9-30-2026
2026 Fall On-Air Appeal | A Catholic Take / The Catholic Current – Day Three – Joe McClane
We welcome back Fr. Robert McTeigue, S.J. to cover the headlines from a Catholic perspective and raise funds to keep The Station of the Cross on the air. Because we are a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization, all donations are tax-deductible! To make a donation, call 1-877-711-8500 or visit thestationofthecross.com
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9-29-2026
2026 Fall On-Air Appeal | A Catholic Take / The Catholic Current – Day Two
Joe McClane
We welcome back Fr. Robert McTeigue, S.J. to cover the headlines from a Catholic perspective and raise funds to keep The Station of the Cross on the air. Because we are a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization, all donations are tax-deductible! To make a donation, call 1-877-711-8500 or visit thestationofthecross.com
LINKS:
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Catholic by Design – https://joemcclane.com/books
Speaking – https://joemcclane.com/speaking
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9-28-2026
2026 Fall On-Air Appeal | A Catholic Take / The Catholic Current – Day One – Joe McClane
We welcome back Fr. Robert McTeigue, S.J. to cover the headlines from a Catholic perspective and raise funds to keep The Station of the Cross on the air.
Because we are a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization, all donations are tax-deductible! To make a donation, call 1-877-711-8500 or visit thestationofthecross.com
LINKS:
Watch live weekdays 4pm ET – https://joemcclane.com/watch
He Is Coming (novel) – https://joemcclane.com/he-is-coming
Catholic by Design – https://joemcclane.com/books
Speaking – https://joemcclane.com/speaking
Pilgrimage – https://joemcclane.com/pilgrimage
Support the work – https://joemcclane.com/support
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9-24-2026
Padre Pio Warned Us: “Can’t You See? The World is on Fire.” – Joe McClane
As the story goes, Padre Pio said the inventor of refrigeration went to heaven, and when asked about the inventor of television, he pointed down. Fulton Sheen went on television and preached Christ to millions of Americans every week. The day after the Church beatified Sheen, author Mary O’Regan joins Joe McClane to explain what Padre Pio saw coming in the media age, and who the men were that tried to shut him away. Plus: Dr. Anthony Stine on Blessed Fulton Sheen, Pope Leo XIV’s first day in France, and the fight over the Seal of Confession in the United Kingdom.
At 4:14 ET, Dr. Anthony Stine joins Joe for the week’s news. On Thursday, 24 September 2026, Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle beatified Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen before some 50,000 people at the Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis, the first American-born bishop beatified on U.S. soil. His feast is 9 December. Today Pope Leo XIV began his apostolic journey to France, with stops in Paris, Saint-Denis, Lourdes and Metz and an address at UNESCO. And in England, a new mandatory-reporting law for child abuse has reopened the question every Catholic priest already knows the answer to: the Seal of Confession is inviolable, and no confessor may betray a penitent for any reason.
At 4:30 ET, Mary O’Regan, author of “Padre Pio and You: An Epic Story of Spiritual Fatherhood” (Sophia Institute Press), on the friar’s warnings about what the screen would do to souls and to the family, the churchmen who worked to restrict and suppress him, and why his spiritual fatherhood is still on offer to anyone who asks for it.
SCRIPTURE (Douay-Rheims):
Philippians 4:8 – “For the rest, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever modest, whatsoever just, whatsoever holy, whatsoever lovely, whatsoever of good fame, if there be any virtue, if any praise of discipline, think on these things.”
Matthew 5:11 – “Blessed are ye when they shall revile you, and persecute you, and speak all that is evil against you, untruly, for my sake.”
REFERENCED:
Beatification of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, St. Louis (24 September 2026)
Apostolic Journey of Pope Leo XIV to France and UNESCO (25-28 September 2026)
Crime and Policing Act (England) – mandatory reporting duty, in force 2027
Code of Canon Law, can. 983 – the sacramental seal is inviolable
LINKS:
Watch live weekdays 4pm ET – https://joemcclane.com/watch
He Is Coming (novel) – https://joemcclane.com/he-is-coming
Catholic by Design – https://joemcclane.com/books
Speaking – https://joemcclane.com/speaking
Pilgrimage – https://joemcclane.com/pilgrimage
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9-23-2026
Rome Silenced Padre Pio. A Con Man Fought Back. – Joe McClane
In 1931 the Holy See stripped Padre Pio of everything but a private Mass. No confessions, no public Mass, no letters. The man who fought hardest to get him back was a con man from Turin who walked into the friar’s confessional wearing white gloves and walked out a different man. On the feast of St. Pio of Pietrelcina, Joe McClane tells the true story of Emanuele Brunatto, the man Padre Pio called “my policeman.” Plus: Oscar-shortlisted director Tod Polson on The 21, his animated film about the 21 martyrs of Libya.
