By DONALD DeMARCO
The Talmud states that God counts the tears of women. This is a beautiful statement and underscores the compassion that God has for all women. Moreover, it is a compassion that should be shared by men, for the same text warns men that “they do not cause their wives pain.” Rabbi Chaim Vital, one of the great kabbalists, said, “A man’s soul is judged in the next world according to how he treated his wife.” The woman who weeps should elicit any man’s instinct to protect as well as his compassion. It is part of God’s design of the human anatomy that whereas a woman’s tear ducts are larger than those of the man, his protective arms are stronger.
Over the centuries women have had much reason to shed tears. St. John Paul II stated in his encyclical On Social Concern (Sollicitudo Rei Socialis) that “the transcendent reality of the human being…is seen to be shared from the beginning by a couple, a man and a woman (Gen. 1:27), and is therefore fundamentally social.” The destiny of a married couple, then, is personal rather than political, transcendent, rather than imminent. And husband and wife achieve their fulfillment together and through love.
The great weakness of secular feminism is for women to seek their destiny apart from men. A fundamental strategy that is involved in this case is to emphasize the tears of women to the exclusion of the compassion of men. It is to interpret their tears in terms of exploitation and view men as part of an incorrigible patriarchy. And yet, this feminist isolation from men is inevitably counterproductive because it deprives women of their true path to transcendence. Neither sex, by itself is self-sufficient; they are, by nature and by God’s design, complementary.
When we reduce the water molecule to its component parts we find that hydrogen is explosive and oxygen supports combustion. Only when hydrogen and oxygen are firmly united is water life-giving. Something of the same can be said of the male-female relationship,
The “trust women” movement is an example of this hopeless attempt of trying to achieve fulfillment by exploiting how women have been oppressed by men. Rebecca Todd Peters, a Presbyterian minister, recently wrote a book called Trust Women that is a case in point. Should all women be trusted? Have all women in the past been proven to be trustworthy?
A certain Ellen Cooke, national treasurer at Episcopal headquarters in New York, was entrusted with the donations of its church members. She admitted to embezzling $2.2 million over a period of several years. She used some of the money to purchase, among other things, a necklace from Tiffany, a huge house, and a larger farm. When her untrustworthiness was fully revealed, Bishop Edmond Browning fired her.
In her defense, she claimed that she felt a certain “powerlessness” during the years she worked “as a laywomen on a senior level at the church headquarters.” Cooke was earning a salary of $120,000 per year and had what nationally syndicated columnist William Murchison, himself an Episcopalian layman, called “near-despotic authority over the budget.”
Was the “powerlessness” of Ellen Cooke sufficient to justify thievery from collection plates? Or was this a failed attempt to exploit ideological powerlessness? At any rate, her bishop found her to be untrustworthy.
Some time ago, reacting to threats to the legal status of abortion, 18 women’s magazine editors mutually agreed to stepping up “pro-choice” advocacy. The magazines included Cosmopolitan, Family Circle, Ladies Home Journal, Woman’s Day, Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour, Redbook, Mademoiselle, Ms., and Good Housekeeping. Were each of these 18 editors of women’s magazines — all on the same page — being trustworthy? Or were they simply responding to ideological pressure?
In Plato’s dialogue, Euthyphro, Socrates meets a man who is filing a charge of homicide against his own father. When Socrates asks on what basis he has made his claim, Euthyphro’s answer is nothing more than “because I said so.” Socrates is unimpressed and believes that a firmer ground should be established in order to secure justice. Euthyphro, however, is not interested in so transcendent a value.
The entire edifice of our system of justice is based on the distinction between an accusation and a conviction. A mere accusation does not constitute a conviction. In order to secure a conviction, there must be an investigation of some sort to ensure that there is or that there is not enough evidence to bring about a conviction. This distinction is related to another critical distinction, that is, between innocence and guilt. It is not in the interest of justice to convict an innocent person on the basis of a mere accusation. These twin distinctions provide a foundation for civilization. To reduce a conviction to an accusation is to return to “frontier justice” or a policy of “might makes right.”
Secular feminism and a one-sided media can be mesmerizing to many. Yet, as Sheldon Vanauken stated in his book, Under the Mercy, “There is only one wisdom for Christians: to look with a cool eye and very skeptical eye at all the things their own age is precisely most certain of. Especially is this true of the certainties that contradict what has been believed by wise Christians down the centuries.”
G.K. Chesterton articulated the same idea in fewer words: “We do not want a Church that will move with the world. We want a Church that will move the world.”
There will be justice only when there is a recognition of the truth. We should be wary of giving carte blanche trust to any individual; but we should be eager to trust the truth. Magna est veritas et praevalebit (Great is truth and it will prevail).
Truth will eventually prevail. In the meantime, we must be patient without being inactive, hopeful without being naive.
(Dr. Donald DeMarco’s latest two books, How to Navigate Through Life and Apostles of the Culture of Life, are posted on amazon.com.)
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