Beautiful!

Thanks for this, Brian. I read some of the remarks in the other comments section and couldn't believe I was on a Catholic website.

Here's a whole slew of them:

http://www.fisheaters.com/marialactans.html

fantastic post. whenever I got hassled because of breastfeeding in public, I often said, would you have asked Mary to stop breastfeeding Jesus? That usually got them either thinking or walking away in a huff. I too was surprised by the vehemence of the posters and questioned whether i was on a Catholic site as well.

Thank you!!! Beautiful!

Not only is she breastfeeding....the baby has a bare bum! What IS that woman thinking!

Those are lovely paintings. I especially liked the idea of having a status of Our Lady La Leche in each church, then nursing moms can just point out their role model.

I nursed mine in church. Usually we sat in a corner or back pew and so unless someone really went out of their way to oogle, they would have never known.

So comforting to us nursing mothers who were so hurt by the comments we read. Thank you, thank you.

Since we have spineless leaders in the church, it will take the Church Militant to take your breastfeeding elsewhere, you, you....MOTHER OF GOD!!!

I suppose since we have the beautiful paintings of Adam and Eve on the Sistine Chapel, it is acceptable to go nude to church. Or how about Michelangelo's David? Great model of decency there. Seriously, how wise is it to take your public standards of decency from renaissance paintings? The only church militants around here are the bare-it-all-breast-feeding crowd.

Did the Blessed Virgin pose Herself for those paintings? Do we know She even approves of them?
They came from someone's IMAGINATION.

No one would be so unreasonable as to think that our Mother did not breastfeed Jesus!

But NO ONE knows if she ever did so in public,or in Temple. No one has the right to ASSUME She did. She is the model of modesty!

As far as I know, anytime She has appeared to approved visionaries, she is fully clothed, only her feet, hands, and face and neck are exposed. If the Child Jesus is with Her, She is holding Him in Her arms.

I ask the Lord through His Most Tender Mother, to give His peace and understanding to us all.

Patrick and AB ... If you set the picture of Mary nursing Christ next to the photo featured with Kate Wicker's article (which is from a file ... not the author) what causes you this disdain? It seems to relate to "decency" ... and that a milk-filled breast should never, even cloaked, be in public? Have I got that right? Or maybe, it should never be present in public in a way that makes you aware? This deeply troubles me. When I was nursing babies a decade ago, I "leaked". When I did not have a baby immediately at breast, my full bosom could just "leak" milk sometimes. I did so once in a court room where I was appearing for a client. My milk suddenly "let down" and I had to excuse myself. This was completely unintentional, like a sneeze you might have. Like a baby who needs to eat now, I discretely paid attention to the situation. If we respect you and the natural things your bodies do - like a urinary dysfunction, what's the issue with milk production and feeding? I am trying to understand your disdain?

Sixteenth century artistic sensibilities are probably not the safest thing to take as a model for day to day life in the modern world. By the same logic, we could be walking around stark naked because some very beautiful statuary depicts nudes.

The fact is that we have, like it or not, modern sensibilities and the idea of a woman popping a boob out in public is contrary to modesty and propriety, two words which are roundly disparaged in our degenerate times. Most people reading this will be too young to remember but I recall that this sort of demand to have everyone be publicly accepted in the raw is one of the many products of hippie culture. And this reminds me all too much of the incredible rudeness of my mother's hippie friends to my grandmother's objections that I should not be allowed to run around on the beach in the buff, even if I was only five.

If a woman is going to expose herself, she should do so in private. Most churches are equipped with washrooms, and traditionally, nursing mothers were not expected to attend Mass anyway. It has always been considered by the Church a time of great privacy for women and has been respected as such.

Indignant demands for acceptance of public nudity on the grounds that it is "natural" and "beautiful" is precisely and exactly an echo of the hippie/marxist revolutionaries who have, contrary to all predictions, inherited the earth. Or at least, inherited Western culture, and have done with it what all ingrateful spoiled rich kids do with their inheritance.

How tiresome! The original intent was not to condone 'popping out' ones breast for everyone to see for the purpose of nursing a child. Come on people! Twenty-two years ago I nursed my then infant daughter whenever she needed to be fed -- yes, even at Mass. People had no idea. Anyone with any discretion knows that it is possible to do so without anyone seeing ANYTHING. I agree that women who are not discrete can cause people to be uncomfortable. A receiving blanket works wonders.

