The “sexes and the vocations pertaining thereto are not interchangeable,” wrote late Catholic priest Vincent P. Miceli in his 1981 book, The Antichrist: The Final Campaign Against the Savior. Recently republished by Sophia Institute Press, Miceli’s analysis of man and woman and their critical roles in the family remain as relevant today as his previously examined insights into secularism and the leftist cult leader Jim Jones.
Miceli noted that “sex is not an accidental characteristic of man and woman. A human person without sex is a monstrous abstraction. Sex entails the very identity of each person; sex plunges to the deepest mystery of each person.” Given the distinctiveness of male and female, every “person is called to serve God and his fellowman, accepting gladly the sex with which one is endowed and the vocation attached to that sex.”
Miceli trenchantly exposed the hollowness of feminist ideology, which defined equality between the sexes in male terms. He wrote:
Indeed, under the guise of advancing women to equality with men, this false principle makes a final attempt to subject women completely to the tyranny of purely masculine criteria. Women cannot be made “copy-cat” men without degrading them by unnaturally robbing them of their femininity. A bogus masculinity does not honor or liberate women. Woman is honored and left free when she is genuinely accepted as an integral woman with all the characteristic charms of femininity. For woman contributes to human society what she alone can contribute with consummate excellence—the mothering, nurturing, and training of the human family through tender love.
Motherhood for Miceli was just as important as any career. As he observed,
mothering is perhaps the most important social activity for the establishment of sanity and sanctity in the family and society. It is a full-time, demanding vocation, requiring a constant spirit of gentleness, persevering commitment, steadiness, and a limitless capacity to give oneself in self-sacrifice and total love.
Contrary to feminist dictums, “femininity does not enslave woman to man; rather it enshrines woman in the place of love in the family as sweet counterbalance to the weight of authority emanating from the man,” Miceli noted. Marriage reflected Christ’s loving self-sacrifice, Miceli explained:
Woman was created for man to save him from social isolation, to be his loving companion, wife, and mother of his family. When He created woman, God had in mind that both man and woman would find their social joy in their mutual surrender in love. The divine dimension of that surrender is found in the surrender Christ made when He became man for us, for our salvation, emptying Himself and becoming a slave for love of us.
As opposed to marriage’s order, family breakdown inflicts enormous damage upon society, Miceli correctly observed:
Satan, his demons, and their human henchmen know that the fate of mankind depends on the spiritual durability of family relationships. If one splits the atom, the smallest unit of matter, tremendous physical disaster results from the explosive forces released. And if one splits the family, the smallest unit of society, tremendous social disaster results from the explosive passions released.
Already in 1981 Miceli worried about the dominance of what others would describe as the “sexual state” of state-sponsored libertinism. “Promiscuous cultures rot quickly from within; many a great empire was felled by its unrestrained sexual mores. This is happening today to the whole Christian West,” he wrote. He noted particularly the “ominous fact that the gay movement is having its way of life redefined as a simple variant of normal sexuality and woven into the fabric of society.” These “abnormal human activities…point up the moral landslide that is burying the family and society.”
Since Miceli wrote, no evidence has emerged to refute the contention supported by him that homosexuality results largely from an individual’s childhood environment, and not any inborn “gay” gene. “The cause of these perverted activities has been unequivocally traced to childhood experiences within the family,” he wrote. “The increase in this form of psychopathology is directly related to the faulty psychological development of the child within a disturbed family.
In an era of “transgender” insanity and a seemingly unstoppable onslaught of LGBT pride, Miceli can sound like a dead white male from a bygone world. However jarring he appears to modern woke sensibilities, though, his words retain penetrating logic, which events since Miceli’s time have only borne out. Miceli’s views on Islam and Israel, by contrast are more complicated, as future articles will examine.
somehistory says
Any honest person has to admit that the family, a male husband and father, a female wife and mother and the kids…however many or few…make the best design for society.
And males are best suited to shoulder the responsibility for the security…financial and otherwise….for the wife and kids, while the female has the main function of seeing that the children have what they need emotionally esp, to grow up to be well-rounded adults, able to take care of their own new families.
society has gone off the rails with ‘the woman can be just like men, homosexuals are just living a different ‘lifestyle’ and the kids can decide what gender they wish to be.’
This is by design also…but the designer of this is pure demon, pure evil and his ‘guidance’ is to the eternal detriment of those who follow him.
Wellington says
Agreed, somehistory. But now professing admiration for the traditional nuclear family—father, mother, children—is considered anachronistic if not evidence of sheer bigotry.
