mothers

Wimbledon Gladiatrixes

Wimbledon Gladiatrixes on July 4, 2009

Since the window of my present habitation looks out in the distance over Wimbledon Park, I have been seeing for the last week or so crowds of sports fans often camping out overnight to get good seats for the world’s top tennis tournament held every year close by. Example pulls. One evening I went myself for a few hours.

Evening entry is neither to the best seats nor to the best games – as an air stewardess once unforgettably said to me, “You can’t get champagne for beer money” – so I saw none of those singles matches which are the greatest spectacle in the noble sport of tennis: one mind, will, and strength pitted in single combat against another in an eminently skilful contest, as of two gladiators, only without the bloodshed. However, I could watch part of several men’s and women’s doubles games, two against two.

All the men I saw playing were dressed to my surprise in virtually knee-length shorts, which one supposes therefore cannot hinder a tennis-player. Yet the dress of the women-players reached at most halfway down the thigh. Of course nothing seemed more normal, indeed a number of the female spectators were dressed even more briefly. Now the weather was hot, but are there no menfolk left to tell their daughters, sisters, wives – or mothers! – that such dress is fit for the eyes of a husband only?

Yet another problem was going unnoticed, still more serious. Tennis is then a gladiatorial sport in which a thundering service, powered drives to the baseline and vollies punched away are at a premium, making physical strength and stamina, a fighting spirit and the will to dominate all-important. These being male prerogatives, naturally the women do their best to imitate men, which may flatter macho pride, but do we men ever stop to think how we are de-naturing our womenfolk by admiring and encouraging them to gladiate? The one gladiatrix who might have looked graceful the other evening turned graceless the moment she prepared to deal out or receive balled thunder!

So here is a practical question: when a woman commits herself to championship tennis or any other male-enhancing sport, can she regard as anything other than a nuisance to be got rid of, that sometimes crippling reminder each month from God that she was designed for the continuation of the human race? Scorning or blocking her fertility, how can she foster it for maternity? Can then the countrymen of Wimbledon, Roland Garros and Flushing Meadows, etc., be surprised if their native birth-rates are collapsing? Have they any right to complain if their countries look like being taken over by immigrants in a not too distant future?

Kyrie eleison.

Sinister Fashions

Sinister Fashions on November 8, 2008

There reached me today an interesting letter from a German wife and mother in her early 50’s, who was born and bred in Communist Czechoslovakia, but who by motherhood and the grace of God found her way out of the modern scene and back to traditional values, to the Catholic Faith in particular. Now she is planning to help write a book about her experiences and conclusions. Here are two paragraphs from her letter:

“Thanks to my previous career as a photographic model, I came to know what goes on behind the scenes of fashion design. It is shattering to realize how trends in fashion are forced on women with one deliberate end in view – the destruction of their femininity and the stripping away of their dignity as women.

“Every year from Paris and Milan to London, fashion-designers put on display ready-to-wear clothing in which any ‘fashion-conscious’ woman is presented almost exclusively as a male or a woman of the street. One glance at a fashion-magazine like Vogue is enough for one to sense the all-embracing dictatorship of fashion, which brooks no resistance from behind its twisted mask of sensuality and provocation.” Strong words!

The womanliness of woman, tied to her natural destiny as mother, is so deep-seated in human nature that it is one of the last bastions to come under assault by the enemies of mankind. If the good German lady follows up their trail behind the scenes, she will stumble upon that massive plot against God and man which reaches back many centuries, and of which today’s onslaught on womanhood is all the more furious for being, as the plotters sense, one of the last battles they must win to achieve their final victory, as they think.

In this relentless war, one pressing need is to fight on today’s battlefields and not only on yesterday’s. Mother of virgins, Mother of mothers, obtain for the projected book to enable many souls to see how to take some first steps off the road to eternal damnation.

Kyrie eleison.

Children’s Treasure

Children’s Treasure on June 7, 2008

Do mothers know – do they still want to know – what treasures they, and they alone, can lay up in the hearts of their children? Here is a charming reminder from a young poet of the Irish countryside, born in the last years of the 19th century, who died on the eve of World War Two, Michael Walsh. The poem is entitled “Roses”:

Roses of evening – O loveliest of roses

Falling in music as the night came down –

To me the most familiar sound of childhood,

My mother praying on her beads of brown.

Evenings at home – O evenings long remembered!

Sunset on the meadows – moonrise on the snows,

Be it June or December – twilights that descended

To low soft music of a falling rose!

Of all the memories of a quiet valley

That haunt me, haunt me in this dusty town,

But one remains – the loveliest and the sweetest –

My mother praying on her beads of brown!

What a mother can give to her child in its earliest years cannot be replaced by the father, nor even at a later date by a beloved spouse. Both of them come upon the heart made, or unmade, by the mother. The key to its unmaking is her self-centredness, or selfishness, arising often today from the pursuit of her own fulfilment – how little does she know! The key to its making, and to that profound veneration in which mothers are naturally held, is her self-sacrifice, or selflessness. See in “Roses” how deep in the child struck his mother’s forgetting herself in God!

Kyrie eleison.

