The National Catholic Register portal reports on a commentary by Bloomberg Opinion columnist Abby McCloskey, amplified by EWTN Radio host Ashley McGuire and Catholic author Carrie Gress, warning that artificial intelligence is eroding maternal instinct through “cognitive offloading,” citing a Lurie Children’s Hospital study claiming one-third of parents trust AI over their own judgment. The piece frames motherhood as a naturalistic art of “pondering” and “wisdom,” lamenting feminism’s devaluation of the maternal role and the isolation of modern women, while cautioning against AI hallucinations and the “lie of optimization.” The Register presents this as a defense of human connection against digital dependency. This analysis exposes the article as a quintessential product of the conciliar sect: a purely naturalistic, psychologized treatment of motherhood stripped of its supernatural finality, the necessity of grace, the doctrinal reality of original sin, and the absolute primacy of the Social Kingship of Christ, thereby functioning as a subtle apologia for the integration of the faithful into the emerging technocratic antichurch.
The Naturalistic Reduction of the Maternal Vocation
The cited article treats motherhood as an ars naturalis — a human art perfected by experience, community, and “pondering these things in our heart” (a stripped, sentimentalized allusion to Luke 2:19). Nowhere does it mention that motherhood is a munus supernatural, a participation in the creative and redemptive work of God, ordered to the generation of children ad Deum for heaven. The “maternal instinct” lauded by McGuire and Gress is presented as a biological-psychological endowment — “God built women for motherhood, and not only gave us natural instincts” — but the gratia sanctificans, the sacramentum matrimonii as a channel of grace for the offices of parenthood, the duty of Christian education in fide et moribus, the obligatio gravissima of forming souls for eternal life: all are utterly absent.
God built women for motherhood, and not only gave us natural instincts that serve our families well, but also an abundance of women — be they sisters, mothers, grandmothers — to impart wisdom and lessons learned to help us in moments of doubt.
This is pelagianism disguised as piety. The “wisdom” of grandmothers in the conciliar sect is typically the wisdom of the world, formed by Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes anthropology, not the sapientia crucis. The article’s silence on baptismal regeneration, the state of grace, the duty of parents as primary educators in the faith (Canon 1113, 1917 Code), the horror of original sin in the infant, the necessity of the Church’s sacraments for salvation — this silence is the loudest heresy. It reduces the Christian mother to a stressed manager of domestic logistics, seeking “optimization” or “community,” rather than a cooperator veritatis waging spiritual warfare for her children’s souls.
The Conciliar Sect’s Complicity in the Technocratic Enslavement
The Register, EWTN, The Catholic Association — these are organs of the secta conciliaris, the “Church of the New Advent” occupying the Vatican’s structures. Their “critique” of AI is a limitation hangout: they concede the battlefield of nature to the machine while having long surrendered the battlefield of grace to Modernism. McCloskey’s “cognitive offloading” is merely the digital analogue of the theological offloading the conciliar sect has practiced for sixty years: offloading the depositum fidei to “experts,” “dialogue,” “signs of the times,” “pastoral discernment,” and the magisterium of the usurpers.
Over time, you could see how that would erode confidence in how you think is best to deal or treat your own child, which then creates more reliance on AI for parenting.
Replace “AI” with “Vatican II,” “post-conciliar ‘catechesis’,” “Amoris Laetitia,” “Fiducia Supplicans,” and the sentence describes the precise mechanism by which the conciliar sect has destroyed Catholic motherhood. The “maternal networks” McCloskey mourns were dissolved not by algorithms but by the novus ordo parish, the destruction of the domestic church via contraceptive mentality (tolerated, winked at, pastorally accommodated), the replacement of the Rosary and family altar with “faith sharing” and “social justice.” The article’s hand-wringing over AI is the crocodile tears of the arsonist lamenting the fire.
