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

Leo XIV: A Pontificate On Ice

Maureen Mullarkey

October 7, 2025

It did not take long for this shiny new pontificate to lose its lustre. And its credibility. The spectacle of Pope Leo granting solemn blessing to a block of glacial ice was the point of no return for papal dignity. There is no way to unsee what the world saw at “Raising Hope for Climate Justice” the Vatican’s October 1st shindig against the bogey of climate change. Have you any clear idea what climate justice means? Or how to distinguish it from climate injustice? Continue Reading

Charlie Kirk: A Line Crossed

Maureen Mullarkey

September 16, 2025

We woke up last Thursday in a different country from the one we knew the morning before. A line had been crossed, one that we hardly realized was there. And if we did, we tried not to see it. Now there is no looking away. Charlie Kirk’s murder is, indeed, a turning point. But toward what does it point? Gunned down on the threshold of the twenty fourth anniversary of 9/11, Charlie Kirk died because he addressed the Left as if they could hear and be reasoned with. Continue Reading

Gallows Observance in the Papal States

Maureen Mullarkey

July 8, 2025

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