Meet Giovanni Battista Bugatti, official executioner for the Papal States from 1796 until he retired, with a papal pension, in 1864. Nicknamed Mastro Titta—a corruption of the Latin for “master of justice”—he was the longest serving and storied executioner under papal authority. He delivered justice 516 times over the years he held the job. “With ax, noose, guillotine, Mastro Titta served the pope.” That enviable sentence is the opening line of “He Executed Justice,” an illuminating essay by John L. Allen, Jr., Continue Reading

Leo XIV & Abolition of The Death Penalty

Maureen Mullarkey

June 21, 2025

Two days after his election, Leo XIV summarized the keynotes of his reign. In his first formal address to the College of Cardinals, he pledged compliance to the works and aims of Vatican II: “I would like us to renew together today our complete commitment to the path that the universal Church has now followed for decades in the wake of the Second Vatican Council.” He emphasized adherence to the fundamental priorities “masterfully and concretely” set forth in Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis’s first apostolic exhortation delivered in 2013. Continue Reading

Pope Leo’s Pentecost & the Spirit of Open Borders

Maureen Mullarkey

June 12, 2025

Leo XIV’s sermon on Pentecost Sunday took its keynote from Benedict XVI. On Pentecost, 2005, Benedict proclaimed: “The Spirit opens borders… She [the Church] must open the borders between peoples and break down the barriers between class and race. In her, there cannot be those who are neglected or disdained.” Benedict was not the first pope to oblige globalism by doing theology with one eye on geopolitics. Massive problems have followed that trajectory. Some are on view right now in the streets of Los Angeles. 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.