Catholicism has always possessed a vivid symbolic imagination. The Church embraces a sacramental worldview, filled with signs and mysteries — miracles, apparitions, relics, saints, and sacred gestures. This imagination can nourish faith, but without guidance it can also slide into magical thinking, apparition-chasing, or conspiracy theory mindsets. In today’s digital landscape, these imaginative tendencies have merged with online outrage, giving rise to a kind of improvisational world-building. Whenever a fresh Catholic panic erupts — whether about an offhand papal remark, a photograph from a synod, or a viral claim about infiltration — the contours of this imaginative crisis become evident.

This pattern is not new. In the 1970s, a middle-aged housewife named Veronica Lueken claimed visions of the Virgin Mary at her parish in Bayside, Queens. Her messages warned of apostasy, chastisements, infiltration of the hierarchy, nuclear war, and diabolical plots in the Church. After a lengthy investigation, the Diocese of Brooklyn declared in 1986 that “no credibility can be given to the so-called ‘apparitions,’” citing doctrinal errors, failed predictions, and a pattern of undermining legitimate Church authority. Yet the movement did not collapse. It reorganized, reframed the condemnation as persecution, and expanded its prophetic framework.

As Joseph P. Laycock describes in The Seer of Bayside: Veronica Lueken and the Struggle to Define Catholicism, Lueken’s followers continue to hold regular prayer vigils at the 1964 New York World’s Fair Vatican Pavilion site in Flushing Meadows Park in Long Island, New York. They meet in two groups that do not speak with each other. Laycock explains that in 1997, a schism occurred among Lueken’s followers and a judge ruled in favor of her husband Arthur. His group, the larger of the two, retained the “Our Lady of the Roses” title and the other group formed Saint Michael’s World Apostolate. To this day the groups alternate schedules to access the park, but when both groups are present they alternate who has access to the Vatican Pavilion monument site in the park. One group has the privilege of putting its statue of the Blessed Virgin on the monument, while the other group gathers in a nearby traffic island to pray.

The Bayside movement survives to this day — even with its condemnation from the institutional Church — because it provides a symbolic universe. The apparitions and prophecies described by Veronica Lueken tell a story in which bewildering events made sense.

A helpful way to grasp what happened at Bayside — and what continues to shape much of today’s Catholic media ecosystem — is through Claude Lévi-Strauss’s notion of bricolage in The Savage Mind. The word comes from the French bricoler, “to tinker” or “to make do,” and a bricoleur is a tinkerer of ideas, someone who builds meaning from whatever lies close at hand. Rather than beginning with a coherent theory, the bricoleur gathers scattered materials — memories, myths, scraps of doctrine, political cues, personal anxieties — and fits them together into a narrative that feels ordered and authoritative. It is mythmaking through improvisation.

Lévi-Strauss sets the bricoleur in contrast to the scientist or engineer, who works from general principles and deliberate design, selecting tools and methods suited to the task. The bricoleur, by contrast, stitches together whatever he finds, creating a structure that holds together emotionally even when it lacks the rigor or internal consistency that disciplined inquiry demands. This contrast helps explain the appeal of movements like Bayside, whose power lies not in systematic reasoning but in the evocative joining of fragments into a world of meaning.

In The Seer of Bayside, Laycock argues that Veronica Lueken and her followers, the “Baysiders,” exemplified this process. The Baysiders’ belief system was not a systematic theology or coherent worldview but a meaning-making machine.

Once this lens is applied, it becomes impossible not to recognize the same interpretive logic operating in the narratives found in the novels of 20^th century author Malachi Martin, the panic over the Pachamama statues, and the worldview curated by media figures such as John-Henry Westen. The materials differ by decade, but the method has remained astonishingly consistent.

How Bricolage Shapes Catholic Meaning-Making

Lévi-Strauss’s bricoleur uses whatever materials are available. The materials are finite, but the combinations are endless. In The Seer of Bayside, Laycock shows that the Bayside phenomenon operated exactly this way. Lueken’s messages provided a flexible narrative shell — a framework that could absorb Cold War fears, AIDS anxieties, debates about extraterrestrial life, geopolitical events, cultural moral panics, and even speculative claims about the end times (pp. 100–101).

As Laycock puts it, Baysiders “incorporated nearly any discourse into a unified model of how the world works” (p. 101). The world of Bayside expanded continuously, drawing in new anxieties as they emerged. It was self-reinforcing, not because it was historically grounded but because it offered interpretive coherence.

