"Lies! I've been robbed!"

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A few weeks ago, there was a kerfuffle among Traditionalists over something the pope said about Our Lady.

I won't repeat it, because it's awful. But I think I may have an answer as to why a man like Francis might say the kinds of things he says, and why it's only the Trads who noticed how awful it was.



I think it's the same reason very few people outside the Traditionalist movement batted an eye. For fifty years, we have been taught that she, and Our Lord too, are really just regular folks. Just like you and me and apart from the special role she played in Christian history, there's really not much about her that would distinguish her from the rest of the world.

If that were actually the case, the Pope's description of her "likely" reaction would be fairly understandable. It's what any mother might say, if she were a modern, secularised western woman with the normal, half-trained faith in God that is the standard for our post-Christian global culture.

It's just another indicator that this pope is a man trained in the intellectual milieu of his time, the post-Vatican II world of dumbed-down, halfassed and humanised, horizontal Catholicism that is virtually all that is left in the mainstream Church and his held by millions upon millions of Catholics around the world.

The problem is not that he said it, but that nearly all Catholics of the world shrugged it off. We have known for decades that one is taught anything about the Faith in the normal institutions of the Church, schools, parishes and seminaries. With the majority of Catholics in the western world not believing in the Real Presence or the reality of sin or Hell or whathaveyou, is it any surprise that they are no longer imbued with the Marian doctrines that once formed such a bedrock? Who today knows anything about the special prerogatives of our Lady? Of the effects on her of being preserved from conception from the effects of original sin? No one has the least idea what she is really like.

I am not a big Mary-person, on the whole, but I know two things about that. One, that this is a fault of mine, a failure of my personal faith that I am seeking to remedy through prayer. Second, that this is the normal condition of nearly all Catholics. I know enough to know that perhaps one of the most dangerous effects of the Conciliar Asteroid has been to rob the faithful of the benefits of closeness and familiarity with this great advocate and intercessor, one whom God cannot refuse. No one, from the top of the Church to the bottom, seems to have retained in a deep way these rock-bottom foundational beliefs.

Many people in the Church still cling to the more obvious moral teachings; they know that abortion and euthanasia are murder, they know (though in a kind of distant and foggy way) that fornication and sodomy (and all the rest of that stuff) is morally harmful. Indeed, these are considered the litmus test for "conservatism". But from the point of view of the Faith, "believing" that you shouldn't kill people is, to put it mildly, lowering the bar as low as it will go without actually digging a trench and burying it.

I submit that this is mainly because the men in the Church have refused, en masse, to teach anyone the faith. And this has now been going on so long that the men in the Church no longer know it any better than the rest of us schmoes.

Francis, like everyone else of his generation, trusted that the schools and seminaries would be teaching him all he needed to know. And this was the correct way to proceed! Of course you should be able to trust your superiors in the Church, your teachers in Catholic schools, your professors in seminary.

It was not until many, many years later, after the effects of this bad education had already devastated the vineyard, that parents and seminarians wised up and steered clear.

Another thing about this is that Francis is talking the way almost every public figure talks. A great deal of the time, I think the pope talks without giving any consideration whatever to the actual meaning of what he says - and this is only surprising to us in the Church because until now, we've had popes who were not of that generation, and who had received a very different intellectual training. He's using words the same way everyone else does who has the kind of half-assed "education" that is normal and expected in his time and in ours - not to describe objective reality, but the same way you and I use Christmas tree decorations; to produce an emotional effect.

Is it any wonder that he talks like everyone else? Particularly like every other politician? He is not only a son of the Church, he's a child of his times, who, like nearly everyone in the Church of his generation, never figured out that he was being led astray.

In that, he is the perfect representative of the vast majority of the Catholics who are in exactly the same condition.



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