Conversation with Carrie Gress

[Music] hello and welcome to another edition of napa institute conversations i'm kristin meyer and today we are joined by a very special guest dr carrie grass author mother wife and today she's going to be talking about one of her latest books the anti-mary exposed rescuing the culture from toxic femininity she's also the author of several books especially on our lady the marian option theology of home and her newest book theology of home to carrie welcome thank you it's so great to be here today so today we're going to be talking about the anti-mary exposed and we are in a situation while this book was published in 2019 two years ago it's been in the news again you are one of the latest victims of cancel culture it's been cancelled so you've been cancelled but i i would like to point out that it is uh women's history month and the theme of women's history month of last year was they shall not be silenced so you tell us a little bit about what happened with your book well this book um some a gift shop actually tried to sell it on facebook marketplace and they were told it didn't comply with facebook's you know policies and community standards and whatever and you know initially i thought okay well maybe it's kind of a fluke and then it turns out they tried to post the same book on instagram so i was like okay well they're owned by the same people there must be maybe this is a fluke but it's systemic at least um at this point so anyway they ended up um what happened there of course is people found out that it looked like it was really being banned and so people just bought a ton and ton ton of copies and it just shot up on on amazon it was up at like 242 and it was number one on um on women's theory and feminist books actually which is pretty funny because the books underneath it were things like i hate men and you know all of these books that that were just such a contrast to this to this book um but what then happened was amazon actually stopped selling it they ran out of stock but they stopped selling um like future products you know how when sure you buy something and it's not gonna ship for like a month it'll say this will ship you know and here are the buttons to buy well that was all taken down you could only buy it from a third party seller so for like a week that happened and my publisher was working with them trying to get it put back up and anyway it was just one of those things where i was like okay this book is two years old um it's right after the inauguration and suddenly big tech is making it very difficult for this book to be sold you know it could be fluke we don't have a lot of you know there's no evidence that that was really targeted but when you've got three different platforms it looks pretty clear that something's going on so you can now buy it back at amazon i think that they were just trying to keep it from getting like a bestsellers list somewhere or something so sure um so that's what happened was it never made a bestsellers list but it certainly sold out and i think as has definitely renewed people's interest in the book and sure um people are looking at it and reading it and we're working on a spanish edition so it's been really heartening to see you know that something good can can come from this and what is it in the book that's so controversial that would make them want to ban something right well and this was the fun part because you know i ended up doing actually a lot of media in um and i did russian tv i did polish radio or polish newspaper hungarian um radio so it was interesting to see that it was these countries where they had lived under censorship for so long to see that they were really interested in the story and and ran with it but you know in the book i i basically outline you know the fact that that women have been silenced for 50 years that we've got this narrative um that started really in in the 60s and you know it's still with us today in fact you know all you have to do is blame the patriarchy for something and that that's a good enough answer sure um even last week madonna blame the patriarchy for i don't know it was her lack of success or something on twitter you know she's only worth 850 million dollars and um she was blaming the patriarchy death to the patriarchy so interesting um so it's fascinating and sad at the same time that we have this narrative that's been running on for 50 years it hasn't changed you know it's the same arguments today that mothers and grandmothers are making before but part of that narrative is really to silence those of us that disagree with it and to paint us as doormats and you know not intellectually savvy and you know all of that so that's really the the contrast that i think that they've been successful at doing and yeah so that's what i'm really pushing back against is this idea that um you know if we don't buy into their narrative um that something's wrong with us and in fact you know we can see that that narrative has led to a lot of really unhappy women too there was a nap institute conversation that fran mayer did with rodriguez about two months ago and he had mentioned in his latest book that he met with a woman a grandmother from czechoslovakia and she was seeing all of the same issues happening in america that she dealt with with the communists and he thought maybe she was just being a little dramatic and so he asked other people who suffered under communism and they said absolutely we're seeing the same patterns happening in our culture now interesting you mentioned russia that you did russian tv speak a little bit about fatima and how that plays into the feminist movement well i talk about this in the book our lady of fatima of course said that um if the world didn't convert if russia wasn't converted that the lies of russia would be spread worldwide and um the live russia of course is marxism sure and this is in 1917 1917 very very long over 100 years ago yeah um so her point in russia was