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Given the meaning of the word "Catholic", the Pope has always been the planet's pope. But I'm happy to see Rolling Stone appreciating him. Evangelists for 2000 years would call that a win. But the people most outraged and offended by that are the ones who consider themselves the Greatest Catholics of All Time. They see their mission as driving away the riff raff, pouring boiling oil from the ramparts of the Church on all who approach and driving out all the vermin within the Church who do not measure up to their rigorous standards of purity, beginning with the pope himself.

It is a shock to discover that Tyrannosaurus is closer in time to the cell phone than it is to Stegosaurus. It is likewise a shock to learn that Cleopatra is closer in time to AI than she is to the building of the Great Pyramid. And it is an even greater shock to American conservative Christians to learn that ancient and medieval Catholics are closer in spirit to Communists than they are to Libertarians and MAGA.

Meet Hank Kunneman. He runs Lord of Hosts Church in Omaha, Nebraska. He founded it in 1997 and calls himself a prophet. He guaranteed Trump would win in 2020. Trump lost. Being a member of the Party of Personal Responsibility, he did not blame himself for being a false prophet. He blamed demons. And being a good worshipper of Mammon, his church has piled up an estimated $14.9 million in real estate since then.

The realization that my kids came of age during Trump I didn’t know how good we had it with Clinton Bush etc And I can’t believe I’m saying that He’s unleashed demons in our country mark I really believe that He revealed demons in our country. None of this is a surprise to Christ. Only to us. This is a moment the Divine Physician tells the patient he has cancer.

Over on the Book of Face, I ran into this excited proclamation: The caption breathless asked, "Could humanity be on the verge of answering one of its oldest questions?" Now, don't get me wrong, I will be as tickled pink as anybody if they are able to prove there is life on K2-18b, or one of the other earth-like planets orbiting other stars.

Yeah. That's really kind of it. I have no particular devotion to the Dem party. I certainly have no personal devotion to Dem politicians. The idea of looking at a Dem pol the way the weirdos and cultists in MAGA routinely look at Trump is absolutely foreign to me. Such looks should be reserved for the Son of the Living God.

The weirdest thing about about the Cult is their everlasting surprise when their orange messiah--who has made an entire career of betraying and discarding wives, family, friends, workers, sycophants and toadies--betrays and discards them. Case in point: Greg Bovino, the former Border Patrol commander who led President Donald Trump's mass deportation raids, accused senior administration officials of pulling his security detail because "they want me dead ...

There is nothing the Party of Personal Responsibility loves to more than dodge responsibility. As we noted in this space yesterday, ex-MAGA contrition is nearly always deeply imperfect contrition. Case in point: This, being translated, means, "I remain as vengeful and stupid as I always was, but I don't want to take responsibility for it. So instead of admitting that Biden did a pretty good job, I will lie that he…

People ask what I think of ex-MAGA. Are they sincere? Should we forgive them? Should we trust them? In order, I reply: Depends. Yes. Always. Depends. Here are some samples of ways I respond to MAGA who claim to be out of love with the antichrist they did so much to create: He is exactly the same man. You are lying to create distance from him and try for a piece of market share among disaffected MAGA.

...than Real Catholics know. A loud subculture in the Church has, for far too long, reduced what it means to be a Real Catholic to a handful of boutique aesthetic obsessions about liturgy, and a couple of political obsessions with magicking away abortion and homosexuality, no matter how many people have to die to get the fantasy lied into being. All the rest of the Body of Christ are, in their eyes, vermin who can be safely dismissed as CINOs and LibCaths, including--especially--the Pope.

Back in November 2024, we decided to take the plunge and get 15 solar panels on our roof. The system went live on November 25 It's worked out well so far as you can see from this graph charting our production and usage. Most of 2024 (till November 25) is just power we were paying for from the grid. But as you can see, there are marked declines in imported electricity starting in Feb 2025 (compared to Feb 2024) and by May our bill drops to almost nothing.

