The last few days have brought us both the mistrial of Lindsay Clancy and the feast of Mother Teresa (Sept 5). Curiously, each represents a different direction: the path of the feminist or the Christian. The feminist embodies a life of glamorized victimhood, control, and sterility, while the second embodies the life of a woman deeply in love with Christ who has poured herself out fruitfully for others.
Lindsay Clancy, as an icon of feminism, requires some context. Much of that context has become the cultural water in which we all swim daily, so it can be difficult to identify. But how is it that we’ve gotten to the point that a woman can premeditatively strangle her three small children and then not just gain widespread support, but have tens of thousands of women identify with her behavior?
Every part of her story and the women drawn into it, relies upon a deliberate amnesia about what it means to be a woman.
Women are the fulcrum of life. We are the remarkable portal through which God allows us to conceive and gestate new life. It is perhaps the one place in the world, other than the Mass and other Sacraments, where we know God actively engages and connects with humanity.
In every act of conception, no matter how exalted and reverent, or tawdry and awful, He ensouls the child conceived. This is a great mystery. There are never just two actors when a child is conceived; God must always be involved, which is why sexuality in the Christian tradition is treated with great reverence.
It should, then, be no surprise that the evil one wants to destroy the very vessel where life sparks, where God ensouls the connection of sperm and egg.
Our age has witnessed every conceivable way in which a woman and her womb can be destroyed, sterilized, desecrated, and eliminated. Where her body can be stripped of dignity, beauty, and life-giving capacities.
But Satan is very cunning. He has actively recruited women themselves in this process. Not only do women not reject the ubiquitous degradation, but many have come to see it as good, for example: promiscuity, birth control, or no-fault divorce.
Nowhere can that be seen more clearly than in the way women have turned against their own children. There is no greater human bond than mother and child and to have twisted that into a means for evil and destruction is something to behold.
What is it that we have carefully and selectively forgotten about ourselves, our bodies, and our children such that we can’t see how Lindsay Clancy is on the opposite spectrum of womanhood/motherhood than Mother Teresa? Here are just a few of the biggest points:
1. Women are engineered to give life; wombs, breasts, muscles, hormones, bone structure, and brains are all oriented toward giving others the gift of life.
2. Life requires diligence, patience, and sacrifice, whether it is caring for a tiny imperious newborn, a defiant toddler, or children at any other stage of development. They require love, care, warmth, nourishment – the very things that women understand or can cultivate in their own person in ways much different than men.
3. Every woman is called to motherhood. This does not mean that every woman will have biological children but that she is meant to be a source of life, nourishment, and pouring herself out for others, as seen in the iconic life of Mother Teresa (which is why she is called “mother.”)
4. Women are made to live in a complementary way with men in a permanent, monogamous, and fruitful relationship, through the Christian understanding of marriage. This true understanding of marriage creates the stability and foundation where a couple can grow together in a bond that utilizes their gifts and make them stronger together than they ever could be simply as individuals.
5. The family is the cornerstone to every flourishing society. Without it, every civilization will crumble no matter how strong its economy or military. The strength of the family comes from understanding of sacrifice and love. As the soon-to-be beatified Fulton Sheen said: “Only a nation that recognizes that sweat, toil, and sacrifice are normal aspects of life can save itself. And this is first learned in the home.”
In Lindsay Clancy, we can see feminism’s fingerprints all over her situation. Feminism has curated a malignant ecosystem of womanhood. Shedding light on it helps to make some sense of Clancy and her supporters.
1. Feminism offers women the prized status of victim, impervious to moral criticism that might come from elsewhere in the culture. This status offers a sense of entitlement and social tyranny.
2. Feminism has prioritized autonomy over the common good of the family. The woman’s needs and desires have been made the center of all attention and energy. Her wishes, desires, and even whims are more important than her husband and children’s happiness or even the life of a child.
3. Feminism has convinced women that they must control their own fertility, which has had the result of making children expendable.
4. Feminism has offered women identity and meaning through work, while belittling the duties and responsibilities of caring for a home.
5. Feminism has normalized the use of antidepressants, with one in four women taking them today (the number is higher among liberal women). Antidepressants have taken on a kind of social status (because they feed into victimhood), but are a response to the unhappiness wrought by the very activities promoted by feminism: abortion, priority of work over people, isolation because of broken relationships, etc.
This list gives us a clear roadmap of how we have gotten to where we are now. Feminism has offered women a place of priority, autonomy, pleasure, and power. It’s no wonder women don’t want to give it up.
In contrast is Mother Teresa with her very simply message of loving and caring for those who have been rejected, seeing in each “Jesus in his most distressing disguise.” She understood the role of motherhood, of protecting and caring for the most vulnerable. No one was too small or insignificant for her attention and love.
Not every woman will become a Lindsay Clancy or a Mother Teresa, but these extremes demonstrate the paths from which we can choose. They are not the same. The Clancy case has made clear to the whole country, maternal amnesia is nothing to celebrate. If our country has any kind of chance at a future, we must embrace again the beautiful model of Christian motherhood seen in Mother Teresa and so many able and capable women like her. Truly, it is a matter of life or death.