Well, when you make the normal abnormal and the abnormal normal, then all kinds of descent should be expected. Sure getting it now.
somehistory says
Thank you, Wellington. If it makes me a “bigot,” I say rather a bigot than a fool.
mortimer says
Glad to read the observations of Vincent P. Miceli: “Sex entails the very identity of each person; sex plunges to the deepest mystery of each person.” Gender is a primary piece of our consciousness, so primary in fact, that if you dream about a person, you may not remember the appearance or name of a person in your dream, but you will always remember the person’s sex.
In genealogy, the most important clue in discovering a person’s family tree is gender. With that clue, building a family tree is impossible. Today, it is even more important as one hunt’s for relatives through DNA matches. Gender is of prime importance in DNA searches for relatives.
Rarely says
So I guess he sees islamic society as the ideal. Let the most ignorant, downtrodden half of society raise the kids so that the male children feel superior to all those inferior females. Seems to work doesn’t it?
Why do so many people oppose simply letting others be what they are as long as they aren’t harming anyone? Why shouldn’t women be able to compete equally in the work place? Why can’t a couple share equally in the raising and nurturing of their off spring if they agree to do so?
This guy is straight out of the Middle Ages — or should I say the Dark Ages.
somehistory says
Your “guess” is off the mark. Way off. He isn’t saying that at all. Try reading it again, slowly.
Btw, Doctors have found that a child needs the mom more during the first five years than he/she needs attention from the dad, and more from the dad as the child grows older.
Each parent has their place in the raising of the kids, and since the kids need the mother a lot when they are very young, they fair better if the mother is at home when they are.
Rarely says
My mistake. I haven’t been watching as many reruns of “Ozzie & Harriet” “Leave it to Beaver” and ‘Father Knows Best” as I would need to to picture the “ideal” family.
somehistory says
good to admit it. Now get busy. It’s never too late to learn as long as you’re taking regular breaths. all of those shows can be seen on the world-wide-web for your enlightenment.
James Lincoln says
Rarely,
I grew up in 1950s in a family closely resembling the ones in the three TV shows that you had mentioned.
My father was a physician and my mother was a homemaker while we children were young. When my siblings and I got older, my mother worked for many years as an office manager for my father’s medical practice.
Never once in my upbringing did I ever feel that I was “superior” to a female because of the fact that my mother was a homemaker while I was young. Also, my brother and father also did not feel that way – all of us held my mother in the highest possible regard.
Today’s woman, depending upon her knowledge skills and abilities, has immense opportunities. She can become a physician, lawyer, airline pilot, engineer, pharmacist, etc.
A woman may also decide to become a full-time homemaker – and that very worthy decision should be respected.
gravenimage says
I agree that women who choose to be full time homemakers–if such an option is open to them–should also be respected.
Mary C says
“mothering is perhaps the most important social activity for the establishment of sanity and sanctity in the family and society. It is a full-time, demanding vocation, requiring a constant spirit of gentleness, persevering commitment, steadiness, and a limitless capacity to give oneself in self-sacrifice and total love.”
Yet some so-called mothers are anything but loving, gentle, and nurturing… I’m not speaking from personal experience, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know things.
somehistory says
Well, there are lousy doctors, lawyers, truck drivers, chefs and others who are unqualified for their jobs.
that mother thing just means it’s more important that the “good ones” keep going so at least some people have a good example to follow and from whom to learn the “job” and how it should be done.
Mary C says
Just like lousy doctors, lawyers, etc., have no business being in their professions, some women have no business being mothers, but have children anyway because it’s expected of them.
somehistory says
I have never met a woman who “had children because it was expected of them.”
I say, if you don’t want to have kids, don’t have them as they are not going to be loved and cared for as they deserve. there are ways to keep from getting pregnant and any woman who doesn’t want a child, should take care not to get pregnant.
gravenimage says
Alas, this is quite true, Mary.
gravenimage says
Timeless Truths on Man, Woman, and the Family
……………………..
I have the greatest respect for Andrew Harrod. But I do take issue with some of his claims here.
He quotes Vincent P. Miceli:
Woman was created for man to save him from social isolation, to be his loving companion, wife, and mother of his family.
………………………………..
I actually believe that Christianity teaches that every soul has intrinsic worth, not merely to service other, more valuable humans. I love and care for my husband, but he also does the same for me.