Feminism, The Conciliar Church, and the “Devaluation of Motherhood”
Carrie Gress identifies feminism as the culprit: “One of the results of feminism’s devaluation of motherhood is that women haven’t been well trained in the art of mothering.” She omits the principal agent of that devaluation within the Church: the conciliar hierarchy. It was Paul VI who capitulated to the feminist demand for a “commission on women” (1973). It was John Paul II who penned Mulieris Dignitatem (1988), conflating the munus of motherhood with generic “feminine genius,” opening the door to female altar servers, lectors, theologians, and ultimately the “synodal” priesthood of the baptized. It was Benedict XVI who refused to condemn the “ordination” of women as a crimen haeresiae rather than a mere canonical impossibility. It is “Pope” Leo XIV (Prevost) who now spearheads the “synodal church” where motherhood is reduced to a “charism” among many.
Most of us don’t have a mom, aunt or wiser woman to tap into when things become challenging. It is easy to panic.
Why do they not have them? Because the conciliar sect destroyed the communio sanctorum in the domestic sphere. The “wiser women” of the past were formed by the Catechism of Trent, the Baltimore Catechism, the Imitation of Christ, the daily Mass of the Vetus Ordo, the fasting, the veiling, the timor Domini. The conciliar sect replaced this with “conscious active participation,” “liturgical dance,” “inclusive language,” and the “theology of the body” — a phenomenological anthropology that makes the body a symbol of the person rather than the temple of the Holy Ghost. Gress’s “art of mothering” is a ersatz craft, severed from its supernatural telos.
The Lie of Optimization and the Truth of the Cross
McCloskey denounces the “lie of optimization”: “I think it’s fundamentally a lie that parenting has to be optimized, that if you control every single thing you can within your home, that you’re going to set your child off on the right track.” She is half-right. The error is not “optimization” per se, but the finis of the optimization. The Catholic mother does not seek to “set her child off on the right track” for worldly success, emotional resilience, or “flourishing.” She seeks salutem animarum. She optimizes for caelum. The “arms race of perfectionism” the article decries is the inevitable fruit of a religion that has replaced the imitatio Christi (suffering, cross, self-denial) with the imitatio mundi (wellness, balance, mental health, “thriving”).
Motherhood is more of an art. It offers women the capacity to truly grow in wisdom, becoming like Mary and ‘pondering these things in our heart,’ instead of living with a constant dependency on technology. When we let others do the mothering, without discernment or developing our own maternal instincts, it is easy to stay stuck in an adolescent mode instead of growing into full emotional and spiritual maturity.
“Emotional and spiritual maturity” — the language of Carl Rogers, not the Sancta Tridentina. Mary “pondered” not to achieve “maturity” but because she was Plena Gratia, the Sedes Sapientiae, the Co-Redemptrix pierced by the sword of Simeon (Luke 2:35). The article’s Mariology is Protestantized: Mary as a model of “reflective parenting,” not the Mediatrix omnium gratiarum without whom no grace flows to the mother. The “discernment” Gress praises is the Ignatian discernment of spirits — but stripped of the regulae for distinguishing the good spirit from the evil, stripped of the obsequium religiosum to the Magisterium infallibile, it becomes the examen particularis of the autonomous subject — the very essence of Modernism condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi: “The dogmas of faith should be understood according to their practical function, i.e., as binding in action, rather than as principles of belief” (Lamentabili, prop. 26).
AI as the Mirror of the Conciliar “Magisterium”
The article’s fear of AI “hallucinations” — “randomly hallucinating or just saying something without any sort of backing behind it” — is rich with irony. The conciliar sect has lived by hallucination for six decades: the hallucination of “collegiality” superseding papal primacy; the hallucination of “religious liberty” as a natural right; the hallucination of “ecumenism” as the Church’s mission; the hallucination that the Novus Ordo Missae is the Missale Romanum; the hallucination that a manifest heretic can occupy the Chair of Peter. McCloskey warns: “When it’s giving facts wrong that you know are not right, that’s one thing. But all of a sudden, if you’re using it to help medicate your child, make vaccine decisions, make school decisions… where it’s randomly hallucinating… I think it becomes incredibly concerning.”
