Anti-Mary a model for the modern woman?

Professor Carrie Gress speaks with the Przybądźcie Wierni Association about the deep crisis of womanhood in our time.

Przybądźcie Wierni Association: In Europe, but also in the United States, we are seeing a dramatic decline in faith – this is happening in societies that are, after all, culturally and religiously Christian. In particular, among Catholic families, we see more and more departures from the faith in successive post-war generations – it is increasingly difficult for parents to pass on the faith to their children – even in those families where parents live in sacramental marriages, practice regularly (especially attendance at Holy Mass, use of the sacraments of the Eucharist and Confession), and try to live in accordance with the moral teaching of the Catholic Church – i.e. there is no deep rift between what they profess and how they live. And even in such families, we are observing more and more frequent dramas of falling into grave sin and subsequent complete cutting off from God and the Church by young people.
In your opinion, what are the main reasons for this?

Carrie Gress: This is an important question. I think there are several different reasons for it, some of which have been covered very well by Ryszard Legutko in his book, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in a Free Society, where he explains that the old ideologies are really just the new ideologies but in a different disguise, in different trimmings.
Prosperity also has a lot to do with our current state. When things go well, people quickly forget their radical dependency upon God and their littleness. Suffering and struggle quickly remind us of these timeless realities when our material needs aren’t easily met. Salvation history plays this story out over and over again.
What is new, however, is the dramatic change we have seen in women in the last century. The most significant change has been the tearing away of the most natural bond in all of nature, that between mother and child, with the promotion of feminism. Feminism, since the 1800s, has promoted the myth that women can be truly independent, financially, emotionally, physically, free from the demands and drudgery of husbands and children. This has been a concerted effort that was first made by the communists and then picked up in the United States, France, and beyond by such women as Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, and Gloria Steinem, all involved with either communism or the New Left. They were highly effective in selling a kind of feminism that was cool, sexy, and appealing to other women. Using psychology, TV, radio, print media, they were able to make their narrative the most popular narrative peddled by all elite women (and many, many men). They took over Hollywood, fashion, magazines, book publishing, TV, politics, and academia so that American women and women all over the world were fed daily doses of what the ideal woman should look like and act like. That ideal did not include having children because the children were considered an obstacle to happiness, not a source. 
This new feminist myth has had dramatic effects because when you get women, you get the whole family. The family has been decimated, divorce is rampant, and abortion is commonplace. Feminism has silenced men, who are viewed as oppressors simply because they are men, while women are all considered victims. This tactic has been to promote the LGBTQ+ movement and has led directly to the Woke movement. If feminism had not been so successful and promoting those who are considered victims and while silencing the designated oppressors, these other ideologies would never have arisen. 

Przybądźcie Wierni Association: You point to the relative prosperity of the West and modern democracy, which is occupying more and more space both geographically and culturally because it is violently encroaching on all areas of human life, wanting to deprive people of their privacy (most recently even in the sphere of human sexuality) as the reason for the decline of faith in our time. Prof. Ryszard Legutko, mentioned by you, warns that modern democracy does not want to leave any sphere of human life outside its control at all. In this it reveals its totalitarian face.
But I infer from your statement that you see feminism and its “work” of building and spreading such a model of women, which causes a profound deconstruction of the family, as the most serious cause of the decline of faith in young people.
Why? Is it perhaps because the family is the best place to pass on the faith to the next generation? 

