Summary of The Anti-Mary Exposed: Rescuing the Culture from Toxic Feminity by Carrie Gress

The Anti-Mary

What is the Anti-Mary Spirit?

Just as there is an anti-Christ spirit (see 1 John 2:18; 4:3), so too there is an anti-Mary spirit (see Genesis 3:15, Revelation 12:1-5).

What are the characteristics of the Anti-Mary Spirit?

“If there is indeed an anti-Marian spirit, what might it look like? She would be bawdy, vulgar, and angry. She would rage against the idea of anything resembling humble obedience or self-sacrifice for others. She would be petulant, shallow, catty, and overly sensuous. She would also be self-absorbed, manipulative, gossipy, anxious, and self-servingly ambitious. In short, she would be everything that Mary is not. She would bristle especially at the idea of being a virgin or a mother.” – Carrie Gress

Anti-Virgin: Through the pill.

• The anti-Mary spirit has deceived women into thinking that they have to become like men to be happy – to have “sex without consequences”.
• The “discontent” that women feel is the main entry-point for the anti-Mary spirit and it builds with “jealousy, envy, cunning, gossip, and conniving.”

Anti-Mother: Through abortion.

• Children are seen as a threat to the mother’s success and happiness.

Example: Spreading Russia’s Errors.

• Our Lady of Fatima warned against the errors of Russia, which were largely Communist & Marxist ideologies focused on changing human nature & making everyone “equal” in order to destroy the family (fundamental building block of a flourishing society) & force everyone to work, especially women (legalizing abortion to put women to work). In 1934, abortions outweighed live births by 3 to 1. One woman admitted to having 80 abortions.
• The errors of Russia, which have spread well beyond her borders, are ultimately that they try to do what the devil desires: change human nature. The promises of the Russian Revolution transitioned into the promises of the Sexual Revolution – human nature is infinitely malleable – trying to make men & women exactly the same through “gender equality” & “pro-choice.”

Example: Cosmopolitan Magazine.

• Became the Playboy for Playgirls. Hottest women’s magazine in USA. Motherhood out, sex in = new lifestyle. Anything but mother or virgin. Made up stories.

Sue Ellen Browder, author of Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement and former employee at Cosmopolitan, said that when she worked at the magazine, she regularly fabricated stories about fictional women known as the Cosmo Girl. “I could make her into anything I wanted her to be—a doctor, lawyer, judge, even a high-priced call girl—but there were two things she could not be if she was going to be glamorous, sophisticated, and cool: a virgin or a mother.”

Example: Occult & Goddess Worship.

• In addition to the direct attack on the Virgin Mother and those who follow her model of womanhood, there has also been a significant rise in the occult and pagan goddess worship among women. Basic witchcraft items can now be purchased at places like Sephora and Target, and tarot card reading, astrologers, and psychics are common in our cities and smaller towns.
• Goddess movement: Based on non-sensical story that, in the beginning, the patriarchy overtook the matriarchy and changed the world from a place of peace & harmony to one of violence and discord. The goal of the goddess movement is to restore the matriarchy, promote lesbianism, and help women discover their goddess within (to divinize women).
• Lilith is one prominent anti-Mary demon (called the wife of Satan, embodies chaos & destruction, Isaiah 34 – considered one of the top 5 demons).
• Madonna has perhaps done the most to entrench the anti-Mary/goddess worship ideal into our culture. 2013 Super Bowl Halftime Show intentional Satanic ritual.

Results of the Anti-Mary Spirit Dominating Our Culture:

The second-wave feminism movement, fuelled by the anti-Mary spirit, which promotes promiscuity, abortion, lesbianism, goddess worship, astrology charts, divorce, and drugs, has really damaged our culture. For example, click here for the story of Kate Millett, who is considered the high priestess of the feminism movement.

“Divorce rates are still staggering, with 70 percent initiated by women; suicide rates are soaring; drug and alcohol abuse is unprecedented; STDs, particularly among women, are at epidemic levels, and depression and anxiety are everywhere. Women are not getting happier, just more medicated.” – Carrie Gress

Instead of nurturing children or spiritual children, women have taken their fundamental desire to nurture to intangible things, “such as a grudge, anger, victimization, resentment, or pain,” or for “the more narcissistic woman, she might nurture her career, her figure, her bank account, her adventures, or her sexual exploits. This deep desire is also what is driving the pet craze in our culture, one that has led Americans to spend half a billion dollars on pet costumes for Halloween, to name just one of the outrageous animal expenditures, while folks in Virginia made sure shelter animals had a place to go to for Thanksgiving. Women must nurture something.” – Carrie Gress

Today, abortion is by far the leading cause of death in the United States annually, significantly outpacing heart disease and cancer. It kills more than the equivalent of total US fatalities in Vietnam every three weeks.

