Comment:A friend pointed out the further abuse of women in calling the Roman Catholic Church “she.” Mother church! I think with a century’s update, Mark Twain may have revised his emphasis on “men.” That a group of greed-based violent males, with their slaves, overran goddess-based agricultural Europe, set up and ran an institution of power and dominance to slaughter (millions of women), torture, make slaves of and bore people, not permitting the ordination of women, called their institution “she” and “mother” is perhaps the black irony of doublespeak through the centuries—
--Jack S.
There you see the hand of that awful power, the Roman Catholic Church. In two or three little centuries it had converted a nation of men [sic] to a nation of worms. Before the day of the Church's supremacy in the world, men [sic] were men, and held their heads up, and had a man's pride and spirit and independence; and what of greatness and position a person got, he [sic] got mainly by achievement, not by birth. But then the Church came to the front, with an axe to grind; and she [sic] was wise, subtle, and knew more than one way to skin a cat -- or a nation; she invented "divine right of kings," and propped it all around, brick by brick, with the Beatitudes -- wrenching them from their good purpose to make them fortify an evil one; she preached (to the commoner) humility, obedience to superiors, the beauty of self-sacrifice; she [sic] preached (to the commoner) meekness under insult; preached (still to the commoner, always to the commoner) patience, meanness of spirit, non-resistance under oppression; and she [sic] introduced heritable ranks and aristocracies, and taught all the Christian populations of the earth to bow down to them and worship them. Even down to my birth-century that poison was still in the blood of Christendom, and the best of English commoners was still content to see his inferiors impudently continuing to hold a number of positions, such as lordships and the throne, to which the grotesque laws of his country did not allow him to aspire; in fact, he was not merely contented with this strange condition of things, he was even able to persuade himself that he was proud of it. It seems to show that there isn't anything you can't stand, if you are only born and bred to it.
Mark Twain,
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