And I don’t believe that my writing, drawing, painting, and editing makes me a “copy-cat” man, nor is it an expression of bogus masculinity–women do indeed have intelligence and capability, and this can be applied to many different vocations.
somehistory says
If one reads Genesis and believes it to be true;, it’s easy to see why he wrote that. “God said ”’it is not good for man to continue by himself . I am going to make a helper for him as a **complement.”” And God made a helper for him. And then Adam, said (happily) “At last, bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.”
Man was not complete without a woman. Christ treated women as *equal* in God’s eyes…equal worth, but not necessarily in strength, ability, etc. Men are better at some things than are women and the opposite is also true; women are better at some things than are men.
gravenimage says
I know this, Somehistory–thank you.
But Miceli appeared to believe that women have no value beyond that of serving men. And while men and women certainly are different, I think that there are a vast number of things that both can be very good at.
Andrew Harrod says
I do not think that Miceli would believe this either. He is referring more to an ideology that says that women must strive to be exactly like men, with no basically different orientations in life goals.
somehistory says
from my reading, it seems he’s saying that the *feminist* movement was not really designed to help women succeed at being women and the best they could be at whatever they tried, but it was a work of deceit. after all, he says it was in the ‘males’ voice.
and here’s a quote:
“Indeed, under the guise of advancing women to equality with men, this false principle makes a final attempt to subject women completely to the tyranny of purely masculine criteria. Women cannot be made “copy-cat” men without degrading them by unnaturally robbing them of their femininity. A bogus masculinity does not honor or liberate women. Woman is honored and left free when she is genuinely accepted as an integral woman with all the characteristic charms of femininity. ”
women don’t need to “copy-cat” men. They have their strength and value being what they were born and created to be.
gravenimage says
Again with respect, I don’t think that saying that women are the equals of men is saying that women have to “copy cat” men. Women actually are good at many things. They are not actually pretending to be men if they dare reveal this.
somehistory says
And again, I don’t see his words the same way. He actually is putting the blame on men who pretend that women must be different to be equal…different from what they are…more like men. He seems to be saying that women have value without having to be like men.
Westman says
Yes. And the cost to women and society is men who father children without commitment, less children, maladjusted children, and unhappy women who missed the window for child bearing.
Women and men are different and it is men who benefit most from the notion of “equivalence”. It is passive men who benefit from, “let the woman carry my responsibility.” It is women who make the decision to limit family size in an age of unreliable males.
We look at a nation like Denmark and watch it being lost to Islam because, in its temporary two-income wealth, it won’t make the sacrifice of producing enough children to sustain itself.
Inviting work replacements who did not share their ethnicity destroyed the Roman Empire. It might be worthwhile to note that Rome had also learned how to control family size and enjoy the current wealth.
somehistory says
Thank you, Westman.
gravenimage says
Somehistory, I suppose your interpretation may be correct.
But when Miceli says, “for woman contributes to human society what she alone can contribute with consummate excellence—the mothering, nurturing, and training of the human family…” this certainly sounds to me that he believes that this is the *only* way she can contribute to human society, and that anything else is just ‘copy catting’ men.
I consider motherhood to be of great importance–as well as fatherhood. But I think that both men and women can contribute beyond this, as well, without damaging their sex.
somehistory says
I see him pointing to the fact that only a *woman* can be a mother. this is esp important now that the entire “men can become pregnant and give birth” nonsense is so widespread and the government has so many who refuse to say the truth about it.
He isn’t saying that being a mother is *all* a woman can do. But he is saying that only a woman can be a mother and can “nurture” the young as only a woman can do
he points out that **men** were the ones who wanted women to believe that they needed to be like men in order to do the same kinds of things and it was a trick
gravenimage says
Somehistory, I certainly agree that only women can be mothers, and that this “pregnant people” thing is grotesque tosh.
However, I don’t agree that men were the main ones pushing for women to be allowed into the work force, including in traditionally male occupations. Some were supportive, certainly, but quite a few men were actually terribly hostile to women being allowed to work professionally. I experienced some of this first hand.
somehistory says
Probably because for the simple reason that you didn’t want to be male, made them hostile to the idea that you could find a place in the work they were doing.
and many males do not respect women even when they decide to be mothers, first, second and always.
to be honest, there have been times when I was in need of a professional, and felt that a man could have handled what I needed better than the woman I was “assigned.” In one situation, I needed help, was assigned a woman to do the job, and she was intimidated by a male and baled on helping me as I needed. A man would not have been.
But for many jobs, women are just as proficient as are men. I have found that female mail carriers are more likeable and willing to assist me when I have needed it.