Last Updated:Friday - 09/24/2010

Desecrating Mary's cathedral

On International Women's Day, a group of vandals burst into Montreal's Mary Queen of the World Cathedral, shouting anti-Catholic slogans. They spray painted the altar, threw condoms around the church, stuck sanitary napkins to pictures and walls, and tried to overturn the tabernacle.

Many questions need to be raised about the minimal public reaction to this incident. Columnist Charles Moore (page 15) rightly takes issue with the lack of media coverage of this desecration. In the National Post, retired law professor Ian Hunter questioned why the vandals were only charged with unlawful assembly - a charge notoriously difficult to prove - when there was ample basis for charging them with five more serious criminal offences. These are legitimate and important concerns that need to be aired.

But Canadians also need to ask why these feminists chose to vent their rage on a Catholic cathedral. Isn't the Catholic Church in Quebec yesterday's villain, a once-powerful social force which is now more of a museum piece attracting the allegiance of only the elderly and the reactionary? Or, so we are led to believe.

Catholics can only see it as significant that this vandalism took place in a church dedicated to Mary in a city originally christened Ville-Marie de Montreal (Our Lady's City of Montreal). Church attendance in Quebec may be at its lowest ebb ever and the societal influence of the Church may be marginal, but Mary the Mother of God is still (rightly) seen as the greatest threat to radical feminism.

This sort of feminism is rooted in the modern denigration of the feminine. The modern world sees life and knowledge only in terms of power and domination, never in terms of the "feminine" principle of being and contemplation. The modern world denigrates the feminine. But these "feminists" (whose beliefs are not at all feminine) react by striving to make women full-fledged members of the patriarchy.

Patriarchy, rather, needs to be brought into line. But this can only happen by balancing the emphasis on making and doing with a renewed emphasis on contemplation, not by eliminating the feminine.

For these vandalizing feminists, Mary is public enemy number one. It is only fitting that they should attack her cathedral in her city. For in Mary's "Fiat" - "let it be done to me according to your word" - they see the image of woman as doormat for men. Unfortunately, over the centuries, the Church's sons and daughters have done much to strengthen that image.

Mary's holiness consists in her utter submissiveness to God, but not necessarily to other people. In that, she is the model for all Christian believers. And the God to whom she submits "has shown strength with his arm, . . . has put down the mighty from their thrones" (Luke 1:51-52). To submit to this God is to choose a way other than power and domination. It is to be contemplative and receptive, on one hand, and courageous and forthright, on the other.

Hunter, the law professor, said the cathedral desecration "revealed a satanic streak not far below the surface of militant feminism." While this analysis appears extreme, it may ultimately be correct. For one of Satan's overtures to Jesus was to lure him with the temptation to dominate the world. Modern society has bit hard on that apple. A feminism that desecrates cathedrals only extends the logic of power and domination. It is reactionary rather than a true hope-filled alternative. A truly post-modern feminism will recover and renew the logic of human receptivity to the power of God and contemplation of his ways.

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