Gianna Molla

A CATHOLIC MOTHER writes:

The Canonization of St. Gianna Molla has come up in several conversations with other Catholic women who use her life to defend feminism and careers for wives and mothers. I tend to be at a loss when this comes up because a sense of betrayal sweeps over me. What are your thoughts on St. Gianna Molla? I know you do not believe that Pope Francis is a true Pope, that the(Vatican II Church is not true). I do not know if I could make such a claim, but I am surely tempted to agree with you.

As a young Catholic wife and mother who believes in wifely submission, [traditional sex] roles and the building up of one’s home and family,  I feel betrayed by the Church, by its leaders and this is keenly felt when St. Molla is brought up. Yet I do not want to voice such feelings, because I love the Church! But, oh, how alone I feel. I have no Matronly role model or confidant, no like minded friends or family (despite the fact they are Catholic). As I defend feminine virtues, as I try to cultivate these virtues, I ask myself where is the Church? Perhaps there are others that feel this.

 I have several daughters. I want to raise them in the Church, I want to encourage their femininity, I want them to grow in virtue and yet I feel utterly alone in this mission. Everywhere I turn girls are encouraged to be boys even within my beloved Church and it grieves me. Oh, how I hate to say it, but I feel the canonization of St. Molla is like rubbing salt in a wound. Perhaps it is just a hardness of heart on my part. I am not sure. I am struggling, I do not wish to speak ill of one of God’s beloved souls – I do not deny that her death could have been a holy one. Yet I dislike justification of careerism and feminism by her example.

 Laura writes:

Gianna Molla was canonized in 2004. She was an Italian pediatrician who died after giving birth to her fourth child. She refused to have an abortion or hysterectomy when she was diagnosed with a uterine tumor while pregnant. Some view her as a sort of Catholic ‘Supermom’ because she continued to have a career after her children were born. Was her canonization favored for this reason, because it would send an ambiguous, quasi-feminist message? It’s a reasonable question.

I do not know the answer. I don’t doubt that she was a good woman, but I cannot judge her sanctity. The mere act of refusing to do something immoral does not, one would think, make a saint. Certainly, that is a highly virtuous thing to do, to choose the life of her child over herself, but she also had cancer and it is a situation that quite a few women in history have faced.  There is a difference between someone who is a saint and someone who does the right thing and refuses to do wrong. Truthfully, I do not know enough about the case, especially regarding the miraculous dimension.

However, altogether the canonizations of the Vatican II Church are highly problematic for several reasons. From the year 1594 to 1978, when John Paul II was elected, only 296 people were canonized. By his death John Paul II alone had canonized 483 people. Remember, Joan of Arc died in 1431. She wasn’t canonized until 1909! Gianna Molla died 42 years before she was officially proclaimed a saint. Francis canonized more than 800 people in a single day last year. The whole thing has become a joke. But the real issue is not the number of canonizations but the validity of them in light of the heresies of the Vatican II Church, especially the heresies embodied in the Novus Ordo Mass, which represents a violent and formal rupture with Catholic theology and cannot be accepted by any true Catholic.

Leaving aside the case for her canonization, we can say that anyone who uses Gianna Molla’s life to defend careerism in mothers is simply going against timeless Catholic teaching. Unfortunately, the Vatican II Church has never clearly and forcefully opposed feminist careerism and in fact has subtly cheered it on, leaving millions of women with demoralizing ambivalence or sending them out of the home. In its closing statement, the Second Vatican Council proclaimed:

“The hour is coming, in fact has come, when the vocation of women is being acknowledged in its fullness, the hour in which women acquire in the world an influence, an effect and a power never hitherto achieved. That is why, at his moment when the human race is undergoing so deep a transformation, women imbued with a spirit of the Gospel can do so much to aid humanity in not falling.”

This is a revolutionary declaration.

