To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a publicity-conscious demonologist everything stinks of sulphur. Fr. Chad Ripperger is a celebrity exorcist with a vigorous following in certain Catholic circles. His disapproval of the Harry Potter series is well known among fellow traditionalists. He deems Harry Potter a wizard of dark magic, a caster of real spells and, consequently, a baneful influence. It is an odd stance for a man with a bent for soft-core spell casting himself. Prior to the 2020 election, Ripperger recommended two prayers for “breaking oppression and sending evil back before the election is called.” Continue Reading

A Personal Note On Pride Month

Maureen Mullarkey

July 10, 2024

While the holy month of Pride was upon us, I thought often of the ancient Dance of Death. Through the 1990s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, a parade saluting sexual behaviors that shortened lives struck me as a celebration against itself—an inverted Danse Macabre. What once had been cautionary and didactic was becoming exhortative. The parade was encouraging if not, in a perverse way, edifying. A certain kind of free spiritedness, however lethal, was assumed to be tinged with heroism. Continue Reading

Pope Francis, The FCC, And Gender Ideololgy

Maureen Mullarkey

July 8, 2024

Pope Francis’ coy two-step on sexual mores hangs over Catholic culture like the sword of Damocles. Papal ambiguity weakens the Catholic Radio Association’s current effort to resist newly mandated reporting rules about workforce diversity. Driving the rules is an ideological ambition to demolish the scaffolding of traditional behavioral norms regarding sex. Specifically at issue is the “nonbinary” classification. In February, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reinstated a dormant requirement that radio stations must file Form 395-B. The document requires radio stations and their affiliates to list the race and “gender” of their employees. Continue Reading

Seeing Things: Female Impersonation from Cabaret to Identity

Maureen Mullarkey

July 6, 2024

So far as seeing things is an art, it is the art of keeping your eyes and ears open. (John Borroughs, 1908) You really can tell some things just by looking. It cannot be said too often: the eye is an organ of the brain. It has its own way of knowing. When it looks, for instance, at the grotesque Admiral Rachel (né Richard) Levine, or Sam Brinton, the non-binary former Biden appointee to the Department of Nuclear Energy, it discerns the gulf between sanity and a simulacrum of it. Continue Reading

Cecilia’s Funeral & Theology of the Beaten Dog

Maureen Mullarkey

March 25, 2024

We wake up every day to signs of a civilization in free fall. Cratering with it is the moral authority of the Roman Church under the captaincy of Pope Francis. One signal in particular stands out: last month’s funeral circus at St. Patrick’s Cathedral for transgender activist, prostitute, and sex-worker advocate, Cecilia Gentili. The entire production exhaled the rancid breath of Bergoglian accompaniment Much has already been said about the funeral (see here, here, here, and elsewhere). What has not been said is any recognition of the thing for what it was: an act of war. Continue Reading