The Anti-Mary Exposed: Rescuing the Culture from Toxic Femininity

it is an archetype or guide to understanding what happens to a woman when her true heart is removed. The results are dramatic, devastating, and widespread. And yet the antidote is very simple: to remind her that “this is not who you are.” The world of the anti-Mary is not who we are, not what we are made for.

The grave evil of abortion has reached into every area of familial life and left society morally threadbare.

The unspoken feminist mantra says, “Men, even though we want to be just like you, you must change.

Women are not getting happier, just more medicated.

If there is, indeed, an anti-Marian spirit, what might it look like? Well, a woman in its grip would not value children. She would be bawdy, vulgar, and angry. She would rage against the idea of anything resembling humble obedience or self-sacrifice for others. She would be petulant, shallow, catty, and overly sensuous. She would also be self-absorbed, manipulative, gossipy, anxious, and self-servingly ambitious. In short, she would be everything that Mary is not. She would bristle especially at the idea of being a virgin or a mother.

Anglican convert Blessed John Henry Cardinal Neumann described Mary as our "happier world". By leading her children to her Son, the Blessed Mother helps "them to regain that which has been lost through the fall and sin. She rids us of false teaching. Far from a saccharine devotion, Mary burns through the vices of the cynic, the jaded, the angry, the agitated and the hopeless. In their place, she plants the gifts of peace, order, hope, strength, goodness, and creativity.

The important impulses of protection and responsibility that have so often inspired men to greatness have been reduced to “toxic masculinity.” The unspoken feminist mantra says, “Men, even though we want to be just like you, you must change.

Women have always desired equality and respect, but our current culture isn’t seeking it through the grace of Mary; rather, the culture seeks this equality and respect through the vices of Machiavelli: rage, intimidation, tantrums, bullying, raw emotion, and absence of logic. It is this aggressive impulse—this toxic femininity—that finds pride in calling oneself “nasty,” feels empowered by dressing as a vagina, belittles men, and sees the (tragically ironic) need to drop civility so that civility can somehow return again. The devil knows that all these marks of the anti-Mary—rage, indignation, vulgarity, and pride—short-circuit a woman’s greatest gifts: wisdom, prudence, patience, unflappable peace, intuition, her ability to weave together the fabric of society, and her capacity for a deep and fulfilling relationship with God. Instead, the father of lies promises power, fame, fortune, and sterile, fleeting pleasures.

Both of these ideologies—radical feminism and homosexuality—are committing the same error of negating the necessity and goodness of the opposite sex.

hook-up culture and shows like Sex and the City or Girls that glamorize the lifestyle of “going through men” have made heterosexual sin so banal that more exotic forms of eroticism have become trendy, particularly homosexuality, which opened wide the doors to the now readily accepted LGBT movement.

The splendor of a soul in grace is so seductive that it surpasses the beauty of all created things.” —St. Thomas Aquinas

We live under ghe impression that we are freethinkers; the irony is that thinkers are generally not free when they think just like everyone else.

the independent woman who finds herself pregnant will think, “This baby cannot be, for it isn’t who I am.” The young women without means or with pressure from others will think, “This baby cannot be, for it isn’t who I am allowed to be.” And the mother of the less than perfect baby (or the baby who isn’t the right sex) will think, “This baby cannot be, for he isn’t who I want him to be.” That’s the power of pink. Like abortion, foot-binding was foisted upon women by other women. “The truth, no matter how unpalatable, is that foot-binding was experienced, perpetuated and administered by women.” It did, however, finally come to an end. “Though utterly rejected in China now, … it survived for a thousand years in part because of women’s emotional investment in the practice.”29 One day something similar will be said about abortion: it was finally defeated when women realized that they didn’t need to maintain the emotional (or financial) investment in the practice. Until

author Joseph Pearce wrote, “The truth is that the healthiest societies are always in one important sense matriarchies. They are societies in which strong and virtuous women raise strong and virtuous children, and in which well-behaved wives rein in the unruly passions of their poorly-behaved husbands. The unhealthiest societies are patriarchies in which the power of men runs riot because the power of well-behaved women to restrain them has been weakened. The most unhealthy society of all is one in which the women want to run riot with the men.

Parents are the bridge between a child and God; they are the first icon of his unconditional love.

The last few decades have witnessed the subtle erasing of the Marian icon in real women. First, through the pill, followed by the advent of legalized abortion, motherhood has been on the chopping block along with childhood. Motherhood has become dispensable to the point that today the broader culture doesn’t bat an eye when a child is adopted by two men.

This book, although it engages in the heavy battles at hand, will not end with the anti-Mary having the last word. Gratefully, we have the real Mary who is present in the world, in our lives, and who is capable of the miraculous. With an unparalleled track record, our spiritual mother is far from distant, superficial, or saccharine. She is the true model of authentic femininity and offers us her assistance through all of life’s demands, struggles, frustrations, and tears. She brings clarity, healing, peace, joy, and grace wherever she is invited. She offers us the key to unlock the confusion about what it means to be women and what we need to do to find the true happiness that our souls crave.

The layers of confusion, twisted thinking, decadence, sacrilege, and viciousness descend ever-deeper with each passing day. Rage, obscenity, sexual license, nudity, erasing of gender differences, and the cheapening of life have all become commonplace in the public square.

remember that our battle, as St. Paul reminded the Ephesians and us, isn’t really with them but with the devil: “For our struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens” (Eph 6:12 NABRE).