This inexorably reminds me of C.S. Lewis' description of the Uncle Screwtape's Hell: "We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment. This, to begin with. For the rest, my own choice of symbols depended, I suppose, on temperament and on the age.

Reagan now occupies for Republicans the same psychic space the office of the papacy holds for Traditionalist Catholics. They love to wave him as a flag but they hate and fear most of what he actually says. From gun control to respect for immigrants to tariffs and trade wars with allies to actual opposition to actual Communists, Reagan would be denounced, hated and mocked by the Cult if he were still alive.

Now and then I offer the periodic reminder that we are never getting off the Earth in any meaningful way and that the dream of colonizing even the planets, let alone the stars, is a secular eschatological fantasy clung to by a civilization that has (I think without sufficent reason) abandoned hope in the only eschatology that we (literally) have a prayer of seeing fulfilled.

The first intellectual and spiritual misgivings I felt about my failure to support Trump came when he coined the term "Dumocrat". The realization that "dumb" had the letter "b" in it was like a thunderclap to my smug, insular communist worldview. And then, when he hit me with the one-two punch follow-up of replacing the "e" in "Dem" with a "u" to make it "Dumocrat", the dawning and dreadful thought, "What if…

The principal effect wealth and power always have is to cocoon the wealthy and powerful from the consequences of their actions. When the wealthy and powerful are (as they already have a tendency to be) bad people, this effect is accelerated, which is one of the many reasons Jesus warns of Mammon worship. When the bad man is a sociopathic narcissist who lies constantly the cocoon effect is turbo-charged and he cuts himself off from anybody but a tight and sycophantic inner circle who labor to deny him all contact with reality.

...and the 60th Anniversary no less! I thought I would be a buzzkill. I am old enought to remember watching STAR TREK on my brother's little black and white TV in his bedroom. I would get a big bowl of chocolate ice cream and savor it and the show. I watched "The Menagerie" the very first time it played. I was a devoted fan and remain so.

Brass SpittoonsBy Langston Hughes Clean the spittoons, boy.      Detroit,      Chicago,      Atlantic City,      Palm Beach.Clean the spittoons.The steam in hotel kitchens,And the smoke in hotel lobbies,And the slime in hotel spittoons:Part of my life.      Hey, boy!      A nickel,      A dime,      A dollar,Two dollars a day.      Hey, boy!      A nickel,      A dime,      A dollar,      Two dollars…

Relatedly, I would rather be ruled by a good atheist than a bad Christian. But, of course, best of all would be to be ruled by a smart, competent, and good Catholic disciple of Jesus who wisely draws on the riches of the Tradition to serve, not to be served and not to impose the heresy of Christian Nationalism on a population of slaves.

It is one of the great paradoxes of a uniquely Christian form of hope that David Bentley Hart can have such a clear-eyed and prophetic view of the deep corruption of American Christianity and culture (which are virtually the same thing and so all-penetrating--like a mold or fungus--that even non-Christians bear its imprint.) And yet seeing all this, he hopes, like St.

Item: Last year alone the Sunshine State executed 19 death row inmates, and this year the number is already at 12, with three more to go. This trend alarms Florida's bishops and it should stir the consciences of all Catholics. Nobody loves killing people more than "pro-life" MAGA Catholics like Ron DeSantis. They will spit on Holy Church and the Eucharist if only they can murder 4 perfectly innocent people out of 100 in order to slaughter 96 people who do not need to be killed.

There is an old Russian joke about an angel who appears to a peasant and tells him he can have whatever he wishes: wealth, happiness, beauty, the works. However, whatever he asks for will be give double to his enemy. The peasant thinks for a moment and says, "Gouge out one of my eyes and beat me half to death."

When I was a little boy, we went to visit my Grandparents, Thidder and Eva Collar, in a little hamlet in Ontario called Glen Miller. They were my Mom's parents. It was 1964 and I was six. I remember their house had a hole in the floor upstairs from the kitchen where the stove pipe used to go through. You could drop stuff through it and watch it hit floor way far down below you (I never lived in a house with two storeys, so this was a huge thrill.)

