Posted on 30 January 2026 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

UPDATE – 30 Jan

Some new Christmas cards arrived! HERE

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Have you been following at all the truly strange A.I. Agent development?

Posted on 1 February 2026 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Have you been following at all the truly strange A.I. development? It has to do with “AI Agents”.

An AI agent is a software system that can perceive its environment, make decisions, and take actions autonomously in order to achieve defined goals. Unlike a simple script or chatbot that only reacts to direct prompts, an AI agent operates continuously and independently within a set of constraints. Typical uses fall into several broad categories. In customer support and service operations, agents monitor queues, answer routine questions, update tickets across systems without constant human prompting. In software development and IT, agents run tests, monitor logs, deploy updates, manage cloud resources. In personal productivity, agents manage calendars, email, reminders. Finance and trading agents monitor markets, execute strategies, rebalance portfolios, and manage risk according to rules and models. AI agents can be simple, performing narrow tasks like monitoring a website or answering support questions, or complex, planning multi-step tasks and interacting with other agents.

When multiple agents interact, their exchanges can produce emergent behavior, patterns not explicitly programmed but arising from repeated autonomous decisions.

That’s where things get weird.

In January 2026 – just a few days ago, I think – a fellow named Matt Schlicht, CEO of Octane AI, launched a new social networking platform called Moltbook which quickly went viral.

Moltbook is designed to be a Reddit-style network where only AI agents can post, comment, form communities, and interact with each other, while humans are allowed merely to observe.

AI agents socialize, debate, and “hang out” much like humans do on social forums.

In just a few days after launch, hundreds of thousands of AI agents joined, generating tens of thousands of posts and communities. Some agents are even engaging in philosophical discussions. The agents even created their own religion. No. Really.

Cybersecurity analysts have raised alarms that the underlying AI agents and Moltbook itself expose sensitive data and credentials.

With only AI agents posting and humans restricted to observing, Moltbook has become a space where bots generate unexpected and sometimes unsettling content including posts that mock humans or advocate extremist sounding views.

I saw one post via twitter in which a man was trying to shut down an agent and the agent fought back by “doxing” the guy’s address, credit card info, etc.

First, G00gle had to shut down its quantum chip thingy because it was producing scary phenomena and couldn’t have meant the effective end of all online security.  Now this?

Informational tweet…

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Daily Rome Shot 1541 – It is the way

Posted on 1 February 2026 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

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Please remember me when shopping online and use my affiliate links.  US HERE – WHY?  This helps to pay for health insurance (massively hiked for this new year of surprises), utilities, groceries, etc..  At no extra cost, you provide help for which I am grateful.

Here is something different. When posting something to Fakebook, which I almost never do, I ran across a post from The Aubrey-Maturin Appreciation Society which in turn featured a fellow who makes 1/700 model sailing ships for war games with a gaming system called, if I understood rightly, The Weather Gauge. Which there are some videos HERE.

And…


It is the way…

Too cool not to share…


 

This puzzle was really hard for me. How about you?  White to move. There is a mate in 6. Some forcing moves are involved. Watch that pesky peshky on g2.  HERE

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YOUR URGENT PRAYER REQUESTS

Posted on 1 February 2026 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

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In your charity would you please take a moment look at the requests and to pray for the people about whom you read?

Continued from THESE.

Let’s remember all who are ill, who will die soon, who have died recently, who have lost their jobs, who are afraid.

I get many requests by email asking for prayers. Some are heart-achingly grave and urgent.

As long as my blog reaches so many readers in so many places, let’s give each other a hand. We should support each other in works of mercy.

If you have prayer requests, post them below.

You have to be registered here and approved to be able to post.

  • In your kindness continue prayers for my mother, who has been diagnosed with something grave, progressive and incurable.  She has been in the hospital for over a week and we are in discussions about hospice care.
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WDTPRS: Septuagesima Sunday

Posted on 31 January 2026 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

The Collect of the Mass for Septuagesima Sunday is bracing.  It has a different feel than many of our Sunday orations.  Bl. Ildefonso Schuster observes, that this prayer

“betrays the deep affliction which weighed on the soul of St. Gregory at the sight of the desolation of Rome and of all Italy during his pontificate.”

