Catholic conservatives fundamentally confuse cause and effect

The firestorm of criticism from conservative Catholics over Pope Francis's controversial statement that a "great majority" of sacramental marriages are "null" has exposed the very heart of the crisis of the Church: namely, that countless millions of Catholics are receiving the sacraments without sufficient spiritual instruction or maturity.

In the strict sense, of course, the Pope's critics have a point: the mere fact that 60-odd percent of Catholic marriages in the West end up in separation (to avoid the term "divorce") doesn't render these sacramental unions invalid to start with. That would deny both the power and the universality of sacramental grace, which as Christians (Catholic or otherwise) we must firmly believe is ultimately independent of human will and actions (i.e. sin or rebellion).

On the other hand, it's undeniable that faith can't work like magic - at least, not in most cases. No less than a child must be continually instructed according to the Catechism for years after first communion and/or confirmation, in order to constantly acquire habits of life that conform to it and shed those that don't, a new married couple must constantly work to maintain and improve their actual state of matrimonial union - an endeavor typically requiring very conscious and deliberate choices to forgive faults which, outside the sacrament's protection, are simply impossible to repair.

That's where it's crucial to really grasp the context of the "provisional culture" that the Holy Father repeatedly speaks of: it's the provisional culture that renders traditional and orthodox conceptions of marriage and family far less exclusively influential than they used to be.

To put it bluntly: asking many couples and families to stay together in this day and age is effectively asking them to suffer more than they would if they split apart. This societal and cultural dynamic simply didn't exist before the era of mass consumerism and women's participation in the workforce.

This is what Catholic (and other Christian) conservatives never seem to understand or, even if they do, concede: where they believe that it's the attack on the family that has corrupted the culture, the reality is that a corrupted culture has severely weakened the family.

In other words, conservatives fundamentally confuse cause and effect, and because they misidentify the source of the powerful forces arrayed against the traditional family, they're always reduced to a highly reactive kind of defensiveness which betrays a deep insecurity, sometimes even bordering on quasi-Apocalyptic foreboding, over the state of the world they inhabit. And the pontificate of Francis has left them distressed to see that even their own leadership has somewhat moved on from such an inflexible nihilist view of God's creation (tainted though it may be).

Anyway, I'm hopeful that sooner or later even conservatives will start reconsidering their self-imposed exile from the realm of contemporary social realities.