what well i think most people when they think of marxism they think of it economically um that you know it's the the opposite of um capitalism but i think that what she meant and i think what we're seeing is really um this distortion of human nature because that's what the soviets did they came in right and they tried to change women into the you know the great um you know the perfect worker yeah and they sent their children away they made abortion available to anybody who want one you know you couldn't own any land but you could have an abortion any day of the week yeah um so i think that that's where it really started was this idea that human nature can can in fact be changed and is malleable so then if you look at what's happened since the 60s and 70s i mean that's really the effort is to really deny the feminine make women think that they need to be like men but also try to convince men that they need to be like women and even gloria steinem said um she wrote this book shortly after she turned 80 and she said that was the whole goal of her life and the movement was to just make this genderlessness you know ubiquitous to make everybody kind of genderless and um yeah and so you can see it's really that you know the lgtb movement is just an extension of all of this because if you didn't have women denying their femininity and what it means to be a woman you certainly wouldn't have you know gone off the cliff into just all this confusion and gender dysphoria and whatnot that we're dealing with today and even blm has a lot to do with it because of course there's some deep deep marxist roots there it was started by three lesbian women so it's all part and parcel of this desire to change human nature to destroy the family and um to just promote this genderlessness so it's very sad so let's back up a little bit and define what an anti-marian woman is right well that are some of her qualities right well the first thing is the anti-mary is it's a play on the idea of an antichrist um so it's not a single person um the way that it's spoken of like an antichrist in revelation um st john talks about in one of his um letters talks about this idea of an antichrist spirit that's in the world and that's kind of how i describe it in the book that it's a spirit that's it's taken over the heart of women so it's not an individual um per se but the woman that is the anti-marion and she's she's animated by kind of all the things that are opposed to our lady um you know that there's especially life the life issue i think is a big piece of it um but our lady was humble she was you know willing to serve others and i think that in the culture today it's so easy to see this layer of narcissism and this desire to be served this desire to have it all to sort of take it all in and want everything but not recognize that there's an element of service and self-gift right so yeah that's really i think i'm very much struck struck by um the images that we see especially a few years ago when the women's march came about and the difference between the contrast between the pro-life march of these really wonderful young vibrant vibrant healthy people who young people who are fighting for the rights of others right and for innocent human beings and for the right to life and then you contrast that a day later with women who are wearing grossly inappropriate hats who are saying very vulgar things who are making threats to people and and it's just not a virtuous um sense that you get from that i'm wondering what your what your thoughts are on that and what that stems from no i think that you i like the way that you put those together in fact that's one of the reasons this is actually a picture from the women's march on the cover of the book um i'm wearing those pink hats oh it's interesting it looks like flowers yeah no that was the idea was just this contrast it looks like flowers but it's actually an actual picture from the march of all those pink hats so um yeah i think that there's a definitely a contrast and um you can just see so clearly this brokenness in fact i had a good friend of mine shortly after the book came out he said you know once you see the anti-mary you can't unsee it it's really hard to unsee it because it just feels like it's kind of evident and everywhere um so yeah i think that that those two marches kind of exhibit it beautifully in terms of just the contrast of where it comes from the idea of feminism i think started out with a good root right and sort of a proper equality in the first wave feminism but then the second wave feminism comes about in the 60s so talk a little bit about who the founders were sort of their backgrounds their relationships with their mothers you go into that the idea of lesbianism that came out of that yeah well the first wave i did i haven't done research on deeply i've actually started looking into it there's there's a book that's just come out from oxford university press on this topic it actually talks about how the first wave was even satanic sure had those roots in it so but i i didn't focus on that there were so much in the second wave and i think that's really where it was like the match was thrown and everything sort of blew up into this fire that we we're living with now um but yeah you i interviewed um mallory millett whose sister kate millett um kate's passed away now but kate was very much an instrumental figure in in terms of um just promoting the movement and um giving it some sort of intellectual credence and credibility and it's her book um sexual politics that actually has been used for all of the um the women's studies programs that we have in our universities and things like that sort of the backbone of it and she was really instrumental in helping those um get established but you know she's on the cover of time magazine and she's very much an icon of this and you know since her death mallory has been talking about just how troubled and awful kate was i mean she was schizophrenic and