With Abbess Gabriela Platon, Voronet Monastery or the Sistine Chapel of the East, Romania

Orthodox Christianity and the Good Migrants--from Frontpage Magazine

Orthodox Christianity and the Good Migrants Why are young men flocking to a thriving, real Christianity? by Thom Nickels The secular world, it seems, has discovered Orthodox Christianity, the Church that predates Rome with ancient roots in Jerusalem and Antioch. Prominent among the “discoverers” are young men. Young men that Abbot Seraphim of Holy Cross Monastery in West Virginia says “are broken” and “searching for spirituality.” Abbot Seraphim describes this brokenness as the result of absentee or abusive fathers — mothers too — and the fact that many of these young men come from non-believing homes. In many cases they were raised nominally Protestant, meaning church on Christmas, weddings and funerals but nothing in-between, something that amounts to a superficial faith minus backbone and substance. Many of these young men have seen their Protestant denominations dissipate into woke reflections of the secular culture. That reflection includes Black Lives Matter banners strung from the steeples of Protestant churches; rainbow flags used as altar cloths; sermons that concentrate on feminism, “reproductive” rights, or the “rights” of illegal aliens. Even Scripture has been bastardized with pronoun changes along with the forced alteration of explicit but unpopular Biblical condemnations to make them blend with societal changes. The New York Post’s feature on the phenomenon of young men entering Orthodox Christianity got a lot of attention. The article revealed why men find Orthodoxy attractive: In a world of flux and changing fashion, the new converts desire something ancient, substantive and unchanging. The superficiality of what many have experienced in Protestant churches might be said to include abbreviated entertainment-style worship services and sermons that mimic TED Talks. Orthodoxy, as has been said, is not for sissies. Unlike their Catholic brethren, the Orthodox Church never diluted fasting to a simple one hour before receiving the Eucharist. Orthodox Christians fast most of the year, and the fasts are strenuous. Long worship services contribute to a complicated life of prescribed prayers and frequent confession. The article refers to Orthodoxy as “muscular Christianity,” as opposed to the softer, almost feminized world of Protestantism where the Jesus worshiped is often the Jesus of equity, inclusion and diversity, or the woke Jesus as invented by the Left. In Orthodoxy there are regular processions, a heavy use of incense, and the kissing of icons. There is also an act of submission known as prostrations — or kneeling with one’s face on the floor — a worship practice adopted from Eastern Christianity by Islam. Multiple prostrations in Orthodoxy involve gymnastic stand up/lie down maneuvers that often exhaust the most athletically inclined. Psychologist and author Jordan Peterson compares the Orthodox liturgy to a dance. Tradition, he told the Post, makes Orthodoxy unquestionable: “Unlike a Protestant service, which is much more dependent on the preacher, you can’t criticize an Orthodox service…. It’s ritualized. It’s a dance. And it’s not the words only. It’s the words in the architecture, in the images, in the history. And you’re participating in it.” The number of Orthodox converts nationwide has increased by 80 percent since 2019, tripling the size of many established congregations. New Orthodox churches are being built to accommodate this rapid growth. While young men are discovering Orthodoxy, what about young women? Why isn’t there a mass exodus of young women into the Orthodox Church? The question deserves some attention. Part of the reason has to do with the damage feminism has done to women in the culture. “The feminist movement,” as Carrie Gress writes in her book, The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us, “has eviscerated our homes, our children, our lives as wives, our fertility, and now finally our bodies, leaving us in a strange no-man’s-land — or rather a no-woman’s-land — where we are simply a generic ‘human being,’ a traumatizing blank slate imposed over natural realities.” Recently I had a conversation with Mother Christophora, the abbess of the Orthodox Monastery of the Transfiguration in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania, founded by the exiled Princess Ileana (Mother Alexandra) of Romania in 1965 after her tonsure as a nun. During our talk, Mother Christophora pointed out the crisis in vocations to the monastic life among young women, but not with young men. “Orthodox male monasteries are flourishing with young men, but the opposite is true with women,” she said. “And yet when you consider what the culture has done to young women, you begin to understand this discrepancy.” The ravages of feminism are certainly behind the changes we see in many Protestant denominations. One by one, old guard Protestant churches that once resisted radical liberalization are falling into line. One Anglo-Catholic parish in Philadelphia, Saint Clement — for years noted for its beautiful Christmas 3-hour High Solemn Mass — finally succumbed to the woke virus that has transformed nearly Episcopal church in the nation. The parish now has liberal priests who preach woke Democrat Party-inspired sermons. The parish also employs women deacons and priests who dress for Mass in rich fiddle-back vestments. This visual incongruity — safeguarding the superficialities of tradition while accessing all the latest woke talking points — is a queer phenomenon, something that young men searching for authentic Christianity no doubt see as false. It should be noted that the Episcopal Church in Philadelphia has been used in past years as a sort of entry into society, what used to be called the Social Register class. Membership is mostly about making connections with the right people — lawyers, physicians, or old families with Mayflower roots — even though the “right people” category in Philadelphia is nearly depleted due to changing demographics. I was reminded of this at Christmastime when a post on Facebook included a photo of a man standing outside an Episcopal church. The caption read: “The Episcopal Church is the gentleman’s way to Heaven.” (But first you have to stomach left-wing rants by the female priest or bishop as well as a short talk on Gaza and Black Lives Matter.) Many Orthodox male converts say they first investigated Orthodoxy during the pandemic lockdown when their Protestant churches were closed or having virtual-only services. According to a study published by the National Catholic Reporter, of all the Christian denominations, many Orthodox churches remained open during the pandemic: “From 2020 through 2023, the study found 44% of Orthodox churches remained open during the pandemic, compared to just 12% of all U.S. congregations. Only 31% of Orthodox priests publicly encouraged parishioners to get vaccinated compared to 62% of all clergy.” This is the fearlessness of true belief and ancient wisdom. If you turn away from receiving the Eucharist because you’re afraid of germs and catching COVID, you really have little to no belief in the power inherent in receiving the Body and Blood of Christ. The young men who have gone over to Orthodoxy talk about the feminization of non-Orthodox forms of Christianity. As one Orthodox priest, Father Josiah Trenham of Riverside, California told the Post: The vast majority of attendees at most Christian churches are female, and many services are accordingly dominated by emotional songs, swaying, uplifted hands, and eyes closed in ecstasy. Men are much less comfortable [in those settings], and they have voted with their feet. Our worship forms are very traditional and very masculine. Of course, all is not perfect in Orthodoxy. There are snake-in-the-grass liberalizing groups and trends, like a group called Public Orthodoxy at Fordham University, a Jesuit-run school, that wants to see the Church embrace same-sex marriage the way the Catholic bishops are doing in Germany — in direct disobedience to the pope by the way — an act that only 20 years ago under Pope Benedict XVI would have resulted in some form of censure or excommunication. I suspect Pope Francis secretly agrees with the German bishops and his only real worry is that the Germans are moving too fast, while he prefers a slow, incremental reformation. (Recall the apologue of the frog being slowly boiled alive.) I suspect the young men coming into Orthodoxy see through this charade as well. It appears that Orthodoxy — for the most part — remains one of the sole true survivors of ancient Christianity, a shining city on a hill.