Much like today’s radical traditionalists and reactionary Catholics, the Baysiders insisted that they were orthodox and obedient to Church authority. Laycock recounts a core belief of the movement that allowed them to brush aside accusations that they were disobedient to Church authority. Around 1975, Veronica Lueken shared a revelation that Pope Paul VI had been replaced by an imposter. According to Lueken, the real Paul VI “was kept heavily sedated by the conspirators and the man now claiming to be Paul VI was actually a communist doppelganger created by plastic surgery” (p. 6).  In other words, according to Laycock, “The Baysiders were not in rebellion against their Church; they were only questioning the orders of conspirators and imposters who had infiltrated the Church hierarchy.” This type of explanation was repeated during the pontificate of Pope Francis, with the so-called “Benevacantists.” Those who held to this premise believed that Francis was an antipope because Pope Benedict XVI had not properly resigned from the office of the papacy and was still the true pope. This allowed them to reject Pope Francis and his teachings outright, because (according to them) he wasn’t pope at all.

Much like the Benevacantists, the Baysiders didn’t see their situation in the same way the institutional Church did. “To Church authorities this claim was evidence of rebellion against papal authority,” Laycock writes. “But to Baysiders it was not a matter of doctrine at all. It was an observable fact” (p. 69). And true to the bricolage model, the fake pope theory was malleable:

“The conspiracy theory allowed for a kind of selective loyalty, in which Baysiders could show unquestioned fealty to the pope while also asserting their own moral autonomy. In many Baysider versions of the Paul VI conspiracy theory, the true pope and the doppelganger occupied the Vatican at the same time––meaning that some of Paul VI’s public statements were legitimate and others were not. Only by thinking critically about the pope’s statements could Catholics discern whether the man making them was the genuine pope” (p. 111).

Today’s Catholic internet functions in a similar way. Influencers do not often provide theological arguments. They provide stories — symbolic narratives that explain confusing events by linking them to familiar tropes: modernism, globalism, infiltration, apostasy, chastisement, and spiritual warfare. The audience is not convinced by documentation. They are drawn into a symbolic universe.

Debunking false narratives against the impenetrable certitude of the Catholic bricoleur is fruitless.

The Human Mind and the Instinct for Symbolic Meaning

Human beings instinctively interpret signs. Throughout history, people inhabited symbolic worlds where dreams, coincidences, and natural events carried spiritual significance. Catholicism baptized this instinct, orienting it toward Christ through sacramental theology. Vatican Council II attempted to purify this symbolic instinct — not to suppress it, but to ground it more firmly in Scripture, liturgy, and the communal discernment of the Church.

But the instinct itself was never fully erased. Some Catholics today — many of whom are attracted to radical traditionalism, the tall tales told by celebrity exorcists, and/or end-times prophecy and sensationalism — exemplify the bricoleur’s mindset. At the same time, the Church — especially in the teachings of John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis — has consistently affirmed that faith and reason belong together, encouraging openness to empirical research, intellectual honesty, and the disciplined methods of modern science. These popes have insisted that the natural and supernatural orders are not rivals but partners in the search for truth, and that authentic faith has nothing to fear from scientific inquiry.

Many Catholics nevertheless disregard the approach of the institutional Church. Contemporary traditionalism often welds pieces of American culture-war ideology to fragments of scholastic moral theology, producing a system that feels traditional but is, in reality, an improvised hybrid of modern politics and selective medievalism. Recently, some traditionalists have openly urged Catholics to return to a pre-modern, anti-rationalistic mindset. Traditionalist philosopher Sebastian Morello has written extensively on “the pressing imperative to re-enchant our world,” blurring the line between superstition, grace, and the supernatural. In a follow-up essay, he insists that “sorcery and witchcraft are very real” and that modern Christianity is too “rationalistic” to confront them—claiming these practices are “on the rise.”

This drift toward magical thinking mirrors the logic of bricolage described earlier: when doctrinal coherence erodes, Catholics begin stitching together explanations from whatever symbolic materials feel compelling—fear, rumor, folklore, and the ambient panic of online Catholic subcultures. Pope Francis repeatedly warned against this temptation. In a 2014 homily, he lamented, “It is easier to believe in a ghost than in the living Christ! It is easier to go to a magician who predicts the future… than to have faith and hope in a victorious Christ.” Such shortcuts, he said, ultimately distort the imagination: “This relativization of the faith ends with distancing oneself from the encounter, with moving away from God’s caress.” In an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, he reinforced the point: “God is not a demiurge or a magician, but the Creator who gives life to all beings.” And in a 2019 audience he warned bluntly, “Please: magic is not Christian… The grace of Christ brings you everything: pray and entrust yourself to the Lord.”

