QUOTATION: Women in the Gospel

If you read the Gospel, women play a very secondary role. Even the Holy Virgin is mentioned very rarely and speaks very little. The very moment that you put on supernatural lenses you are going to come to the strange conclusion that it is a privilege to be a woman. It is a privilege precisely because, to be in the background, from a secularistic point of view, to be humiliated, which often happens, is a tremendous supernatural advantage.

--Alice von Hildebrand, “The Secular War on the Supernatural.”

QUOTATION: Inequality of the Sexes?

People talk with a quite astonishing gravity about the inequality or equality of the sexes; as if there could possibly be any inequality between a lock and a key…A woman is only inferior to man in the matter of being not so manly; she is inferior in nothing else. Man is inferior to woman in so far as he is not a woman; there is no other reason.

--G.K. Chesterton

QUOTATION: Childbearing

One thing is certain: When the time has come, nothing which is man-made will subsist. One day, all human accomplishments will be reduced to a pile of ashes. But every single child to whom a woman has given birth will live forever, for he has been given an immortal soul made to God’s image and likeness. In this light, the assertion of de Beauvoir that ‘women produce nothing’ becomes particularly ludicrous.

--Alice von Hildebrand

QUOTATION: Womanhood

When we know something, we always bring it down to our own level…but when we love something, we always have to go out to meet it. For example, if we love music, we have to meet the demands of music. If we study a foreign language, we have to follow its laws. Even if we study ping pong, we have to meet its requirements too. Now in as much as woman is loved, it follows that the nobler a woman is, the nobler man will have to be to be deserving of that love. That is why the level of any civilization is always the level of its womanhood.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, Women Who Do Not Fail

QUOTATION: Femininity

Unwittingly, the feminists acknowledge the superiority of the male sex by wishing to become like men. They foolishly want to alter inequality rather than to achieve truth or justice. Femininity is a linchpin of human life; once it is uprooted, the consequences are disastrous.

--Alice von Hildebrand, The Privilege of Being a Woman

QUOTATION: Women in the Passion of Christ

Though men failed in this crisis (of Calvary) there is no instance of a single woman failing. In the four trials the voice heard in Christ's defense was that of a woman, Claudia Procul, the wife of Pontius Pilate...On Calvary it is woman who is fearless, for there are several of them at the foot of the Cross. Magdalene, among them as usual, is prostrate. But there is one whose courage and devotion was so remarkable that the Evangelist who was there indicated the detail that she was "standing." That woman was the mother of the man on the central cross. Our Blessed Lord willed her presence there. Since he was the second Adam undoing the sin of the first, Mary would be the new Eve proclaiming the new race of the redeemed.

-- Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: Female Sacrifice

A woman is capable of more sacrifices than a man. Man is more apt to be a hero, through some great passionate outburst of heroism. But a woman's love makes a thousand small sacrifices, sprinkling them through the days and the months; their very repetition gives them the character of the commonplace. Not only her soul, but her body, has some share in the Calvary of Redemption; furthermore, she comes closer to death than man, whenever she brings forth a child.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, Life is Worth Living

QUOTATION: Post-Abortive Women

I would now like to say a special word to women who have had an abortion. The Church is aware of the many factors which may have influenced your decision, and she does not doubt that in many cases it was a painful and even shattering decision. The wound in your heart may not yet have healed. Certainly what happened was and remains terribly wrong. But do not give in to discouragement and do not lose hope. Try rather to understand what happened and face it honestly. If you have not already done so, give yourselves over with humility and trust to repentance.

The Father of mercies is ready to give you his forgiveness and his peace in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. You will come to understand that nothing is definitively lost and you will also be able to ask forgiveness from your child, who is now living in the Lord. With the friendly and expert help and advice of other people, and as a result of your own painful experience, you can be among the most eloquent defenders of everyone's right to life. Through your commitment to life, whether by accepting the birth of other children or by welcoming and caring for those most in need of someone to be close to them, you will become promoters of a new way of looking at human life.

--Pope John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, 99

QUOTATION: Alternatives to Abortion

All who are genuinely committed to the advancement of women can and must offer a woman or a girl who is pregnant, frightened, and alone a better alternative than the destruction of her own unborn child.

-- Mary Ann Glendon

QUOTATION: Abortion

A woman who sets her rights, the supposed right to privacy or right over her own body, above the life of another human being is saying that a woman’s rights are superior to human rights. She has put herself above the human race, she has made herself the executor over life and death. Is that a woman’s right?

--Janet Smith

QUOTATION: Feminism

It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.

--G.K. Chesterton

QUOTATION: Abortion

Society as a whole must defend the conceived child's right to life and the true good of the woman who can never, in any circumstances, find fulfilment in the decision to abort.

--Pope Benedict XVI

QUOTATION: Women and the Priesthood

The divine law indeed has excluded women from this ministry, but they endeavour to thrust themselves into it; and since they can effect nothing of themselves, they do all through the agency of others.

–St. John Chrysostom