she was she's very much a lesbian and just struggled and suffered with so many various issues in her life but she's also a marxist there is very much an occult element involved mallory describes this dinner that she showed up to on halloween night with these 12 women sitting naked around a table with nothing bowls and utensils and a boa constrictor um interesting and mallory was like okay it's time to leave and just you know got out of there so she doesn't even know what happened but you know 12 is not an accidental number i mean kate was very much a catholic and and understood this symbolism of you know 12 women and i i think you can see even from that group and you can see you know all these other groups that were were kind of coming up at that time just so much brokenness and yet they were just they were on they were getting they had so much attention you know there was someone like that you know larry steinem who was gorgeous and who was articulate and women just followed them and just thought this is this is something that's it's got to be there's got to be something good about this and it's glamorous yeah they made it very fashionable and of course tv was really up and coming at that point too so it was all those things working together but you can kind of see how it was these lost women and phyllis chessler is one of these these grandmothers of the movement she talks about them being these lost girls that they finally found themselves because all of them had issues with their moms especially betty for dan i mean it was just amazing to see that the background and the baggage that these women had and so they took that baggage and you know they're they're breaking others you know broken people break other people and so rather than recognizing like okay maybe we need actually you know therapy and and faith and god right um they took it the other direction and really ran with it and and just absorbed all of the attention and that's what made the movement i think so explosive um and we can see that very much the exact same pattern with the lgtp movement right lgtb movement right now right um is so much attention you would think that every other person is part of that culture and yet the general number is 2 i think gallup just came out with a new poll and among millennials it's up higher it's at 16 well why is that because there's so much attention that they're getting so it's an interesting um it seems to be rooted in eve right and the serpent tempting her saying right you can be like god right and so these are these women who are searching for something that you know saint augustine obviously says right hearts are restless and rest in thee but when you're searching for something outside of god they have found it in their community um dear friends of the the napa institute robbie george and um pastor eugene rivers who's a dear personal friend of john and i's along with his wife jackie from the seymour institute at harvard had this really beautiful quote the other day the other day and gene says to robbie robbie when the devil comes to try to take my soul to lead me away from christ and into the mire of sin do you think he's going to come dressed up in a kkk robe and hood do you think he's going to be wearing a nazi ss uniform do you think he's going to be preaching racism and bigotry no the devil is evil but he's the opposite of stupid when he comes to try to take my soul he's going to make sure to look like me and sound like me he's going to be saying things i want to hear he's too smart to present himself in a way that's going to repel me he's going to present himself in a way that's going to attract me he's my worst enemy worse than any klansman or nazi but he's going to try to convince me he's my best friend he does that to everyone no matter whether you're black or white male or female young or old that's why he's so dangerous and why he's so often successful now that takes me into the idea of where much of these feminine feminism and what much of where the feminism came from and you talk a lot about the cosmo girl and girly brown yeah well i mean first it's i think um you're right on with um betty friedan is actually the first one that talked about this egg with no name sure um and speak a little bit about that what is the ache with no name yeah i think she's referring to that egg that we all have you know the desire for god and but she didn't realize that that that's what she was talking about she just thought it was because women were at home right and that's kind of how she articulated the housewives weren't fulfilled right motherhood exactly it wasn't exactly and so that's the ache um and of course now that women aren't at home the egg is still there because it's an egg for god um so it's it's sad that she didn't know her tradition as a jewish woman well enough to really recognize like okay this is what's going on instead she put it in her books and this is what really spoke to so many women who didn't also know their their own traditions as jewish women or catholics or even just educated women like this is what what historically we know to be the case um so it's interesting because you you know you've got someone like betty fernand um who was not an intellectual um she was also not a lesbian and actually there was a lot of infighting about that she didn't want that part to be part of the movement then you've got kate millett who was very much an intellectual and then you've got helen gurley brown who's the cosmo girl and actually she modeled her whole book whole cosmo rather cosmo magazine after playboy um she got the same writers you know so all all of that was just modeled after playboy you know down to the smallest detail so then it begs the question like how do all these women actually fit together and be united under one banner and i think that was a real struggle for a long time but you know what actually did it was abortion and that's the glue that has has held them together was this this belief that