Brunatto had been an actor, a tailor, a jockey and a hustler. In 1920 he went up the mountain to San Giovanni Rotondo to see the friar for himself, and within a couple of years he was living in cell number six, next door to Padre Pio in cell five, serving his Mass every morning. When the friar’s enemies went to Rome, the con man became a detective. Two folders for the Cardinal Secretary of State. A book put on the Index within days. A 431-page dossier printed in Leipzig, every copy of which ended up in the Vatican. And a deadline in 1933. Through all of it, Padre Pio told him not to publish, not even to win his own freedom. One man fought, one man obeyed, and both of them loved the Church. And that’s their Catholic story.
At 4:30 ET, Tod Polson joins Joe. Polson, a former creative director at Cartoon Saloon whose credits include The Secret of Kells and The Book of Life, spent five years leading more than 70 artists from 24 countries to tell the story of the men killed by ISIS on a Libyan beach in February 2015: twenty Egyptian Copts and one man from Ghana. The 21 is told in the visual language of Coptic iconography, scored by the Ayoub Sisters, executive produced by Jonathan Roumie, and was shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short. Polson on why he told it from the perspective of peace, what the martyrs’ families asked of him, and what the West still hasn’t learned from 21 men who would not deny Christ.
SCRIPTURE (Douay-Rheims):
Matthew 5:11 – “Blessed are ye when they shall revile you, and persecute you, and speak all that is evil against you, untruly, for my sake.”
Apocalypse 2:10 – “Be thou faithful until death: and I will give thee the crown of life.”
REFERENCED:
Holy Office declaration on Padre Pio (1923)
Holy See restrictions on Padre Pio (June 1931), lifted by Pope Pius XI (July 1933)
Canonization of St. Pio of Pietrelcina by Pope St. John Paul II (16 June 2002)
The 21 martyrs of Libya added to the Roman Martyrology (announced 11 May 2023)
THE 21:
Watch the film – https://www.the21film.com/
St. Pio of Pietrelcina, pray for us.
LINKS:
Watch live weekdays 4pm ET – https://joemcclane.com/watch
He Is Coming (novel) – https://joemcclane.com/he-is-coming
Catholic by Design – https://joemcclane.com/books
Speaking – https://joemcclane.com/speaking
Pilgrimage – https://joemcclane.com/pilgrimage
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9-22-2026
Why Trad Catholics Turned on Fulton Sheen | Mark Lambert – Joe McClane
On August 25th, EWTN posted a clip of Archbishop Sheen reciting Teilhard’s “Mass on the World”: “I am going to spread my hands over the entire universe and take its immensity as the matter of my sacrifice.” Two days later, after a wave of criticism, the post was gone with no explanation. On September 21 Hugh Owen of the Kolbe Center said the Church had a duty to confront Sheen’s embrace of Teilhard’s evolutionary theology before Thursday. Mark Lambert, co-host of Catholic Unscripted, and Joe take the question head-on: what Sheen actually wrote about Teilhard, what the Holy Office’s 1962 monitum actually says, whether a Blessed can have been wrong, and what the Trad turn against Sheen says about the rest of us. Archbishop Sheen will be beatified Thursday, September 24, at the Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis, with Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle presiding.
Ellen Holmes Steeves-LeBlanc is a cradle Catholic from Massachusetts, a mother of three, and the founder of Destined4This, a charity that funds scholarships for pilgrims, for men and women discerning a vocation, and for priestly enrichment. She calls her story one of “love, pride, grace, disobedience, sin, discovery, rebellion, renewal, and forgiveness,” and has taken John 18:37 as her mission. She joins Joe to discuss the pilgrimage life, the Rosary, and her campaign to see bishops and priests pray it visibly with their congregations.
SCRIPTURE (Douay-Rheims):
John 18:37 – “For this was I born, and for this came I into the world; that I should give testimony to the truth.”
