“Why pick on Francis now that he is dead?” That was Gavin Ashenden’s lead-in to his conversation with Peter Kwasniewski about Dominic J. Grigio’s The Disastrous Pontificate, a critical analysis of the Bergoglian era. The two theologians teamed up last month to examine Grigio’s analysis of consequential theological knots left from the reign of Pope Francis. In sum, the reason to keep studying Francis is that he is key to the nature and direction of his successor’s pontificate. These are not academic issues. Continue Reading

After Long Silence

Maureen Mullarkey

April 18, 2026

Studio Matters has been silent for several months. Permit me to say simply that this has been a hard season. Let me leave it at that. How to reboot? Where to start? Interests and concerns pile up, like snowpack layers on a mountainside. It seems only courteous to bore into the consolidated mass with optimism, something upbeat and smiling. But the ground under good cheer is unsteady. Allow me to forego the balancing act. If you would, let the words of Will Herberg set the tone. Continue Reading

Pope Leo XIV: Cautionary Notes

Maureen Mullarkey

June 1, 2025

Celebrity worship creates mirages. Media attention to the coronation of Robert Francis Prevost as Pope Leo XIV is not all that it seems. The 24-7 news feed degrades the new pope into a celebrity before he has begun to govern. When white smoke went up the Vatican chimney, emotional display rose to fever pitch in St. Peter’s Square. The spectacle of uninhibited emotionalism evoked the sentimental spree that Britain reveled in after Princess Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997. Continue Reading

The Samaritan Woman: Devotional Reading & Misreading

Maureen Mullarkey

April 22, 2025

“Is theology poetry?” C. S. Lewis asked the question in a 1944 talk to an Oxford debating society called the “Socratic Club.” Nearly two decades later it became the title of one essay published in a collection: They Asked For A Paper (1962).

Does Christian Theology owe its attraction to its power of arousing and satisfying our imaginations? are those who believe it mistaking aesthetic enjoyment for intellectual assent, or assenting because they enjoy? . . . . if Theology is Poetry, it is not very good poetry.

Sedevacantism, Ultramontanism, and Papalotry

Maureen Mullarkey

March 24, 2025

For sedevacantists, it is Katie bar the door at the next conclave. A stubborn refrain from a subset of Catholic traditionalists accompanied the press’s bedside vigil during Pope Francis’s hospitalization. The narrative was elementary: Francis is in error. He has signaled heretical attitudes. Moreover, the Saint Gallen Gang short-circuited divine guidance by lobbying the 2013 conclave for Francis’s benefit. Thus, he is not really the pope. The Chair of Peter stands empty. It follows, then, that all of Francis’s appointments to the cardinalate are invalid. Continue Reading