Saint of the Day for August 14: St. Maximilian Mary Kolbe (Jan. 8, 1894-Aug. 14, 1941)
August 14, 2019ARCHIVES: Fr. Richard Heilman: Things Accelerate Toward the End–Prophecy of Archbishop Fulton Sheen
August 14, 2019
By Paul Krause, Crisis Magazine, August 14, 2019
The negation of Mary is directly linked to the anti-feminine, anti-maternal, and anti-family nihilism that grips us today. Long a stumbling block for Protestants, Mary is increasingly rejected and mocked in the godless, death-infatuated cultures that stand strongest in formerly Protestant, but now almost entirely atheistic, lands. The story of Mary, however, helps bring to light the fullness of God’s love and the place of motherhood and family in salvation history, which is precisely what the West must be reminded of if it has any future.
The battle for Mary is a fight over the centrality of motherhood and family in the human experience. As such, the negation of Mary undermines a culture’s understanding and appreciation of motherhood and family. In working to strip Mary from European and American culture, Protestant crusaders set motherhood and family on a collision course with eventual irrelevance. By sabotaging the most graceful and fruitful image of motherhood—the Holy Mother herself—anti-Marian Protestants prepared the ground for the anti-feminine, anti-filial nihilists who control the cultural levers today. It isn’t coincidental that the lands with the strongest “feminist” movements are those which first negated the presence of Mary from the heart of western culture. ….