1 Timothy 6:20 – “Keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding the profane novelties of words, and oppositions of knowledge falsely so called.”
DOCUMENTS REFERENCED:
Holy Office, Monitum on the writings of Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. (30 June 1962)
Fulton J. Sheen, Footprints in a Darkened Forest (1967)
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “The Mass on the World” (1923)
9-21-2026
How Jesus Fulfills Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement
Today is Yom Kippur. On September 20 the U.S. bishops’ conference posted a greeting to the Jewish community from Bishop Joseph Bambera, chairman of the Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, citing the dialogue and friendship built since Nostra Aetate. The post never mentions Jesus Christ. Joe walks through Leviticus 16 and the Letter to the Hebrews: the high priest, the veil, the blood, the two goats, and the one sacrifice that accomplished what the yearly rite could only foreshadow, the same sacrifice made present on every Catholic altar. Nostra Aetate itself says it is “the burden of the Church’s preaching to proclaim the cross of Christ.” Charity toward the Jewish people and the proclamation of Christ are not rivals.
On September 20, Patrick Clancy gave his first television interview to 60 Minutes. His former wife, Lindsay Clancy, is charged with killing their three children, Cora, Dawson and Callan, in Duxbury, Massachusetts, in January 2023. Her murder trial ended in a mistrial on September 4 with the jury reported split 11 to 1; her defense argued postpartum psychosis, and prosecutors have not said whether they will retry the case. Patrick says he has forgiven her: “I felt that if I didn’t get there, I would be eaten up inside.” Mike Koeniger and Joe take up the hard questions: what forgiveness is and is not, how grave mental illness bears on culpability (Catechism 1735), and what a father’s mercy says to the rest of us.
SCRIPTURE (Douay-Rheims):
Leviticus 16 - the rite of the Day of Atonement
Hebrews 9:12 - "Neither by the blood of goats, or of calves, but by his own blood, entered once into the holies, having obtained eternal redemption."
Hebrews 10:4 - "For it is impossible that with the blood of oxen and goats sin should be taken away."
Matthew 27:51 - "And behold the veil of the temple was rent in two from the top even to the bottom."
John 1:29 - "Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who taketh away the sin of the world."
Matthew 6:14 - "For if you will forgive men their offences, your heavenly Father will forgive you also your offences."DOCUMENTS REFERENCED:
Vatican II, Nostra Aetate 4 (28 October 1965)
Catechism of the Catholic Church 433, 1366-1367, 1540, 1735, 2843-28449-18-2026
Anthony Stine: Dialogue With Everyone — Except This Priest? – Joe McClane
On September 16 the Vatican published “A Journey of Hope,” a Note for the 60th anniversary of Nostra Aetate approved by Pope Leo XIV. It says “the defensive entrenchment in one’s own position and the view that proselytism is the only way to engage with the other no longer make sense.” Anthony Stine of Return to Tradition asks what sixty years of dialogue have produced, and why the social Kingship of Christ, taught by Pius XI in Quas Primas and by Vatican II’s own account left “untouched,” is now treated as dangerous.
On September 4 Fr. Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., a leading integralist, was suspended from teaching moral theology at the Benedict XVI Philosophical-Theological University at Heiligenkreuz, Austria. The rector, Fr. Wolfgang Klausnitzer, cited a 2019 post on Waldstein’s blog Sancrucensis defending Pope Leo X’s bull Exsurge Domine, which condemned Luther’s proposition “that heretics be burned is against the will of the Spirit,” and called his remarks “unspeakable.” Fr. Waldstein: “I do not advocate for such punishments today.” Vienna’s Archbishop Grünwidl has called integralism “political messianism”; Edward Feser, Thomas Pink and Fr. Thomas Crean have defended him.
On the morning of September 15, the day after the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, Fr. Román de la Cruz Hernández, 48, pastor of Santa Cruz (Holy Cross) parish in Huejutla, Hidalgo, was found shot to death beside a highway in Lolotla. The Mexican Bishops’ Conference has called on authorities “to conduct a thorough investigation to clarify the facts and ensure that justice is served swiftly.” Bishop José Hiraís Acosta Beltrán of Huejutla urged the faithful not to speculate. According to the Catholic Multimedia Center, President Claudia Sheinbaum’s term has seen 28 incidents of violence against members of the Church,
including four priests murdered.
SCRIPTURE (Douay-Rheims):
Matthew 28:18-19 – “All power is given to me in heaven and in earth. Going therefore, teach ye all nations.”
