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Where Peter Is

Deception Day: New Spielberg film stirs a satanic panic

In February, President Donald Trump announced that he would declassify the government’s confidential files on UFOs — or unidentified aerial phenomena — and have the Pentagon post them online on a rolling basis. Excitement over disclosure was already very high among enthusiasts, but the next month it took an unexpected spiritual turn. On...

Preaching Without Prompts

For better or worse, preachers have always used “canned” content. There has been a wide variety of “homily hints” resources to draw upon, long before the advent of artificial intelligence. Given that, is there anything new or different in generating a homily with AI – especially if those in the pews don’t know...

God Does Not Want Suffering

In the past couple of weeks, two readers reached out to me asking if I had ever written anything about how theology about suffering is misused in coercive ways within the Church. Then yesterday, unprovoked, a friend sent me this excerpt from an address Pope Leo gave this past week in Spain: This...

Magnifica Humanitas’s Latin Snag

Quite unexpectedly, Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica Humanitas brought me back to my time years ago studying with the much-beloved papal Latinist Reginald Foster. Much of Magnifica Humanitas explicitly hearkens back to Leo XIII’s seminal social encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), including its use of the Latin phrase res novae to introduce the...

Thoughts of a former SSPX priest on the July 1 consecrations

It is well known that the schismatic Society of Saint Pius X plans to consecrate four bishops on July 1, 2026, in Écône, Switzerland — despite being warned explicitly that to do so would incur excommunication for both those ordained and those performing the ordinations. We have been here before. In 1988 Archbishop...

SSPX Consecrations and Impending Schism

At the prompting of several friends from the Catholic traditionalist and apologetics community, I started writing this piece — unsure exactly what I feel compelled to write, not knowing where we will end up. I suspect this will be more personal reflection than apologetics or canon law. Approximately 14 years ago, I quietly...

Magnifica Humanitas and the 12 Steps

Dawn Eden Goldstein, theologian, canon lawyer, and author, who has written Father Ed: The Story of Bill W.’s Spiritual Sponsor, a biography of Fr. Edward Dowling, who was pivotal to the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous, sees a link between 12 step programs and Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. She notes Pope Leo’s...

Msgr. Rossetti versus the Little Gray Men

On June 3, 2026, Robert Cardinal McElroy, the Archbishop of Washington, removed Monsignor Stephen Rossetti as an exorcist of the Archdiocese of Washington and ended the archdiocese’s affiliation with Rossetti’s Saint Michael Center for Spiritual Renewal. In a statement posted to the archdiocesan website, the cardinal said that Rossetti’s public remarks linking UFOs...