Please understand. There is no denying the historic cruelties visited on Amazon peoples. Still, they are hardly alone in that. Ruthlessness and barbarity have befallen every peoples on earth at some point in their history. Nor has it stopped. At present, it is Christians—not aborigines—who are prime targets for violent persecution around the globe. Vatican emphasis on past affliction in the Amazon is a pretext for something else altogether. It is a seductive ruse for the synod’s anti-development, denuciatory, Marxoid serenade with native activists on the ocarina. Continue Reading

Amazon Synod Goes Dancing With Wolves

Maureen Mullarkey

August 9, 2019

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

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.

A Brief Detour: Invitation To An Exhibition

Maureen Mullarkey

January 19, 2019

This weblog began life under the banner Studio Matters for good reason. So permit me, this once, to sidestep expected topics—the baleful doings of the papal court, of an unnerving pope, and all those signals of civilizational decay. Instead, let me invite you to an exhibition at George Billis Gallery, New York City. If you are in town or passing through between January 22nd and February 23rd, perhaps you will stop by. It would be lovely if you did. Herewith, a link to the e-catalogue, a sampling of some—not all—work on the wall. Continue Reading

St. Xavier’s: From the Waterfront Priest to the Dancing Priest

Maureen Mullarkey

December 19, 2018

There exists no sharper illustration of present-day enfeeblement of the Jesuit temper than the difference between the ministries of John Corridan, S.J., the “waterfront priest” of the 1940’s, and today’s Robert VerEecke, S.J., the “dancing priest.” Fr. Corridan earned a significant place in labor history. Fr. VerEecke earned removal from the Church of St. Francis Xavier for making sexual overtures to a male parishioner. The diminution is tragic. And telling. In the slide from Corridan, a morally serious man, to VerEecke, a flâneur on ideological boulevards, we witness the unsteadiness of a Church listing toward the conceits of the age. Continue Reading