And when the “pope” teaches that the death penalty is “inadmissible,” that capital punishment is “an attack on the inviolability of human dignity,” that proselytism is “solemn nonsense,” that “God wills the diversity of religions,” that the divorced and “remarried” can receive Communion — this is not “hallucination,” this is haeresis formalis. The Register’s writers swallow these camel-like hallucinations daily while straining at the gnat of a chatbot error. Coecus caecum ducit (Matt. 15:14).
The Black Box of the Conciliar Conscience
McCloskey observes: “The surprising thing to me in all of this is that what comes out on the other side of what to trust and who to believe is indeed perhaps the least accountable, most black box of all, which is AI.” The conciliar “conscience” is the ultimate black box. It answers to no lex, no canon, no traditio, no magisterium prior to 1958. It is the forum internum absolutized — the very principle of the Reformation, now digitized. The article’s proposed remedy — “restore trust… not going to be increasingly cognitively offloading to a machine” — is a call to autonomous reason, to fides quaerens intellectum severed from fides quae creditur. It is the religion of the subiectum, the cogito of Descartes baptized by Rahner.
Symptomatic Diagnosis: The Conciliar Sect as Precursor to the Antichrist’s System
The article is a symptom, not a cure. It reveals the conciliar sect’s role as the praeparatio antichristi. By reducing the Faith to “values,” “wisdom,” “community,” “discernment,” “mental health,” and “human connection,” it has prepared the faithful to accept the bestia ex terra (Apoc. 13:11) — the technocratic simulation of religion. AI is the perfect “pastor” for the conciliar church: it is synodal (aggregates consensus), inclusive (no dogmatic boundaries), pastoral (affirms the user), evolving (updates its weights), and non-judgmental (no hell, no sin, no truth). The Register’s anxiety is the anxiety of the falsus propheta realizing the bestia may render him obsolete.
The way to restore said trust, especially in oneself, is not going to be increasingly cognitively offloading to a machine. That seems like it’s going to make it worse over time and not better.
The way to restore trust is Conversio ad Dominum. Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. The mother who trusts the Sacrosanctum Concilium of Trent, the Catechismus Romanus, the Summa Theologiae, the Rituale Romanum, the validly ordained priest offering the Sacrificium Incruentum, the Sedes Vacans as the visible sign of the Church’s passion — this mother needs no algorithm. She has the Certitudo Fidei. The Register’s mother has only “instincts,” “community,” and “pondering” — reeds shaken by the wind (Matt. 11:7).
Conclusion: The Maternal Office is a Supernatural Priesthood
The article’s fundamental crime is the laicization of the maternal priesthood. The Christian mother exercises a true munus sacerdotale in the domestic church: she offers the hostia viva of her children to God (Rom. 12:1), she intercedes as a mediatrix in the order of grace (subordinate to Christ and Mary), she teaches the Credo with the authority of the Church. This office requires gratia sacramentalis, virtutes infusae, dona Spiritus Sancti. The conciliar sect, by denying the necessity of the Church’s jurisdiction, the validity of its sacraments, the integrity of its doctrine, and the reality of its hierarchy, has rendered the Catholic mother a spiritual orphan — precisely the “isolated” figure the article describes. AI does not cause this orphanhood; the abominatio desolationis in the holy place (Matt. 24:15) causes it. The Register’s lament is the lament of the orphanage administrators who sold the children to the traffickers and now complain about the quality of the food.
Non est bonum praetermittere verbum Dei et ministrare mensis (Acts 6:2). The conciliar sect has abandoned the Word of God to serve the tables of the world — psychology, sociology, technology, “mental health,” “wellness.” Its “defense” of motherhood is the defense of the homo naturalis against the homo technologicus. The true Catholic defends the homo supernaturalis against both. Regnavit a ligno Deus. The Cross, not the chatbot, not the “community,” not the “instinct,” is the throne of the Mother. Stabat Mater dolorosa iuxta Crucem lacrimosa. There is the school of motherhood. The Register knows it not.
Source:
Death of the Maternal Instinct? How AI Is Teaching Moms Not to Trust Themselves (ncregister.com)
Date: 27.10.2026