Crumbling Edifices

Ouch!!!

On 2 May of the Year of the Lord 2021, Father Z published a blog post about St Catharine of Siena. I will try to link to the article here, but it seems not to work.

The blog post is, like every other one of the same author, very interesting. It would appear that this saintly woman “travelled widely” and “was enormously influential”.

How does this, pray, square with the usual feminist narrative of women who were treated, more or less, like dirt, and certainly as radically “inferior beings”, before “emancipating” themselves? Well in one word, it doesn’t. Letting aside the issue of the travels (which already demolishes a good part of the narrative), it is the fact of her enormous influence that gives the lie about the role of the woman in the pre-emancipation age. This would never be possible if Catherine had been considered, qua woman, unable to exert influence. You will find no child, bar Jesus, able to exercise such “enormous influence”; and even Jesus chose to exercise his influence later in life.

It appears clear that the, undoubtedly, very manly and very “patriarchal” Christian society of the time was extremely ready, eager even, to be influenced by a woman who was also – besides being woman – very young!

Watch with me the feminist edifice of lies crumble in front of your eyes, leaving behind a huge cloud of smoke and debris everywhere.

It is extremely wrong, and the result of the stupidity of our times, to make women’s position and human dignity directly related to her voting rights, or to her ability to parrot men in this or that activity. It is like thinking that cats will be inferior to dogs until they are finally allowed to bark.

Intelligent women have always been influential. However, their influence was exerted in a different way than the one proper of men, and was used (when a good, positive one) in perfect harmony with the special graces that God has given specifically to women. It appears, as we read in the blog post, that men of the past perfectly understood this. I wonder how many men, today, can think with the same lucidity; though they have, no doubt, smartphones vastly exceeding the computation ability of their ancestors.

Also, it is not known to me that St Catharine of Siena, who was “enormously influential”, ever used her influence to advocate for women’s vote, or women’s emancipation, or the right of women to become part of the Imperial armed forces, or priestesses, or deacons, or lectors at Mass. It is, in fact, not known to me that this saintly woman ever thought that there was anything fundamentally wrong with the societal structures of her time.

But no, we are to listen to Hillary Clinton and (*if* she is a biological female, of course; which is said in jest, but not so much…) Michelle Obama. They clearly know better than St Catherine.

Modern Western societies are deeply, deeply intoxicated with feminist poison. Yes, even many males who think themselves conservative. They might think of themselves in that way, but every quisque de populo in a factually independent, largely self-administered city (“Comune”) in Italy in, say, the XII or XIII Century, would have actually laughed at hearing these people defining themselves as manly, or even “conservative”.

They would, in a word, laugh at people with such smart phones, but unable to get the basics of the God-given order themselves.