9-8-2026
Where Mary’s Birthday Actually Came From | Nativity of the BVM
Mary’s birthday is not in the Bible. The names Joachim and Anne are not in the Bible either. And the Church has kept September 8 anyway for more than fifteen hundred years. Joe walks through where the feast actually came from — a second-century document the Church refused to canonize but never stopped remembering, a church dedication in Jerusalem, and a Roman procession under Pope St. Sergius I — and why December 8 exists only because September 8 does.
The Church keeps just three birthdays on her calendar: Jesus, John the Baptist, and Our Lady. Everyone else is remembered on the day they died. Joe reads from the free cheat sheet on air — the two ancient sources side by side, every quote with its citation, and a dated timeline of the oldest references to Mary in the Church Fathers, from St. Ignatius of Antioch around A.D. 107 to the Council of Ephesus in 431.
Also on today’s show: Luis Roman joins Joe on “Murder in the 33rd Degree,” the documentary series he is associate producer on, based on the testimony of Fr. Charles T. Murr and his book of the same name — Vatican corruption in 1977-78 and the Year of the Three Popes. Directed by Luis Piccinali, presented by VADE RETRO and produced by Dominus Estudios.
https://www.youtube.com/live/MI_LM2hQkd4?si=NprNWxn3cZ-hW64a
Bishop Strickland: Are We the “Prophets of Doom”? | ACT LIVE 9-4-26 – Joe McClane
Joe McClane is joined today by Bishop Joseph Strickland and Dr. Anthony Stine of Return to Tradition for three stories. FIRST: Bishop Strickland’s reflection on Dei Verbum 13 and what the Council calls “the marvelous condescension of eternal wisdom” – God stooping to reach us in our own language, then in our flesh, and finally under the appearance of bread. His warning is blunt. False mercy sits down with a man in the pit and tells him he need not leave. True mercy climbs in and pulls him out. “Go, and sin no more.”
SECOND: The International Theological Commission’s document “Caring for Our Common Home – A Responsible and Fraternal Response to the Triune God,” released September 2 with Pope Leo XIV’s authorization. It is a study text of the ITC, not an encyclical and not magisterial teaching, and it proposes that the Church begin speaking of “sin against Creation and against the Creator.” Dr. Stine on what that language would actually do.
THIRD: Pope Leo’s September 2 general audience, the first of his catechesis on Gaudium et Spes, in which he recalled Saint John XXIII’s 1962 rebuke of the “prophets of doom” who say our age is entirely worse than the ages before it. LifeSiteNews read it as aimed at critics of the post-conciliar settlement. The Holy Father named no one. So we put the question to a bishop.
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Lindsay Clancy: The Three Victims Nobody Marched For | ACT LIVE 9-3-26 – Joe McClane
Three hundred women stood outside the Massachusetts courthouse in pink. Their signs read “Believe” and “She Needed Help.” Not one of them named Cora, Dawson, or Callan. Joe McClane is joined by Nick Cavazos, the Traditional Thomist, to ask the question the cable coverage will not: what does the Catholic Church actually teach about guilt, madness, and mercy? The jury in Duxbury is deadlocked. The culture already reached its verdict. Those are not the same thing, and the difference is where Catholic moral theology does its hardest work. Diminished culpability is real Catholic doctrine. It is not the same as innocence, and it is not the same as the sentimental absolution being handed out on the courthouse steps. Nick walks through what the Church requires before an act becomes a mortal sin, why a genuine psychotic break changes that calculus, and why none of it erases three children.
ALSO THIS HOUR: Raymond Ibrahim’s “Today in History” – George Kastrioti, called Skanderbeg, the boy taken as a slave by the Ottomans and raised a Janissary, who escaped, returned to Christ, and on September 2, 1457 routed an 80,000-man Ottoman army at Albulena with 8,000 men. Pope Callixtus III called him Athleta Christi, the Athlete of Christ.
Fr. Charron: What Still Holds the Antichrist Back | ACT LIVE 9-1-26 – Joe McClane
A ruler rises in a time of decline. He persecutes no one. He protects religion, rewards his allies, and works signs that seem to confirm his mission — until the world begins to ask whether God Himself has sent him. That is not a modern prediction. It is the medieval Church’s portrait of the Antichrist. Fr. Jason Charron joins Joe McClane live on A Catholic Take to walk through the eschatology the Middle Ages actually taught: Adso’s 10th-century Letter on the Antichrist, the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, the legend of the Last Emperor who lays down his crown in Jerusalem, and St. Paul’s mysterious restrainer — what still holds the man of sin back. The Antichrist of the medieval mind is not an obvious monster but a counterfeit Christ: just, peaceful, generous, religious — winning the world with gifts, false teaching, and wonders before he ever reaches for terror.
In the second half, Fr. Charron reports from two weeks in Europe and Ukraine. Europe is dying, he argues — not first from collapsing birthrates or war, but from spiritual fear. The Fathers and St. Thomas trace the progression: loss of trust in God breeds fear, fear breeds disordered self-preservation, and the passions end in bondage, despair, and death. Yet as in the days of Elias, God keeps a remnant — seven thousand whose knees have not bowed to Baal.
SCRIPTURE REFERENCED:
2 Thessalonians 2:3-10 — the man of sin, the son of perdition; “he who now holdeth, do hold”
Matthew 24:24 — false Christs shall arise, “insomuch as to deceive (if possible) even the elect”
Daniel 7:25 — the horn that “shall speak words against the High One”
3 Kings 19:18 — “I have left me seven thousand men in Israel, whose knees have not been bowed before Baal”
Apocalypse 13:13 — “he did great signs, so that he made also fire to come down from heaven”