Flogged Fathers

Flogged Fathers on December 8, 2007

Last week Eleison Comments suggested that, as the prime remedy for the scarcity of vocations to the Catholic priesthood (or Brotherhood or Sisterhood), family fathers should set a leading example of true piety in the home. But that was not to say that today’s young fathers are alone to blame. Let me quote again from the non-Catholic friend in England, quoted in EC#12 on “Family Destruction,” commenting this time on today’s workplace:

“The way the world now works has made it harder for the young people in the work-force. Most of them cannot afford to buy their own homes, given the state of the property market. At work they have to cope with the pressure of instant communication, the ignoring of time-zones leading to unbelievably long working hours, the increase in graduate numbers and therefore the competition for worthwhile jobs, the influx of immigrant workers, the short-term contracts offered by employees, the regular “360-degree” appraisals once you have got a job, the number of courses you are required to take to keep yourself up to speed in that job, the Americanization of the work-place, the loss of “paternal” employees and collegiate perspectives because of the influence of the multi-national companies in the labour market, the cocaine culture prevalent both in the work-place and in after-work socializing, the threat of AIDS.

“Against this you can balance advantages like maternity and paternity leave, carefully structured dismissal procedures which offer more protection than our generation had, and better health and safety standards. But all of the young people I know, i.e. my own children and those of my contemporaries who are in good jobs, absolutely flog themselves to death, well-paid though they may be.”

My friend surely speaks from experience, of a steadily increasing daily pressure, surely global rather than just English. And what is that pressure? – Mammon.

Conclusion? A total – and global – way of life is stifling vocations just as it is disabling young men for fatherhood and young women for motherhood. Such a way of life is suicidal. And doomed. Young fathers, think. And act.

Kyrie eleison.

Woman’s Gifts

Woman’s Gifts on October 27, 2007

Confronted with the proposition that women should not step forth in public in any such way as to suggest that they have authority over men, a reader of these “Comments” of two weeks ago reasonably asked, alongside what women should not do, what should they do?

The prime principle involved is that creatures of God are created to achieve their perfection by acting in accordance with their nature: Now creatures without reason cannot choose to act otherwise, but human beings have reason, and so they must choose to act in accordance with their nature. The key question then becomes, how do the observably different and complementary natures of man and woman essentially differ?

Scripture, the Word of God, tells us that woman was created to be the helpmate of man (Genesis II,10). Commenting upon this text, St. Thomas Aquinas (Ia, 92, 1) says that she was created to help him in the engendering of children, because in any other work man could be better helped by another man. St. Paul (also the Word of God) similarly says that woman will be saved by childbearing (I Tim. II,16).

Here is the key to woman´s nature as woman: she is designed to be a mother. Do we not observe, and does not St. Thomas Aquinas suggest, that in everything involved in motherhood – which is no less than the future of the human race – she is man´s superior, whereas in everything else she is his inferior?

All kinds of conclusions follow, but in answer to the reader´s question, surely whatever a woman may by today´s circumstances be enabled or obliged to do, she must, if she wishes to be happy by living in accordance with her God-given nature, somehow, intelligently, do it in a motherly way. Teaching within a private domestic framework, or true nursing, present in this respect no problem. On the contrary, making herself into a soldier, lawyer, pilot, politician, etc., etc., presents a serious problem.

Mother of God, we beg of you, inspire and protect womanhood!

Kyrie eleison.

Family Destruction

Family Destruction on September 22, 2007

Anybody today seriously concerned for human beings realizes two things: first, the three-letter word is enough for human beings to happen, but for them to grow up to be truly human, family is absolutely necessary. Secondly, that the so-necessary family is under fierce attack. Why and how?

The deep-down reason why is that God instituted the family (father-mother-children) to launch souls on their way to Heaven, whereas modern man is making war on God, and a major part of that war is to get as many souls as possible into Hell. Therefore the family must be destroyed as God designed it, and modern life must be redirected accordingly. As for the how, here are a few paragraphs (from the letter of a non-Catholic friend) to illustrate that direction being taken in England today, and surely in many other countries as well, unless they have the good fortune to be “under-developed.”

“A decade of Labour government and its policy of ‘absolutely anything goes’ has resulted in what appears to be pretty much the destruction of the family. There is little incentive to marry, following the total loss of tax advantages for married couples and the subsequent State recognition of co-habiting couples and equality of the sexes (a side-effect of feminism).

“Single mothers abound and all mothers are required to work, mainly I think to further fill the nation’s coffers. There seems to be no onus of responsibility on fathers. This has led to the mushrooming of inferior childcare services and nursery schools. Even tiny babies are dropped off into daycare and collected at the end of the working day. Schools run breakfast clubs and after-school child-sitting arrangements. There is a huge loss of hands-on parenting.

“At the bottom end of the social scale the children, with few father figures and exhausted, incapable mothers, resort to a sort of ‘family life’ within the urban gangs now proliferating in the major cities. Children turning into wild animals are a genuine problem. Higher up the social scale, educated parents feel enormous guilt at not spending more time with their children because of their work, relying as they do on nannies and au pair girls. This leads to absurd levels of indulgence, relaxation of discipline, a laissez-faire attitude as to what the kids are up to (benign neglect) and tremendous emphasis on the terribly sad concept of ‘quality time’ – e.g. ‘I might get home in time to spend five minutes getting to know my children better before they go to bed.’

Many of these parents are older career women who in my view have little idea anyway of what being a parent involves – they, after all, were themselves brought up by Sixties parents who frequently rejected ‘old-fashioned’ concepts of child-rearing and set few boundaries of behaviour. I’ve been struck by the lack of self-confidence in dealing with their children shown by many parents these days. Kids aged three still in diapers? Ye gods! You get the awful stock phrase: ‘If I discipline him he won’t love me.’ Pathetic! Smacking in public is illegal; it’s a pity that tantrums aren’t as well.”

Kyrie eleison.