Sentimental Idolatry: Kreeft’s Crucifix Sentimentality Masks Neo-Church Personalism
The National Catholic Register — the flagship digital organ of the Legionaries of Christ and the EWTN neo-church media apparatus — publishes a hagiographic puff piece by Alyssa Murphy lionizing the professional “Catholic celebrity” Peter Kreeft. The article reports on a recent episode of the “Pints with Aquinas” podcast, hosted by Matt Fradd, wherein the 88-year-old Boston College professor and EWTN staple exploits the recent death of his wife, Maria, to dispense a sentimentalized, personalist distortion of Catholic marriage, famously comparing his deceased wife’s emaciated corpse to a crucifix. This spectacle of grief commodified for content exposes the sentimental core of the neo-conservative ghetto: a Christianity reduced to therapeutic sentimentality, devoid of the *Social Kingship of Christ* and the rigorous Thomistic ontology of the sacraments.