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Daily Mass Fervorino.
The book I mentioned by Kennedy Hall from good old faithful TAN, Terror of Demons: Reclaiming Traditional Catholic Masculinity.
Effeminacy is undermining and sapping the vigor from the Church and larger society. It is a tool and temptation from Hell and it must be resisted. Hall writes:
Effeminacy does not mean “femininity,” as femininity is a perfection, like masculinity. Effeminacy is a different word entirely, and in its etymology, we find a definition for things like “softness” in its Latin usage. The Greek word for effeminacy in the New Testament is malakia, which means “softness.”
St. Thomas defines effeminacy as a reluctance to suffer due to an attachment to pleasure. He explains that effeminacy is a vice opposed to perseverance. In essence, effeminacy is a vice that is opposed to the cross, which is an unfortunate characteristic that might explain the multitude of soft men who reject life’s redemptive sufferings in pursuit of temporal pleasure.
As I have mentioned before, effeminacy is not the jesuitical limp-handed lisping of a confused boy-man with a streak of sullen teen-age girl purple across his half-shaven skull full of mush. Women can be effeminate, too. We want women to be feminine, not effeminate. We want men to be neither, but rather, both virile and masculine. Get the distinction?
There is another kind of effeminacy, by the way. It’s the sort whereby, in defiance of their wiring, they relate to others more as women might than men, thus leading to one of the wisest premonitory insights I ever received from a bishop about clergy: “There are old women of both sexes.” Another analogy about how some of clergy with power work is: high-school mean-girls in the bathroom.
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“Another analogy about how some of clergy with power work is: high-school mean-girls in the bathroom.”
Worse yet is they are high school mean girls in the bathroom who never grow up. Some mean girls might outgrow the behavior after high school. Others continue it well into their thirties, forties, fifties, and beyond.
It would behoove the bishops worldwide to read Kennedy Hall’s book.
Healthy men are “virile.” What is the equivalent English word for women? A healthy woman is in control of herself, energetic, active, goal-oriented, a force to be reckoned with. Mary the Mother of God wasn’t “virile” so what would we call that?
@ David Spaulding:
“Feminine”, I should think.
…not to be confused with “effeminate”, of course.
I’m not thrilled with using a word that is considered archaic but “muliebrity,” from the Latin “muliebris,” meaning “of woman” is the most complete explanation I was able to find. (I’m nothing remotely like a Latin scholar or etymologist so PLEASE set me right if what I’ve derived from googling is incorrect!) Further messing with things is that we often used “virility” in what I think of as a corrupt way to mean “with a strong libido.” This robs Man of our natural order which is protective, given to labor, honorable, reliable, and faithful, much more like the Yiddish “mensch” than the conjured image of the furry-chested 70s disco dancer.
We really need to rescue our language. Father Z says “we are our rites” and I think there’s a corollary, “a culture is its language.” As applied, if we don’t have commonly recognized words for men and women at the peak of human performance, how do we call one another to be better, to aim for that ideal?
David Spaulding,
I found a scan in the Internet Archive of the volume with ‘M’ of the New English Dictionary (later renamed the Oxford English Dictionary) which has ‘muliebrity’, defined as “Womanhood; the characteristics or qualities of a woman”, though it only has three not very illuminating examples of it in use, the third by Oliver Wendell Holmes from The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858) in reference to a voice “which had so much of woman in it, – muliebrity as well as femineity” – I have not tried to look up ‘femineity’, yet.
David Spaulding,
More people frequently praying the Rosary in Latin would probably do a lot to make ‘muliebrity’ seem less strange.