Matthew 5:10 – “Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
John 15:20 – “The servant is not greater than his master. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i41MMix5oA
DOCUMENTS REFERENCED:
Pope Pius XI, Quas Primas (11 December 1925), 18 and 32
Vatican II, Dignitatis Humanae 1 (7 December 1965)
Note, “A Journey of Hope” (16 September 2026) https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/co…
LINKS:
Watch live weekdays 4pm ET – https://joemcclane.com/watch
He Is Coming (novel) – https://joemcclane.com/he-is-coming
Catholic by Design – https://joemcclane.com/books
Speaking – https://joemcclane.com/speaking
Pilgrimage – https://joemcclane.com/pilgrimage
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9-17-2026
Michael Matt: Rome Just Put the Vatican II Problem in Writing – Joe McClane
On September 16 three Vatican dicasteries — Doctrine of the Faith, Promoting Christian Unity, and Interreligious Dialogue — published a sixty-paragraph Note, “A Journey of Hope: Sixty Years of Interreligious Dialogue and Fraternity in the Light of the Conciliar Declaration Nostra Aetate.” It was approved by Pope Leo XIV and signed by Cardinals Fernandez, Koch and Koovakad. That night Michael J. Matt, editor of The Remnant, posted: “Leo XIV Just Put the Vatican II Problem in Writing,” and pointed readers to Robert Morrison’s review of it.
Today Michael Matt joins Joe McClane to go through the text itself, not the headlines about it. We read the paragraphs out loud — 13, 22, 32, 46, 53, 54 and 58 — and ask what each one actually says. Joe puts the hardest version of the question to his guest: where does the document say what The Remnant says it says, and where is the claim really about what Rome left out? Then he applies Bishop Strickland’s test from yesterday’s show to the same text — continuity cannot merely be asserted, it must be demonstrated.
SCRIPTURE (Douay-Rheims):
John 14:6 — “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No man cometh to the Father, but by me.”
Acts 4:12 — “Neither is there salvation in any other. For there is no other name under heaven given to men, whereby we must be saved.”
Matthew 25:40 — “Amen I say to you, as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me.”
John 14:15 — “If you love me, keep my commandments.”
THE DOCUMENT, IN ITS OWN WORDS:
13 — “This does not mean, for Christians, that there are two paths to salvation… the Church teaches that Christ is the one and only Redeemer.”
22 — “It must be free of ambiguity, avoiding relativism and syncretism, with the fullest possible affirmation of identity and the fullest possible commitment to dialogue.”
53 — “It is not a matter of founding one great world religion in which all beliefs are flattened.”
54 — “The defensive entrenchment in one’s own position and the view that proselytism is the only way to engage with the other no longer make sense in a world that increasingly resembles an interconnected and constantly evolving global village.”
58 — “religions are called to transform the world and society so that they may become fraternal expressions of God’s will.”
SOURCES:
Note, “A Journey of Hope. Sixty Years of Interreligious Dialogue and Fraternity in the Light of the Conciliar Declaration Nostra Aetate” (16 September 2026) https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/co…
Robert Morrison, “Leo XIV Signs New Defense of Religious Pluralism…” (The Remnant) https://www.remnantnewspaper.com/leo-…
Vatican News — “Nostra aetate, 60 years on: Church renews dialogue against hatred and division” (16 September 2026) https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican…
MICHAEL J. MATT / THE REMNANT:
The Remnant Newspaper – https://remnantnewspaper.com/
Remnant TV – https://remnant-tv.com/
St. Robert Bellarmine, pray for us.
LINKS:
Watch live weekdays 4pm ET – https://joemcclane.com/watch
He Is Coming (novel) – https://joemcclane.com/he-is-coming
Catholic by Design – https://joemcclane.com/books
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Pilgrimage – https://joemcclane.com/pilgrimage
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9-16-2026
Bishop Strickland: “I Have Not Moved” on Vatican II – Joe McClane
Bishop Joseph Strickland says “I have not moved” — and on the morning Rome published a Note asking Catholics to “esteem” other religions, he joins Joe McClane to do what his new letter proposes: examine Vatican II in the light of Tradition, document by document. Nostra Aetate at 60, Archbishop Lefebvre, and the question the Vatican’s new text has to answer: if Christ is the only Redeemer, what is dialogue for?
