He’s at it again. This time, the Friar Pope is championing what I call the “untouchable class” of Catholics, the single mother, also known throughout Christianity’s Dark Ages as the “UN – WED  MOTHER.”

(Funny, but those dark ages seem like only yesterday!)

Pope Francis chastised his own clergy for not being sympathetic to the plight of single mothers, pointing out the immense burden they carry  every day while raising a child or two . . . or more. The mother still prays to Jesus and wants the blessings of God the Father while  beseeching the Holy Mother of Christ, Mary, to intercede. Not for her sake, but for the sake of a child — all children who are as much created in the Image of God as the more fortunate of us who came from parents legally married.

(I know, I know . . .  The marriage doesn’t count unless it was performed by a Catholic priest, just like the ones the pope recently criticized for not giving their blessing to an elderly woman when she requested one outside the church building, and like another ordained minister who treated a single mother as (in my words) an “untouchable” for the sin of giving birth to and raising her kid without first receiving the sacrament of marriage.

That priest did nothing more than to refuse to baptize the child of the un-wed mother, the bastard.

(Not the child, the priest!)

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Good for you, Holy Father. You told ’em where to get off while uplifting the spirit of every man and woman who will never become a priest, and who must deal everyday with the earthly desires we weak lay people have in our broken homes, the urban ghetto, or at the hands of some molester or other who wants nothing more than to defile another young child just as he was defiled by someone stronger, someone older, someone perhaps in his own family or the family’s friendly neighbor.

Untouchables are not confined to a caste in far-away India. They are like the lepers of today who are shunned by many who called themselves Christians, but forget that it was among the dirty prostitutes, the outlaws of his society, and the sinners of all stripes that the Jesus the pope recalls spent much of his time among — and with — drinking red wine and performing miracles upon.

I like to think his early followers also  included a subset of sinners known as the “single mom,”

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“Think about a single mother who goes to church, in the parish and to the secretary she says: ‘I want my child baptized’. And then this Christian, this Christian says: ‘No, you cannot because you’re not married!’. But look, this girl who had the courage to carry her pregnancy and not to return her son to the sender, what is it? A closed door!

This is not zeal! It is far from the Lord! It does not open doors! And so when we are on this street, have this attitude, we do not do good to people, the people, the People of God, but Jesus instituted the seven sacraments with this attitude and we are establishing the eighth: the sacrament of pastoral customs!”.

“Jesus is indignant when he sees these things” – said the Pope – because those who suffer are “his faithful people, the people that he loves so much.”

“We think today of Jesus, who always wants us all to be closer to Him, we think of the Holy People of God, a simple people, who want to get closer to Jesus and we think of so many Christians of goodwill who are wrong, and that instead of opening a door, they close the door of goodwill … So we ask the Lord that all those who come to the Church find the doors open, find the doors open, open to meet this love of Jesus.”

(– Pope Francis speaking recently at one of his Vatican gatherings)