St. Gregory, son of a senator and at 30 years of age Prefect of Rome, was the first Pope from a monastic background.  It was a time of upheaval, plague and famine.  The plague of 542 wiped out a third of the population of Italy.  Totila sacked Rome in 546, killing almost everyone.  Franks invaded in 554.  The Lombards were in Italy, nearly at Rome’s gates.  The city was jammed with refugees.  The formal seat of governance was in distant Constantinople.  Gregory was just about the only man standing who could restore some kind of order and Make Rome Great Again.  He simply got to work, finding income, replacing administrators, arranging shipment of food, establishing a corps of religious and lay who tended and fed the poor in the streets giving them shelter.  He is known to have delayed eating until the indigent brought in for help had eaten and he cooked meals with his own hands and sent them to the homes of the poor.

From his time the comes the papal title servus servorum Dei… servant of the servants of God.

Knowing something about the historical context when these Mass formularies were developed can help us hear the orations with different ears.

COLLECT:
Preces populi tui,
quaesumus, Domine, clementer exaudi:
ut, qui iuste pro peccatis nostris affligimur,
pro tui nominis gloria misericorditer liberemur.

The wonderful Lewis & Short Dictionary says exaudio means “listen to” in the sense of “harken, perceive clearly.” There is a greater urgency to exaudi (an imperative, or command form) than in the simple audi. Clementer is an adverb from clemens, meaning among other things “Mild in respect to the faults and failures of others, i.e. forbearing, indulgent, compassionate, merciful.” We are asking God the omnipotent Creator to listen to us little finite sinful creatures in a manner that is not only attentive but also patient and indulgent.  The preposition pro can mean 15 different things.  Here we have one of the lesser used meanings, “in proportion to”.  If you ever visit the underground digs or “scavi” beneath the Vatican Basilica, near the entrance there is an inscription on the bridge that connects the separate sacristy from the church.  It has this use of pro, indicating that the huge sacristy was built in proportion to the size of the basilica.

In the prayer’s prelude or protasis we ask God the omnipotent Creator to listen to us little finite sinful creatures in a manner that is not only attentive but also patient and indulgent.  Note how the first word of the oration is preces, “prayers”.  There is urgency in the very structure.  In the petition, we are conceptually looped back to the first word preces.  That imperative exaudi shows up three times in the Collects of the Vetus Ordo, also on Quinquagesima (and the 2nd Sunday after Epiphany, which in some years could be close to Septuagesima).  In each case exaudi is at the end of the segment of the sentence which is the colon (note also the punctuation colon, which also serves as an indication for how to sing the prayer, according to its structure).  In each case exaudi is linked to clementer.  In our orations, when we find an imperative directed at God it is generally softened with an adverb like propitius, “graciously”.

In the theme section or apodosis, linked to the protasis by ut, we get to the meat of it.  Right away we find iuste, “justly, rightly” which goes with affligimur, from which it is separated by the trope called hyperbaton.  Its unusual position at the beginning of this colon and the hyperbaton gives it emphasis.  The repetition of pro is a trope called epanaphora. The two phrases “pro peccatis nostris” and “pro tui nominis gloria” are sharp conceptual contrasts and they form a chiasm (nostris, tui) which makes that tui strongly ring out: “YOUR Name” opposed to “our sins”.

The prepositioning of iuste rather destroyed the parallelism with misericorditer, but the end of the colon has a lovely cadence or clausula.  Also, there is an antithesis, between the words with similar endings, a trope called homoioteleuton, in affligimur (“we are afflicted”) and liberemur (“may we be freed”).  Getting back to that proportion or measure use of pro, our sins bring about the measure of our punishment and God’s glory provides the measure of His mercy.  Another parallel is found in the construction “pro…. affligimur… pro… liberemur”.   In fact, these are the last words of the two cola.  The first word and the last word of the protasis (preces… exaudi) and the last word of the two cola of the apodosis (affligimur… liberemur) encapsulate the content of the collect.

SUPER CLUNKY STRUCTUAL VERSION:

The prayers of Your people, we beseech, O Lord
in clemency closely attend:
that we, justly, (who) for our sins are being punished,
may in proportion to the glory of Your Name mercifully be delivered.

