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

Slouching Toward Dhimmitude

Maureen Mullarkey

November 5, 2025

This essay was written late on Election Day. Just as I was about to post it—within 30+ minutes of the polls closing—Zohran Mamdani was declared the Mayor-elect. The speed of the decision was more shocking than the result. I had expected he would likely win. I did not expect the outcome would not even be close. If votes for Cuomo and Sliwa had been added together, Mamdani’s empty rhetoric and ignorant proposals to make NYC “affordable,” would still have carried him to Gracie Mansion. 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

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