National Catholic Register, Nov 5, 2024 / 14:15 pm
The intellectual evolution of emblematic radical feminist Marguerite Stern, spectacular in more ways than one, is a mystery to many commentators.
In February 2013, she burst, topless, into the iconic Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris to celebrate, along with other feminist activists, the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI and howl her hatred of the Church.
Less than a decade later, Stern has become a leading figure in the fight against the excesses of the so-called “woke movements,” in particular transgender ideology.
In recent years, this struggle has led her to distance herself from many of her former radical allies and to question, one by one, the progressive dogmas that once served as her moral compass.
This intellectual journey led her to offer, in a video published on YouTube on Oct. 31, the eve of All Saints’ Day, her “sincere apologies” to Catholics hurt by her frequent public provocations when she was a Femen activist between 2012 and 2015, “notably during a campaign in favor of gay marriage.”
How to explain such a turnaround?
For Stern, the awakening began five years ago, when she became convinced that transgenderism, which “does not create but destroys,” represented a civilizational threat, which “comes from death drive and self-hatred.”
It was a comparable impulse that she felt animated her when she attacked the Catholic religion, which has forged the “history, architecture, and customs” of her native France.
“Rejecting that, going into Notre-Dame de Paris screaming,” she continued, “was a way of damaging a part of France, which is to say a part of myself. At 22, I didn’t realize it.”
Brought up in the Catholic faith, this avowed atheist retains an instinctive love for her country’s religious heritage. Indeed, she revealed that she has never stopped loving Notre Dame. “I remember that the day after the fire [in 2019], I went to cry in a church. But sometimes we love badly.”
‘Fight to preserve rites’
Noting that her opposition to transgenderism has made her patriotic, and then socially conservative, because her only deep connection is with her country, Stern said she is convinced that France must remain Catholic. And to this end, its religious rites must continue to be kept alive.
“Rites bring us together. They soothe, sometimes repair, and regulate our emotions; they anchor us in the present by reminding us of what has gone before,” she continued.
“And then there’s something else: There’s what’s beyond us. The steeples that tower over us and dress our soundscapes. The majesty of the buildings. The wonder of entering a church. The beauty. And the faith of believers. I’m sorry I trampled on that.”
This respect for the country’s Catholic traditions is all the more important to her as the ideologies she fights against are all corollaries of transhumanism, where humans, like demiurges, become their own creators.
“Without believing in God, on certain points I ultimately come to the same conclusions as Catholics,” she claimed; hence her conviction that blasphemy, while a protected right in France under the nation’s 1905 law on the separation of church and state, is “not always moral.”
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“It’s fashionable these days to denigrate Catholics and make them out to be old-France idiots, insufficiently hip to deserve the status of human beings,” Stern concluded. “In the past, I have used this climate to act immorally, while helping to reinforce it. I sincerely apologize for that.”
This story was first published by the National Catholic Register, CNA’s sister news partner, and has been adapted by CNA.
Solène Tadié is the Europe Correspondent for the National Catholic Register. She is French-Swiss and grew up in Paris. After graduating from Roma III University with a degree in journalism, she began reporting on Rome and the Vatican for Aleteia. She joined L’Osservatore Romano in 2015, where she successively worked for the French section and the Cultural pages of the Italian daily newspaper. She has also collaborated with several French-speaking Catholic media organizations. Solène has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
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