Due to “unforeseen circumstances,” an event scheduled for later this month in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee featuring the controversial celebrity exorcist Fr. Chad Ripperger was forced to change venues, from a retreat center run by the Catholic Schoenstatt movement to...
It’s pretty clear that the claim that Joe Biden has joined the Freemasons is fake news. This is a non-story that has thrown a lot of fuel on the preconceptions of Catholics, conspiracy theorists, and (most especially) Catholic conspiracy theorists....
Last month I traveled to Baltimore to cover the USCCB’s Fall Plenary Assembly. There were some worthwhile speeches and discussions at the meeting, as well as some interesting results in a couple of elections for new committee chairmen. For an...
Note: Jimmy Akin recently did an episode of his “Mysterious World” podcast on a short book that had a significant impact on my life. My understanding of this book changed as I matured, and I learned a significant lesson about...
Late Wednesday night, I saw a post on X (formerly Twitter) that had me scratching my head. I happened to see a tweet from the account of the infamous media outlet Church Militant, which announced it would be ending its...
Since the pandemic and the election I’ve seen an increase in conspiracy theories being spread both online and in person. When I hear a conspiracy theory, my gut says, “that’s not right” or “this is crazy” but I often don’t...
The public has been advised that an outfit named the Catholic Identity Conference is organizing a press conference on October 1 in a DoubleTree Hotel ballroom in Pittsburgh that will unveil “articles of resistance against the Vatican and the Pontificate...
You may have noticed that recently my article output has been a bit more sporadic than usual. There’s a reason for this, although it’s somewhat embarrassing to admit. For the last month or so, I have been neck-deep in the...
One morning, back in March of 2016, checking up on the news of the day, I came across a headline from the website of the Daily Express (an outlet whose alleged “journalism” has been discussed on this website once before),...
For decades in certain traditionalist Catholic circles, conspiracy theories have been circulated claiming (among other things) that Pope St. Paul VI and other prominent bishops at the time of Vatican II were secret Freemasons. Paranoia about Freemasons trying to take...
In the first half of this essay, I explained the importance of engaging in dialogue with conspiracy theorists [1]. Thinkers such as Romano Guardini can provide us with the points of congruence that are needed for such dialogue; in particular,...
During his Wednesday audience of March 16, 2022, Pope Francis commented that for all our talk of progress, “our imagination appears increasingly concentrated on the representation of a final catastrophe that will extinguish us…an eventual nuclear war… it seems that...
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