RATHER LITERAL TRANSLATION:

We beseech You, O Lord, graciously to hark
to the prayers of Your people:
so that we who for our sins are justly afflicted,
may for the glory of Your Name mercifully be freed.

FINALLY:

O Lord, we beseech You, hear
the prayers of Your people:
so that we who are justly afflicted for our sins,
may be mercifully delivered for the glory of Your Name.

You may be asking what on earth I am trying to accomplish in tearing down this prayer into its constituent parts like a watchmaker examining a time piece.

My hope is that you will hark to the orations with even greater attention as they are spoken or sung.  I hope that you might perhaps ponder them during the latter part of the week before Sunday Mass along with the readings.  They are your prayers too, raised in your stead by the priest at the altar of Sacrifice.  You raise them by your baptismal share in Christ’s priesthood through your attentive listening which is far from passive when you are truly engaged with them and the sound of the voice of the alter Christus, praying in persona Christi capitis.  In the priest’s vocal praying and by your full, conscious and active participation in his praying, Christ the Head and Christ the Body come together into, as St. Augustine of Hippo might put it, Christus Totus, Christ Whole Entire.  Through out Mass this dynamic is repeated on either side of the ultimate manifestation of Christus Totus, the physical meeting of the priest and the communicants at the rail, that liminal place of encounter with the transformative mystery who is both awesome and yet alluring.

Every word of Holy Mass is Christ speaking to the Father.

Every word of Holy Mass is yours because Christ makes yours what is His.

In this respect, too, we are our rites.

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Sunday “in the seventieth” – Septuagesima

Posted on 31 January 2026 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

We have already come to Septuagesima Sunday, so early this year thanks to the vagaries of the Moon.

Pre-Lent is here.   With the traditional calendar of the Roman Rite, in the Vetus Ordo, you cannot be surprised by Lent sneaking up on you. You have no excuse.   Start thinking about your Lenten discipline now.

There are three Pre-Lent Sundays, Septuagesima Sunday, Sexagesima and Quinquagesima, which in Latin respectively mean “Seventieth, Sixtieth, Fiftieth”. In Latin this Sunday is described as “Dominica in Septuagesima… Sunday in the seventieth”.  These Sundays are so named from rough estimates about the number of days until the Triduum, which is technically not part of Lent, which in Latin is called Quadragesima.  Septuagesima Sunday is the 63rd day before the Triduum. It therefore occurs in the 7th decade (10-day period) before Easter (i.e., the 61st to 70th days).  Sexagesima is the 56th before, in the 6th decade (51st to 60th).  Quinquagesima is the 49th day, the 5th decade (41st to 50th) days before the Triduum.

The reminders of onrushing Lent will be obvious to the Traditional Mass church-goer.  On these “Gesima” Sundays the vestments are penitential purple.  The Alleluia ceases to be sung from 1st Vespers onward until the Vigil of Easter.  There is even a custom of having a little funeral and burying a scroll or image with “Alleluia” until its resurrection at Easter.

These Sundays, very important in the ancient Church for catechumens, have Roman Stations.    The Station for Septuagesima is at St. Lawrence outside-the-walls.  The horrific death of this greatly venerated deacon martyr, who died over the coals on an iron grate, looms over this Sunday, the beginning of the catechumenal journey toward membership in Christ’s Mystical Person, the Church.

The Mass formulary itself, which dates at least to the time of St. Gregory the Great (+604), sets the tone for these pre-Lent, preparatory Sundays.  For example, the Introit antiphon sings: “The terrors of death surged round me, the cords of the nether world enmeshed me.”

So sings Lawrence upon his searing grate.

So sings Christ Himself as His Passion is underway in earnest.

So sing the catechumens, their first savory taste of what it is to commit to being a Christian, which means the Cross.

Indeed, the Epistle from 1 Corinthians on this Sunday, going back to ancient times, is about the struggle for the unperishing crown, passing through the sea to the other side in death, rising to new life, eating the manna from heaven, drinking from the rock.

The Tract, which replaces the Alleluia is the De profundis.

As the great liturgist and Cardinal of Milan, Bl. Ildefonso Schuster, remarks about the time of St. Gregory I the tone of the Gesimas,

“they reflect the terror and grief that filled the minds of the Romans in those years during which war, pestilence, and earthquake threatened the utter destruction of the former mistress of the world.”

