This essay was written late on Election Day. Just as I was about to post it—within 30+ minutes of the polls closing—Zohran Mamdani was declared the Mayor-elect. The speed of the decision was more shocking than the result. I had expected he would likely win. I did not expect the outcome would not even be […]

Leo XIV: A Pontificate On Ice

Maureen Mullarkey

October 7, 2025

It did not take long for this shiny new pontificate to lose its lustre. And its credibility. The spectacle of Pope Leo granting solemn blessing to a block of glacial ice was the point of no return for papal dignity. There is no way to unsee what the world saw at “Raising Hope for Climate […]

Charlie Kirk: A Line Crossed

Maureen Mullarkey

September 16, 2025

We woke up last Thursday in a different country from the one we knew the morning before. A line had been crossed, one that we hardly realized was there. And if we did, we tried not to see it. Now there is no looking away. Charlie Kirk’s murder is, indeed, a turning point. But toward […]

Mixed Race

Maureen Mullarkey

August 10, 2025

“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” If George Orwell had seen ahead to today’s scramble to make black—but not white—a proper noun when referring to racial groups, he might have cited capitalization, too, as a corruptor of thought. Jennifer Harvey, evangelist for the anti-racist gospel of Ibram X Kendi, never capitalizes white […]

The Rainbow, LBGTQ Catechesis, & Queering the City

Maureen Mullarkey

July 22, 2025

Graphic design is a silent but powerful language. Instantaneously recognized, a single graphic is easily digestible. It serves as a branding device for more than your afternoon cuppa at Starbucks or a Ralph Lauren sport shirt. Applied to an ideology and a movement, it simplifies everything it stands for. It leapfrogs over complexities, contradictions, and […]

Gallows Observance in the Papal States

Maureen Mullarkey

July 8, 2025

Meet Giovanni Battista Bugatti, official executioner for the Papal States from 1796 until he retired, with a papal pension, in 1864. Nicknamed Mastro Titta—a corruption of the Latin for “master of justice”—he was the longest serving and storied executioner under papal authority. He delivered justice 516 times over the years he held the job. “With […]