Trump has found the perfect masochist partner for his sadism. The more he abuses her, the more cravenly she abases herself and begs for more. And in exchange, she urges him on to be his worst self, which is quite the challenge given how monstrous he already is. The grave danger, of course, is that she will urge him on to treat the entire world as he treats her.

I have a theory that, as the Body of Christ diversifies and ramifies like the roots and branches of a tree, its various expressions tend to produce both saints and sinners who become more and more specific to their particular traditions. Dolly Parton expressed a very particularly American Protestant kind of saintliness. The Catholic tradition could not have produced her any more than the Orthodox could have.

Yesterday, I noted [H]historically, the roots of mass opposition to abortion spring from Christian seed. That means that there are lots of people from other (and no) faith traditions who see no reason at all why they should oppose abortion and who regard the attempt to make them embrace a theology they do not, in fact, embrace as an imposition on their conscience.

The Indiana ruling is part of a growing multi-state legal strategy in which Jewish, Unitarian, Buddhist, Episcopal, and other faith plaintiffs are challenging abortion bans in Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Utah, Wyoming, and Florida on the grounds that those bans impose a narrow Christian doctrinal view of when life begins onto citizens of all faiths — a direct violation of both state and federal church-state principles.

(Note: This is grossly unfair to Evangelicals, by the way. Millions of MAGA Catholics also whored themselves out to this dimestore antichrist.) "To get the man's soul and give him nothing in return--that is what truly gladdens the heart of Our Father Below." - Uncle Screwtape on every single member of the MAGA "prolife" movement A reader writes in response to the abject failure of the "pro-life" heresy:

Jesus clearly, painfully obviously, intended to do exactly that. It is an utterly delusional reading of every single document from every single witness to his ministry to say he never intended to set up a religious system. He trained disciples. Told them "He who listens to you listens to me". Declared that they would sit on twelve thrones and judge the twelve tribes of Israel.

I believe that the survival, not only of the US, but of much of the human race requires the destruction of the GOP as a political force in the US. It is now the most dangerous terrorist organization in the world, with a demented sociopathic criminal at its head, aided and abetted by co-conspirators and enablers who will permit him to do anything to preserve their power and wealth and protect themselves from facing justice for their crimes.

A reader writes: Sorry to bother, but I'm a bit perturbed and thought I'd pick your brain..... Your expression "Fortress Katolicus" came to mind for me as I heard we're going to start locking doors during Mass at my parish (one of two parishes in a town of 30k).  My coworker said they're already doing that at her hometown, population 1500 ish.  

Years ago, like back in the 90s, I saw a home video taken by some guy from Podunk, America who had been dragged by his wife to make a pilgrimage to Betania, Venezuela. He was clearly my kinda guy: there because he wanted to keep peace with the Missus, not because he really thought there was an apparition of Mary happening there.

The Assumption has rightly been called “Mary’s Easter.” It’s the great icon of the glory and joy awaiting every person saved by Jesus Christ. The mystery of the Assumption reminds us that Christ’s .Resurrection was not an end in itself. Jesus wasn’t raised just to prove God could raise the dead. He was raised so that we would be raised with him and live, not as disembodied spooks, but as fully human beings in the glory of God forever.

I am a total sucker for a "dinosaurs loose in suburbia" flick. You say, "It sounds dumb". My reply, "Your point?" You are talking to the guy who loved the T Rex chasing a gang of Japanese tourists down a San Diego street, feasting on screenwriter David Koepp, and rolling a 76 ball at Jeff Goldblum in JURASSIC PARK: THE LOST WORLD.

Christopher Nolan again demonstrates the central thesis of historian (not actor) Tom Holland's DOMINION: that Christianity is the most successful revolution in the history of our species. So successful that its assumptions are simply taken for granted even by those who imagine they are not deeply Christian. Matt Walsh, MAGA Catholic, meanwhile demonstrates that the MAGA cult is the most profoundly anti-Christ movement since the Nazis.

