Why is the Pope trolling Traditional Catholics?

In Rome in October 2019 a young traditional or ‘Trad’ Catholic man grabbed several small Amazonian ‘mother earth’ statues from a church near the Vatican and threw them into the River Tiber.  

The five small wooden statues had featured at several ceremonies of the Synod of the Amazon, then underway in Rome, and the young Austrian activist was outraged at the relativism and idolatry on display at the centre of Western Christianity. 

The liberal Catholic hierarchy in Europe and the United States might have discounted the incident as a one-off reaction from an insignificant wing of the Church. 

But Trad Catholics have been growing fast in number, populating Latin Mass congregations,…