Men, Love Your Wives
Modern society has lost much in the way of reverence due to the political embrace of acting as a secular republic. This has taken peoples’ focus away from higher powers, and made personal interest paramount. Even Christians, who acknowledge in words that Christ is king, often don’t understand the concept of serving a king.
People have become more interested in personal desires but, because individuals lack power that groups possess, organizations and movements have grown to promote, typically, one special interest.
When dealing with a multitude of people, it is often difficult to accommodate more than one interest as a collective so the result becomes that groups are inflexible to handle nuance or the complexity of society.
Unfortunately, even well-meaning Catholics have suffered from growing up under the worldview of collective-individualism that secular republics promote. For Christians, the pitfall of learning under this model means there is a danger towards serving principles, or special interests, rather than their king.
When Jesus established the New Covenant, He did not abolish the law, but he redirected man’s focus away from robotic performance to reminding mankind that when you serve God, following His commandments becomes refined to a purer form.
Lusting After Submission
One category where many Catholics have perverted Christ’s laws by adopting a collective-individual approach towards following it is men’s desire for a submissive wife.
Catholic men enjoy tailoring Saint Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians for their personal use:
“Being subject one to another, in the fear of Christ. Let women be subject to their husbands, as to the Lord: Because the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the Church. He is the savior of his body. Therefore as the church is subject to Christ, so also let the wives be to their husbands in all things. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ also loved the church, and delivered himself up for it.”
Lila Rose is a public figure in the pro-life movement. I won’t identify her critic so as to challenge his beliefs without attacking the man.
In order to break down why two Catholics, a man and a woman, are breaking down Catholic teaching in two seemingly different ways, it is important to consider two things:
What is the concern each person seems be worried about?
What aspect of mankind is God elevating with his laws towards the ideal family?
We will give Rose the benefit of the doubt and say she made her tweet from a genuine Catholic perspective since the secular potential will be covered when addressing the male response:
Rose’s apparent concern is not with Church teaching itself. Presumably, if one were to be a fly on the wall in her family’s dynamic, she is an appropriately submissive wife.
If so, her concern is that men who are obsessed with following Christ’s law on a submissive wife aren’t interested in why God has elevated the institution of marriage, but that these men desire to have a female slave who follows all their physical needs without complaint.
If her assessment is correct, then these Catholic men are not following the spirit of Christ, but want to enforce His law for a lustful, secular motivation.
This is a fair concern, and the solution to the concern would be that men need to remember that submission is earned, not demanded.
As an example, in Saint Paul’s epistle to Timothy, St. Paul advises that, “The desire of money is the root of all evils; which some coveting have erred from the faith….”
Money, itself, is not evil and Saint Paul exhorts the rich to commit good works with the resources God has provided. In the same way, the ideal family with the husband as head is not something to be lusted after, but a state of things that arises from having a generous heart.
Men who are strong, generous, and Christ-focused attract women who feel safe to submit to his headship of the family. Men who demand submission run the risk of demeaning women and pigeon-hole women into one role, to the exclusion of all else.
The Male’s response to stay away from women who reject Catholic teaching is grounded in Truth, so it is necessary to consider his best potential motivator before we consider why many Catholic men have turned the Truth into a special interest by attacking any perceived feminism:
If women reject husbands as head of the household, there is great potential for conflict as you have two potentially competing interests in how the family operates. If both partners focus on work to the exclusion of children, then the children grow up without the proper nurturing and education.
The reason we this is the ideal family is that one person must make the final decision, otherwise you wind up with inefficiency. When you look at the difference between kingdoms and republics, a king can swiftly make a decision and execute, whereas republics are built on slow collaboration that doesn’t look towards the best outcome, but the one that can accommodate the biggest range of possibilities.
If the Male’s assessment of Rose is correct, she is advocating for women to reject men as the head of household. Rose is a public figure, which makes it necessary to rebuke anti-Christian sentiment when they arise because she could potentially lead women astray.
The solution to this concern is to remind everyone that every family has different capacities and internal concerns to worry about. Just because a woman is a public figure, doesn’t mean she isn’t submissive to her husband, it just means that their family is able to accommodate her being a wife, mother, and pro-life activist.