The idea that the true vocation of women had never been fully acknowledged is feminist sloganeering. This talk of power and influence came precisely at a time when feminists were demanding power and influence. Though John Paul II is referring to spiritual power and influence, his words are suggestive of approval for feminist conception of history.

John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis I all have lent support to feminism by their silence and by their statements significantly blurring the concepts of male dominion and woman’s role in the home. In his apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem and his Theology of the Body, John Paul II speaks of man and woman as almost constituting a single being, diminishing the notion of distinct roles. In Mulieris, he wrote:

In the “unity of the two”, man and woman are called from the beginning not only to exist “side by side” or “together”, but they are also called to exist mutually “one for the other”.

This also explains the meaning of the “help” spoken of in Genesis 2 :1 8-25: “I will make him a helper fit for him”. The biblical context enables us to understand this in the sense that the woman must “help” the man – and in his turn he must help her – first of all by the very fact of their “being human persons”. In a certain sense this enables man and woman to discover their humanity ever anew and to confirm its whole meaning. We can easily understand that – on this fundamental level – it is a question of a “help” on the part of both, and at the same time a mutual “help”.

This is familiar John Paul II theology. It reinterprets and confuses the meaning of the woman as helpmeet. John Paul II writes that man and woman are both helpmeets. Then why the language in Genesis? Of course, there is mutual help in Christian marriage, both man and woman are bound to love each other, but this occurs in the context of their distinctive roles, with the man as the head of the family and  the woman as helper.

Atila S. Guimarães has written about Benedict XVI’s 2004 Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World:

The document takes as a fait accompli that women work outside the home. There is no special opposition to this state of affairs; there is no courage to remind women of their mission in the home. Just a small and timid request not to discriminate against those women who still might want to stay at home:

“Woman who freely desire will be able to devote the totality of their time to the work of the household without being stigmatized by society or penalized financially, while those who wish also to engage in other work may be able to do so with an appropriate work-schedule” (n. 13f).

How different from the secure and majestic position of the Church of other times facing the question of women in the world. Let me quote some lines of Pius XI in his Encyclical Casti connubii on a similar topic. He taught the following regarding the economic emancipation of the woman that presupposed she would leave home:

“Neither this emancipation of the woman is real, nor is it the reasonable and worthy liberty convenient to the Christian and noble mission of the woman and wife. It is the corruption of the feminine nature and maternal dignity, as well as the perversion of all the family, since the husband lacks his wife, the children their mother, and the entire family her vigilant guard.

“On the contrary, this false liberty and unnatural equality with man is harmful for the woman herself, because at the moment that she steps down from the royal domestic throne to which she was raised by the Gospel, quickly she will fall into the ancient slavery of Paganism, becoming a mere instrument of man” (n. 76).

Compare Joseph Ratzinger’s statement with Pope Benedict XV’s warning in 1917 that revolutionary movements were striving to “snatch” women from the home:

“With the decline in religion, cultured women have lost their sense of shame along with their piety. Many, in order to take up occupations ill-befitting their sex, took to imitating men. Others abandoned the duties of the housewife, for which they were fashioned, to cast themselves recklessly into the current of life.” [Natalis trecentesimi, December 27, 1917; as cited by Tradition in Action]

He also wrote that when when women leave the home to work for long hours:

“The atmosphere of the home cools, the family circle practically ceases to exist … and the center of daily life will be found elsewhere for her husband, for the wife herself and for the children.” [Allocution to newly-weds of February 25, 1943]

This lack of support for your position by the Nouveau Church is depressing and demoralizing. But you shouldn’t look for support from those who scandalously deny the true Mass anyway. You are obligated to have as many children as possible and to be the primary teacher and nurturer of your children unless absolute financial necessity pulls you away. You are called to defend your home. That obligation flows from your recognition of the soul’s immortality. Ultimately, your children do not belong to you. And in this era, mothers are needed at home more than ever, to be a protective force in a decadent, depersonalized, neo-pagan world. Please don’t expect support from others. You are swimming against the tide — and that is good.

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