Crisis Magazine

Crisis Magazine is an American Catholic opinion magazine. It was launched in November 1982 under the working title Catholicism in Crisis by Michael Novak and Ralph McInerny, reportedly with about $3,000 of their own money; it was first based at Notre Dame and published by the Brownson Institute, and the title was later shortened to Crisis (Crisis Magazine; Wikipedia). Deal W. Hudson became publisher and editor in February 1995, and ownership passed to the Morley Institute he created. The print edition ended in late 2007, when content moved online under the name InsideCatholic; after Sophia Institute Press acquired the magazine in 2011 the Crisis name returned (National Catholic Reporter; Wikipedia). Since 2019 a Crisis-branded book imprint has published titles on social and cultural trends from a Catholic perspective.

Eric Sammons became editor-in-chief in January 2021 and is executive director of Crisis Publications, which acquired OnePeterFive in July 2021 (OnePeterFive; OnePeterFive). The magazine produces the Crisis Point podcast (Crisis Magazine), which in May 2025 discussed how traditional Catholics should respond to Leo XIV (Crisis Point).

Defenders of Pope Francis counted Crisis among his critics: Mike Lewis of the website Where Peter Is listed it with LifeSiteNews, Church Militant and The Wanderer as outlets that had abandoned support for the pope (Millennial Journal).

After the SSPX consecrations of 1 July 2026, Crisis took a line critical of the Society. On 2 July it published an essay, "The SSPX's Foundational Error", arguing that the Society's appeal to a state of necessity does not hold and that the excommunications are legitimate (Crisis Magazine). In editorials that month Sammons argued that much of the confusion over "automatic" excommunication came from misunderstanding the concept, and set out what he called the legitimate options for Catholics attached to the Society, the first being to obey the pope and refrain from association with it (Crisis Magazine; Crisis Magazine). Integrity Magazine described the episode as turning former friends of the Society into foes (Integrity Magazine). See papal-critique and resistance media.