This same concern was raised by Catholic men when the Catholic Justice, Amy Coney Barrett was nominated to the Supreme Court. Many Catholic men would have been happier not having a justice sympathetic to the pro-life movement in America’s highest court because, in their mind, women should only be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, and nowhere else.
They implicitly insult Barrett’s husband by believing he must certainly be a weak man for letting his woman run amok when, it is equally possible that they are both highly intelligent, capable people who can have successful careers without sacrificing the development of their children.
Just because a husband and wife are successful, doesn’t automatically mean that the woman is engaging in feminist rebellion.
Both concerns presented in the aforementioned tweet have roots in the Truth, so it is necessary to consider why God elevated marriage to a sacrament:
Without God, men are naturally predisposed to exercising their strength. Early civilizations were focused on building kingdoms so that they could increase resources for themselves and, as a consequence, benefited the people who served them.
Since men, on average, are physically bigger and stronger than women so they have the potential to subjugate other men and women through force of arms if they fail to appeal to the world around them through diplomacy.
Early kings had many wives whose sole purpose was to breed offspring who could contribute to the overall strength of the ruling dynasty. If a king, or any man for that matter, doesn’t have children then they are limited in terms of human resources to develop with.
This pagan approach treats people as chess piece commodities. Men and women can only be a master or a slave. Following this mindset of having submissive wives is what causes men to insult, rape and assault women, even their wives.
God elevated the married state to remind men of their obligations to women. Women are not there merely to be a slave, but to elevate men’s attitudes towards God. When a man views his wife as a part of his own self to be protected, men start to think towards the protection of others, rather than the conquest of others.
Furthermore, by accepting that another person has the same dignity as one’s own self, mankind realizes that he, himself, is not God and that he owes his devotion to God.
The natural conclusion to men loving their wives in a Christian manner, is that the family takes no more than is necessary to sustain their lives, contributes to society, and owes ultimate fealty to Christ.
This mindset is what developed human society into a more peaceful one. The process was slow, because people resist what is good in favor of personal interests, but it inevitably created a society that was more respectful than what came before.
An unfortunate consequence that came with social structures breaking down in modern society, is that there are Catholic men who think that all women must be lower than all men, rather than that women must be led by a man of equivalent status.
A personal anecdote to highlight the problem of modern social structures:
Due to the nature of online dating, I was able to have a relationship, for a short period of time, with a woman who made more money than myself. We enjoyed each other's company but there was always underlying conflict because we were two individuals, rather than thinking of ourselves as an authentic Catholic couple.
I’m not the type to demand submission, so instead of our relationship naturally developing along Christian lines, we fell into the pattern of collecitve-individualism. We both argued out interests, compromised where we could, and got angry when we couldn’t compromise.
Even if I wanted to demand submission, I never could have because she had no need to comply because she had the money to be her own master, so to speak. I tried to be a good person and treat her right but, because I had life plans that would have ran contrary to her career, I would never have been able to provide the security she needed to be a submissive wife.
This inevitably led to our ending the relationship.
If I was the type who advocated staying away from “non-submissive women,” I could complain and accuse her of not being a “good, Catholic woman,” for not automatically submitting to my desires without complaint when, in reality, I have no right to demand someone accept a life with less income on the sole basis that I am a man.
Was I disappointed to have found myself in a relationship where a Catholic marriage between two well-meaning Catholics would not have been possible? Of course, but any resentment towards her was misplaced.
Social hierarchy is built upon the same principles as a kingdom under Christ.
Many women will be smarter, more competent, or wealthier than I am and they serve God according to their means. If I want the ideal family, I can’t demand that any and all women submit to me without reserve, I have to be in a position to earn the ideal family.
If I, or any man for that matter, can’t provide stability to a particular woman, we can’t demand submission of her. We must find someone whose life we can elevate.
There are certainly many women who are radical feminists who reject a husband’s headship. The answer to this social problem is not for men to become belligerent against women, but to cultivate competent men who are able to deliver themselves up for their wives just as Christ did for His Church.
