest in heart and soul and mind. It isn’t an office, is it? We have plenty of second-rate men in our world. Our whole late capitalist bureaucratic human-resource drudging economy consumes second-rate men as fuel. We don’t need any more. We need first-rate women” (pp. 127-128).
Q. Recently I agreed to help provide a place for someone to recover from an immoral procedure. I was told that I was performing an act of charity. However, I wonder if instead it was a way of cooperating with a serious sin. What do you think? — S.F., New York.
A. Since you don’t mention what the immoral procedure was, we can only speculate. The first thing that popped into our mind was abortion. But whether that was the sin or not, you did not do anything wrong in agreeing to help the person involved. As long as you did not approve of the procedure, you cannot be guilty of cooperating in it. You were merely doing the loving thing by trying to help someone get beyond a very traumatic episode, and part of your charitable outreach should include getting the person to seek God’s forgiveness through Confession.
Recall the encounter at the well between Jesus and the Samaritan woman (cf. John 4:4-42), who had had five husbands and was then living with another man. Jesus did not condemn her. He knew that she had been looking for love in all the wrong places, and He offered her the life-giving water of His grace. This loving approach to the woman lit a fire in her heart, and she became a fervent disciple of Jesus, suggesting to the people of her town the possibility that this stranger might be the Messiah.
Though her sinful lifestyle had made her an outcast up to that point, now she was so persuasive among her people that they invited Jesus to stay with them for two more days and came to believe in Him.
The Lord works in unconventional ways to bring sinners back to Him, and perhaps He is using you as His instrument in this situation.
Q. When preparing students for Confirmation, we insist that they go to Confession before receiving Confirmation. One complaint we often hear is that they don’t have any sins to confess. How would you respond to this? — M.A.C., Maryland.
A. Perhaps they’re thinking that they haven’t committed any of the “big” sins, like murder, adultery, abortion, etc., so they don’t need Confession. But there are other “big” sins that they routinely commit but don’t recognize as sins, like failing to pray each day, misusing the name of God, skipping Mass on Sunday, abusing alcohol or drugs, watching pornography, cheating in school, trashing the reputations of others, and so forth.
But there are plenty of “little” sins that we commit, which in turn can lead to “big” sins. In a column in January of this year, Msgr. Charles Pope offered this summary:
“Each of us is personally sinful and needs a savior. If we are honest, we must admit that we can be selfish, egotistical, rude, insensitive, prideful, lustful, greedy, unkind, and ungrateful. We can be dishonest, insincere, shallow, inconsistent, double-minded, and uncommitted. We can be stingy, selfish, petty, spiteful, hateful, wrathful, vengeful, and just plain mean. We struggle with laziness, indifference, worldliness, and lack of discipline. We routinely fail to give witness to Christ and to our faith. We fail to submit our will to God, lead a holy life, stand up for justice, speak the truth, call sinners to Christ, and pray for others. Did I mention somewhere that we need a savior?”
Q. I read a booklet about the Mass in which the author repeatedly states that at the consecration, we are made present on Calvary, and we are witnessing the crucifixion of Christ as it is happening. The author carefully avoids the word “again” and does not say Jesus is being crucified again. But he emphasizes that we are present at His crucifixion. What is the Church’s teaching on this? — M.M., Alabama.
A. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (n. 1367) says that “the sacrifice of Christ and the sacrifice of the Eucharist are one single sacrifice,” with the same victim, Christ, and the same priest, Christ — “‘only the manner of offering is different’…‘since in this divine sacrifice which is celebrated in the Mass, the same Christ who offered himself once in a bloody manner on the altar of the cross is contained and offered in an unbloody manner’.” The interior quotations are from the Council of Trent.
Though we at Mass are not present on Calvary, the events of Calvary are made present and memorialized for us. “The Eucharist,” says the Catechism, “is the memorial of Christ’s Passover, the making present and the sacramental offering of his unique sacrifice, in the liturgy of the Church, which is his Body….In the sense of Sacred Scripture the memorial is not merely the recollection of past events but the proclamation of the mighty works wrought by God for men [cf. Exodus 13:3]. In the liturgical celebration of these events, they become in a certain way present and real. This is how Israel understands its liberation from Egypt: every time Passover is celebrated, the Exodus events are made present to the memory of believers so that they may conform their lives to them” (nn. 1362, 1363).
“In the New Testament,” says the Catechism (n. 1364), “the memorial takes on new meaning. When the Church celebrates the Eucharist, she commemorates Christ’s Passover, and it is made present: the sacrifice Christ offered once for all on the cross remains forever present [cf. Heb. 7:25-27]. ‘As often as the sacrifice of the Cross by which “Christ our Pasch has been sacrificed” is celebrated on the altar, the work of our redemption is carried out’” (Lumen Gentium, n. 3; cf. 1 Cor. 5:7).
