Topics
From the NOR Dossiers
New Oxford Notebook by Pieter Vree
A Rogue Receives a Red Hat
January-February 2025Radcliffe is a walking cliché who parrots all the standard liberal dogmas like women’s ordination, gays in the priesthood, and Communion for remarried Catholics.
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Indiff’rent Strokes
November 2024In blurting out his opinion of the supposedly wonderful and God-gifted diversity of religions in a slapdash manner, Francis does great injustice to the Catholic religion.
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A Machiavellian on the Throne of Peter?
September 2024Francis’s soundbite approach to theology has been a disaster for the Church. But worse have been the machinations from which the dissembling serves to distract us.
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Are We Weimar?
June 2024Abortion rates are sky high. Birth rates are at rock bottom. Americans are rejecting parenthood on a scale not seen before. What does this mean for our nation's future?
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Was Pope Benedict XVI Holding Back the Destroying Flood?
May 2024Key to the great apostasy is the liturgy. “The way we treat the liturgy,” Benedict said, “determines the destiny of the faith and the Church.”
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Fiducia Supplicans: A Fine Mess
April 2024The Catholic Church is supposed to speak in one voice, down the ages, in season and out. Now she doesn’t even speak in one voice to her own people!
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Transanity Is Taking Over. How Will the Church Respond?
January-February 2024Gender ideologues are at work in the Church -- no surprise. That they occupy positions of power and speak with authority is, however, cause for great concern.
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...And Justice for Some
November 2023Catholic monuments, Catholic buildings, and Catholics themselves will continue to be attacked but the attackers have little to fear from the law.
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The Latest Episode of the Francis Follies
October 2023We resist the urge to parse every questionable utterance that issues from the Pope’s mouth because the exercise is exhausting and not a little discouraging.
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The Woke Ethic & the Spirit of Protestantism
September 2023The woke project, like much of Protestantism, is led by a self-selected group of “the Elect” who see themselves as arbiters of excellence in moral matters.
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A Terrible Forgetting
June 2023The greatest factors for maximizing religious commitment seem to be poverty and persecution, and for minimizing religious commitment: wealth and security.
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Our Future Foretold
April 2023Twice as many Hispanic Catholics do not attend Mass after the pandemic as before. Weren’t they the ones who were supposed to revive American Catholicism?
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Preaching Christ Customized
January-February 2023To the list of things Jesus could have been but wasn’t, there is now one more to add: A new movement would recast Our Lord as a transgender woman.
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The Pontifical Academy for What?
December 2022The Academy for Life’s horizons are so broad that it seems to have lost sight of its mission to promote and defend the Church’s pro-life teachings.
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Is America Under Divine Interdict?
October 2022John Paul II wrote of political superpowers that all-consuming pursuit of profit and power are “forms of modern imperialism” and “real forms of idolatry.”
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Neocon Hubris & the Battle for Ukraine
September 2022Pat Buchanan warned in 1999 about expanding NATO to include Ukraine: “By moving NATO onto Russia’s front porch, we have scheduled a 21st-century confrontation.”
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The Great Deformer
July-August 2022When Pope Francis told millions at the 2013 World Youth Day to "make a mess," he was also describing the modus operandi of his papacy.
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A Synod on What?
April 2022How can the Synod on Synodality be a rebalancing of ecclesial powers? It is, after all, the brainchild of the most powerful of ecclesial figures.
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A Time of Reckoning
January-February 2022The priestly sex-abuse scandal will bring the Church in America to the same sad state as her counterpart in France: discredited and depopulated, a shell of her former self.
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Traditionis Custodes: Taking a Bulldozer to an Anthill
October 2021There are no protagonists in the latest liturgical drama, only antagonists. Nobody comes out clean, neither traditionalists nor Pope Francis.
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Some Dare Call It Schism
July-August 2021The German Church has launched a program of reforms with elements that, if approved by the bishops’ conference, would contradict longstanding Catholic teaching.
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Dispatch from the Dead Letter Office
May 2021The McCarrick report is a historical accounting that doesn’t hold anyone accountable, and it will have no practical consequences.
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Imbergoglios or Standard Franciscan Procedure?
March 2021Pope Francis is entitled to his opinions, and he’s not shy about sharing them in front of microphones. But his opinions don’t equate to magisterial pronunciations.
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Love on Trial
December 2020The Episcopal Church contorts its theology to conform to the broader culture, but the culture has no real use for a Christianity remade in its image.
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Religious Persecution Is Rising. Do Catholics Care?
November 2020Our struggles in the U.S. are a far cry from the hard persecution that our coreligionists elsewhere in the world face on a routine basis.
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The Fires This Time
October 2020July was a cruel month for attacks on Catholic churches. But the mother of them all wasn’t an act of destruction; it was an act of desecration, a hostile takeover of a former Catholic cathedral.
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Will the Coronavirus Lockdowns Usher in a Mustard-Seed Church?
September 2020The willful suppression of the sacraments by Catholic leaders could portend the diminution of the Church in both numbers and influence.
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Spendthrift Shepherds & Pervert Priests: Where Are They Now?
June 2020Here we follow-up on some disgraced prelates and their inner circles who did the dirty work of covering fraudulent, criminal behavior.
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A Deficit of Heroes
May 2020We must maintain an emotional distance even from those who project an aura of holiness. Often, God’s holy ones are known only to Him.
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“Love” Conquers All
April 2020What a crazy, mixed-up world we live in where even polygamists claim their lifestyles are part of their 'identity' and who they were created to be.
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Million-Dollar Bishops
March 2020It’s no coincidence that financial corruption walks hand in hand with sexual immorality. Where you find one, you’ll often find the other.
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The Vatican’s Filthy Lucre
January-February 2020Peter’s Pence doesn’t solicit funds for financial speculation that fattens the Vatican’s investment portfolios; the fund shouldn’t be used that way.
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A Peek into Papal Priorities
December 2019Here’s your Pope: When pagan idols are removed from a sacred space, he apologizes; when his belief in the divinity of Christ is questioned, he’s silent.
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A “Deeper Understanding” of the Priesthood?
November 2019No temporal or civilizational events can override the sacramental necessity of the Catholic priesthood’s being reserved to men.
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You Can Say That?
September 2019China could well be poised to inherit the earth that the U.S. once commanded — especially if our comparative student bodies are any indication.
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Father Figuring
July-August 2019The Catholic Church's sex-abuse problem is caused by predators who wear clerical collars and who are protected by a clericalist culture.
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The Myth of Meritocracy
June 2019A meritocracy fits America’s sense of itself as free from the class-based social structures that defined the European countries from which our predecessors fled.
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Wuerl, the Flesh & the Devil
March 2019The whole Wuerl saga goes to show — yet again — that many of the leaders of the Church aren’t so much interested in professing the truth as they are in protecting their prestige.
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An Outcast Among Organization Men
December 2018Few are the churchmen who are willing to speak publicly about the root cause of the sex-abuse crisis: the scourge of homosexuality in the priesthood.
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Ecce Papa Franciscus!
November 2018The Pope convened a summit for February 2019 with the presidents of all bishops’ conferences to discuss "protection of minors."
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At Last, a Reckoning?
October 2018Archbishop Viganò has cracked open the Vatican cone of silence and exposed what might be a Church-wide cover-up of McCarrick’s crimes.
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Uncle Ted’s Long Shadow
Apart from the possible connection to Francis’s old pal McCarrick, McElroy is basically a Francis clone. He’s parroted the Pope’s pet projects at nearly every turn.
VIEW ARTICLE"Catholicism's Intellectual Prizefighter!"
- Karl Keating