Hilary,

If you read the original column that this is in reference to, you'll know that the argument is not about "popping a boob out in public". It's about being able to nurse discreetly at Mass.

If the traditional practice was to allow nursing mothers to stay home, it certainly shouldn't have ever been construed to have been a proscription to keep nursing mothers from Mass - if so, many women wouldn't be at Church more than a few times over the entire span of their childbearing years.

The image of Maria Lactans is older than the 16th century. It dates back to the third century, and the devotion to the breastfeeding Madonna is generally considered to have begun in the 4th. The imagery became very popular in the 13th century, and only tapered off in the 16th as the more rigidly Calvinist strands of Protestantism in Europe began to assert themselves.

No one is advocating that mothers breastfeed without covering up. If they are covered, however, there is nothing remotely revealing about the practice. As the eldest of six and a father of three, not to mention being the 2nd out of some 40 or more grandchildren on my mother's side of the family, I have seen my share of nursing mothers never expose their breasts.

This is absurd.

Oh, and guess what the first Marian shrine in the U.S. was? Give up?

http://tinyurl.com/7ftj4

Yep. A shrine to Our Lady of La Leche, called "The Milk Grotto", featuring a statue of Mary breastfeeding the baby Jesus.

In Church!

It was dedicated in the 1600s. According to the website:

Perhaps I have not been clear. What I object to is not breastfeeding in public. As the lady said above, it can be done discreetly. But frequently it is not.

What I object to is the loud, strident, one might say even shrill demands that the world change its traditional cultural sensibilities to suit the personal preferences of one group of ideologues.

And that is a word I use quite deliberately. I have met the women in the 'breastfeeding movement' and it is an ideology like any other, with all the evangelical characteristics of any movement.

I mention again that I have heard before exactly the same tone and content in my hippie childhood. I heard it screeched at exactly the same pitch, (at my grandmother and other ladies of her generation) with precisely the same indignant tone of injured self-righteousness - by women, you will note - who demanded not only that everyone around them politely tolerate what they wanted, but warmly applaud it. And it frequently revolved around the same issues, as I mentioned, the insistence on the abandonment of all the social and cultural conventions about modesty of previous times.

Have we not had enough of the cant, "I have a RIGHT to do this natural thing in public ANY TIME I WANT and your delicate patriarchy-induced Victorian sensibilities be damned. This is a new age and you better learn not to make ANY objection or we're going to start screeching about how you've hurt our feelings."

Haven't we had enough of such incivility? Could the ladies not just do what ladies have always done and consider that some people might not want to see? If they want, they could even maintain their moral high ground by telling themselves that not only are they the more advanced and enlightened person present, but the most charitable too by accommodating the regressive and absurd sensibilities of us common plebs. I'm sure they can work out a way of being thoughtful while maintaining their accustomed position of moral and cultural superiority. And we won't know the difference.

Aren't there enough offenses against charity going around in the form of shrill demands (with menaces) to abandon traditional cultural values? Do we have to listen to it from Catholics as well? Is there some reason the woman has to breastfeed in the pew? I understand that there might not be a washroom. But is there no narthex? Can she not sit in the back? Can she not at least cover herself during the process? Or do we all need so badly to be reeducated?

Do we have to go around deliberately offending and insisting that being offended is a sin and the fault of the person assaulted by this most recent cultural demand? Haven't we had enough of such bullying?

Please provide documentation that nursing mothers are excluded from their Sunday Obligation? If that's the case I would have been excluded from Mass for the last 11 years, due to nursing....gee thanks.

And, I also invite you to take your next meal in the "washroom", I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

Breastfeeding is feeding your child. Each breastfeeding session is not some intimate Hallmark moment. Most times, it's just feeding your baby the way God created. I don't go all moony-eyed each time I breastfeed. I don't breastfeed to get some "charge" or "thrill". I breastfeed because that's what breasts are for and that's what's best for babies.

Ah, of course. The indignation continues.

They were not 'excluded', but excused.

But of course, in jumping to the worst possible conclusion and assuming my bad will and correcting me with sarcasm and hostility, I think you might be making my point for me about tone and charity.

