“Why pick on Francis now that he is dead?” That was Gavin Ashenden’s lead-in to his conversation with Peter Kwasniewski about Dominic J. Grigio’s The Disastrous Pontificate, a critical analysis of the Bergoglian era. The two theologians teamed up last month to examine Grigio’s analysis of consequential theological knots left from the reign of Pope Francis. In sum, the reason to keep studying Francis is that he is key to the nature and direction of his successor’s pontificate. These are not academic issues. Continue Reading

The Rainbow, LBGTQ Catechesis, & Queering the City

Maureen Mullarkey

July 22, 2025

Graphic design is a silent but powerful language. Instantaneously recognized, a single graphic is easily digestible. It serves as a branding device for more than your afternoon cuppa at Starbucks or a Ralph Lauren sport shirt. Applied to an ideology and a movement, it simplifies everything it stands for. It leapfrogs over complexities, contradictions, and muffles the noise of rational argument. Most significantly, it conveys an identity and, with that, a corresponding ethos. Under Constantine, the Chi-Ro—standardized and emblazoned on the official banner of the Roman Empire—was disseminated throughout the known world as understood by Greeks and Romans at the time. Continue Reading

Misuse of Orlando

Maureen Mullarkey

July 5, 2016

On the day after the Orlando bloodbath, I read in Crux Edward Beck’s scripted recollection of the homily he delivered in church the previous morning. The two did not quite square. Between the spoken address and the published account, something crucial was omitted and something ugly added. As can happen with Fr. Beck’s homilies, the gospel becomes a vehicle of persuasion in favor of his personal preoccupations. Edward Beck is a visiting Passionist priest who offers the noon Mass at my parish every Sunday. Continue Reading

The Michael Voris Affair

Maureen Mullarkey

April 27, 2016

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.

Homosexuality: The Testimony Of Roy Strong

Maureen Mullarkey

July 11, 2014

If I had been born ten years later, I might’ve lived my life as a gay man. —Roy Strong Is homosexuality innate? Is there a gene for it? If not a complete molecular unit, then perhaps some partial genetic link? And if a link, would this sectional fragment prove a determinant to sexual preference? Or would it hover in our DNA with all the other unfinished suggestions that move each of us past the many roads not taken? The findings of Dean Hamer, the American geneticist who claimed to have discovered a “gay gene” in the Nineties, has never been replicated. Continue Reading

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The Phone in Francis’s Coffin

The Rainbow, LBGTQ Catechesis, & Queering the City

Misuse of Orlando

The Michael Voris Affair

Homosexuality: The Testimony Of Roy Strong

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