The National Register portal, in a commentary by Joseph Pearce dated May 11, 2026, presents a literary and historical panorama of women he terms “femmes formidables”—women of faith and virtue contrasted against the “femme fatale.” Pearce invokes figures from Scripture, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Catholic hagiography, culminating in a litany that includes saints, literary heroines, and modern Catholic writers. The article is rhetorically polished and superficially orthodox, yet beneath its veneer of Catholic appreciation lies a telling silence: the absence of any reference to the Church’s present crisis, the obligation of the faithful to resist the conciliar apostasy, and the supernatural duty of Catholic women in an age of universal ecclesiastical collapse. The piece functions as a comfortable exercise in literary nostalgia, precisely the kind of spiritual escapism that enables the faithful to admire dead heroines while ignoring the living catastrophe of the Church.
The Archetype Without the Battle: Mary in a Vacuum
Pearce correctly identifies the Blessed Virgin Mary as the “archetypal femme formidable,” the New Eve who undoes the wickedness of the Old Eve. This is sound Catholic theology, and one would expect such an observation to lead naturally to a discussion of the Church’s present need for Marian devotion, consecration, and the prophetic warnings given at authentic apparitions approved by the pre-conciliar Magisterium. Yet Pearce stops at the archetype. He offers Mary as a literary and poetic figure rather than as the Regina Apostolorum, the Queen of the Apostles, whose Immaculate Heart the Church has been commanded to honor and whose intercession is the last refuge of the faithful in times of apostasy.
The omission is not accidental. To speak of Mary as the New Eve in the present hour would necessarily require addressing the abomination of desolation that has taken possession of the Vatican structures since 1962—the systematic dismantling of her devotions, the suppression of the Rosary in favor of ecumenical prayer services, and the replacement of her image with the idols of modernist “inclusion.” Pius XI, in Quas Primas, declared that the reign of Christ the King encompasses all nations and all individuals, and that “there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). Mary’s role is inseparable from this reign. To praise her archetype while remaining silent about the structures that have dethroned her Son is to offer a bouquet of flowers to a corpse.
Hagiographic Name-Dropping as Spiritual Evasion
Pearce’s litany of “femmes formidables” is extensive: Antigone, Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia, Fabiola, Callista, Clare of Assisi, Teresa of Ávila, Margaret Clitherow, Anne Line, Margaret Ward, and others. Among the modern figures, he includes Thérèse of Lisieux, Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein), Sigrid Undset, Flannery O’Connor, and Mother Teresa. The selection is revealing in its inclusions and omissions.
Edith Stein, canonized by John Paul II—an antipope whose entire pontificate was characterized by public heresy, syncretism, and the embrace of religious indifferentism—is presented without the slightest critical note. Her canonization by a manifest heretic is, by the principles articulated by St. Robert Bellarmine in De Romano Pontifice, null and void. Bellarmine teaches that “a Pope who is a manifest heretic, by that very fact ceases to be Pope and head, just as he ceases to be a Christian and member of the body of the Church.” If the canonizing authority was no pope, then the canonization is no canonization. To invoke Edith Stein as a “femme formidable” without noting this is to implicitly validate the conciliar sect’s authority to confer slanders—a validation that no faithful Catholic can grant.
Similarly, Mother Teresa of Calcutta is invoked without reference to the well-documented spiritual darkness she endured, which, far from being a mark of sanctity to be imitated, was a private trial whose meaning only the pre-conciliar Church’s theology of suffering could properly interpret. More critically, her work was frequently characterized by an ecumenical indifferentism—baptizing the dying without proper instruction, collaborating with non-Catholic and even non-Christian organizations in ways that blurred the exclusive salvific mission of the Church. Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors, condemned the proposition that “man may, in the observance of any religion whatever, find the way of eternal salvation” (Proposition 16) and that “Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion” (Proposition 18). Mother Teresa’s public witness, whatever her personal intentions, was consistently marshaled by the conciliar sect as proof that the Church had “evolved” beyond such “narrow” exclusivism.
The Silence About the Present Apostasy
The most damning feature of Pearce’s commentary is not what it says but what it refuses to say. The article was published in May 2026, during the pontificate of the usurper Leo XIV (Robert Prevost), a period in which the conciliar sect continues its relentless program of syncretism, the promotion of false ecumenism, the liturgical degradation of the Most Holy Sacrifice, and the systematic persecution of the faithful who cling to the Traditional Latin Mass and the unchanging doctrine of the Church.
Pearce writes that “history and literature are full of femmes formidables who shine forth feminine faith and fortitude.” This is true. But the present moment demands more than literary appreciation. It demands that Catholic women—and men—recognize that the Church founded by Christ has been occupied by enemies who wear the vestments of shepherds while acting as wolves. St. Pius X, in Lamentabili Sane Exitu, condemned the modernist proposition that “the Church is an enemy of the progress of natural and theological sciences” (Proposition 57) and that “contemporary Catholicism cannot be reconciled with true knowledge without transforming it into a certain dogmaless Christianity, that is, into a broad and liberal Protestantism” (Proposition 65). This transformation is now complete in the conciliar structures. The “femmes formidables” of the present hour are not those who write literary commentaries for Catholic media outlets that refuse to name the apostasy; they are the mothers who teach their children the catechism of the Council of Trent in secret, the women who risk everything to attend the true Mass offered by validly ordained priests in hidden chapels, and the wives who resist the conciliar sect’s assault on the family, on modesty, and on the supernatural life.
The Literary as a Substitute for the Supernatural
Pearce’s method is fundamentally literary rather than theological. He moves from Homer to Dante to Shakespeare to Austen to the Brontës with the ease of a well-read professor, and his prose is pleasant. But pleasantness is not a theological virtue. The Church does not need literary criticism; she needs soldiers. The “powerful silence” he praises in Cordelia and the “eloquence” he admires in Portia are, in the present crisis, precisely the qualities that the faithful must exercise—but in service of the Faith, not of English literature.
G. K. Chesterton, whom Pearce invokes, wrote that “the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” The same is true of the “femme formidable” ideal as Pearce presents it. It has been found comfortable and confined to the pages of literary journals. The truly formidable woman of the present hour is she who, like the Blessed Virgin at the foot of the Cross, stands in the midst of the Church’s Passion and refuses to look away—who names the apostasy, rejects the conciliar sect, and clings to the Faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3).
Conclusion: The Litany That Omits the Living
Pearce’s commentary is a masterclass in Catholic cultural nostalgia—a genre that permits the faithful to feel orthodox without ever confronting the radical demands of orthodoxy in an age of universal apostasy. His “femmes formidables” are all safely dead or fictional. Not a single living woman of the resistance—not a single mother who has lost her children to the conciar sect’s “youth ministry,” not a single nun expelled from her convent for refusing the Novus Ordo, not a single laywoman who has been marginalized by her parish for insisting on the traditional teaching on marriage and contraception—receives so much as a mention.
The truly formidable women of 2026 are invisible to the Catholic media establishment because they are inconvenient to its project of accommodation with the world. They do not write for the National Catholic Register. They do not appear on EWTN. They are in the catacombs, and they do not need Joseph Pearce’s literary approval. They have something far better: the grace of the true Faith, the true Sacraments, and the true Mass—all of which have been abandoned by the structures Pearce implicitly legitimizes by his silence.
Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. Outside the Church, there is no salvation—and outside the true Church, there is no “femme formidable,” only a well-dressed ghost.
Source:
Femme Formidable: The Power of Faithful Women (ncregister.com)
Date: 12.05.2026