Christmastide is over. Still with us, however, is Vatican preoccupation with youth culture and contemporary art. The showcased 2020 Nativity scene generated sneers and Mayday alarms. Demon-spotters went on high alert. Call the exorcist? By now, temperatures have gone down but the infection remains misdiagnosed. It matters that we get it right. Dislocated indignation distracts […]

A Demon In The Demos

Maureen Mullarkey

February 1, 2021

The bourgeoisie produces its own grave-diggers. The Communist Manifesto Can a culture celebrate those who want to destroy it and still stand? We are about to find out in this fateful November. Until recently, I thought the word “demonic” no more than a figure of speech. It carried a chill dislodged from religious myth and […]

John Leo: A Journalist’s Call to Accountability

Maureen Mullarkey

November 2, 2020

When I learned that John Leo had retired as editor-in-chief of Minding the Campus, my thoughts leaped to T.S. Eliot’s final prayer at the end of Ash Wednesday: “Suffer me not to be separated.” The news came as a wrench, a decisive twist to the bolt on a repository of shaping memories, His writing was […]

Supreme Court |Gender Madness |Bernanos

Maureen Mullarkey

September 29, 2020

Senate confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court cannot come soon enough. From all that we have read, she is a brilliant choice. And a welcome one. Barrett clerked for the great Scalia for two years and considers him her mentor. That is heartening. But no one should expect her to be a […]

Prêt-À-Manger Eucharist, etc.

Maureen Mullarkey

August 2, 2020

More than monuments are toppling. Our sense of the sacred diminishes further with each week that fear of Wuhan virus ranks higher on parish concerns than the concept of sin. Thomas Mann once quipped that nowadays sin is “an amusing word used only when one is trying to get a laugh.” Now we can get […]

Hand Sanitizer: The New Sacramental

Maureen Mullarkey

August 1, 2020

“Doctor, Doctor, will I die?” “Yes, my child, and so shall I.” Hand sanitizer has entered the liturgy as both a stay against mortality and a sacramental displacing holy water. Coronavirus is not cholera but it might as well be. That is the unavoidable impression given by churches with dry fonts but multiple dispensers of […]