abortion um is this inviolable right and it's very important and you know women can't be happy without it and of course that's the real fundamental lie i mean there's several lies in feminism one of them of course is um that women in order to be equal have to be like men and men are our enemies um but the second one is is more tragic and we've you know we live this every day with the abortion numbers um and that's it our children are an enemy that they will they are an obstacle to our happiness instead of an avenue or conduit to our happiness so um that's really the the tragedies that you have all of these women of these various broken pieces that all come together and are glued together so you have women who you know are much more attracted to the cosmo girl um that are reading helen gurley brown or you have other women who are more like kate millet that they're more intellectual like there's something for everybody in it because they've been able to to pitch their wagons together ideola ideologically right under um this abortion umbrella so peter kreeft had a i think i'm pretty sure was peter craft had a great saying that i read in plough magazine which is a fantastic publication uh written by the bruderhof community and he said that abortion is the antichrist sacrament i'm paraphrasing here abortion is the antichrist sacrament using the same language this is my body yep right and an abortion it's this is my body i will not give it up for you and of course the opposite is true for us and that always struck me i read that a number of years ago and it always struck me because it really is the antichrist it really is anything other than christ and i think it's important to know especially as catholics that there is a lot of demonic in our world there is a spiritual battle that we're fighting and sometimes we sound like we're crazy when we say that but but it's true right i mean our lady of fatima spoke to that over 100 years ago every marian apparition kind of you know extols her love and her peace or has some sort of warning and so i think it's important to you know keep that as our source and to draw draw close to the sacraments now you mentioned that the lgbt movement and which was about two percent and among teenagers did you say is up to 16 millennials millennials so what has changed yeah i think it's just because it's fashionable right um you know it's me it's everywhere it's all over media and and this is one of the ways that we've been our culture has been destroyed is is that um these elite women and certainly the men that follow them control everything they control politics they control fashion industry they control magazines books hollywood all of that is just this kind of lock box of ideas and you can't really stray from that or else you find yourself on the outside of it and that's what they've been able to do with the lgtb movement is is that very same thing is just promote these ideas so it looks like the population is just riddled with um people of this from that group but in fact it's it's actually not um and i always think that's one of the fascinating things as catholics you know we're there's 35 million catholic females in the united states i mean it's almost the population of canada i think canada has 39 million people we're 35. um and like 10 of the population and yet we have zero voice we have zero presence right um you know we're very invisible right um so i think that that's a great opportunity for us as as catholics to be able to find ways to to use the things that they've used against us to reclaim women and to give them kind of an off ramp from all these things that are making them miserable because that's the sad saddest part is that we know you know the anti-mary is targeting virginity and it's targeting motherhood um sue ellen browder who wrote that book subverted said when she wrote for cosmo for 20 years she said i could write anything i wanted to i could make any kind of story i wanted about the cosmo girl she said but i could not make her a virgin and i could not make her a mother and that's the saddest part is that those are the pieces that are actually fulfilling to women um and we've entirely cut those avenues off for women so that they don't even begin to think about them as options for their happiness um and so that's that's you know i think the real issue is again this this twisting of human nature and getting us away from that place where we can actually be happy and we can live our life with god and we can follow our lady in that route i mean she's a virgin mother yeah so it's and the only one throughout history exactly right i think all of this sort of came to fruition in the senate confirmation of amy coney barrett for the supreme court right and i i was struck by you know the questioning with senator feinstein right with the dogma lives loudly within you and this was previous in 2017. what struck me though in her line of questioning is that she always began very complimentary of amy coney barrett and her large family and she makes the comment that she is has admiration for admiration for her for raising seven children and that she struggled with raising one and it almost seemed as if it was this realization that feminism was a lie and she immediately went into but women need to have the right to control their own reproduction right and right but it seemed to me that as she has progressed in age and is now a grandmother that maybe some of those realizations are coming about and that here is this wonderful successful woman who is now a supreme court justice right who has seven children is a loving mother and wife and has it all but right but she's not lauded as a feminist icon right no i think that's an incredible example of exactly how a woman like her is silenced because she really does show women like oh maybe i didn't need to abort my children for success and i think that that's it's it's got to be a very painful and sad place to be somebody in that position i know you