The longer I'm Catholic, the more I realize how bizarre and dysfunctional this whole debate is.

Breastfeeding mothers used to bother me too. The only time I was ever exposed to the female breast as a kid was in a sexual context. I seldom ever witnessed a nursing mother. However, during the last 9 years as a traditional Catholic I've seen more mothers nurse (discreetly) in public than in my previous 32 years on this planet. Many of them at holy Mass, right there in front of Jesus and everybody.

Those raised in a normal sized family - or raised around such families - have witnessed so much breastfeeding that it is simply a part of the normal human landscape, a totally non-remarkable everyday event. My own kids see this dozens of times each week - at the dinner table, at Mass, in the van, at music lessons, with their own mother and with others as well. And yet, I would bet that their sense of modesty is far more refined than those who are seldom exposed to breastfeeding.

A local observation: At the Novus Ordo Mass all mannner of flesh is exposed and immodest dress is the norm, but few would dream of breastfeeding in church. At the TLM the women are decently covered , modesty in dress is the norm, and there breastfeeding mothers all over the place.

I'm not indignate. I'm stymied that a fundamental action of caring for a baby is taken to be gross, dirty and unacceptable.

Excluded or excused--it's all the same. Women with babies aren't welcome to be at Mass by some because they might have to breastfeed. My statement stands. I would have to excuse myself from Mass for most of 11 years because I have 6 children and breastfed them all, each for a year or more. I will also repeat, please take your next meal in the bathroom and let me know what you think--bathrooms aren't for eating, there's no place to comfortably sit and nurse, and well, yuck.

There seems to be a lot of reacting going on to the extremes of a situation, rather than what's actually being advocated or defended.

Is there a mass movement of Catholic moms who want to whip out their breasts for all to see at Mass and announce it to the parishioners? No, there isn't. (But if I ever breastfeed, there's an idea!) So, I'm not sure, Hilary, what mass indiscretions with respect to breastfeeding you are reacting to, apart from your own hippie-infested childhood.



Hilary, just which and whose traditional cultural values are you talking about? I'm confused about which ones public breastfeeding violates. The cultural values of Latin and South America? Africa? Rural areas of North America? Or are we speaking of Victorian England? Which century? The taboo against public breastfeeding is both relatively modern and localized. You certainly won't find it in much of history or in most cultures (including western).



Clearly we live on different planets. From where I stand - which includes a childhood where my mother breastfed 10 children when it was not fashionable - there is no "cultural demand" for breastfeeding today. Thus, the formation of groups to advocate for it. And the need of Catholic moms to defend it. (I don't think I've even seen a breast feeding a child for many, many years and I've lived in many cities and towns across this continent.)

Btw, do you actually feel bullied by breast feeding advocates?

Immodesty shows itself in many forms -- it is not primarily about how much flesh is exposed. Those who are offended by public breastfeeding - by any sight of a breast - are the ones with the problem. Manicheeism? Jansenism? Puritanism? Hang ups? Take your pick. But this is not a Catholic view of the human body.

First of all, with all due respect, it is very offensive to most of us nursing mothers when it is suggested we go into the bathroom to nurse our babies. Bathrooms are not only unsanitary but ill-equipped and uncomfortable - nursing a baby is complicated enough when you are not having to do it on a dirty bathroom floor or sitting on a toilet.

Also, I am willing to guess that Mary was still nursing Jesus at the time that she brought him to the temple to be circumcised. Her obligation to present him was NOT excused, nor should a parent's obligation to attend Mass for themselves, as well as to attend as an example to their children (for whom they took baptismal vows once) be. And, as I have stated in the other thread, new mothers, who are just starting a vocation ordained by God, are certainly in need of the nourishment of the sacraments. I know I would not have survived my own bout of severe postpartum depression without being able to attend Mass and receive Communion nearly every day.

I appreciate your concern about women who "whip it out" with no concern for those around them (as I, too, find this offensive), but I would venture to guess that most Catholic mothers visiting this site are ill inclined to do such a thing, preferring to nurse their child modestly, ESPECIALLY in Mass. In my church, where there are many nursing mothers, and I have never seen even a suggestion of skin from a single one of them - I see more chest-area skin exposed on teenage girls in my church. These mothers (myself included) tend to sit toward the outer edge of the pews and cover themselves completely - apart from the fact that they may remain seated during certain parts of the Mass, you would never know what they are doing. I agree that the Church is not the place for immodesty, but there are many ways nursing can be completely modest. A right minded mother knows how to nurse without causing offense to those around her, and other right minded people know how to accept what the mother is doing at face value.

