Tentative Publication date: Early 2025

Carol Robinson was a savvy first-hand witness of the collapse of large swaths of Catholic culture in America in the immediate post-Vatican II years. In these detailed and perceptive essays from the pages of The Wanderer, she passionately yet soundly dissects the destructive forces at work in the years spanning 1971–1987. Robinsons’ keen analytical mind surveys many of the most pressing issues of the time, but three themes are uppermost in her mind, beginning with a concerning reluctance from Bishops to exercise their apostolic duty to teach the faithful. Robinson chronicles the epidemic of increasingly poor catechizing that resulted in a generation of young Catholics who were ever more ignorant of the Magisterium. Robinson is exceptionally good at chronicling the dereliction of the teaching office in regard to Scripture, examining how the misuse of historical-critical methodologies at the hands of Catholic biblical scholars progressively undermined belief in the word of God among post-Conciliar Catholics. Above all, Robinson devotes her energies to exposing distressing trends within Thomism in the wake of the Council, a time when the Angelic Doctor’s work lost its preeminence in the schools, especially when it came to seminary formation. Robinson is particularly insightful in her critique of a growing historicization of Aquinas’ thought amidst the Thomist movement itself, which in her mind parallels the analogous process of demythologizing of Scripture. After surveying a host of innovating academics who would reduce Thomas’ thought to the historically conditioned product of a bygone era, Robinson persuasively argues for the enduring universality of the Common Doctor, and the undiminished relevance of his teaching as anchored in a firm, clear-sited philosophy of being. The pieces reprinted here provide a fascinating window into the tumultuous situation in the Church in these years, but this collection is much more than a mere review of the troubled past. In her diagnosis of the problems besetting the Catholicism of her time she also provides a prophetic strategy for the embattled Church in our own day, centered around a profound retrieval of authentic Thomism and the perennial spiritual and intellectual patrimony of Catholic Tradition.

Table of Contents

Introduction by Gregorio Montejo,  Ph.D.

1971
Adult Brainwashing (May 13)
Death of a Priest (June 23) 
1972
Bless Me…/Ma’am? (January 13)
A Little Thomistic Logic: Letter to the Editor (February 3)
The Modern Mind (March 16)    
Gremlins at Work (April 13)
The Artificial Sermon (April 20)
1973
The Bare Ruined Choirs of Secular Molinism (January 4)
The Most Private Property (May 31)
The Credulity of Father Brown (June 7)
The Credibility of Father Brown (November 8)
1974
The Church Militant (March 28)
Death of a Killer (April 11)
Dishonoring St. Thomas (May 12)
The Demythologizing of St. Thomas (November 21)
1975
Dissolving the Faith in Action (March 20)
Male Chauvinist Pigs, Marriage, and the New Catholic World (August 7)
The Sins of the First Lady (September 18)
The Greening of the Catholic Church in America (November 13)
1976
On the Revolutionary Front (January 15)
NCR’s “Non Serviam” (February 12)
Jimmy Carter’s Little Sister (June 17)
Secular Christianity and the Eucharist (August 12)
A Denial of Thomistic Principles: Letter to the Editor (September 16)
On the Validity of the Tennessee Sacraments (December 30)
1977
More on the Validity of the Tennessee Sacraments (February 24)
Prodigal Sons…Or Unjust Stewards? (March 10)
On the Demythologizing of Roots (May 26)
Little Pockets of Holiness and Peace (December 22)
1979
A Reason to Rejoice, The Pope is Coming (September 27)
1980
Putting the Pope Down (August 14)
The New Fundamentalism (September 11)
Whatever Happened to Amazing Grace? (November 27)
If the Blind Lead the Blind (December 11)
1981
Bishops as Mouthpieces for Freud (March 19)
Children Need to Know About Purity (June 25)
Monasticism as Therapy (September 10)
Religious Pragmatism (October 8)
The New Apologetics (November 19)
1982
The Case of the Occult Heretic (February 25)
The Hinckley Case (July 22)
Whose Church Is It, Anyhow? (December 16)
1983
Social Insecurity (February 17)
So That’s Why It’s Called “Amazing Grace” (March 3)
On Polarization (July 7)
The Worship of Freedom as an End in Itself (July 14)
The Signs of Predestination (September 29)
The Signs of Reprobation (October 6)
Happy Birthday, Martin Luther (November 10)
1984
Pleasing Martin Luther (January 19)
Renew: On-Site Training for Becoming The American Church (March 15)
My Dream (March 29)
Who is the Common Doctor of the Church: Thomas Aquinas or Martin Luther? (November 8)
No Knee Shall Bend: The Triumphalism of the Religious Proletariat (November 29)
1985
Antinomianism in the Catholic Church (February 7)
Renew: The American Mode (May)
Who am I?: Letter to the Editor (October 3)
Six-Part Series on Karl Rahner (October 24–November 28)
Part I: Karl Rahner’s Duplicitous Theology 
Part II: Rahner in Context
Part III: Kant’s Copernican Revolution 
Part IV: The Reversal of the Order of the Sciences 
Part V: Existentialism: The Flat-Earth Philosophy 
Part VI: The Medium is Not the Message 
1986
A Summit Meeting of The Two Cities (September 11)
1987
The Common Good and “Pack of Lies” (March 28)

Size: 6 x 9