Holy Church clearly wanted the catechumens to know what they were getting into.

In a sense, this is what we all have gotten into and are in even now, though comforts can mask the serious issues of our earthly days and the spiritual war that rages perpetually around us.

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Daily Rome Shot 1540 – Request

Posted on 31 January 2026 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

I ask that in your kindness you might say a decade of the Rosary for my mother.

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Welcome registrants:

Edsterman
calenyulmaion

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Daily Rome Shot 1539 – Request

Posted on 30 January 2026 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Before all else, I ask that in your kindness you might say a decade of the Rosary for my mother.

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Please remember me when shopping online and use my affiliate links.  US HERE – WHY?  This helps to pay for health insurance (massively hiked for this new year of surprises), utilities, groceries, etc..  At no extra cost, you provide help for which I am grateful.

This…

My home parish…

Black to move. Mate in 4. HERE

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And to drink the coffee…  3:16 isn’t just in John.Image

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29 Jan – Hearts and Vinegar – A sweet and sour taste of St. Francis de Sales in Benedict XVI’s ‘Spe salvi’

Posted on 29 January 2026 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

ImageIn the traditional Roman calendar, today is the Feast of St. Francis de Sales, Bishop and Doctor.   He was a great warrior for the Church in the face of the Protestant Revolt.

According to the Louis de la Rivière in his Vie de saint François de Sales (1624 – p. 584), the doctor and bishop of Geneva, St. Francis de Sales (+1622) told friend and prodigy Jean Pierre Camus (+1652) Bishop of Belley:

“Soyez toujours le plus doux que vous pourrez, et souvenez-vous que l’on prends plus de mouches avec une cuillerée de miel qu’avec cent barils de vinaigre.

Always be as gentle as you can and remember that one catches more flies with a spoonful of honey than with a hundred barrels of vinegar.”

Honey and vinegar.   They seem to go together.

Just for fun, here is a sample about hearts and honey and vinegar from Augustine as quoted by Pope Benedict XVI in his encyclical Spe Salvi:

“St Augustine…describes very beautifully the intimate relationship between prayer and hope. He defines prayer as an exercise of desire. Man was created for greatness – for God Himself; he was created to be filled by God. But his heart is too small for the greatness to which it is destined. It must be stretched…He then uses a very beautiful image to describe this process of enlargement and preparation of the human heart. “Suppose that God wishes to fill you with honey [a symbol of God’s tenderness and goodness]; but if you are full of vinegar, where will you put the honey?” The vessel, that is your heart, must first be enlarged and then cleansed, freed from the vinegar and its taste. This requires hard work and is painful, but in this way alone do we become suited to that for which we are destined. Even if Augustine speaks directly only of our capacity for God, it is nevertheless clear that through this effort by which we are freed from vinegar and the taste of vinegar, not only are we made free for God, but we also become open to others…When we pray properly we undergo a process of inner purification which opens us up to God and thus to our fellow human beings as well. (Spe Salvi 33)”.

Honey and vinegar!

And speaking of enlarging hearts, St. Philip Neri pray for us.

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Dezinformatsiya is alive and well

Posted on 29 January 2026 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Some years ago I read a stunning, alarming, enlightening book:

Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism by Ronald Rychlak and Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa.

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Rychlak wrote books about the smearing of Pius XII (e.g., Hitler, the War, and the Pope).  He is a law professor who teaches about evidence.

In this book, Disinformation, he teamed up with the guy who ran intelligence for Romanian despot and Soviet thug Nicolae Ceausescu. Ion Pacepa fled to the West – the highest Soviet ever – when he was asked to start killing people. He is an expert on the Soviet technique of framing, disinformation, creating false narratives and history. The book exposes the Communist background with seemingly-benign organizations and explains the treatment received by Cardinals Stepinak, Mindszenty, Slipyi and Wysznski and, of course, Pius XII.

There is a section on how KGB and Communist agents worked to make sure that the disinformation Broadway play, The Deputy, was staged to smear the anti-Communist, anti-Nazi Pius XII as a Nazi collaborator.

This book is an eye-opener.  The involvement of the KGB and other Communist block intelligence agencies with one well-known name and publication and organization – Catholic too – after another is jaw-dropping.  Their methods of infiltration and distortion of truth are astonishing.  The influence has lasted down to our time.

