By Donna Provencher I mulled a few hours too long about an uncomfortable Facebook message I got a few days ago, doing that thing where you read the message in thumbnail but don’t click into the box to send the read receipt that starts the time clock ticking on your response. (Maybe it’s my inner tournament chess player: To this day, I linger after a move before taking my fingers off the piece because once you do, no backsies.) Someone... Read more
I recently saw an article that was published and became very popular last summer, which proclaimed that people ought to “tend to their own monsters,” convert their own hearts and care for their own families rather than taking to the street to protest racism and white supremacy. The article also said that people who are more left-leaning should “worry about Antifa” rather than racism; that white supremacy is only for non-racist conservative-leaning people to fight. It’s not that I don’t see where the author was... Read more
Imagine her terror. Things were bad enough before. She came to Bethlehem in the worst of circumstances and gave birth, destitute, in the stable. She went to the temple with her baby, longing for consolation, and received a prophecy of more suffering. Now, her husband wakes her in the middle of the night. He tells her the angel– that beautiful messenger who announced the baby’s coming and told him not to be afraid– that angel has returned. But this time,... Read more
 [This account was written for me by a Brooke Alker Gregory. I am sharing it with her permission, as a reminder to all of us in the Apostolic Churches of how painful and traumatic spiritual abuse by a confessor can be to a soul, and how important it is to speak out and believe survivors.– Mary Pezzulo] “I hate silence when it is time to speak.” That was my patron saint’s only recorded reply when she was beaten for her iconodule... Read more
(Note: most Seven Joys devotions skip over the Visitation and count the Nativity of Christ as the second joy. The Franciscans, in their Franciscan Crown devotion, count the Visitation as the Second Joy and combine the Assumption and Crowning of Mary as one event for the seventh. The Visitation has always been one of my favorite Mysteries and I wouldn’t dare skip it over.) The angel departed from Miriam, and she went in haste into the hill country, to visit Elizabeth.... Read more
Gobble Gobble, everyone! It’s time to talk turkey with some entertaining tips from the Marchioness of Manners, Mary Pezzulo! First of all, a word about the recipes I keep seeing from Buzzfeed. Buzzfeed has been filling my facebook news feed with those irritating fast-motion recipe demonstrations for weeks now, and most of them seem to involve adding processed cheese, bacon and jalapeño peppers to things that don’t require them: things like cornbread, corn pudding and biscuits. It is my opinion that the... Read more
Donna Provencher, one of the women who reported being used sexually and spiritually abused by Jonathan Ryan Weyer last weekend, has posted the following publicly on her Facebook: The Diocese of Lafayette in Indiana HR lady called me and told me Jonathan is “under investigation” but may or may not be removed and “this is the first she’s hearing of it.” She also said it was a personnel issue and there would be no way to notify the victims or the public of... Read more
Hi everyone, This is just your periodic reminder that Steel Magnificat is about 90% donor-supported, which is a fancy way of saying that Mary and Michael’s income, apart from begging for help from already-strapped relatives, is almost entirely tips from gruntled* readers. And I do make it my goal to keep you guys gruntled. I am the primary writer, and I do my best to keep things in here evenly balanced between art, religious meditations and social justice preaching with the occasional... Read more
She must have been exhausted. Eight days after giving birth unexpectedly, in a stable, in the cold of a desert winter night, after a long journey in abject poverty, the Law demands she get up and carry that baby to the temple. Mary and Joseph are obedient to the Law. They go. Somehow, they buy two turtledoves to take as their poor offering. They stumble to the temple, exhausted, destitute, knowing no one in a strange city, to fulfill the... Read more
I have seen many men– men I respect deeply and believe are totally sincere– reacting to the testimonies I posted last night with horror and genuine bemusement. Horror that this happened, and bemusement at Donna’s words: “much like how every man knows hundreds of women who have been sexually used, abused, exploited, manipulated, harassed, or assaulted, but none of them seems to know anyone who has done it.” These men have been genuinely concerned by this statement. They want to... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In