Indubitable

25 years ago, and smugly assuming that their views were the consensus, members of the WASP elite on at least three continents invoked their nth generation club rights to demand that their church change to suit their specifications.

They are still screeching abuse at the insolent colonial darkies who were having none of it. Such Baby Boomers were then in their pomp rather than in their early dotage, and Western Europe, North America and the Antipodes had yet to feel the full effects of mass immigration from outside each other.

In the coming days, their sociologically indistinguishable Catholic contemporaries from the same regions and from the whitest parts of Latin America, including Argentina, are going to have the same experience, but they will have it from a far weaker position at home no less than abroad.

Meanwhile, the Western world is crying out for fidelity to the Magisterium, and is increasingly discovering it, only to be confronted instead with a “cultural Catholicism” that has little culture and no Catholicism. But this Pope is already 86.