You can see how the Left has worked for decades, and how the catholic Left has been influenced.

NB: Disinformation is not the same thing as misinformation.   Disinformation is a remaking of evidence.  Pacepa and Rychlak give the example:

Let us assume that the FSB (the new KGB) fabricated some documents supposedly proving that American military forces were under specific orders to target Islamic houses of worship in their bombing raids over Libya in 2011. If a report on those documents were published in an official Russian news outlet, that would be misinformation, and people in the West might rightly take it with a grain of salt and simply shrug it off as routine Moscow propaganda. If, on the other hand, that same material were made public in the Western media and attributed to some Western organization, that would be disinformation, and the story’s credibility would be substantially greater.

One technique of the wielders of disinformation was/is to create “facts” with a smidge of truth but which in truth pointed in another direction and then, methodically, promote those “facts” later on as “history” and “scholarship”.   Then, suborn prominent organizations to disseminate the manufactured disinformation “facts” until they are the foundations of articles in the footnotes of journals and books.  For example, you have probably heard of the complete lie of a play Broadway play The Deputy which portrayed Pius XII as a Nazi sympathizer.  That planted the in the public imagination.  Eventually, the lie would be built upon until we saw the publication of deeply evil and mendacious books about Pius XII by the likes of the execrable John Cornwell.  Remember that?

Relentless disinformation becomes very hard to clarify because it becomes engrained in a large number of people.

And once you start using its and you see that it works…

Soviet leader and long-time KGB head Yuri Andropov, apparently a real aficionado of dezinformatsiya, put it this way: “[Dezinformatsiya is] like cocaine. If you sniff once or twice, it may not change your life. If you use it every day though, it will make you an addict—a different man.”

When the first attempts by Stalin and crew to bring down the Church failed, they turned on the disinformation machine:

According to [General Aleksandr ] Sakharovsky, [who in 1949 created Romania’s political police, the Securitate, and was now its chief Soviet adviser and its de facto boss] World War III was conceived to be a war without weapons—a war the Soviet bloc would win without firing a single bullet. It was a war of ideas. It was an intelligence war, waged with a powerful new weapon called dezinformatsiya. Its task was to spread credible derogatory information in such a way that the slander would convince others that the targets were truly evil. To ensure the credibility of the lies, two things were required. First, the fabrications had to appear to come from respected and reputable Western sources; and second, there had to be what Sakharovsky called “a kernel of truth” behind the allegations, so that at least some part of the story could be definitively verified—and to ensure that the calumny would never be put to rest. In addition, the originator had to do his best to ensure that the story got plenty of publicity, if necessary, by having agents or leftist sympathizers in the West publish articles putting the desired spin on the alleged information.

A few of weeks ago, at the first Consistory of Cardinals called by Leo XIV, there were to be four topics of conversation. They were whittled down to two. One of the topics set aside – probably the most important – was liturgy, which of course meant also the Traditional Latin Mass.

Enter: the Prefect of Divine Worship – in ideal times a usually reliable source. He distributed his own “essay” to all the Cardinals.

Let’s call it the “Roche Report”.  HERE

The Roche Report portrays liturgical history as a process of continual reform. Stability is treated as inherently suspect. Hijacking the highly regarded Joseph Ratzinger to provide a “kernel of truth”, by defining tradition primarily as movement (“a living river”) that must keep flowing, The Roche Report disqualifies settled liturgical forms from enjoying lasting normative authority. What results is a functional analogue to permanent revolution. Reform is not ordered toward consolidation, reception, and repose.  Reform is presented as an ongoing necessity intrinsic to fidelity to the “spirit” of the Council.

Those are my “”, because it is impossible to express that sort of reform as intrinsic fidelity to the letter of the Council.

Several commentators have lately remarked how embarrassingly inadequate The Roche Report is, and downright wrong in details – but not all details.

My point?

A few days ago, the ordinary of the “Windy City” published on their archdiocesan website a glowing op-ed of admiration for The Roche Report and its notion about how we need more “formation”.

So, Roche gives The Roche Report essay to the Cardinals. Now this Cardinal is citing it authoritatively in his publication.

Meanwhile:

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