About Catholic Paradigm
Scripture, the Church’s social doctrine, and the week’s news, worked through carefully and sourced so you can check every claim.
Who Writes It
Deacon Dan DeLuca, ordained to the permanent diaconate for the Archdiocese of Omaha in 2023. He is completing a Master’s degree in theology and preparing to begin doctoral studies. His areas of study are Scripture, liturgy, and ecclesiology.
Everything on this site is written by him. Nothing is syndicated, and nothing is reprinted from a publisher’s service.
Catholic Paradigm is an independent publication. Deacon Dan DeLuca is a permanent deacon of the Archdiocese of Omaha, but this site is his own work: the Archdiocese does not review, fund, or endorse it, and nothing here speaks for it. What it does carry is a citation for every claim — so where this site reports the Church’s teaching, you can check it against the document rather than taking the author’s word for it.
The Standard Everything Is Held To
Claims are cited to the document they come from, by paragraph number. Not “the Church teaches” but Compendium 164, Laborem Exercens 6, Catechism 2258. A claim you cannot locate is a claim you cannot examine.
Where a quotation cannot be verified against the primary text, it is paraphrased and said so rather than dressed up with an invented reference. The scriptural work leans on St. Thomas Aquinas and the Fathers, with current biblical scholarship alongside them.
Where faithful Catholics may legitimately disagree, that is said out loud. A prudential judgment about which policy best serves a principle is not the principle itself, and most confusion between Catholics is really a confusion between those two things.
Why a Deacon Writes About Public Life
Because the Church has been doing it since 1891. Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum into an industrial upheaval nobody had prepared workers for, and every pope since has added to that body of teaching. It is not a political programme. It is doctrine, and most Catholics have never been handed the key to it.
This site does not write about candidates or parties, does not describe a Church teaching as conservative or liberal, and does not predict elections. Where the Church has a mind, it names the document.
What Is Published Here
- A daily Mass reflection, on the day’s readings, free.
- Commentary on the day’s news through the Church’s social teaching, free.
- A Sunday homily preparation guide, eleven days ahead of its Sunday. The readings and the opening analysis are free on every one.
- The Catholic Citizen, a weekly issue on one principle of Catholic social teaching applied to that week’s news.
The Saturday Digest gathers it into one email a week, with a note from Deacon Dan. Subscribe here, or see what the memberships include.
If you form deacons, teach, or preach and something here is useful to you, write to me. I answer.