On September 12, Bishop Strickland published “Go and Repair My House, Which, as You See, Is Falling into Ruin” at Pillars of Faith — his answer to those who say he has “changed” or “crossed over.” He has not, he writes: every word about the liturgical, catechetical and formational losses since the Council stands. What he proposes is the next step. Stop arguing “Vatican II caused everything” against “only the implementation went wrong,” and find out where the rupture actually is — in the documents, in their ambiguities, in the reforms, or in the “spirit of Vatican II.” Taking up Benedict XVI’s hermeneutic of reform in continuity, he insists that “continuity cannot merely be asserted. It must be demonstrated.” Of Archbishop Lefebvre he writes: “I believe it possible that the Church will one day recognize his sanctity.” Lefebvre held the shore; his own call, he says, is to build a bridge across the wounds that have divided Catholics for half a century.
Four days later, three Vatican dicasteries — Doctrine of the Faith, Christian Unity and Interreligious Dialogue — released “A Journey of Hope,” a roughly twenty-page Note for the 60th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, approved by Pope Leo XIV on June 22 and signed by Cardinals Fernández, Koch and Koovakad. It calls for “a new ethic of dialogue,” affirms that “the Church teaches that Christ is the one and only Redeemer,” rejects “one great world religion in which all beliefs are flattened” — and says that “the defensive entrenchment in one’s own position and the view that proselytism is the only way to engage with the other no longer make sense” in a “global village.” Joe asks the Bishop to read that text the way his letter says every conciliar text must be read: in the light of Tradition, saying plainly what stands, what is ambiguous, and what does not.
SCRIPTURE (Douay-Rheims):
Matthew 28:19-20 — “Going therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”
Acts 4:12 — “Neither is there salvation in any other. For there is no other name under heaven given to men, whereby we must be saved.”
John 14:6 — “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No man cometh to the Father, but by me.”
9-14-2026
Fr. Carlos Martins: The Door Ordinary Catholics Open Without Knowing – Joe McClane
Exorcist Fr. Carlos Martins says most of the people who come to him did not go looking for the demonic — they opened a door and never knew it was a door. Then: how the Church actually tells the difference between mental illness, the voice of God, and the enemy — and the test every exorcist runs before he prays a single word of the Rite.
Fr. Carlos Martins is a priest of the Companions of the Cross, an exorcist of almost two decades, host of The Exorcist Files podcast, author of The Exorcist Files: True Stories About the Reality of Evil and How to Defeat It, and director of Treasures of the Church, the relic ministry that has brought the relics of the saints to parishes in more than 200 dioceses. On today’s show he walks Joe through the ordinary, un-dramatic ways Catholics give the enemy a foothold — the curiosity, the media, the unconfessed habit, the thing done “just for fun” — and then the harder question: when someone says they hear a voice, how does the Church know whether it is God, an illness, or a demon? The Rite of Exorcism requires the psychiatric question be answered first, and Father explains what an exorcist looks for that a doctor cannot.
Earlier in the hour, ACT’s Monday regular Mike Koeniger on Virginia Ballot Question 1. On November 3, Virginians vote on a constitutional amendment creating a “fundamental right to reproductive freedom,” including abortion, that the state may not infringe without a compelling interest pursued by the least restrictive means. The General Assembly passed it a second time in January 2026 (House 64-34, Senate 21-18). Bishop Michael Burbidge of Arlington and Bishop Barry Knestout of Richmond have asked every Catholic in the Commonwealth to vote NO, and Bishop Burbidge’s letter was read at Masses across the diocese this weekend. Early voting opens Friday, September 18. Mike and Joe go through what the amendment’s strict-scrutiny standard does to Virginia’s existing parental-consent and third-trimester laws, why the Virginia Catholic Conference calls it extreme, and what the bishops are asking of Catholics before the 18th.
SCRIPTURE
1 Peter 5:8 — “Be sober and watch: because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, goeth about seeking whom he may devour.”
1 John 4:1 — “Dearly beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits if they be of God.”
Ephesians 4:27 — “Give not place to the devil.”
James 4:7 — “Be subject therefore to God, but resist the devil, and he will fly from you.”
Jeremias 1:5 — “Before I formed thee in the bowels of thy mother, I knew thee.”
