(Because, as Kierkegaard said, “The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”)

Which intercession means, I should say, that the contemplation of her, if entered upon in a spirit of reverential love, for the sake of, and with gratitude for, her Son, can change us so significantly that any petitions we might direct toward her, if not resolved by an influence beyond our control, will resolve themselves by the very change we have undergone.

Which is why the Catholic Church venerates her, regards her as the first among the saints, as the Queen of Heaven, and as a powerful intercessor, before God, on our behalf.

In other words, she is special, even among those figures, from antiquity till now, who’ve played a special role in the unfolding of the plan that eternally is written in the ‘mind’ of God.

Because, although there have been many holy and sanctified people, both before her and after her in history, never has there been a person whose cooperation with Providence was so necessary to the work of Redemption, and without whose willing participation that work so clearly goes unfulfilled.

Meaning, it is Our Lady we can look to for a model of living that most completely integrates the material with the spiritual in a way that resembles a vocation.

Against this tendency toward an unbelief in spiritual reality, and an insistence on a purely natural order (to the exclusion of the supernatural), does the Virgin Mary stand, as an example of the most harmonious and complete orientation to life.

Which I suppose is the way of things. It would seem that the spirit of evil, across time, does not change in kind so much as in influence.

Which is to say that the ‘contemporary type of this person’, as I referred to it, is likely no different than the same type of person from previous generations. Or differs from those iterations only superficially.

That they happen to be the loudest and most sure of themselves (on TV and social media and so forth) is, I suppose, a given, insofar as such traits tend to go hand in hand with a casual disregard for the spiritual reality of evil, no matter the era.

Because, in the back of their mind (which is to say their conscience), they know that sin does have a reality, and that they’ve been denying this fact only because they’ve been conditioned to do just that for as long as they can remember, and have been validated by their culture for doing so.

Of course, only the boldest, most disciplined, and non-conforming of these types actually act as though sin has no reality, when push comes to shove. The rest sin timidly, in small, unoriginal ways, in accordance with what has been prescribed to them (and deemed acceptable) by their culture and their peers, so that they will always refrain from, as it were, ‘going too far’, that they might maintain for themselves the illusion that they are ‘good’, and that they wish only to ‘express themselves’, and live ‘freely’, and be their ‘true selves’, and so on and so forth.

In other words, to deny that sin has a spiritual reality, and to claim instead that it is a social construct, or a tool of ‘the patriarchy’, intended to control people, or to keep them from doing all the things they’d like to do, is to make room inside oneself for a number of tendencies shared by those who are scornful of a worldview (Catholicism) because that worldview doesn’t define itself strictly by rationalism or ‘scientism’, even if its organizing principles are rational, and it has no quarrel with science.

Such people reveal themselves most frequently by their attitude toward sin, because it is through this attitude that one indicates one’s belief or unbelief in the spiritual reality where sin (as well as virtue) finds its ground.

Any mode of conduct or belief that would ask them to disregard their ego, so that they might heed something greater than themselves, they will balk at, though they will disguise that balking as some other, nobler act, or pretend that another, more complicated motive is at play, in precipitating that act, or that whatever has victimized them in life continues to victimize them to this day, and will never be able to amend itself enough to remedy that fact.

As for tradition, they have no use for it, except insofar as it might, from their perspective, increase their reputation, or further their agenda and career.

Certainly they do not have much in the way of coherent, rational, wide-ranging arguments, though they have plenty of insults, superficial comments, ‘talking points’, and misinterpretations.

They have no familiarity with the Desert Fathers, the Doctors of the Church, the writings of the mystics, the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, the meaning of the liturgy and the sacraments, the heroism of the saints, nor the unbelievable breadth of the artistic, monastic, and apostolic traditions that emerge from, and sustain themselves on, the fact that the Church, according to scripture, came into being at the behest (and with the authority) of Christ, and yet they, these ‘reasonable’ people, are ready to dismiss all these things as irrelevant, patriarchal, or ‘fantastical’, merely because they themselves have a quarrel with some element that can be associated with these things, some ‘trauma’ that they are unable to ‘get past’, or because they are too lazy, stubborn, proud and embittered to engage sincerely with the Church herself.

They could not tell you what is meant by the non-contingency of God, or of the arguments that Thomas Aquinas set forth, with regard to this, in his Summa Theologica.

They have no conception of what is meant by God, on theological and philosophical grounds, and yet regard themselves as paragons of rationality.