Okay ladies and gents, here’s the deal: yesterday, I turned comments off for a while. You may have noticed that new posts today are accepting comments, while old ones are still locked. The law of gradualism has found its way even to these sterling shores. So far, so good. I’m now going to re-open comments…
Over the past few years, we’ve all seen articles advising people what to do in an active shooter situation. The advice usually goes, “run, hide, fight.” But many articles point out that the biggest challenge for responding to a crisis isn’t necessarily knowing what to do, but overcoming “normalcy bias.” What is normalcy bias? It…
On the Monday 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. Fr. Beck is a visiting Passionist priest who…
Some of you may have already noticed that comments on all of our posts are closed. This is not a glitch. I decided it was time for a break. Just since May 1, our website has received 7,502 comments on 112 posts. That’s an average of almost 67 comments per post, though some have none…
Hands up everyone who is a) a woman, b) single, between the ages of 40 and 50 and c) believed she had a vocation to religious life from her earliest memory. Come on, get ‘em up… you know who you are. What happened? Was it something like this? Reaching the age bracket, about 22-35, you…
Like other false prophecies, the St. Malachy Prophecy about the popes just keeps turning up. I’ve already shared my thoughts on a common misinterpretation (that I myself was guilty of for some time) of Anne Catherine Emmerich’s vision of the “Two Popes.” In my response to Ann Barnhardt’s declaration that Francis is an anti-pope, I tackled…
On 25 June, Catholic News Agency published an article about an interview with Archbishop Georg Gänswein, which was originally conducted on 27 May 2016 by the German veteran journalist and EWTN Rome correspondent, Paul Badde. The German archbishop currently serves Pope Francis as Prefect of the Papal Household, but he has also maintained his duties as the…
While it was Pope Francis’ 17 May 2016 interview with the French journal La Croix that led to a strong critique of the pope as a “relativizer” by German journalist Dr. Alexander Kissler, it was Francis’ recent comments about the invalidity of a vast majority of Catholic marriages that provoked another well-known German journalist – Christian Geyer – to write his…
On Friday, I commented on a story about Cardinal Reinhardt Marx, one of the closest advisers to Pope Francis, head of the German bishops’ conference, and a presenter on Amoris Laeitia. Last week, Marx made waves in Dublin with a speech in which he said: “The history of homosexuals in our societies is very bad because we’ve…
Cardinal Reinhard Marx is the head of the German bishops conference and a member of the council of nine cardinals who act as Pope Francis’ closest advisers. He is also well-known as a heterodox bishop an extreme ideological progressive. He famously announced, in February 2015, that the German Church is “not just a subsidiary of Rome,” and that “Each…
In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’ … But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance. –…
