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All Catholic commentary from June 2025
Now available: Liturgical year ebook for Ordinary Time after Easter
We have just released the fifth volume in the 2024-2025 Liturgical Year series of ebooks. Volume five covers the first half of the long stretch of Ordinary Time between the close of the Easter Season on Pentecost and the beginning of Advent. Like all CatholicCulture.org ebooks, this volume is downloadable free of charge.
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Small is Beautiful
War-related PTSD has become depressingly common. As we carefully reserve judgment subject to the facts, in many cases, a significant cause of PTSD is likely a gnawing sense of personal responsibility for unjust killings in war that violate the Fifth Commandment.
The Ritual portrays exorcism accurately, but is stuck in genre cliches
The new exorcism film The Ritual, starring Al Pacino and Dan Stevens, is based on the famous 1928 exorcism of Emma Schmidt, which also partially inspired The Exorcist. The Ritual is touted as more realistic and meticulously researched than most exorcism films, and it avoids many of the worst pitfalls of exorcism movies. However, the film is still sensationalistic, and flattens interesting real-life details to fit the genre’s cliches.
Occult subversion of traditional Catholicism
A prominent traditionalist Catholic press has published a book advocating the practice of "Hermetic magic", equating Catholic spiritual practices with magic words and talismans. More generally, among some traditionalist intellectuals there is an increasing interest in the occult, magic, and esoteric spiritual traditions. This is rooted in a philosophy called perennialism, which holds that the various great world religions have passed down the same essential wisdom from a single ancient source.
Should there be “performances” in Church?
A church is not one of the seven sacraments; it is not a ritual instituted by Christ to give grace. But it is both the normal locus for these sacraments, and is itself sacramental in the sense of an outward sign—the extraordinary housing and atmosphere, so to speak—within which the grace of Christ is intended to be communicated.
Understanding Pope Leo, bit by bit
Pope Leo does not need to draw the obvious inference: Insofar as Amoris Laetitia allowed for admitting divorced and remarried Catholics to Communion, it is an aberration.
What Musk vs. Trump means for Catholics and for Vance
Vance hasn’t spoken a word about the Musk/Trump split as I write this column. But you know it’s coming. So let’s get out ahead of it and have that conversation now.
St. John Henry Newman—The Indwelling Spirit
"The Comforter who has come instead of Christ, must have vouchsafed to come in the same sense in which Christ came... by a real and personal visitation."
Forks in the Road
The birthday of the Church fulfills one of the loveliest phrases in Revelation: “Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created, and you shall renew the face of the earth.” (Psalm 104)
197—Same-Sex Attraction and Conversion w/ Andrew Comiskey & Marco Casanova
Today’s guests both have a background with same-sex attraction, and yet are each now married with children. Andrew Comiskey and Marco Casanova run Desert Stream and Living Waters Ministries, which for decades have offered help to Christians seeking healing from sexual disorders (including but not limited to SSA). This conversation offers solid, spiritually sound, experience-based answers to some disputed questions about how the Church should be pastoring those with same-sex attraction.
Will this be an ‘ordinary’ pontificate?
Maybe now we should be prepared for an “ordinary” pontificate. The trouble is, not many of us are old enough to know what that means.
St. Francis: Spinning, off balance, but onto a new path
If we must twirl around and even fall down at times, so be it. But let us at least learn the one thing needful—that is, to pray our way through the spin, listening only for the Master’s voice even in our own dizziness. For only at Christ’s command, through whatever messenger He sends, will we end up facing the way we are to go.
5.12 St. Hildegard of Bingen: Multimedia Visionary
St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was a visionary, teacher, Abbess, composer, theologian, painter, and the first woman in history to be given papal approval to preach in public. Four centuries before the emergence of the “Renaissance Man,” there was Hildegard of Bingen. Usually known mostly for her music (and rightfully so) there is so much more to this medieval mystic.
The under-the-radar growth of Catholic commitment
Most Americans think the Catholic faith is losing public influence, and no wonder. The overall statistics look grim. But they aren’t noticing the emergence of what then-Cardinal Ratzinger famously termed a “creative minority” of dedicated faithful Catholics.
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