Closest to the Cross

"Great men we need like Paul with a two-edged sword to cut away the bonds that tie down the energies of the world, and men like Peter who will let the broad stroke of their challenge ring out on the shield of the world's hypocrisy, and great men like John who with a loud voice will arouse men from the sleek dream of unheroic repose. But we need woman still more; women like Mary of Cleophas who will raise sons to lift up white hosts to a Heavenly Father; women like Magdalen who will take hold of the tangled skeins of a seemingly wrecked and ruined life and weave out of them the beautiful tapestry of saintliness and holiness; and women, above all, like Mary, the Lady of Equity, who will leave the lights and glamours of the world for the shades and shadows of the Cross where saints are made. When women of this kind return to save a world with equity, then we shall toast them, we shall salute them not as the modern woman, once our superior now our equal, but as the Christian woman — closest to the Cross on Good Friday, and first at the tomb on Easter Morn." 
Communism and Woman, Fulton Sheen