In re-reading Aemon Dufy’s Stripping of the Altars, I was very struck by the way in which rood screens incorporating Mary and John at the foot of the cross became so important.
The restoration of the Catholic faith in Queen Mary’s reign saw one of the most substantial efforts to re-catholicise the parish churches involved, getting back the rood screens that the Edwardian regime had torn down. It was all the more poignant reading it in Holy Week.
There, on the rood screen, Jesus was accompanied at the cross by Mary and John. In this scene he utters one of his seven utterances from the cross: “Woman behold you son. Son behold your mother.”
This is an expression of care for his mother as his life draws to an end. But it also acts as a modelling of the new ecclesial family that is both practical and symbolic.
John, who understands the deeper mystery of love, represents the adoring Church that will not desert Jesus; and Mary becomes mother of the whole Church, the new body of Christ. Each embody a quality of love that a close intimacy with Jesus created.
A further representative aspect is that together Mary and John, mother and son, adepts in the deepest kind of love, embody a new embodiment of ecclesial family.
The symbolism of what was to be the post-Resurrection holy family was central to Catholic spirituality. Yet while the family could be taken for granted in the sixteenth century, the secular assault on it in our time has been both ideologically fanatical but also practically disastrous for our culture.
History invites us to assess the faith as being good for people. Societies that repudiate both natural law and the teaching in the Gospels function worse.
In our culture, over recent decades, feminism has paradoxically waged an overt war on all aspects of womanhood and particularly the role of the mother in creating the family.
In order to, supposedly, set women free to play a full part in the capitalistic venture on equal terms with men, motherhood became a hindrance not a help. The process of the masculinisation of women proceeded apace.
Fatherhood, which is needed to enable, sustain, protect and nurture motherhood, was spun as toxic. The assault on marriage led to generations of single mothers who became clients on the State. The State set out to eradicate fatherhood and make mothers dependant on state handouts.
Yet the State proved to be as feckless and incompetent and as untrustworthy as any absent father.
The extent to which a whole generation of women were misled by feminism and feminist aspirations was laid bare as a crisis over pensions broke cover recently.
The government changed the pension goal posts, delaying the age at which women were able to retire and receive a state pension.
From 1948 until 2010, the state pension age was 60 for women and 65 for men – but through a discreet change in the law in 1995, it was decreed that women’s pension age would increase to 65 between 2010 and 2020. Blink, and you would have missed it. Many, if not most, women did.
The campaign group Women Against State Pension Inequality (WASPI) says as many as 3.8 million women born in the 1950s were not made aware of the age change – and were forced to delay retirement without adequate warning.
One can see their point. If the government is going to change part of its social contract with you, it ought to take the trouble to actually inform you. It’s impossible not to assume the government wanted to smuggle this through quietly; in which case this is a form of political betrayal by the State, since the alteration requires changes in expectation and future planning.
And yet from the State’s point of view, the economic facts are seriously bleak. Britain currently has £1.2 trillion worth of public sector pension liabilities, three-quarters of which are unfunded.
Who is going to pay these pensions? In the normal course of social history, the next generation would shoulder the burden. But what has happened to the next generation? It is greatly diminished.
The replacement rate of a population requires 2.1 children for each woman, and in the UK it stands at 1.6. From an actuarial perspective, more children would be needed to solve this pensions crisis.
The argument can be made that greater security for women would have been found in a society that encouraged and enabled motherhood and celebrated having children. Not only would there be greater family cohesion, in which extended families were better placed to share the care of the elderly, but the economic basis for funding the pensions that working women relied on, and were entitled to rely on, would have been less damaged.
William James, the eminent psychologist and author of Varieties of Religious Experience, offered the assessment that we were entitled to judge ideas and religious belief by what they achieved for people. Feminism has failed women not just in the broken promises of unfundable State support, but also by luring them into economic roles that undermined both the capacity to exercise motherhood and a willingness.
There is an old and poignant joke that runs: “No tombstone carries the inscription ‘I wish I had spent more time in the workplace’.” What matters at the end of life is the sharing of love and the quality of love our lives embodied.
Secularism and feminism excel in their quest for status and productivity. But the human heart rebels against a life constructed on those lines. We were created to learn to love.
The pensions crisis and the distressed ‘WASPI women’ remind us that our society and culture not only fail the aspirations of the human heart, but they fail even on their own terms.
As we look at Mary in particular and the women that surrounded her and who remained close to Jesus on the cross at the moment of dereliction, we find a different modelling of humanity and a more inspiring womanhood.
We find a quality of love that does not renege on its promises but instead endlessly fulfils them.
Photo: ‘WASPI women’ gather at the statue of political activist Mary Barbour in Govan to mark International Women’s Day, Glasgow, Scotland, 8 March 2024. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images.)
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