know someone like barbara walters has expressed the fact that she wish she had had more children um you know i think there's so many women out there in that position who have these regrets because you know you get to a certain point where you there's just no going back right um and i think that that's um a real tragedy and and again another place for our compassion because they've been so lied to you know this isn't a lot of this is not willing evil it's being told that you know x is good when in fact we know x is actually bad so um it's really the the weight of the culture has just impressed itself upon us so strongly that we can't really escape it unless we have faith and we have you know other holy and faithful people in our lives to kind of direct us um but that's you know one of the reasons why um i think we just need strong women to to reach out to neighbors or to you know this is how women historically have changed the culture right is their husbands and children from women it does right yeah we are the bearers of culture we have a huge responsibility to promote culture among our children and i think there was a quote in the book about how um women have the power to control culture sort of through the men right we have this beautiful complementarity of men and women and our role of of what god created us to be and separate from each other it's why god created eve right adam was alone when he was by himself he needed a compliment and so we need to have this beautiful complementarity right beyond even marriage we see it in religious life the the priesthood is married to the church right and the the religious life there's a beautiful complementarity there what is the hope for the future yeah is there hope well i think i think there is there's tremendous hope i mean there's always hope with our lord and with our lady we know that there's these cycles of of civilization um i think that we have hope in in the sense that people are are sad and they're upset and they're in pain and i think that those are opportunities for us to meet people in that in that space and say you don't have to live your life this way in fact that's the big secret is catholic women have what every woman wants you know if you look at the statistics and the way it's broken down in terms of a faithful husband uh they want children they you know they want um all of these elements that they want to be peaceful in the midst of chaos you know all of this that we have been given through our faith um so i think that that is is compelling um i think we're also seeing sort of this bifurcation of just there's no more being in the middle like the lukewarm is getting hard a harder and harder place to be right um so i think that that is certainly hopeful in a cert in a way because it just you're not wondering anymore you know it's just you've got these two different directions to go in so anyway um but no that i i mean i wrote the whole book the marion option about how our lady has interceded so many different times and different ways throughout culture and history and that all we really need to do is form that relationship with her and keep it alive through the rosary and and through coming to know her and coming to know her son and the sacraments and fasting you know all those things are really vital and important but our lady builds culture you know we've been tearing down culture if you look around this is what's happening is culture's being torn down um but she builds it you know look at the the greatest civilizations have been related to our lady look at notre dame cathedral you know all these incredible places all throughout europe are named for and because of our lady the battle of lepanto the battle of the pontiac awards she is protecting us she is so i think that we have great great hope in that in terms of the divine intervention and what she can do through us when we make ourselves malleable and open to god's will you say in the book um that if we're not an icon of mary we're an icon of satan right there's a i think that's that's striking in that it's a reminder every day that if we're not um aligned with the beauty of the feminine genius and the beauty of what our lady offers us right then we're something other and that other generally is not of god and the others is is becoming more and more stark in fact i just wrote a piece for the catholic thing about this um you know looking at recoverated churches you know churches that were have been made ugly and how we're renovating them but i also compared it to to women and the beauty that women are supposed to have and we're not seeing that beauty and it's it's not just skin deep you know the the beauty is also on is is lacking on the interior part of the woman's soul and i think that that's why there is so much happiness and unhappiness and so much brokenness and are women happier from the feminist movement no no no and that's that's another you know here we are right decades later i'll be happier right and i think that that's what's one of the things that as catholic women we sort of feel like well i have all these opportunities that i wouldn't had without feminism so we kind of remain quiet about and don't pay enough attention to it and yet there are so many pieces um that have just really destroyed women and are not making them happy you know if you look at everything from suicides drug abuse depression stds all of these things are not you know you would expect sort of a correspondence with feminism and these happiness metrics and in fact they're it's inverted that women are becoming less happy right um because they're destroying those relationships that are actually the ones that would that make us happy you know our relationship with husbands fathers is another area where they're they're really breaking relationships and then certainly with our with our children i think there was a study that the happiest people in the world are religious sisters right i mean i think there's there's definitely