I don't understand why Fr James Martin SJ cannot accept being disinvited to speaking engagements with the same graciousness, understanding and humility as His Eminence Cardinal Raymond Burke, who is often considered 'too hot to handle' and finds himself for some reason being told that a venue or Diocese is not prepared to host him, yes him, a Cardinal no less, who has no problem with being called and treated as a Successor of the Apostles. I hear that he is most gracious when his speaking engagements are pulled for no apparent reason and with little in the way of justification.

I do feel sorry in a way for Fr James Martin because clearly there is nobody to shepherd him and reign him in so that he does not set himself up for such public disappointment and the attending histrionics that follow being regarded as somewhat scandalous to the faithful. Does he not have a superior somewhere? Wherever you are, you could really help this Jesuit priest!

If I produced business cards,…

Here is a musical take on the recurring aviation fiascos so regularly embraced by Pope Francis.


Happy Feast of St Francis de Sales, patron of journalists, may he intercede for  Catholic writers, journalists and bloggers across the world.

May we proclaim our Lord Jesus Christ in season and out of season and oppose any and all attempts to subvert His Teachings inside the Church.

Because it made such a headline, I immediately thought - as I made apparent in my last post - that Pope Francis had gone and done something that was controversial, that would serve to generate a great deal of publicity and would ensure that such publicity would serve to benefit himself but few others, including Christ our Lord.

As more commentary came flooding in through social media, it became clear that the cynical among us would not be disappointed. This is one of the redeeming elements of cynicism, that you can't really be disappointed by bad Church news, especially now bad Pope news, but you can feel affirmed and thoroughly justified in your attitude. Even now, I feel rather self-congratulatory about the prescience of my last post on the aggressive PR campaign that surrounds the Most Humble Pope Ever. Pray that such feelings pass, however, because as well you know, the deep crisis in the Church is not about me, or how right I or you feel, but about God Himself and His Church…

There are rumours circulating that an embattled, deceitful and thoroughly discredited pontificate - at least discredited among faithful Catholics following events carefully - seeks to draw the clergy of the Holy Catholic Church, by coercive means, into a new vow of obedience in particular to Pope Francis and his own 'unique' Magisterium. I shudder at such rumours.

Are these rumours true? We do not yet know. How do such rumours evolve? Who wishes these things to circulate? Are they credible? Should it be taken seriously? Only the last question can I answer and only with an opinion. I fear so. I believe clergy have reason, based on their own observation of five years of laughably less than transparent conduct within the Vatican, to be on the alert at least. The new rumour suggests that this pontificate - one in which the use of reason as a faculty has already been 'taken down a peg or two' during the intra-ecclesial 'dialogue' concerning Amoris Laetitia - is con…

#IamMarcantonioColonna

It is frankly unforgiveable that I forgot to place a slide of 
Fr Thomas Weinandy into this song.

But you have to understand that one day nearly the whole Church woke up to find itself Colonna...

A stranger pontificate in history shall likely never be found. More bloody pontificates? More violent pontificates? More corrupt pontificates? More edifying and glorious pontificates? Yes to all these, but the award for strangest pontificate shall surely go to Francis.

Everything about this papacy has been strange, confusing and unsettling, disturbing and worrying. I liked that description from the bishops of Kazakhstan - 'alien'.Yes, much of this pontificate has been foreign and 'alien' to Catholic sensibility, to Catholic feeling and to Catholic tradition. Jorge Mario Bergoglio sidled into the Seat of Peter with astonishing confidence and he lost no time in laying out the scope of his radical agenda still unfolding in real time. Clearly nothing in the same room as him is to be marked safe.

All along, however, tradition - at least some Catholic tradition - has been an uneasy ally of the man from the ends of the earth. He needs it. He lives off it. Without it, he dies…

To all readers a very happy Christmas to you and your loved ones.