Francis’s insistence is not tangential—it speaks directly to the imaginative crisis shaping modern Catholic conspiracism. Magical thinking replaces discernment with intuition, trust with suspicion, and the sacramental worldview with a hunt for hidden forces. It is bricolage at its most spiritually corrosive: a symbolic universe where the supernatural becomes indistinguishable from superstition and where fear provides the interpretive frame.

Even today, many Catholics do not respond to sensational claims with careful research or historical inquiry. Instead, they respond with imaginative intuition. A prophecy resonates. A rumor “fits.” An influencer repeats a claim. A symbol feels ominous. The emotional narrative assembles itself long before evidence is considered. Conspiracy theories and apocalyptic unapproved apparitions thrive in precisely this imaginative environment because they confirm anxieties already present beneath the surface.

My own temperament pulls toward skepticism. Whenever I encountered dramatic claims — whether about Vatican II, papal conspiracies, infiltration narratives, or alleged apparitions — my immediate instinct is to search for primary sources. This wasn’t always the case. As a teenager, I believed stories about Masonic infiltration because they were woven into the Catholic subculture around me. Only later, after I developed the research and critical thinking skills to investigate these claims, did the narrative collapse.

Ironically, the internet that now fuels conspiracies was the very tool that freed me from them. One of the first articles that changed my outlook about traditionalist conspiracy theories was a 2002 article by Sandra Miesel that appeared in Crisis Magazine entitled “Swinging at Windmills,” which described one of my favorite books, AA-1025, as “manifestly a feeble example of radical traditionalist propaganda that even fails to factor in the Russian purges.” The book is presented as the diary of a Soviet spy who infiltrated the Catholic priesthood and played an influential role in Vatican II, but upon revisiting the text its prose resembles that of a sheltered teenage tradbro trying his darndest to channel what he believes is the mindset of a Marxist anti-Catholic agent.[1]

Sadly, many Catholics follow this path. They rely on trusted figures to interpret events for them. Rather than listening to the pope and other leaders of the institutional Church, they follow their favorite influencers, many of whom are regularly at odds with the Magisterium. These figures include Fr. Chad Ripperger, Bishop Joseph Strickland, and Taylor Marshall, among others, whose media platforms routinely present themselves as guardians of ‘orthodox’ Catholicism over and against the Magisterium, the pope, and Church leaders. In their narrative, leading bishops and virtually the entire US Conference of Catholic Bishops are portrayed as corrupt liberals, modernists, and progressives.

These influencers operate through bricolage, and their audiences adopt the symbolic world those figures construct.

Common Sense Without a Common World

Laycock’s analysis of the Bayside investigation highlights a profound truth. He points out how the Church’s investigation of Lueken’s visions revealed a clear division between Church authorities and Lueken’s supporters. He wrote, “Both sides appealed to what anyone ought to know. But appeals to ‘common sense’ only work when both parties share a common worldview” (p.72). When symbolic worlds diverge, common sense diverges with them.

The bishop saw implausible predictions, doctrinal errors, and disobedience. Baysiders saw divine warnings, spiritual warfare, and corruption in the hierarchy. For the bishop, common sense meant fidelity to Church teaching. For Baysiders, it meant vigilance against hidden enemies. Because the two sides did not share the same symbolic assumptions, appeals to common sense were completely incomprehensible to the other side.

This same phenomenon reappears in modern controversies. To most Catholics, it is obvious that Pope Francis did not engage in idolatry in the Vatican gardens in October 2019. To those immersed in decades of anti-Vatican II rhetoric and online prophecy culture, it was equally obvious that he oversaw a group of natives from the Amazon worshipping a wooden statue that was clearly an idol. Some commentators began labeling the figures as “Pachamama,” a deity from Andean folklore. A traditionalist activist later stole the statues from the church where they were held and threw them into the Tiber.

Pope Francis apologized for the theft, explaining that “there was no idolatrous intent.”

The Pachamama episode reveals how quickly bricolage can accelerate in a digital environment. The disagreement was not primarily about evidence. It is about the imaginative world in which evidence is interpreted. Ambiguous images, online rumors, ideological fears, and decades-old narratives about syncretism fused into a widespread belief that Francis permitted pagan worship. Influencers constructed a symbolic story where the statues were not representations of indigenous culture but spiritual betrayal.