something to that and you don't need to look much farther than the carmelites or the dominicans and know that they always have a huge smile on their face and joy that exudes out of them exactly what can women do and speak a little bit about theology of the home your your newest project what can we do to build up culture to build up each other to support each other and especially to make our homes the domestic church that they're that we're called to create yeah no i think that's a great and very big question that you know we could do a whole nother conversation but um one of the things i noticed when i was researching this was that you know women weren't sitting around reading marks they weren't they weren't looking at this book yeah thank god but what they were reading had marks and it had margaret sanger's ideas in it and they didn't realize it it's all sort of disguised and sort of packaged lovely sure looks beautiful and compelling um and that's one of the reasons why i i wrote theology of home the theology of home books which they're highly illustrated there's like over 100 pictures in both books and um was just to recognize that this is how they've destroyed us was using a narrative packaged beautifully so that we we ingest it over and over and over again every day but as catholics we're not doing that we sort of look at a book like this and people think oh it's just fluff when in fact this is actually really important because we're telling our own story we're saying these are the values of catholicism you know even we joke about how it's full of all these pictures that you know are forbidden in the culture like men who are manly and competent and you know large families and pregnant women and and all of that um so i think that we have to we have to actually focus on you know i have a phd in philosophy so this has been a really long journey because i thought you know i could just reason people back into the faith but we're kind of in this post-rational age emotions and how people feel and are pulled into concepts um through the visual is highly important i mean this is our media issue all day long right um so that's what i we really have trying to do with theology of home is to try to subtly you know no hammer over the head or anything but just present our message and our the way catholicism looks every day right um in a way that is compelling and beautiful and resonates with people you know who doesn't love talking about their home um so that that our first book was one that you know i could give to just about anybody and they would find something that they loved about it um so i think that we have to find common ground but in a way that we're not compromising ourselves or trying to give in to the culture but that is presenting our story in a way that's compelling and beautiful and people can find hope in that so and it's not specifically for catholics either right i mean this is something that all women are called to we're innately created to be welcoming and loving and hospitable all of that and to be the the caretakers of our home right welcome people into it right right there's a you speak a lot about spiritual motherhood and um today is alice vaughn hilton brown's 98th birthday right and she was so so lovely at this and um you know obviously her husband was a brilliant philosopher but she was equally as is equally as brilliant and does so with wit and grace and charm and as only a woman could you know i think that's really beautiful that's something that's not specific to catholics it's something that we can teach to our protestant brothers and sisters or to this increasingly secular society i think that many people find it welcoming and loving and want to be part of someone's home and want to be welcomed to a to a party at someone's home or right just part of their community you know i think that's i think that's something beautiful what advice would you give to women as we close especially young girls i would say you know the biggest thing is to really kind of get out of that cycle of trying to compete and be like men um and this is you know it's hard advice because it's hard it's really hard to even just figure out what it means to be a woman anymore um because it's so it's just not talked about and i remember with my own daughter many years ago she said well what is it that i can do that boys can't do and i it's like a terrible answer like i just didn't have a good answer to give her and i think that that's animated and motivated my own work um and so looking into that looking into what the feminine soul looks like and the things that that drive us um like you said spiritual motherhood is what every woman is tasked with um this desire to have compassion and help others you know there's that great quote by saint edith stein of the woman's soul is fashioned to shelter others so that they may and their souls may unfold um and also the world doesn't need what women have but what they are yeah exactly and that's the capacity to to love others so i would say that's that's where you start um getting to know that and even you know that's the beauty of our lady is she will teach us how it is that that you know she how it is to become the people that that god intends us to be um because she knows already who god made us to be so that's the beauty of the rosary and and all of that but yeah definitely just get out of that what the culture is saying about women and start focusing on really these desires of our hearts which so many times we silence because we're like this isn't acceptable socially and whatnot so be not afraid have the courage to stand up thank you so much carrie this has been lovely thank you and thank you for joining us for another napa institute conversation join us this summer july 21st through 25th in beautiful napa valley our theme this year is all things made new god bless you

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Length: 35min 30sec (2130 seconds)

Published: Tue May 11 2021