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Maureen Mullarkey: Studio Matters

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Discerning the Will of God?

Are you never even a bit uncomfortable when someone claims to have discerned God’s will in this or that decision of their own? I certainly am. It is one thing to pray for discernment, but quite something else to announce being in receipt of it. When anyone tells me that, after much prayer, they have determined that God wants such-and-such from them—however worthy the suchness—something in me backs away. It is the telling that feels all wrong. It seems an impertinence. Continue Reading

Francis & His “New Europeans”

Coverage of Pope Francis by the mainstream Catholic press is barely worth reading. It confuses the papacy—most especially, this particular pontificate—with the Church itself. Scrap the dominant Catholic punditry. Ignore anodyne broadcasts from the Vatican Press Office. Get your goods from somewhere off the ghetto newsstand. Go some place where insight into the character of this pontificate is not befogged by misplaced deference or courtier’s ambition. One place to go is Daniel Williams’ blog Next War Notes. Williams is the author of the recently published Forsaken: The Persecution of Christians in Today’s Middle East (2016). Continue Reading

Conscience in Politics

Papers presented at a 1992 conference sponsored by the Wethersfield Institute were published as a book: When Conscience and Politics Meet: A Catholic View. It is a scant 103 pages. Its brevity makes it all the friendlier to busy people concerned over the issue of conscience-in-politics but with little time to get beyond the daily barrage of  events. We look at the news networks, read the pundits, listen to the talk, and wonder how we arrived at where we find ourselves now. Continue Reading

The Michael Voris Affair

The Catholic blogosphere has been in a whirl since Michael Voris outed himself on Church Militant a few days back. Voris claimed to have gotten wind of a noxious plot by the New York Archdiocese to leak stories of his sinful homosexual past in a move to discredit him:
We have on very good authority from various sources that the New York archdiocese is collecting and preparing to quietly filter out details of my past life with the aim of publicly discrediting me, this apostolate and the work here.
Continue Reading

Pogo, Redux

On the morning after the New York primary all that comes to mind is the distance between ourselves and Franklin’s promise of a Republic—if we could keep it. I woke up this morning to the stench of decline and fall. It is in the air, foul and nation-smothering. It is the stink of a banana republic, one that mimics that founding promise while it surrenders the ground of it to corrosive candidates for high office.  The phrase Walt Kelly put into the mouth of Pogo inverted the words of the great naval commander Oliver Hazard Perry: “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” Continue Reading
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