Before heading full tilt into the neo-pagan mirages of the Amazon Synod, a brief personal word is due. It will only take a second: “There is love and there is life. Yet we have but one heart.” That was the way Edgar Degas explained his failure to marry. If I were to borrow a variant of it to explain why this weblog has been silent recently, it would go something like this: “There is the studio and there is the writing desk. Continue Reading

Scattered Notes on Notre-Dame

Maureen Mullarkey

April 22, 2019

My heart splintered watching Notre-Dame go up in flames. The disorder of my own responses—a jumble of dismay, anger, and foreboding—permits no tidy structure. What follows is a series of thoughts in no strict sequence. Bear with me. • • • • “Somebody did something” on 9/11. Taking a cue from Ilhan Omar, can we wonder if somebody did something to Notre-Dame? It is a rational conjecture. Watching the cathedral tower burn, it was impossible for the mind’s eye not to go directly to the burning towers of the World Trade Center. Continue Reading

Notes on The Gates of Hell

Maureen Mullarkey

March 17, 2019

The gates of hell are no closer than they ever have been. No matter the crumbling of our culture or the dereliction of a pope, they have not moved a millimeter. Immobile, they remain where—and what—they were when life first erupted on the planet: an ineluctable border between life and death. Yet we go on invoking them as a talisman against institutional rot or, alternately, as the default comfort in a waning civilization. What calls attention to the phrase just now is Cardinal Dolan’s February 3rd pastoral letter to all parishes in the New York Archdiocese. Continue Reading

Francis & Mirages of Fraternity, part 2

Maureen Mullarkey

January 29, 2019

In The Idol of Our Age, Daniel J. Mahoney devotes a chapter to “Pope Francis’ Humanitarian Version of Catholic Social Teaching.” Mahoney’s subtitle—How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity—sets the tone of his appraisal of Francis. A careful writer and a courteous man, he is concerned to give due weight to both the consistencies and inconsistencies of Francis’ relation to traditional Catholic teaching:

We need a “hermeneutic of continuity” that forthrightly confronts Francis’ ample continuities and equally amble discontinuities with the great tradition that preceded him.