The “sexes and the vocations pertaining thereto are not interchangeable,” wrote late Catholic priest Vincent P. Miceli in his 1981 book, The Antichrist: The Final Campaign Against the Savior. Recently republished by Sophia Institute Press, Miceli’s analysis of man and woman and their critical roles in the family remain as relevant today as his previously examined insights into secularism and the leftist cult leader Jim Jones.
Miceli noted that “sex is not an accidental characteristic of man and woman. A human person without sex is a monstrous abstraction. Sex entails the very identity of each person; sex plunges to the deepest mystery of each person.” Given the distinctiveness of male and female, every “person is called to serve God and his fellowman, accepting gladly the sex with which one is endowed and the vocation attached to that sex.”
Miceli trenchantly exposed the hollowness of feminist ideology, which defined equality between the sexes in male terms. He wrote:
Indeed, under the guise of advancing women to equality with men, this false principle makes a final attempt to subject women completely to the tyranny of purely masculine criteria. Women cannot be made “copy-cat” men without degrading them by unnaturally robbing them of their femininity. A bogus masculinity does not honor or liberate women. Woman is honored and left free when she is genuinely accepted as an integral woman with all the characteristic charms of femininity. For woman contributes to human society what she alone can contribute with consummate excellence—the mothering, nurturing, and training of the human family through tender love.
Motherhood for Miceli was just as important as any career. As he observed,
mothering is perhaps the most important social activity for the establishment of sanity and sanctity in the family and society. It is a full-time, demanding vocation, requiring a constant spirit of gentleness, persevering commitment, steadiness, and a limitless capacity to give oneself in self-sacrifice and total love.
Contrary to feminist dictums, “femininity does not enslave woman to man; rather it enshrines woman in the place of love in the family as sweet counterbalance to the weight of authority emanating from the man,” Miceli noted. Marriage reflected Christ’s loving self-sacrifice, Miceli explained:
Woman was created for man to save him from social isolation, to be his loving companion, wife, and mother of his family. When He created woman, God had in mind that both man and woman would find their social joy in their mutual surrender in love. The divine dimension of that surrender is found in the surrender Christ made when He became man for us, for our salvation, emptying Himself and becoming a slave for love of us.
As opposed to marriage’s order, family breakdown inflicts enormous damage upon society, Miceli correctly observed:
Satan, his demons, and their human henchmen know that the fate of mankind depends on the spiritual durability of family relationships. If one splits the atom, the smallest unit of matter, tremendous physical disaster results from the explosive forces released. And if one splits the family, the smallest unit of society, tremendous social disaster results from the explosive passions released.
Already in 1981 Miceli worried about the dominance of what others would describe as the “sexual state” of state-sponsored libertinism. “Promiscuous cultures rot quickly from within; many a great empire was felled by its unrestrained sexual mores. This is happening today to the whole Christian West,” he wrote. He noted particularly the “ominous fact that the gay movement is having its way of life redefined as a simple variant of normal sexuality and woven into the fabric of society.” These “abnormal human activities…point up the moral landslide that is burying the family and society.”
Since Miceli wrote, no evidence has emerged to refute the contention supported by him that homosexuality results largely from an individual’s childhood environment, and not any inborn “gay” gene. “The cause of these perverted activities has been unequivocally traced to childhood experiences within the family,” he wrote. “The increase in this form of psychopathology is directly related to the faulty psychological development of the child within a disturbed family.
In an era of “transgender” insanity and a seemingly unstoppable onslaught of LGBT pride, Miceli can sound like a dead white male from a bygone world. However jarring he appears to modern woke sensibilities, though, his words retain penetrating logic, which events since Miceli’s time have only borne out. Miceli’s views on Islam and Israel, by contrast are more complicated, as future articles will examine.
