First, I’d like to send a huge thank you to everyone who donated in my Spring funder. I especially appreciated all the kind and often funny and very encouraging notes. Quite a lot of it was extremely timely. There can be a kind of morally deadening effect that comes with the kind of thing we read and write about for this work, and when you’re living by yourself that effect can sometimes spread and take root. Knowing there are people out there listening, who tell me they’re using this work as a jumping off point to learn and grow in the Faith is pretty much the only thing that still prompts me to keep doing it. There are easier, less soul-crushing ways to make a living writing, but when I see someone write, “Your articles are what started me reading and learning, and now I’m getting out of the Matrix,” that’s what makes it worthwhile.

So, prayers continue and we carry on.

~

Now, I don’t follow American news much, and I’m really not that hip to all the commentators. I’ve seen here and there good Catholics talking about Glenn Beck in vaguely negative terms. I don’t know the details, but apparently there are some inadequacies in his understanding of religious things? Or something? But I understand he’s still a very popular political conservative figure in US politics, and my friend Mike Matt, editor of The Remnant newspaper, had a conversation with him the other day.

I thought it was interesting because it was Mike, for a change talking to someone who wasn’t on the inside. Explaining quite effectively to a non-Catholic audience exactly what it means to the Church and the world to have a pope like Francis. Answering the question, “Just what is going on in the Catholic Church anyway?”

Worth a listen.