Weekly Summary: 1/3/2026
The week in review, from the perspective of a veteran Catholic journalist
My big news this week was the announcement, released on New Year’s Eve, that I am retiring from my post as editor of Catholic World News. After 30+ years on the job, I’m taking a break from the day-to-day news business. What that means, as a practical matter, is that I’ll have much more time to write on other topics— and readers should notice the difference immediately here on Substack.
In other new posts this past week:
• My friends at Thomas More College invited me to speak about my novel, Ghost Runner: what it’s about, why I wrote it, and how it made its way into print. This past week they posted a video of my presentation.
• The seasoned AP reporter at the Vatican noticed that by celebrating the Morning Mass of Christmas— after having been up late celebrating the Midnight Mass— Pope Leo restored a tradition that lapsed. Good point. But I pointed out that he’d already restored another lapsed tradition, because for the last three years of his pontificate, Pope Francis hadn’t celebrated Mass in public at all! He had concelebrated (itself unprecedented for a Roman Pontiff), but never been principal celebrant.
• And speaking of a priest’s duty to celebrate Mass, a woman claiming to have been ordained as a Catholic priest showed no particular interest in that sort of work. It’s remarkable, I observed, that even a sympathetic reporter can take it seriously, when someone who claims to be a Catholic priest is ordained in a non-Catholic church.
• If conspiracy theories are circulating faster than ever these days, particularly among young Americans, I wondered whether those young folks are more apt to believe that things are not what they seem to be, because they’ve so often been told things that they learned were untrue. Is it disturbing that they latch onto conspiracy theories? It would be even more disturbing, I argued, “if they were content to accept the nonsensical explanations they’ve been given, just to go with the flow.”
• In my weekly exploration of just-war theory, I plunged into the discussion of nuclear war. In my first approach the issue, I ask whether there could ever be a rational— never mind moral— reason for an all-out nuclear strike; I think not. That discussion will continue next week, with the focus on whether the use of nukes could ever be morally justifiable.
• On our HomeFront podcast, Leila and I talked about the daycare-fraud scandal in Minnesota, broadening the scope of our conversation to point out that the entire daycare industry is ripe of fraudulent exploitation. It would be surprising if we don’t uncover more scandals. But it would be surprising if the legacy media led the investigation, because— as we also discuss— the liberal bias of the media has long been evidence in the “strange new respect” that is accorded to conservatives who break with their old allies and lean toward the Left.
• Finally I commented on the unfortunate news that a Vatican official— the master of ceremonies for papal liturgies— has been dismissed after a hot-mic indiscretion. He used a derogatory term for homosexuals, and suggested that homosexual wield excessive influence around the Vatican. And so he was fired— which tends to confirm what he said. Then again, he was not the first Vatican official to complain about homosexual influence, nor the first to use that crude language. Can you name the prominent Vatican official who said roughly the same thing— and retained his position?
