I’m sure you, like me, have been reading all of the conclave coverage and enjoying the parade of writers finding new ways to say “look I have no idea what do you want from me”. I personally rented Conclave yesterday but I had to stop it thirty minutes from the end because it was my bedtime so I’ll finish it tonight; no spoilers, although I am excited to see Cardinal Tedesco gaining momentum and look forward to the movie ending with him as Pope restoring the traditional Latin Mass.
Over the five-plus years of G.O.T.H.S., I have written many pieces about the papacy, and am re-sharing them here so that we can all have a fun sexy time on the Internet together.
American Catholics Celebrate Five Years of Ignoring Laudato Si'
“When nature is viewed solely as a source of profit and gain, this has serious consequences for society. This vision of “might is right” has engnedered immense inequality, injustice and acts of violence against the majority of humanity.”
Antipopes, Ranked!
On Thanksgiving day, Pope Francis published a New York Times op-ed titled “A Crisis Reveals What Is In Our Hearts”, reflecting on the COVID pandemic and the opportunity it presented for the global community to reflect on their collective responsibilities to each other. In particular, lines like “Looking to the common good is much more than the sum of wh…
I Have Decided to Become a Doctor of the Church
I'm about to start the third year of the G.O.T.H.S. project, and one of the challenges that I like to give myself is to make sure that I'm pushing the project in new and interesting directions, and thinking about things that other outlets might not be thinking about. For example, I don't want to do a deep dive on a subject like "the history of
Ordinary Timequake
"My great war buddy Bernard V. O'Hare, now deceased, lost his faith as a Roman Catholic during World War Two. I didn't like that. I thought that was too much to lose."
Catholicism: Two and a Half Stars
Hi everyone. This is an essay about Catholicism and also a TV show I like. I don't know what to do with it; it was part of a larger book of essays I was working on and eventually scrapped because most of it was, as it turns out, not very good. This one turned out okay so on a whim I’m just going to put it here. It contains significant spoilers for a com…
R.I.P. Pope Benedict XVI, author of 2019 "Porno on Airplanes" letter
In the early 2010s, I was starting out in my career and working in this big corporate office in Los Angeles; I was a low-level sales grunt, but I was loud (in an annoying way) and very outgoing (also in an annoying way) so a lot of people in the office knew who I was, and there are two days I remember specifically when world-historical events happened a…
Giving Bad People Good Ideas
"I never expected much of the bishops. In all history, popes and bishops and abbots seem to have been blind and power-loving and greedy. I never expected leadership from them. It is the saints that keep appearing all through history who keep things going."
Aim For the Face
A full decade before the Spotlight reports came out, Chicago had its own citywide clergy sex abuse scandal; it’s the only time I’ve been disappointed that we beat Boston to something. This was in the fall of 1991, and the archbishop, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, had fucked everything up. He had reassigned priests he shouldn’t have reassigned, and he had i…
John Needs to Stop
On February 4th, John L. Allen Jr. of Crux published “Pope Francis has two ‘Downton Abbey’ moments of unpredictability,” which opened with this extended metaphor:
An interview with the two to eleven percent of American Catholics who have been responding "I've never heard of Pope Francis" to Pew Research for eleven years
Pew Research has just published their most recent update to their ongoing survey of American Catholics, their attitudes on Catholic teaching, and their views of Pope Francis; this most recent update was fielded in February and reached about 12,700 respondents.
I Want the Buildings
By now, you're well aware that on May 28, the Pope had to apologize for an earlier remark where he said that seminaries were getting a little too faggy; golly, that's a sentence. As reported by Reuters:
Guys, Where Are We?
Every Catholic publication has to run an occasional pop-culture piece to keep the lights on, I get it. Some very recent examples: First Things wrote about Taylor Swift. America wrote about Avatar: The Last Airbender. Word on Fire has a piece about The Giver
Parable of the Talent Show
“Bad news, everyone,” [REDACTED 1] said at the Monday meeting. “The Catholic church is out of money and is going to go under. There have been too many lawsuits and too many settlements, and we just don't have the money to be a church anymore.”
idiot proof
Pope Francis published his third encyclical, Dilexit Nos, in late 2024. He very much sees a continuous theological line through 2015's Laudato Si’ (wrote about that one a while ago), 2020's Fratelli Tutti (wrote about that one a while ago a few times
Wake Up! Go! Go! Forward!
Pope Francis, the 265th successor of Saint Peter and lead artist on the very confusing but absolutely real 2015 combination prog rock/spoken word album Wake Up! that Pitchfork gave a 5.0, died early on April 21st. Official reports confirm a stroke as the cause of death, apparently eliminating JD Vance as a suspect.