Here is a portrait of one of the violent psychopaths deliberately selected by ICE to go out and murder people for them: Ashley Brouillette had not heard from her ex-husband, David Brouillette, since November. She says one of their last interactions was a three-minute voicemail in which David told her that someone should slit her and her daughters’ throats.

Christ offered himself to us as a scapegoat and let us heap upon him all our sin and dysfunction, carrying it to the grave with him and leaving it there. He then rose in fully divinized humanity and offers that divinized humanity back to us as, so to speak, Apex Prey: transforming us by this gift of his body, blood, soul and divinity to become like him in self-sacrificial love of neighbor.

No. Not that Dewey: This Dewey! The Joe Dewey who wrote on Facebook about the scandal and hissing that is this embarrassing chaplain of a brutal authoritarian regime and the lying whore he shamefully platforms: Saith Joe Dewey: Bishop Barron, I have been big a big fan of yours for more than 7 years now. My family on my Dads side is old school Catholic from Chicago (I’m 56).

Located somewhere in the San Juan Islands, on the same island where legendary Microsoft super-villain Paul Allen's secret lair is still to be found haunted (some say) by his spectral ectoplasm, not far from the island where mysterious Benedictine nuns still practice secret rites and rituals dating back to the Age of the Caesars, which is in the general vicinity of the island where the only remains of a theropod dinosaur EVER FOUND IN WASHINGTON STATE were discovered, which is not far from the site where Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders died in a plane crash that may or may not have something to do with faking the Moon Landings, which is a mere ferry ride away from the scene of hostilities in the Pig War that almost plunged America into war with Her Majesty Queen Victoria...

...is always a good day to reprint a piece I wrote 13 years ago, on the Most Popular Moral Heresy in the World. It was part of a series I wrote on logical fallacies and it was highly unpopular with the larval MAGA Catholic crowd. But it remains true anyway. Enjoy! In the previous two pieces in this space, we have looked at two fallacies: the…

Today it comes for me!

One of the more frustrating things those trying to serve God constantly face is that they can't be lying slobs, slanderers, morally lax jerks, and vile swine who make messes and leave everybody else to clean it up. To be sure, many and many and vile swine can and do claim to be serving God while doing such things. But those who are actually serious about it are profoundly constrained to fight fair against people who think fighting fair is for suckers.

This is astute: Christopher Nolan again demonstrates the central thesis of Tom Holland's DOMINION: So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilisation that it has come to be hidden from view. It is the incomplete revolutions which are remembered; the fate of those which triumph is to be taken for granted. Christianity is the most successful revolution in the history of our species.

One of the stranger paradoxes of our time is the death of the virtues of faith and reason among the Greatest Christians of All Time, and the surprising way it illustrates, often to unbelievers who believe in reason, the necessity of faith. For of course, in the past, ordinary people who knew nothing about the sciences took their information from those who had studied the relevant disciplines as they took their information from their priests: with the humble understanding that he who knows little should listen to him who knows much.

Over at his Substack: Toward the end of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, Matt Damon’s Odysseus has a despairing line clearly influenced by an aphorism from the Talmud memorably quoted in Schindler’s List: “Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.” The Talmud also sees absolute significance in the destruction of one life; this is more the sense of Odysseus’s lamentation.

“Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.” (Ac 1:6–8)

"I come again to ask... transubstantiation. What is a good, somewhat understandable, treatment of same. Article length would be good. I currently live in the murky comfort of believing the bread and wine are important yet not needing to have hard-wired doctrine on exactly what's going on in that mystical communion. Thanks, as usual. " THIS IS MY BODY basically makes the case for the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, not Transubstantiation.

I love this. A guy who has never read the Bible and who doesn't believe decides to give it a crack in about the best frame of mind I think a person can: as somebody visiting another country who wants to be respectful to the ideas, customs, and mores of a foreign land and who also has his own thoughts and feelings about what he is encountering.