Understand, Hilary, that many nursing mothers are hesitant to nurse in public because of stares, gestures, and comments. That makes some of us overly sensitive to certain attitudes and comments. We may come off as being more in-your-face than we actually are. If that is the case, we do owe you and those like you an apology. However, I would contend that in your own responses, there is a hint of intolerance - you seem to have decided that since SOME women are immodest and rude about their breastfeeding habits, ALL of us must be, and therefore we should all take it outside. Be careful that you do not fall into the same attitudes you have accused others of harboring.

Peace.

as I said. Clearly we who object must bow in humble acknowledgment of the inferiority of our irrational objections. We exist to be educated into the new mores.

<i>Those who are offended by public breastfeeding - by any sight of a breast - are the ones with the problem. Manicheeism? Jansenism? Puritanism?</i>

Indeed. Certainly any objection can only mean I am a vile heretic.

By all means, continue to browbeat. Pile on. Clearly no insults are grave enough for such a wicked neo-Victorian oppressor as myself. Allow me to stand as a warning to anyone who may dare to follow.

My favorite painting of the Holy Family:

http://tinyurl.com/5lrpvl

Hold on - when did you become the victim here? Most of the browbeating was done in this discussion (I include Kate Wicker's original piece) by those who were outraged that she would nurse in Mass.

I agree with Laura that this is out of control. In fact, it's almost comic.

Here is a link to the church fathers and breastfeeding that some might find interesting.

http://tinyurl.com/69t64c

I notice that public breastfeeding advocates are being tarred with the 'sounds like the 60's hippie movement' argument.

Can I just say that pretty much every mass movement has something true in it- oftentimes it goes overboard or offers poor substitutes as solutions to some real social problems. I, myself, stand against the 'Sex, drugs and rock n' roll' counterculture of the 60's- but I can also see that part of the motivation for a counterculture was legit- if you read in depth about the Vietnam War and American foreign policy as conducted in secret by the CIA et al- a good Christian can not but wince over the abuses, the killing of hundreds of thousands for really awful reasons- if you doubt my conclusions- read Kinzer's "Overthrow" and Weiner's "Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA".

My point being that the "Hippies" had some excellent points in their critique of their Nation's political decisions with respect to Foreign Relations and Just War. Their critique wasn't always perfect- but like with World Religions- Catholics are obliged to look for rays of truth and respond positively- overcoming evil with good- taking the plank out of our own eye- all that Christspeak-Biblespeak stuff that we claim to believe and follow as "God's Word".

And so with such things as modesty- can we not separate out "Free Love" as in public parading around in the buff, and maybe extreme PDA's in parks and restaurants- and the necessary and completely wholesome activities associated with mothers' breastfeeding anytime, anyplace, because a child's hunger must take precedence over any other sensibility? Must we lump it all together?

Isn't the only sound conclusion to all of this found in acknowledging the priority of feeding a hungry child at a moment's notice, and the desirable intent of a mother to discreetly find a way to breastfeed without either making a big production out of it, or by flagrantly flashing her "milking devices!" to all lookers- can we all agree to have a Rodney King moment and 'Just get along' and find this common ground and get back to finding solutions to the killing of innocents in abortion, unjust wars and imperfect economic theories/practices?

Hilary, you may not be a wicked neo-Victorian, but would YOU want to eat in a public restroom? You seem to be suggesting that a nursing mother should sit on a bare toilet seat to feed her infant. Your desire to relegate a mother and her nursling to a toilet stall doesn't sound much like Christian charity to me. What happened to "suffer the little children to come unto Me"?

I realize that this is an old thread, but when I came across it I had to respond. I fondly remember the days of nursing my children -- and YES -- even at Mass. In my baby sling, I alwasy sat in the front of the church, and I was very careful not to be inconsiderate of those who may of considered me rude. I couldn't understand, and still can't, why the American culture is so adamant about nursing in public. Look at the norms that are accepted!!! What a sad world we live in.