Carrie Gress: Poland might have a different experience, but in the United States we are now in about our third generation where mothers have placed their careers above family life. Children are put in daycare and contraception and abortion limit dramatically the number of children women have. The problems that extend from this are certainly the birth dearth – Americans are not reproducing above replacement levels, which also creates problems for the economy, requiring the immigration. But on an even more personal level, there are deep problems. Women have been misled about what their nature is and who they are meant to be. Motherhood has become almost an abstract idea, like getting a driver’s license, it is something one can do if she wants but it isn’t required. But what is lost in all of this is that women are called to be mothers, not just biologically, but also emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually, to the people in their life. Not in a disordered type of codependency or a controlling kind of way, but in a way that helps people become who God made them to be. When there are successive generations who don’t understand motherhood and/or never had a proper experience with a mother – what psychologists call “the mother wound” — there is a lot of damage. There is also a significant breakdown of the family because women are encouraged to be in a kind of competition with men. Men, meanwhile, just want to avoid conflict with women, so they are very reluctant to defend themselves and even their children against their wives, mothers, colleagues, etc… The family is torn apart by the parents not truly parenting, and the children not getting what they need – and the pattern just repeats itself into the next generation and then to the next and so on. Each subsequent generation is made worse — and for those who don’t find healing, they will by surrogates to fill in those areas where they are broken, wounded, in need of love. Pets and pornography are the two most common ways, as are various kinds of addictions. In the United States, Americans spend $700million a year on costumes for their pets for Halloween. Pets now outnumber children in households, which reveals that women still have the urge to mother something, it is just misplaced. 
In the midst of all this, faith is lost. The self or other idols are worshipped and the beauty, richness, and wonder of life is lost in a sea of secularism.
Just like Satan knew with Adam and Eve, if you go after the woman, then you get everyone. And we can look around and see this in real time, that as women become more and more perverse, so becomes the wider culture. Archbishop Fulton Sheen, who was a well-known cultural commentator and had a prime time Television spot in the 1960s, spoke beautifully about how one can know the level of a culture by the behavior of its women. The higher the women, the higher the culture. This is also why cultures who honor Our Lady also have a higher type of culture. As Archbishop Sheen saw, the higher the woman, the more a man must do to be worthy of her.

Przybądźcie Wierni Association: The Polish experience is perhaps even more tragic than the American. Poland was very deeply experienced by wars, partitions, deprived of national elites through planned extermination by the occupying powers – especially during World War II by the Germans and Soviets. From 1945 it was given over to the so-called Soviet sphere of influence, which was tantamount to a bloody occupation and the establishment of a communist regime. Socialist ideology told people that a human being is only a person who takes part in production, a productive person – therefore, a woman, if she wants to be a human being, should work productively in economic life. Also, today’s socialism prevailing in virtually all of Europe strongly supports women’s gainful employment and making available to them all kinds of activities outside the domestic sphere.
Earlier you noted that men avoid conflict with women, are reluctant to defend themselves, and do not even defend their children. Our observations of Polish society, including among Catholic families, show that in 80-90% of families the head of the family is a woman. What has happened to contemporary men? What is the reason that today so often a woman seems to be more powerful than the man in his eyes?

Carrie Gress: Yes, what feminism has done is shifted the power of authority away from men and to women by telling women that they could only be happy if they could become like men. Good men are generally not suited to fight with women, so it is easier to have a peaceful marriage if one person is in charge. And women have been fed so much propaganda to believe that they must be the ones in control. 

Przybądźcie Wierni Association: It’s especially easy for women to go down this path because ladies naturally tend to control everything and everyone (not excluding men) around them. But why men let themselves be so easily deprived of responsibility for the family. Is it only because of the natural male tendency to laziness, which today’s average man is no longer able to fight?

Carrie Gress: I think that there are several things going on. One of them, particularly in the United States, is that Catholics have largely abandoned the culture or engaging with the culture. Catholics seem very focused on education and academic arguments, but the Catholic sway on the culture is almost non-existent. The left owns the culture and as was made clear to me when I researched my book The Anti-Mary Exposed, women have been sold so many lies through magazines, day time TV shows, the fashion industry, Hollywood etc… but these things don’t have to be exclusively the left’s. In the 1940s, a Catholic film on Our Lady of Lourdes, The Song of Bernadette won two academy awards. This is unheard of today because Catholics somehow stopped engaging the culture. Yes, every now and again, there is something Catholic, but it is very inconsistent. People in the pews are inundated with anti-Catholic ideas all day long now on social media and the news, so it is increasingly harder for priests to be able to combat this with a 20 minute Sunday homily. We must get back into the culture, engaging people with real content, whether magazines, TV shows, books, social media, etc.. And not kitsch, but really well done, meaningful content.
The other reality is the relative comfort in which most of us live, not that one wishes misfortune upon anyone, but it is much easier to not think about God when your belly is full, your clothes are warm and clean, and you have free time on your hands. It also offers a false sense of self-reliance and independence that times of suffering erase quickly. 

