A look back at 2025, Catholic Culture and me

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Dec 31, 2025

I wrote 18 columns for Catholic Culture in 2024 and assessed each of them in my final column of that year. This time around, I haven’t the space to assess all 40-plus Catholic Culture columns that I wrote for this site in 2025. But this being my last column of the year, I still want to take my annual stab at pundit self-accountability. So here are some of the highlights.

I picked the wrong year to brag about our success in holding the line against assisted suicide. In a January 18th column I took issue with a Lamp Magazine editor’s dour assessment of the fight against assisted suicide in 2025. He was right and I was wrong. Delaware, Illinois and New York all legalized assisted suicide this year. A couple thoughts about that. First, I stand by my view that we ought to be more than the documentarian of our own defeats. Second, there is no single public issue in my opinion where Catholic and conservative activism is more out-to-lunch than in the matter of assisted suicide. We bring to this fight nowhere near the same level of energy we bring to fighting, say, abortion or gender ideology. Assisted suicide is going to de-Christianize our society in ways that go beyond even the other evils we are fighting. See my sixth and seventh points here.

Two of my biggest hits were my February 1st column on the “emergent Catholic right” and my May 31st piece on “Why support for same-sex marriage is declining.” This is likely due to the attention both columns received from CatholicVote, the first being the subject of one of their emails and the second getting a favorable mention on LOOPcast. Josh Mercer said something on the February 3rd LOOPcast that nicely summarizes my own view: “The Catholic pro-labor Democrats, they lost their party in 1972. They just didn’t realize it until 2024.”

I published four columns in 2025 on Catholic-Jewish issues in the shadow of the Israel-Gaza War, on March 22nd, May 24th, June 14th and Oct. 24th. In the June 14th column I cited a case in Illinois in which a landlord attacked a young boy and his mother for being Palestinian. But I stated, incorrectly, that both had died. The child was murdered, the mother survived. I also stated that there was no pattern of anti-Palestinian violence in the U.S. akin to the uptick in violence that we have seen against Jews. In response to that column, a friend sent me news stories of almost a dozen recent cases of anti-Palestinian violence in the U.S.

My August 8th column claiming that among U.S. Catholics “defending the dropping of the bomb in World War II is just not a thing” may have been my biggest fail of the year. It is clear from the enormous reactions that I received that most Catholics do defend the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan. Still, I think there is a chicken-and-egg question. Is it “a thing” in the sense that Catholics go out of their way to defend the clearly immoral targeting of noncombatants in World War II? Or is it just that they react vociferously every August in response to the annual online Catholic beatdowns?

On September 30th and October 15th I wrote against the U.S. Bishops approving a “gay-washed” Bible. The writers at the Catholic Bible Talk blog agreed with me but the more persnickety ones accused me of dishonest attacks done in bad faith. This is because I only partially quoted Protestant Scripture scholar Robert A.J. Gagnon’s critique of the NRSVue and because they thought I was trying to launch some sort of sensationalist attack on the USCCB. But my September 30th column included a clarification regarding Gagnon, my arguments were respectfully engaged by the USCCB, and the bloggers deliberately ignored my October 15th column. The bloggers also misread Gagnon’s comments on their site as refuting me when, in fact, he was backing me up, albeit with clarifications of his own.

Indeed, I was the one who sent Gagnon to their site. And despite the issue being so hot as to land me on Steve Bannon’s War Room, I have actually turned down several invitations to keep writing about it. As I said before, I don’t know Koine Greek. I flagged the issue for a Catholic audience, yes, but it was never my intention to be the go-to guy for gay-washed Bibles. The experts in the field really ought to be the ones to step up here and work with the USCCB to correct the mistranslation of those two verses. Dr. Peter S. Williamson, a Scripture scholar at Sacred Heart Seminary, has expressed his agreement with me (scroll down to the comments) and I know from speaking with him that household names in the Catholic Bible world agree with me too. In fact, even my critics at Catholic Bible Talk agreed with me on the underlying issue of those two verses being translated in a way that obscured St. Paul’s condemnation of homosexual practice. So the preference of the bloggers to see motives that weren’t there, and to declare my October 15th column verboten, was a bit odd. I don’t think I was the one acting in bad faith here.

On October 31st I wrote of “Older ex-Catholics, younger ex-Protestants.” On November 8th I argued that the never-ending beatdown of Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, for defending Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes, was really a proxy fight for a coming war in which neoconservatives will try to take back the Republican Party from the populists who are now in power. I mention these two columns in the same breath because some people think the coming ideological war will take the form of a 2028 GOP presidential primary fight between Mike Pence and JD Vance. If so, that would not only be a fight between the first and second Trump Administrations or even a fight between internationalists and America Firsters. It would be a fight between two representative figures of the phenomenon I have described. Pence is an older ex-Catholic, Vance is a younger ex-Protestant.

On November 15th, in response to Mater Populi Fidelis I wrote that “I believe that the Virgin Mary is the Co-Redemptrix. And I think Rome was quite right not to define her as such.” In response to my column, one critic cited the document’s line that it is “always inappropriate” to use that title for the Virgin. But my view, which was recommended as “unique” by one of Catholic Culture’s emails to its readers, seems to be the position taken by the Vatican in its follow up press conference. That is, yes, it’s ok to believe that. But no, it’s not going to be official.

Finally, I was wrong on December 20th to say that no Catholic outlet had acknowledged the death of the great Dave Carlin. The Catholic Thing did note it here. I am told that Catholic Answers will soon have something on him too.

Merry Christmas, Catholic Culture readers. And thank you for reading!