I tried to go to Mass. I’ve failed at this several times since Christmas. The panic attacks came back just as the Christmas season ended. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about that. A little over a year ago, I wasn’t sure whether I believed in God anymore at all. Now I’m pretty certain that I do. That is not special. The demon in today’s gospel believed in God, and knew exactly who Jesus was. His theology was... Read more
Hidey ho, everyone! It’s Mary Pezzulo, the Marchioness of Manners, with another informative how-to article! Today’s topic is, how to be a Catholic Traditionalist for fun and profit. You, too, can be a Catholic Traditionalist, and in only seven easy steps! Step One: think of the worst human rights abuse you can possibly imagine. No, worse than whatever you’re thinking right now. No, even worse. Race-based chattel slavery. Beating a toddler. Child marriage and spousal rape. Massacring indigenous people. Pogroms. Torturing... Read more
We went to Robinson in Serendipity. In the past several months, I have learned much more than I ever wanted to about jeans. Back in the 90s when I was a child, there was one type of jeans: thick, blocky, utilitarian garments you wore with plaid flannel to show you didn’t care about anyone or anything. It’s not so in the present day. Nowadays, jeans are a status symbol and they come in more styles, cuts and waists than... Read more
image via Pixabay [Note: a version of this post originally appeared in 2019, but the old links to my two-page posts aren’t working properly, so I’m posting a revised version in one page here.] We were Apparition People. We weren’t just ordinary Catholics who occasionally thought about apparitions. Most every Catholic I knew was interested in apparitions; everybody had a bottle of Lourdes water somewhere. Everyone made their children watch those disturbing CCC videos about Lourdes and Fatima. But my household... Read more
I’ve been thinking about conservatism today. It started when I saw a tweet from Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation: “Governor DeSantis has an extremely bright future in the conservative movement. While we all rally around our movement’s leader—President Trump—we also know that the future of conservative policies will be in how effectively we implement Trumpian conservatism. There is no one, other than President Trump himself, who has done more in that regard than Gov. DeSantis, so I... Read more
I hope I am never so old that I don’t love the snow. Last year we barely had any snow at all, and this year has still been far too muddy. Christmas and New Years were a gray mess. The past ten days were promising: a dusting here, a dusting there, and because it was so cold, it piled up. I went for walks in my neighborhood and felt the ice crunch under my feet. And on Thursday night, it... Read more
[I wrote this short story in 2017, but a lot of the links to the second page in my old two-page posts are broken now, so I’m publishing a revised one-page version here. All persons trying to find a moral in it will be drug out into space and zapped. ] “Are we going to Polaris?” asked the old woman across the aisle. Why anyone would want to get off the bus on Polaris Parkway, I didn’t know. There’s not... Read more
Recently, Pope Francis gave an opinion about hell. It was a hopeful opinion, very mildly put: “This isn’t dogma, just my thought: I like to think of hell as being empty. I hope it is.” Catholics all over social media went bananas. I read “hell is empty” a thousand times in the space of an hour, but I never saw anybody fill in the rest of the Shakespeare quote “and all the devils are here!” because prissy traditional Catholics aren’t... Read more
I don’t think there’s any stopping Donald Trump from getting the Republican nomination. I’ve been wrong before, but I’m beginning to think that’s true. I can’t even count the times I’ve protested that I hate politics, I just happened to gain notoriety back in 2016 as a Patheos Catholic blogger who denounced Trump, thinking it would all be over by the second week of November. I wasn’t wrong to denounce him. I was wrong that he’d disappear. My fellow... Read more
I don’t know how to tell you that it’s wrong to kill children. If you can’t understand that children in danger have to be rescued, whether they’re supposed to be where they are or not, I think you are beyond hope. I would like to think that people who call themselves “pro-life” would understand this completely, but we all know this is not the case. This is just to say that two children and an adult woman drowned in... Read more
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