Przybądźcie Wierni Association: You mentioned about the book The Anti-Mary Exposed. It was this work translated into many languages including Polish that made your name known all over the world. What specifically prompted you to write this book? Let’s add – a book very courageous and very strong in its message? 

Carrie Gress: The Anti-Mary as a concept came to mind when I was writing my book The Marian Option. Hillary Clinton was running for president of the US and it struck me that if she won, she would become the world’s most influential woman, meanwhile the Virgin Mary has been called the world’s most influential woman, even by secular organizations like National Geographic – but these two women have very little in common. In fact, Hillary, and so many elite women, it struck me, are almost opposites when it comes to life, faith, motherhood, etc… Many elite women are like anti-Marys. It was then a brand new concept — we even had to figure out how to spell it properly. But it is modeled after St. John’s discussion of a spirit of an anti-Christ and not a specific person who is the Anti-Christ. I think it serves as an incredibly useful tool to see what is happening in Western culture. One person said, “Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.” The anti-marian spirit is widespread.

Przybądźcie Wierni Association: So how should we understand this new term: the anti-Marian spirit? What is this spirit really?

Carrie Gress: The anti-marian spirit is actually a diabolical spirit that has targeted women specifically. In my book, I chronicle the rise and influence of the occult and witchcraft. There are now more adherents to witchcraft in the United States than there are members of one of our mainline protestant organizations. 
There are also specific kinds of demons that I looked into after repeated names popped up in feminist literature, like Lillith. Lilith is an ancient demon mentioned all the way back in the Epic of Gilgamesh and later in the book of Isaiah. Lillith’s main goal was to seduce men and kill babies. We can see both in the end of sexual mores from the sexual revolution and widespread abortion. Many cultures prayed against Lillith and even the word lullaby comes from a kind of prayer to protect babies from Lillith. Lillith was popular in the US when the name was used for an all women’s music festival headed by Sheryl Crow called Lilith Fair. And Lilith Fund was set up a few years ago for women to get abortions after a massive hurricane in Houston, Texas. The name is also used in a lot of feminist literature.
The anti-marian spirit is fed by the occult in these specific ways already mentioned, but also in things that appear more benign, like tarot cards, horoscopes, which have become very popular in US women’s media and magazines.

Przybądźcie Wierni Association: Professor, you identify the demonic source of the formation of the model of the modern woman in the media and magazines – especially those for women.
Can you list the traits of this proposed or promoted ideal of a woman which is meant to be a role model for all women? Does the diabolical nature of this “ideal” manifest itself in the fact that each of these qualities, as one may guess, is a kind of negation of the virtues of the Blessed Virgin Mary?

Carrie Gress: Yes, this is precisely the problem. The model proposed to women is a kind of idealized woman who does not need anyone. She is independent, successful, powerful. The virtues of humility, surrender, receptivity, and openness to life are witnessed in Our Lady are all scorned by contemporary feminism. Women are led to be narcissistic, haughty, proud, but to shrink easily into victimhood when things don’t go their way, giving us such slogans as “believe all women.” Fertility is also shunned and children and husbands are largely considered obstacles to happiness instead of avenues to it. 

Przybądźcie Wierni Association: By creating the term anti-Mary to describe the ideal of the contemporary woman, haven’t you unveiled Satan’s strategy for the world? We know that Satan especially hates the Immaculate Virgin – the Mother of God. Countless exorcisms show that this hatred – and at the same time revulsion and fear of Her – makes him unable to even pronounce Mary’s name. Is it virginity and motherhood, which Mary most perfectly embodies, that are the virtues Satan is trying to take away from the world nowadays? 

