"Hope she's not 'one of ours'" phenomenon

Regular readers know that a while back I blogged about the phenomenon of stereotyping, specifically when one hears of something really bad (such as a crime) one sometimes hopes "Gosh, I hope he (or she) is not 'one of us.'" I related in that blog post that my ex-husband, a secular Jew, would say that when he hoped that some financial scandal was not done by "one of his," and I explained in that blog that the origin of that was about a terrible nursing home scandal many years ago. (You can read my blog article on that topic by clicking on the label "Thank God he isn't one of us," which takes you to an article on subversive humor, though what I am writing about now sure is not funny to me.)

Well, I am not immune, because when I read something that strikes a certain unpleasant chord, I think "I hope that he (or she) is not 'one of us''' and by that I mean Catholic.

I had that thought twice tonight while reading the news and surfing the web. The first time I was safe, and the event I was reading about did not involve the Church. But alas, I saw something truly offensive on a liberal laity Catholic site, yikes, totally cringe worthy. I saw an image that I feel was exploitative and disrespectful of Mary, while claiming to appeal to her values in a specific area of her patronage. I really was shocked and seriously disappointed. And I had the double disappointment, the perpetrator being both a Catholic "one of us" and a woman "one of us." Ugh, that happens a lot, to be honest. Many western women have totally lost touch with not only relating to other women who happen to be traditional, but as a result of that, they have lost touch with the genuine Mary too. Even non-traditional men are actually, in my opinion, better at comprehending Mary, as are traditional women. But modern women seem to, even as they revere Mary, manipulate her, from their base of misunderstanding. That's not cool. That's very not cool. Or as my ex- would say, "That's not kosher either."

I actually decided not to write the little article I was going to post, because if I got readers interested in this topic, I did not want them to Google and come across what I found, as it would just unravel the whole ecumenical point that I was going to make. Yikes.