Bishop Robber Barren: Thank you for meeting with me, Your Hooliganness. I am honored to be sitting in the same place here in your private Vatican chambers where the great one recently sat.

Pope Frantic: It’s-a great to see you again, Robber! The great one—you mean-a Viganò?

The son of the warlock who spread his talons and cast a spell from his satanic podium last Thursday.

On the Feast of the Assumption, a hard-left theater-of-the-absurd brochure called “the Atlantic magazine” published an instant classic in anti-Catholic ignorance. The Holy Rosary, the Atlantic informed its readers, is “extremist.” The Atlantic further compared the Holy Rosary to AR-15s. In the original graphic for the piece, the Rosary was depicted as comprising, not beads, but bullet holes.

Catholic churches in Canada burned last summer. One arson after another turned much of Canada’s Catholic heritage into ash and smoke. Canadian politicians did nothing to stop the hate crimes. Some among the Canadian hard-left “elite” cheered it all on. The American media voiced its sympathy… with the arsonists.

THE GAY SCIENCE is the book by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche containing Nietzsche’s infamous declaration that “God is dead.” This is bad enough, but it is actually much worse than it seems. For Nietzsche, the death of God was merely an afterthought. What Nietzsche portends in The Gay Science, and in much of his work overall, is the obliteration of all distinction between right and wrong. God’s death follows from this—for Nietzsche—much bigger and more important transgression. Nietzsche didn’t believe in God, so His “death” was anticlimactic. It was the ruination of morals that Nietzsche was really after.

“April is the cruellest month.” So sang American poet T.S. Eliot in “The Waste Land.” But he spoke too soon.

For the cruelest month is now the one just ending. In June, the fakery of compassion de-disguises and comes out florid as rainbow-colored pride. People suffering from temptations and mental illness—people who crave the horror of sodomy or who think that the body they were born with should be carved up and re-sexed—are held up by the “compassionate” among us as the vanguard of a new age. It is the cruelest display I have ever seen. Gay pride, lesbian pride, transgender pride, pedophile pride, and the pride of a thousand other deviancies besides these—this is the animal in man, but said by the “enlightened” to be the highest order of the human race.

My friend Will Goodman’s name was in the news in late March. Goodman was one of nine people charged on Wednesday, March 30 in Washington, DC, with violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act during a pro-life rescue mission on October 22, 2020. Will and his companions entered the notorious DC Washington Surgi-Clinic that day and tried stopping the abortionist there, Dr. Cesare Santangelo, from carrying out his routine and grisly business of dismembering children for money.

I remember reading the chapter in the wildly popular book Freakonomics years ago about abortion and crime. According to studies cited in Freakonomics, an increase in abortion rate correlates with a decrease in crime rates over time.

“Yes, of course,” I thought. “If one kills unborn children, then they most certainly cannot grow up to be criminals. They also cannot grow up to be mothers and fathers, nurses, teachers, friends, and grandparents.” The Freakonomics logic makes perfect sense, in other words. But only when seen through the Malthusian lens of the dismal science. Life is terrible if you’re poor—or so the probably misguided view of economics’ underpinnings goes—so the best course of action is just to spare as many as possible from the nightmarish fate of being born.

Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun’s arrest by the Chinese Communist Party puppets in Hong Kong nails one more scalp to the Communist Wall of Religious Persecution. Communists (and their fellow travelers worldwide) hate religion. Communists hate God. This is nothing new, and it will never change. Even before Cardinal Zen was thrown into a Communist dungeon in what was once one of the most vibrant and Catholic-friendly cities in East Asia, Communists have been gunning for anyone who believes in a higher power than the Party.

Veteran Hollywood actor and practicing Catholic Mark Wahlberg’s new movie, “Father Stu,” has been garnering a great deal of press. The film is about a hard-drinking, hard-living man who has a change of heart, gets right with God, and goes on to do good work in his community and beyond.

Now, making a movie about a faith-filled Catholic priest is, in theory, a wonderful thing to do. Regardless of its cinematic merits, or lack thereof, the fact that “Father Stu” was funded by the lead actor himself, Mark Wahlberg, indicates that Wahlberg wanted to convey a Catholic message to as wide an audience as possible. A big-ticket movie potentially reaches hundreds of millions, even billions of people worldwide. By portraying a Catholic priest in (what Wahlberg must have thought, at least, to be) a positive light, Wahlberg was surely trying to proselytize at least as much as he was just trying to make a movie. “Father Stu,” therefore, can be read as an act of outreach, a way of spreading the Gospel in a world often hostile to Jesus and His Church.