Carrie Gress: Yes, that is exactly right. We know that virginity and motherhood are exactly what our culture has targeted. Sue Ellin Browder, who used to work for Cosmopolitan Magazine has written a book about how she was instructed to make up stories about the Cosmo woman. The fake women (who were presented as real) could be anything but virgins or mothers. So yes, the much bigger target is Our Lady, the Virgin Mother. But that happens by erasing any image of her in individual women. Virginity and motherhood are the means through which women are sanctified, and if you don’t have holy women, then it is very hard for people to imagine Our Holy Mother. 

Przybądźcie Wierni Association: What does the future hold for the world in the face of such a strong and profound attack by Satan on woman in our time? Do you see any hope or any means of saving women – and, as you showed earlier, also men, whose moral condition depends very much on women – from total demoralization, from perdition?

Carrie Gress: Feminism has become the deadliest of all ideologies. 44 million abortions were performed in 2023 world-wide, more than any other cause of death. As you know, this is more than the population of Poland. This killing of innocence must come to an end; mothers, fathers, grandparents moving to kill their own children must stop. 
This is the big question. How do we help women see how much we have been lied to? Obviously, this is the goal of much of my work – to help women see the truth about who they are and where their real power and goodness is. 
I think we are seeing some glimmers of hope. Young women are questioning the feminist narrative and rejecting the rigid “girlboss” attitude. Many younger women are viewing motherhood in a very different light than women in my generation. There also seems to be some interesting trends toward homesteading, the home, and a “soft girl” approach to womanhood. 
What we really need is a new grammar for understanding women away from the leftist ideology. My colleague, Noelle Mering, and I have written about this extensively in our Theology of Home books. All the elements of homemaking are back in style, although the work homemaker is still taboo. We are trying to help women see all of these elements related to the home in a new way. Theology of Home, as an idea, recognizes that we all desire a beautiful home that feels like a sanctuary, but this desire is really a foreshadowing of heaven. 
I think there is hope, but sadly, as history has proved too often, it is really only through suffering that makes most people pay attention, what C. S. Lewis called “God’s megaphone.” But we also know that Our Lord and Our Lady can do the miraculous, can transform hearts, and restore civilization. We have to pray ardently for the radical conversion of hearts and minds, for truth to be seen and the family to be restored to its proper place in our world. 

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Carrie Gress is a Fellow at the Washington, D.C. based think-tank, Ethics and Public Policy Center and a Scholar at the Institute for Human Ecology at Catholic University of America. She has a doctorate in philosophy from the Catholic University of America and is the editor at the online women’s magazine Theology of Home.
Carrie’s work has appeared in numerous publications, including Aleteia, Catholic Vote, Catholic World Report, National Review, Daily Caller, Daily Wire, Newsweek, Real Clear Politics, The American Spectator, The Catholic Thing, The Epoch Times, The Federalist, The National Catholic Register, The Stream, and The Washington Examiner. She is a frequent radio and podcast guest and has appeared on Fox, BBC, CBC, EWTN, OAN.
Carrie has lived and worked professionally in Washington, D.C. and Rome, Italy and her work has been translated into nine languages. She has also lived in France and Poland.
She is the author of Nudging Conversions, Ultimate Makeover, The Marian Option, and Marian Consecration for Children, The Anti-Mary Exposed, and the Theology of Home series.
Ultimate Makeover has been translated into Swedish and Polish, The Anti-Mary Exposed has been translated into Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish, and the first book of the Theology of Home series has been translated into Chinese and Slovakian, with other translations in the works. She co-authored City of Saints; A Pilgrim’s Guide to John Paul II’s Krakow with George Weigel, which has also been translated into Polish.
Carrie’s latest book, The End of Woman, was released in August 2023 and is a secular look at what has led women to not be able to define what womanhood is.
Carrie and her husband, Joseph, have five children, three of which she homeschools.

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