The Pachamama panic was not a misunderstanding. It was bricolage.

No matter how many times Pedro Gabriel, Austen Ivereigh, Vatican officials, Pope Francis, or I tried to explain — in detail, with evidence and citations — that the event was Catholic and not at all pagan, Catholic media bricoleurs insisted that it was obviously idolatry. Crisis Magazine editor Eric Sammons went as far as to claim that “the veneration of this pagan idol in the Vatican” was responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic.

There was nothing systematic about Sammons’s views on the pandemic. On one hand, he claimed that COVID-19 was God’s vengeance for Pachamama worship.

On the other hand, he apparently believed it must not have made God all that upset. During the pandemic, Sammons regularly championed anti-mask and anti-vaxx narratives. He also criticized public health guidelines implemented by the Church. Taken together, Sammons’s claims suggest a jarring picture: God was allegedly so offended by the Vatican garden ceremony in Italy in October 2019 that he permitted a global pandemic to begin several months later in China — yet, in Sammons’s telling, the same pandemic was not serious enough to warrant basic public health measures such as masks, vaccines, or temporary restrictions on public worship.

Make it make sense.

Perhaps God was just mildly irked?

Apparition-Chasing and the Rise of Influencer Authority

This pattern has roots in the explosion of Marian apparitions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In that era, apparition sites multiplied across Europe and the Americas — La Salette, Lourdes, Fátima, Beauraing, Banneux, and many more. These events produced intense devotional energy, but they also created an expectation that the Blessed Mother regularly intervened to comment on historical events.

During the Cold War, this tendency accelerated. Fátima was interpreted through nuclear fears. Apparition literature merged with apocalyptic prophecy. By the 1970s and 1980s, popular Catholic writers such as Yves Dupont were assembling elaborate prophetic timelines that mixed approved apparitions with fringe speculation. This helped set the stage for later conspiracy frameworks surrounding the Third Secret of Fátima, including claims that the Vatican suppressed apocalyptic warnings or even replaced Sister Lúcia with an “impostor” to hide the truth.

An important figure fueling these narratives was Fr. Nicholas Gruner, whose Fatima Center spent decades insisting that the Vatican had concealed or distorted the authentic message of Fátima. Through newsletters, conferences, and media appearances, Gruner promoted a mindset of institutional suspicion, giving oxygen to theories about hidden chastisements, compromised popes, and alternate versions of the Third Secret. His influence ensured that these ideas remained embedded in certain Catholic circles long after the Church attempted to correct them.

With the rise of the internet, this prophetic instinct merged with digital communication. Catholics who once followed apparition news now follow influencers who serve a similar function. Most of these figures do not claim supernatural visions, but they claim interpretive authority — a privileged ability to “read the signs” and decode ecclesial events. Their charisma derives not from ecclesial office but from narrative skill. They are digital bricoleurs who shape how thousands interpret the Church.

From Bayside to Malachi Martin to the Catholic Web

In the era before Catholic social media, no figure exemplified Catholic bricolage more fully than Malachi Martin. Martin was a former Jesuit priest who left the priesthood and moved to New York City in the 1960s. Martin eventually settled on writing conspiracy theory novels for a largely traditionalist Catholic audience after the success of his exorcism novel Hostage to the Devil, which capitalized on the success of the film The Exorcist. His books often blurred the lines between fact, fiction, and insinuation. In works like The Keys of His Blood and Windswept House, he portrayed spiritual warfare, demonic infiltration, and Vatican intrigue with cinematic flair. Readers often treated these symbolic dramas as factual histories.

Martin’s work created an interpretive template that persists today. His insinuations about hidden enemies, suppressed prophecies, and compromised hierarchies continue to influence Catholics who interpret modern events through apocalyptic lenses. His world is symbolic rather than historical, but it offers a compelling way to organize fear.

In the digital age, this symbolic universe expanded dramatically. As Nick Freiling reported earlier this week for WPI, John-Henry Westen, longtime editor of LifeSiteNews — while briefly removed from the organization in 2025 and before his reinstatement — created Sign of the Cross Media, an outlet devoted to stoking fear and outrage in impressionable Catholics through memes and misleading articles about the world of Catholicism. Another arm of Westen’s media outreach is the John Henry Westen Show, a YouTube podcast that platforms extreme voices, dire prophecies, and commentators with dubious credentials. Through his media initiatives, he weaves various claims and assertions into a larger narrative of crisis — ecclesial betrayal, moral collapse, and hidden plots. This narrative framework invites viewers to interpret Church events through the logic of infiltration and apostasy.