We now spend 50% less time with our children than we did 5 decades ago.

“The devil knows that all these marks of the anti-Mary—rage, indignation, vulgarity, and pride—short-circuit a woman’s greatest gifts: wisdom, prudence, patience, unflappable peace, intuition, her ability to weave together the fabric of society, and her capacity for a deep and fulfilling relationship with God. Instead, the father of lies promises power, fame, fortune, and sterile, fleeting pleasures” – Carrie Gress

“The Church has lost the majority of women. Even many women who populate the pews are not living, thinking, praying, and loving with the Church. They tolerate it for one reason or another, while feeling themselves keenly outside of it. There is no intimacy between her and the God who comes down from heaven and offers himself to her everyday; there is no stirring of love for the God who has given her everything; there is no awareness that many of the things she does in her life cause him tremendous pain. This absence of what ought to be there is the tug of the anti-Mary.” – Carrie Gress

The Real Mary

Who is Mary?

Mary is the true model of authentic femininity – the greatest woman of all. Mary is the cause of the real equality between man and woman that happened in the Western world. Just as her fiat reversed Eve’s rejection of God and his will for humanity, so too she can reverse this anti-Marian spirit today with miraculous intervention once again.

• All women are called to imitate Mary.
• Women must be daughters to Mary – open to being taught and directed by her maternal care. To practice her virtues of surrender, humility, purity, and love.
• Women have to live out the Marian virtues to understand Mary – silence, obedience, kindness, meekness, and tenderness.
• “America’s first large network of professional women was Catholic nuns. In the 1900s, they built and ran the country’s largest private school and hospital systems. These women were nurses, teachers—and CEOs.

Sinless and perfect: Up until the point of Mary of Nazareth’s entry into history, every goddess had some sort of Achilles’ heel plaguing her, a vice that would confound her. But Mary was both sinless and perfect as virgin and mother.

• She has defeated the fake pagan goddesses throughout history (Artemis in Ephesus, Athena in Greece, Guadalupe, etc.).
• There is a reason why so many of her beautiful titles are about her assistance: Our Lady Help of Christians, Star of the Sea, Mother of Mercy, Mother of the Church, Mother of Charity. She is not a helicopter mother, only buzzing in to move us on from one task to the next, but a true mother who is always with us.

Beautiful: Mary is the most beautiful woman ever – Mary’s beauty is important because it is the outward expression of her complete perfection emanating from God’s beauty. When one visionary asked Mary why she was so beautiful, she responded, “Because I love.”

• This desire to be beautiful is deeply embedded in a woman’s soul. Even the smallest girl will tell you she wants to be as beautiful as a princess. This isn’t just cultural conditioning; it is something universal that sits squarely in the feminine heart.
• Women’s beauty isn’t meant to fuel our vanity; it is meant both to reflect the goodness and love of God and also draw those around us to him through our gifts. The beauty—both of body and soul—has arguably been the most powerful evangelical force for Christianity in history. Why? Because men crave it, look for it, and want it permanently in their lives.

What are the Marian virtues?

Surrender, Obedience, Purity, Humility.

“The human heart aches for God, but the female heart aches for some very specific things: to know the truth of who we are and secure a recognition of our dignity, a longing to be fruitful or to do what is good, and a desire to be beautiful. These desires run deep in a woman’s soul. They don’t just stem from a superficial place, but are gifted to us by God. The only way that they can truly be satisfied is to surrender them back to God. Ironically, the most powerful woman in the world did very little that people would consider important. Her secret was to unite herself to God in order that she might become more while doing less. Mary’s power, then, is in her perfect surrender to God.” – Carrie Gress

Fruitfulness of the Marian spirit:

Women were made to be fruitful. But what does it look like to actually honour our fertility? What does it look like to understand that at the core of every woman’s heart—though it may be buried under abuse, contempt, ignorance, or misunderstanding—is the desire to be fruitful, to be a vessel, spiritually and physically, for others to find strength, care, affirmation, charity, nurturing, and home.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen wrote, “When a man loves a woman, it follows that the nobler the woman, the nobler the love; the higher the demands made by the woman, the more worthy a man must be. That is why woman is the measure of the level of our civilization.