Deuteronomy 30:19 — “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing. Choose therefore life.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k84Lxxy4sqg
REFERENCED:
Fr. Carlos Martins — https://www.fathercarlosmartins.com/
The Exorcist Files podcast — https://www.exorcistfiles.tv/
Fr. Carlos Martins on YouTube — / @fr.carlosmartins
Virginia Catholic Conference on the amendment — https://vacatholic.org/amendment/
Catholics Vote No (Diocese of Arlington) — https://www.arlingtondiocese.org/vote/
Protect Virginia 2026 (Diocese of Richmond) — https://www.protectvirginia2026.org/
Virginia Department of Elections, Question 1 —
https://www.elections.virginia.gov/el…
Bishop Burbidge’s statement, September 14 — https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2026…
A Catholic Take airs live weekdays at 4:00 PM ET. If this hour helped you, subscribe and share it with someone who has been away from the Church for a while — that is the whole point of this program.
LINKS:
Watch live weekdays 4pm ET – https://joemcclane.com/watch
He Is Coming (novel) – https://joemcclane.com/he-is-coming
Catholic by Design – https://joemcclane.com/books
Speaking – https://joemcclane.com/speaking
Pilgrimage – https://joemcclane.com/pilgrimage
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9-11-2026
25 Years After 9/11: More FDNY Have Died From the Dust Than Died That Day | ACT LIVE 9-11-26 – Joe McClane
Twenty-five years on, more New York firefighters have died from the dust at Ground Zero than died in the towers that day. 343 FDNY members were killed on September 11, 2001. As of yesterday, 453 have since died of World Trade Center-related illness. This morning, for the first time in twenty-five years, the ceremony at Ground Zero fell silent a seventh time – a new bell, for the responders, recovery workers, residents and survivors the dust has killed since. Joe is joined today by a New York firefighter to remember the men lost that morning, the men still being buried, and every soul carried out of those towers.
Also today: Dr. Anthony Stine of Return to Tradition on the Traditional Latin Mass that will NOT be celebrated at St. Peter’s Basilica this year. The pontifical Mass for the Summorum Pontificum pilgrimage – Bishop Athanasius Schneider was to be the celebrant – was refused in a letter from the Secretariat of State. It moves to St. Mary Major.
THE 9/11 NUMBERS, 25 YEARS ON
2,977 people were killed in the attacks of September 11, 2001.
343 of them were New York City firefighters.
453 FDNY members have since died of World Trade Center-related illness – as of September 10, 2026, more than died on the day itself.
The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund has linked nearly 10,000 deaths to 9/11-related illness over 25 years, including 5,892 who died of cancer.
Father Mychal Judge, OFM, chaplain to the FDNY, was killed in the lobby of the North Tower after anointing a fallen firefighter. His was the first body recovered and certified that day – Victim 0001.
THE ST. PETER’S DECISION – WHAT IS ACTUALLY KNOWN
The Summorum Pontificum pilgrimage, Peregrinatio ad Petri Sedem, runs October 23 to 25, 2026.
Permission for the pontifical Mass at St. Peter’s was refused in a letter dated August 7, 2026, signed by Archbishop Paolo Rudelli, Substitute for General Affairs at the Secretariat of State.
The letter says the Mass is not authorized “this year” – wording that leaves the door open for future years.
The Mass moves to the high altar of the Basilica of Saint Mary Major, 3:00 p.m., Saturday October 24, celebrated by Bishop Athanasius Schneider at the invitation of the archpriest, Cardinal Rolandas Makrickas.
In 2025, Cardinal Raymond Burke celebrated the same Mass at the Altar of the Chair with Pope Leo XIV’s permission.
No official reason has been given. Sources speaking to LifeSiteNews suggest last year’s celebration was perceived in Rome as triumphalist. No source has reported that Bishop Schneider himself was the reason.
This is not a ban on the Traditional Latin Mass at St. Peter’s. The basilica continues to offer the traditional Mass, including solemn High Masses on request.
SCRIPTURE
John 15:13 – “Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
2 Maccabees 12:46 – “It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rpR-XnWgxY
LINKS:
Watch live weekdays 4pm ET – https://joemcclane.com/watch
He Is Coming (novel) – https://joemcclane.com/he-is-coming
Catholic by Design – https://joemcclane.com/books
Speaking – https://joemcclane.com/speaking
Pilgrimage – https://joemcclane.com/pilgrimage
Support the work – https://joemcclane.com/support
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X – https://x.com/JoeDMcClane
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Catholic Match: https://www.catholicmatch.com/
9-10-2026
Gideon Lazar: Fatima Is Why I’m Catholic – Joe McClane
Gideon Lazar grew up in a Jewish family. Our Lady of Fatima is the reason he is Catholic today.
