The religious feminist's useful lie

Excuse me a moment, will you? . . . 




ARRRGGGGHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


There. I feel a bit better now.  Harder to kill than Dracula.  If you'll forgive the Princess Bride-ism, it's never more than mostly dead.  It's the useful lie by what Lenin would have called useful idiots (folks supporting something they really don't understand is a kinder way to put it).  You can put a stake through its heart, cut off its head, burn it at the stake (oops, that might have been the wrong picture to evoke), feed it to the fishes in Sicilian fashion, but it simply w-i-l-l n-o-t d-i-e.

What is it?  It's the libel against the Church, that it has traditionally held that women do not have full access to God and that women are by nature lower than men.  Now it is true enough that some men who are called Fathers of the Church have rather gone off the rails on this point, but to indicate it ever was a widely held belief is nothing short of libel.  This same Church called Mary Magdalene the "Apostle to the Apostles" and St. Nina was honored "Equal to the Apostles".  Then there is Hildegard of Bingen, a Magistra who corresponded with Bernard of Clairvaux, Frederick Barbarossa and at least two popes.  One of those popes was so impressed he sent her on a preaching tour of Germany.  Just a few examples, I know,but it's hard to see how someone who knows a bean about church history can get sucked into the perennial lie.

Here are just two correctives, two more stakes in the heart of the lie:

From Augustine and Aquinas

Please feel free to add your own stake.