If we look at the two kinds of extremes that women are tempted to—over-control, on one side, and negligence, on the other—then we can see that the virtuous woman is the one who balances these two extremes. It’s easy to think of the domineering and manipulative mother, on one hand, or the negligent and narcissistic mother, on the other, who can’t be bothered with her family’s needs. In the middle of these two is the good or great mother who is nurturing, supportive, attentive, and selfless.

Mary’s “vocation is to wait, to suggest and respond, to be, far more than to do,” says Dominican theologian Fr. Gerald Vann.

After fifty years of watching the sterility of feminism destroy the culture, there is plenty of evidence that purity, virginity, and motherhood are important not just to women but to families and societies. It is precisely these things that the women’s movement has trampled upon in the name of progress and liberation.

Nobel laureate William Golding, author of The Lord of the Flies, has a tight but colourful description of just what women are able to do when they understand their own fertility, their own fruitfulness, and how it creates or improves the lives of others. He says, “I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been. Whatever you give a woman, she will make greater. If you give her sperm, she’ll give you a baby. If you give her a house, she’ll give you a home. If you give her groceries, she’ll give you a meal. If you give her a smile, she’ll give you her heart. She multiplies and enlarges what is given to her.”

There is a tight link connecting a woman’s respect for her physical fertility—both in virginity and maternity—to the health of her soul and fruitfulness of her actions.

“By honouring her own virginity, a woman imitates Mary. And by honouring her own maternity, a woman also imitates Mary. In imitating her, women can share in her remarkable fruitfulness, both in their own souls and bodies, their families, and society. No wonder, then, that Satan would attack a woman’s purity, that he would try to poison the ground that God hallowed, the very means through which women can truly be fruitful, both physically and spiritually.” – Carrie Gress

Because fertility is a defining character of a woman, it should not be too surprising to discover that our physical fruitfulness is an outward reflection of our inward fruitfulness.

“Women long for meaning in our lives and for a sense of mission, both of which have been placed there by God and point to the hunger we have for him. The culture has left us confused about what is truly fulfilling, so most of us don’t know where to start beyond picking up the Bible or heading back to Mass. But what we miss, again because it is unfashionable, is that we simply must open ourselves up to God through active receptivity. The model for our fruitfulness and the spiritual shortcut back to God is imprinted in our bodies. We were made to allow God to plant beautiful things in our souls and then to help them grow. A woman’s holiness and fruitfulness are directly related to how she treats her fertility and purity. Yes, certainly, men are called to purity, but women have a deeper need for purity because of their capacity to bear children and its deep connection to her own fruitfulness.” – Carrie Gress

In the Mass for the old rite of marriage, the Church reminded marrying couples that “sacrifice is usually difficult and irksome. Only love can make it easy, and perfect love can make it a joy.” Growth in love is connected with sacrifice and getting beyond our own vices, which is why motherhood is a natural route for women to become saints.

We look back and are astonished that women could accomplish so much because women “had no power” in these eras, but only because we are mistaken about the real power that women have—it doesn’t come from them, but through them.

Going forward:

Like every good fairy tale, in the end, we know that authentic beauty, goodness, truth, and honesty can only be hidden, abused, and despised for so long. One day, the flash and fancy of feminist ideology will finally be revealed for what it is and it will no longer be judged the fairest of them all. But this will not happen without a lot of prayer, fasting, and interceding for the women who have come under the anti-Marian spell.

Walking with the wounded: The widespread prevalence of abortion, contraception, lesbianism, and the rest have led us to a place where we are surrounded by the walking wounded. We know that Christ does not want these women left abandoned, but embraced, tended to, and cared for. Doling out this charity is no simple task when they are living with sinful and prideful blindness, and yet, we must not abandon them.

We can debate all we want about what will appeal to women and try to contort the Church and its message into many things, but the real appeal is what it has always been: Christ. He offers the kind of love that women’s hearts crave—to be known just as we are, intimately, uniquely, and purposefully.