A striking example of this appeared in Westen’s recent interview with Rob Marro.

Sensational claims and silent authorities

In the interview, available on YouTube, Marro makes extraordinary claims about Malachi Martin.

Early in the discussion, Marro asserts that Martin was secretly created a cardinal by Pope Paul VI — a claim that is impossible to verify from any public record and is nullified if the pope dies before publicizing the appointment (meaning Martin’s term as a secret cardinal would have ended in 1978). Nonetheless, Westen receives the claim with admiration rather than scrutiny. From there, Marro describes alleged Cold War contingency plans involving hidden apostolic administrators who would govern the Church if Rome were destroyed.

According to Marro, Martin claimed he “would have been the apostolic administrator for the United States in the event of a nuclear war.” Marro said he asked Martin “the obvious question: ‘But Malachi, what good did that do if they also hit New York or Washington? And he just he just kind of said to me rather elliptically, he says, “I would have had notice. I would not be in New York City.’ I didn’t push because I already sensed I was kind of on the ground where angels fear to tread.”

Early in the interview, Marro gives a vivid glimpse into the bricolage that shapes the spiritual worldview of Malachi Martin’s admirers. He recounts a casual lunch in which Martin questioned the validity of his 1970s confirmation simply because it used the post-conciliar rite, then urged a conditional reconfirmation and matter-of-factly declared that he would serve as the bishop using the older ritual. Marro accepts this without hesitation, folding it into his understanding of sacramental reality. The irony, of course, is that Martin was rejecting a rite promulgated by Paul VI — the same pope Marro claims secretly elevated Martin to the cardinalate! In Marro’s symbolic world, however, the pieces fit together as if nothing were amiss. (And he’s selling a book all about it.)

The interview becomes an act of symbolic construction. Marro blends dubious assertions, historical fact, rumor, spiritual language, and apocalyptic speculation into a cohesive narrative. Westen affirms and amplifies these claims, casting Martin as a prophetic figure whose warnings were ignored by a compromised hierarchy.

This is classic bricolage. The interview fuses disparate elements — Cold War tension, mystical warnings, ecclesiastical rumor — into a symbolic world where everything reinforces the same narrative: the Church is in crisis, and hidden forces shape its trajectory. Evidence — and consistency — become secondary to the mythology the bricoleur is weaving.

The Historical Roots: Apparition Culture and Cold War Prophecy

Understanding why bricolage flourishes among Catholics requires a longer historical lens. The nineteenth century saw a surge of Marian apparitions that shaped popular spirituality. These movements formed parallel interpretive structures alongside official Church teaching. Devotees often interpreted global events — wars, revolutions, plagues — through apparitional messages.

During the twentieth century, especially the Cold War era, prophetic interpretation intensified. Fátima was read through nuclear fear. Apocalyptic literature proliferated. Radio shows, newsletters, and early online forums circulated speculative timelines of chastisements and illuminations. Catholics accustomed to reading global events through prophetic scripts became receptive to interpretive bricolage when the internet emerged.

By the 1990s and early 2000s, Catholics encountered a new layer of meaning-making: the rise of self-styled prophecy experts, end-times promoters, Marian enthusiasts, and political commentators who combined devotional imagery with ideological narratives. This culture set the stage for the influencer economy that now dominates Catholic digital life.

Bricolage flourishes when institutional explanations lose credibility. After the Second Vatican Council, many Catholics experienced disorientation. Liturgical changes were rapid. Catechesis weakened. Cultural Catholicism eroded. The sexual revolution destabilized moral frameworks. A few decades later, the clergy abuse scandals shattered trust. Globalization and polarization intensified ideological divides.

In such moments, conspiracy frameworks offer emotional stability. They explain ambiguity through intentionality — someone must be behind these changes. They transform disorientation into drama — the faithful remnant must resist. They offer identity — to reject the narrative is to betray the community.

From a pastoral perspective, this is not merely an intellectual problem but a spiritual one. Fear distorts imagination. Suspicion replaces trust. The sacramental worldview — where God works through visible and invisible means — becomes overshadowed by a cosmic battle that often marginalizes Christ himself.

The Church’s challenge is compounded by deeper theological issues. Vatican II emphasized episcopal collegiality and the dignity of conscience while calling for engagement with the modern world. Yet catechesis often failed to convey the Council’s vision. Many Catholics were left with fragments — devotions without theology, tradition without context, obedience without understanding.

