The crisis of masculinity (and so of femininity also) began in Western Europe in the second half of the eleventh century. This was when the most powerful men in Western Europe introduced compulsory clerical celibacy in a shocking revolution that ran counter to the Christian Tradition up until then. This revolution itself, which was caused by and led directly to what is now known as clericalism, was an anti-woman phenomenon, an act of misogyny, for it asserted that women were unworthy to share in priests’ lives. It is no surprise to learn that many of those behind this revolutionary innovation were homosexuals (1). However, although initially expressing hatred for women, the revolution came to bring hatred for men too – by metaphorically castrating them, making them less than real men.
Apart from a small minority of priests with a genuine monastic vocation, and most village priests, who remained married anyway (as still today, especially in African, Latin American and Southern European Roman Catholicism), this revolution meant that the higher clergy, the Roman Establishment, came to be dominated by homosexuals and pedophiles. This can be seen quite clearly in writers in the Middle Ages (Anselm and Lanfranc of Canterbury and Aelred of Rievaulx in the twelfth century are good local examples (1), but even more in the Renaissance with ‘monks’ like Michelangelo and the pedophile frescoes that cover the walls of the Vatican. As one perceptive and still Orthodox Christian Italian bishop, Bishop Ulric of Imola put it in his ‘Rescript’ at the outset of this transformation in c. 1060, if marriage were forbidden, priests would fall into sins far worse than mere fornication, ‘not abhorring the embrace of other men, or even of animals (2).
Today, by reaction and outrage at injustice, many heterodox women want to have the same clericalist power as men; hence the well-established movements for woman priests and bishops among the Protestants and the desire for the same among protestantized Roman Catholic women. Among the Non-Christian and anti-Christian Western elite, this movement has, again by reaction, turned into the LGBT or Transhuman movement, which altogether denies that men are men and women are women, and is now, with the backing of the US elite, being forced onto the whole world through politically correct media pressure, neo-colonial intimidation and open bribery. President Obama, a man with European, African and Asian roots, a ‘world man’, neither black not white, gives the impression that he is also neither male nor female. We see before us a forerunner of Antichrist. What is the view of the Church of male and female?
The first great difference between the Church and the heterodox world that broke away from it on the orders of the Western elite in the eleventh century is not just that in real Christianity the parish clergy are married, since married man can become priests, but also the great emphasis on the Mother of God. Although any Roman Catholic will recognise a parallel with her (unlike a Protestant), he will most probably not use the term ‘the Mother of God’ or ‘the All-Holy’, but a term like ‘the Virgin’, the Holy Virgin’ or ‘Madonna’, ‘My Lady’. Their emphasis is on her virginity, not on her motherhood, and that is very significant. On the other hand, enter any church and you will see two main icons: Christ the Saviour and the Mother of God, on either side of the doors of heaven. This rejection by the heterodox world of the sacred nature of motherhood (see I Tim 2, 15) lies behind a great deal of its present anti-gender hysteria.
In the Christian world of the Church, the gender differences are always, if anything exaggerated, men are men, women are women. ‘Male and female He created them’, Gen. 1, 27). For instance, much traditional Christian folk singing in Russia or Greece is dominated by sopranos and basses and ultra-feminine and ultra-masculine voices are much prized. In clothing and hair the differences have also always been clear-cut and not just in the Church dress-code; dressing ‘in drag’ and the unisex fashion that began in the 1960s has never been part of the Christian Tradition. Indeed, it has always been outlawed by the Church canons (3), whereas such sexual mixtures were prevalent in the pagan Greek and Roman world, where same-sex relations and pedophilia were considered normal (as they are among the Western Establishment today; the British Establishment notably is notorious for buggery and pedophilia, not least in the higher reaches of the Church of England, the BBC, the government, the army and navy).
Why this desire to even exaggerate gender differences in the Church? It is precisely to avoid grey areas, genetic accidents, for they are full of spiritual and so moral peril and human misery. Souls can very easily be lost there. Quite unlike the now paganized Western world and its hormone-filled or transgenetic food, the Church is not transgender, because that is anti-gender, the Church is pro-gender. This is why the word sex comes from the Latin word ‘cut’; in other words the difference between the sexes is clear-cut, we are one or the other. There are only two sexes, male and female, we have to choose which sex we belong to and that is made visible in the sexual organs that we receive at conception and have at birth. Although some women are less feminine than others and some men are less masculine than others, the anti-gender movement is profoundly suicidal because it will finish sexual attraction, procreation, the family and children, and so end the Western world, which is already dying out and being replaced by Islam. As for Christian society, it has always found a pastoral place for everyone, whether in marriage or in monasticism.
Notes:
1. See J. Boswell, Christianity, Sexual Tolerance and Homosexuality, 1980, p.210-227.
2. See Anne Barstow, Married Priests and the Reforming Papacy, 1982, p. 112.
3. See Canon LXII of the Sixth Council (Quinisext in Trullo) and the Council of Gangra Canon XIII. But these only repeat what the Holy Scriptures say. For example: Deuteronomy 22, 5 especially. See also I Tim 4, 3 and 2 Tim 3, 3.