Like most fairy tales, the story of Rumpelstiltskin has an undercurrent of horror. If it’s been awhile, here’s a refresher: an arrogant father, seeking esteem in the eyes of the king, boasts that his daughter can spin straw into gold. With this lie, the unnamed daughter is discarded from one pair of arms to another, neither [...]

Last week, Leila Lawler and Leila Miller co-authored an article for Crisis Magazine entitled Catholic Men, Rise Up and Fight. This exhortation is a Cri de Coeur from women who are sick of what’s going on in their Church, and they are begging men to address the problem. Here is one man’s response. Mesdames Lawler [...]

Last week, Hans Küng, the king of the dissident German Catholic theologians, met his maker. At the time, I tweeted, “King Küng meets God-zilla.” In doing so, I had no intention of comparing either Hans Küng to a giant gorilla nor the Almighty to a giant lizard. It just seemed too juicy a dad-joke to [...]

Last November, Pope Francis, for the first time, called China’s Muslim Uighurs a “persecuted” people, something human rights activists have been urging him to do for years. However, during his solemn Urbi et Orbi  Easter blessing on Easter Sunday, Francis snubbed the Uighurs as he carefully omitted any reference to those suffering human rights abuses [...]

The statement “To Awaken Conscience” on so-called “abortion tainted” vaccines was meant to propose an ideal, not give arguments. I signed it because I agree with that ideal. But a philosopher should have reasons too, and here I wish to give them. These reasons also explain why I reject the statement recently offered by some [...]

When I logged into Twitter on Easter Monday morning, I was pleasantly surprised. As anyone who has spent time on Twitter knows, timelines related to Catholicism or politics (as mine is) tend to lean strongly negative. Yet on Easter Monday morning, I was flooded with tweets celebrating new members of the Catholic Church. It was [...]

One of the earliest memories I have of Franciscan University, which is the school in Steubenville, Ohio where I teach, took place one evening years ago while leaving my office to go home. Fr. Benedict Groeschel, a wise and holy priest who founded the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, and who himself went home (to [...]

We’ve been writing for years about the crisis of manhood, and that crisis has come to a head within the past year, particularly in the Catholic Church. Now we write to call our men to be what God created them to be. The faithful have been abused through a year of cancelled Masses, locked churches, [...]

Recently, Pope Francis declared that the Blessed Virgin Mary is the one “to whom Jesus entrusted us, all of us; but as a Mother, not as goddess, not as co-redeemer (non come dea, non come corredentrice): as Mother.” This comment generated much controversy in the Catholic world since one of Mary’s traditional titles is “Co-Redemptrix.”   So [...]

Anti-Christian world powers that promote the culture of death are seeking to impose on the world’s population an implicit—though remote and passive—collaboration with abortion. Such remote collaboration, in itself, is also an evil because of the extraordinary historical circumstances in which these same world powers are promoting the murder of unborn children and the exploitation [...]

Today is the Wednesday of Holy Week, also known as Spy Wednesday, when we remember the most infamous act of betrayal in human history: Judas agreeing to deliver Christ to His enemies for 30 pieces of silver. This act of betrayal is still shocking to the Christian; we cannot imagine how an apostle, so close [...]

I was just a kid when the Second Vatican Council was brewing. It was called an ecumenical council; that is, a council meant to be universal in scope. The ecumenism that was of specific interest to the council was focused on communicating with non-Catholics; that is, there was interest in reducing unnecessary friction between religions, [...]

When I first heard the story of a silly nun who’d gotten herself ordained as a Protestant priestess while teaching theology at a major Catholic University, I was not surprised. Nor was I surprised to learn of the subsequent lawsuit she filed to prevent her being fired. What did surprise me, however, was the fact [...]

Several years ago, when I was received into the Catholic Church, I thought I had come into the experience with my eyes fully open. The scandals of 2002 had already happened, and their details and significance were being truthfully unpacked by many Catholic commentators for all the world to see. Because I had spent several [...]

Bishop Joseph Strickland (Tyler, TX), along with Dr. Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, myself, and two others, recently released the statement “To Awaken Conscience” regarding the scandal given by Catholic leaders' widespread acceptance of abortion-tainted COVID-19 vaccines. Since then, the statement has received extensive support—more than 3,000 co-signers to date. It has, however, also elicited controversy in [...]

Though the politics of the USCCB are rather more complex than we are often led to believe, there is at least one issue on which the bishops’ conference is reliably (and disastrously) left-wing: immigration. Who can forget the image of El Paso’s Bishop Mark Seitz physically escorting a family of five Honduran nationals across the [...]

One year ago today, darkness engulfed the United States. On March 18, 2020, the final holdout American dioceses suspended public Masses, making it impossible (or at least disobedient) for a lay Catholic in this country to attend Mass.  I followed the shutting down of public Masses closely, creating maps on Twitter so Catholics could see [...]

This week, the Offices of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, with the specific assent of Pope Francis, issued an instruction stating that the Church cannot sanction blessings of homosexual relationships, partnerships, or other unions. Given the push in some influential Catholic circles, including from prominent German bishops, this was a most welcome [...]

A death-dealing industry and a death-dealing illness are the horns of a dilemma that many Catholics feel caught up in, and the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine has brought new heat to the debate. Of course, as Catholics, we heed the battle cry, “death before sin,” and refuse to participate in the evil of abortion [...]

We’ve been told since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that significant restrictions in the form of lockdowns, social distancing, quarantines, and mask mandates are necessary for the “common good.” This refrain has been heard from medical professionals, politicians, our bishops and other Catholic leaders, and even the man on the street. Yet, looking at [...]