Conspiracy narratives fill that vacuum. They offer clear villains, linear explanations, and a sense of purity.

Pope Benedict XVI repeatedly stressed that faith must rest upon trust in Christ’s presence within the Church, not on efforts to construct a purified remnant. In Fides et Ratio, John Paul II insisted that truth requires unity of faith and reason — precisely the unity that bricolage disrupts. The Church’s intellectual tradition teaches that revelation is safeguarded by the Magisterium, not private interpreters. Yet many Catholics no longer perceive the Magisterium as a trustworthy guide.

This intellectual fragmentation, combined with digital amplification, created ideal conditions for modern Catholic conspiracism.

Pope Francis, Cardinal Fernández, and Pastoral Realism

Pope Francis understood the symbolic hunger driving many Catholics. He admired the popular piety and the private devotions of ordinary faithful Catholics. The 2024 pastoral reform of the norms governing alleged apparitions, written by Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, the prefect for the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, reflects this reality. The Church does not have the resources or capacity to issue a final determination on the supernaturality of every claimed apparition or miracle around the world. The new guidelines instead focus on the orthodoxy and spiritual fruits of each phenomenon, and proposes that local bishops immediately take note of alleged phenomena in their dioceses so that they can help accompany those who are moved by these events. The new guidelines urge pastors to guide the faithful, correct doctrinal errors, and redirect harmful movements while preserving genuine devotion.

The guidelines articulate a complementary approach. They emphasize that discernment must be patient, pastoral, and attuned to the fruits of the Spirit. Not every imaginative impulse is harmful. Many arise from legitimate longing for God’s nearness. But discernment must distinguish between devotion and delusion, between symbolic intuition and theological truth. Perhaps Veronica Lueken and her followers would have benefitted from the accompaniment and guidance of the local bishop, rather than an adversarial relationship. Regardless of the veracity of her visions, Lueken’s devotion and that of her followers seemed genuine. Might there have been a more fruitful way to work with them?

The problem isn’t going away anytime soon. The speed of digital bricolage outpaces pastoral response. Influencers generate meaning (and build international audiences) faster than bishops can clarify doctrine. Every time a charismatic Catholic influencer sends out a sensational new message, the Church is forced into a reactive stance against narratives already entrenched in thousands of minds.

How the Internet Breaks — and Heals — Symbolic Worlds

Despite its dangers, the internet remains a powerful tool for truth. It exposes conspiracy claims to primary sources. It reveals inconsistencies in popular narratives. It allows Catholics to discover Church teaching directly, rather than through intermediaries.

For those open to inquiry (and who know how and where to investigate), this can be transformative. The infiltration narratives I inherited as a teenager unraveled when confronted with actual documents. Vatican II became not a betrayal but a pastoral council responding to modernity. Papal governance became not a puppet show of hidden masters but a human system guided by the Holy Spirit. Grace proved more subtle than conspiracy logic.

For many, this encounter with real history represents a rediscovery of Catholicism’s depth.

The Church faces not only doctrinal confusion but an imaginative crisis. Many Catholics inhabit symbolic worlds shaped not by Scripture or sacrament but by charismatic influencers. These symbolic worlds are powerful, emotionally satisfying, and often impervious to evidence. They are also fundamentally at odds with the Catholic imagination, which sees the world as sacrament, not spectacle.

Bricolage will never disappear. It is part of the way human beings construct meaning. The task is not to eradicate it but to evangelize it: to reorient our imaginative energy toward Christ, to reshape symbolic thinking through sacramental theology, and to teach discernment rooted in charity rather than fear.

The Church’s mission in the digital age is not only to correct falsehoods but to heal the imagination — so that Catholics learn to see the world not as a stage for conspiracies, but as a sacrament of God’s presence. That is the real battle for the Catholic imagination.

 

Bibliography

Laycock, Joseph P. The Seer of Bayside: Veronica Lueken and the Struggle to Define Catholicism. Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

Recommended Reading

Thavis, John. The Vatican Prophecies: Investigating Supernatural Signs, Apparitions, and Miracles in the Modern Age. New York: Viking, 2015.

[1] Sadly, Crisis Magazine took this article down from their site in 2016 because their editorial leadership has taken a turn towards conspiracism and radical traditionalism in recent years, as I recounted in the article, “AA-1025: Was Vatican II masterminded by a Soviet infiltrator?”