Plus: one year after Charlie Kirk was killed, Nick Cavazos on what hardened in America — and where the hope actually is.
Gideon Lazar was raised Jewish, baptized in 2018 and received into the Catholic Church. He holds a BA from The Catholic University of America, is pursuing an MA in theology at Boston College, coordinates the St. Basil Institute for the Theology of Creation, edits the Creation Theology Fellowship, and runs the Byzantine Scotist YouTube channel. On today’s show he gives Joe the short version of the story he told at length on Matt Fradd’s Pints With Aquinas — how a Jewish scholar ended up at the feet of Our Lady of Fatima.
Earlier in the hour, Nick Cavazos of The Traditional Thomist marks one year to the day since Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025. Tyler Robinson, 22, was ordered to stand trial on September 1, 2026 and has pleaded not guilty; prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. Joe and Nick look honestly at what has gotten worse in the year since — and at what did not. Newman Ministry reported roughly a 15 percent rise in Mass attendance across more than 200 campus ministries. Erika Kirk stood in front of the country at her husband’s memorial and said of his accused killer, “I forgive him.” And in Prague, Cardinal Dominik Duka offered a Requiem Mass for Kirk and was publicly criticized for it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwpeUcnUXko
9-9-2026
Cardinal Burke Went on Shawn Ryan. Here’s What He Actually Said. – Joe McClane
Cardinal Burke spent two hours teaching the Old Testament to Shawn Ryan’s audience – former Navy SEAL, five million subscribers, mostly young men with no church at all. Nearly a million views on day one. The same week, the president of the Pontifical Academy for Life said Catholics could morally consent to an “imperfect” assisted suicide law. Two guests today on the two halves of that story.
MICHAEL HAYNES – Vatican correspondent, Catholic Herald
Archbishop Renzo Pegoraro, appointed to lead the Pontifical Academy for Life in May 2025, told the Italian bishops’ news outlet that an assisted suicide bill could amount to an “imperfect law” that it “would nonetheless be morally right to give one’s consent” to, on the reasoning that Parliament might otherwise pass something far more permissive. He also stated plainly that there is no such thing as a right to assisted suicide and that the state has an obligation to provide care. The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, in Samaritanus Bonus, calls euthanasia “an intrinsically evil act, in every situation or circumstance.” Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae: it is “never lawful, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil that good may come of it.” Joe and Michael go through what “imperfect law” actually means in Evangelium Vitae 73 – where St. John Paul II permitted a legislator to vote to LIMIT an already-existing permissive law, not to help pass a first one – the principle of double effect, and why the Veneto vote on September 2 matters: the fourth Italian region to approve an end-of-life law, and the first under a centre-right government. Plus the shadow of Archbishop Paglia, who said the same kind of thing in 2023 and had to walk it back.
MARK LAMBERT – Catholic Unscripted
Cardinal Burke on the Shawn Ryan Show, part one of two on the Bible. What he actually taught: that Scripture is the word of God given in human language; how the canon formed and why the Catholic Old Testament carries seven books the Protestant one does not; that whatever is truly scientifically demonstrated can never contradict Scripture, and that evolution is a theory rather than a demonstration; that no creature evolves a soul; that Our Lady was never an unwed mother, because in Jewish law the betrothal WAS the marriage; and that the days of Noah look a great deal like our own. And the line that ties the whole broadcast together. Zechariah: strike the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered. That, Burke says, is how the devil works. He corrupts the shepherds, and the sheep scatter. Mark Lambert co-founded Catholic Unscripted with Katherine Bennett. Maryvale-trained theologian, veteran Catholic blogger and catechist, and the reporter who broke the Nuncio and TLM dispensations story in November 2025.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kjk8PcwX52s
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.
LINKS:
Watch live weekdays 4pm ET – https://joemcclane.com/watch
He Is Coming (novel) – https://joemcclane.com/he-is-coming
Catholic by Design – https://joemcclane.com/books
Speaking – https://joemcclane.com/speaking
Pilgrimage – https://joemcclane.com/pilgrimage
Support the work – https://joemcclane.com/support
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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”
