Bulletin column from May 9, 2021

Dear Friends at Saint Frances Cabrini Parish and Saint Mary’s Immaculate Conception Parish:
Praised be Jesus Christ! We are blessed this second Sunday of May in our nation to once again celebrate Mother’s Day. Not only is this an opportunity to thank God for the gift of mothers everywhere, but it is also an occasion to offer some pertinent points on motherhood in the light of our cultural moment.
I have often written in church bulletins about Mother’s Day over the years and what a gift motherhood is to the world. In many of those same articles I have spoken about the reality that motherhood is also subject to attacks from a variety of fronts. This is how it often goes in our fallen world: the gifts of God that contain within themselves so much weight and power, and that afford us the means of such intimate participation in his own divine life, are also the very same things that Satan works so hard to distort, disfigure, and even destroy.
Motherhood is from God, as is fatherhood. In motherhood we encounter the amazingly vast capacity of women to co-generate (with fathers), and to nurture, and to sustain life. It is a remarkable sharing in the nature of God himself who is the originator and sustainer of all life. Motherhood is at the core and heart of what it means to be a woman, even if it ends up the case that some women never biologically give birth children of their own. Even those women who never give birth still spend their days and years at the service of nurturing life around them in a way that only a woman can do, and in a way that complements the fundamentally different manner of fathers. As a girl grows into a young woman, and matures in life, she becomes more and more aware of the uniquely feminine and motherly way to express love that is her vocation in the world. As a woman grasps this with greater awareness and self-understanding, she finds security (even it at times a fragile one) in her identity and sense of self in the face of all the challenges of life. What grounds her at the deepest levels is always a matter of whatever originates in her uniquely motherly outlook on self, life, and the world.

It is an especially pernicious assault on motherhood these days to believe that motherhood can be created, as an identity, merely by manipulating hormones and reproductive body parts through surgical procedures. This is what transgender ideology would have us believe. We are now supposed to think that a man, born a male, can change his sexual identity to that of a female by medical means if, in his mind, he decides he is not a man after all. It may end up being the case that he can dress like a woman, and alter his hormonal levels through drugs, and can surgically mutilate his male reproductive system so as to try and mirror that of a female. However, he will never be a mother. Only women, only mothers, are truly mothers to their depths. For a woman to think she is a man, and to try to bend her bodily systems accordingly, is to deny the fact that she is capable of carrying a child, and giving birth, and raising that child as only a mother can raise it.
Motherhood is the lynchpin of feminine identity that the transgender movement cannot get past. That is why it is both praised as well as attacked in our day. As we celebrate motherhood this month, it is important that we truly understand what we are both celebrating, and also what false ideologies we are rejecting. Motherhood, according to God’s authentic and natural plan, matters now more than ever.