Mr. Eric Sammons of Crisis Magazine tweeted the above graph and commented: "From a high of 172,581 new converts in 1999, we only had 72,212 in 2022—a 58% decline."  In other words, the Catholic Church in the United States boasted 173k converts in 1999 but that number dropped to 72k in 2022.  Obviously, a drop in 58% of converts-per-year is a catastrophic loss for a Church that claims to be missionary. Furthermore, the Pew Study center released the above graph on the Catholic Church.  It reveals that for every convert welcomed into the front door of an American Catholic parish, over eight Catholics leave through the back door. How strange, [...]

p/c Jeffrey Bruno For the longest time, I believed the Right could reason with the Left with evidence on the many incendiary issues lighting up Church and State over the last decade.  Because I had two conversions (from left to neo-con, and then neo-con to trad as I recounted in this video here) I believed everyone else had a desire to seek the truth as I did.   "If the evidence were simply presented in charity," I reasoned in regard to any dozen topics of Church and State, "then many more people would repent of their former errors and quickly convert." I actually still think that is true, but there's [...]

Many Catholics casually say the following line to ex-Catholics in order to get them back into a Church building:  "Once a Catholic, always a Catholic." It sounds welcoming, but it's theologically wrong. This is because the Magisterium of the Catholic Church and the Church Fathers, St. Thomas Aquinas and the Popes all taught:   A bad Catholic never ceases to be a Catholic, provided his failure be not faith-based but morality-based (and also provided those moral failures be not excommunicable.)  On the other hand, a baptized person who has purposely rejected even one tenet of the traditional Catholic faith is a heretic who is no longer Catholic.  Furthermore, a baptized person [...]

One of the few "racially insensitive" things I have said in my life (and by "insensitive" I mean how as a liberal, I spoke as a liberal, that is, talking down to ethnic folks while sounding like you're talking up to them) happened several years after my priestly ordination and I was visiting the FSSP seminary in Denton, NE.  I met a Nigerian seminarian in the refectory and we talked about my mission work.   (I told him how I had been on mission to Rwanda in 2014 as a priest.  Then, I was still doing both the Novus Ordo and the TLM.  See above picture and below picture.) In [...]