Romania and the MAGA Revolution by Thom Nickels (Frontpage Magazine)

I recently returned from an 8-day tour of Romania beginning in the city of Bucharest. The trip was planned in December 2024 about the time Romania’s Constitutional Court cancelled the results of the presidential election in which conservative Călin Georgescu won the popular vote on the first round of voting. Georgescu’s victory created panic among status quo liberal politicians, causing the liberal judiciary to claim that Russia had somehow influenced the election results. The Russian interference claim was never proven, just as it was never proven – and later proven false – when Hilary Clinton made the same claim about the 2016 election in the United States. The judiciary, so it seems, is an enemy of true democracy in Romania. Romania’s political history is a study in subservience. The country fell to Ottoman suzerainty in 1541; its liberation from Ottoman rule occurred in 1871. After the Turks were driven out of the country by the Hapsburg Austrian Emperor, there was an Austrian push to convert Orthodox Christians to Catholicism. Orthodox monasteries and churches were confiscated and used as horse stables. Two notable Orthodox churches, Voronet Monastery, founded and erected by Stephen the Great in 1488, and the Cozia Monastery church, built in 1388 by Mircea the Elder, grandfather of Vald Dracula, became hovels for a variety of barnyard animals. Romania was in the grip of Nazi rule during WWII but that ended in 1944 when Romania’s King Michael, at the age of 22, successfully forced out Hitler’s puppet dictator, Ion Antonescue, saving thousands of Jews from extermination. Antonescue previously had been given a free hand by Hitler to solve the “Jewish question,” and this resulted in the murder of at least 420,000 Jews early in the war. Ironically, Antonescue’s Nazi regime was followed by an even harsher communist one. Gheorghe Gheorghieu-Dej, leader of the Romanian Communist party, became the nation’s first communist leader. He served until 1965 and was followed by Nicolae Ceaușescu, a dictator who held the reigns of power until 1989 when communism began to fall throughout Eastern Europe. (The execution by firing squad of Ceausescu and his wife Elena officially marked the end of communist rule). My Romanian tour guide – a Trump supporter who told me he hopes his country follows America’s lead and elects a Trump-like nationalist in the May 4 and May 18, 2025 national elections – expounded on the current state of affairs as we traveled throughout the country. At one point when we were 40 minutes from the Ukraine border he said that while most Romanians dislike Russia, they have an even greater contempt for Ukraine. He called the country brutish and insensitive. “If I were to drive us across the border into Ukraine, we wouldn’t last long. We would be ‘disappeared,’” he said. Fortunately, a tour of Ukraine was not on the agenda. When we passed a car with a Ukraine license plate he remarked how Ukrainians like to escape the bleakness of their country by taking car trips into Romania’s scenic Carpathian Mountain region. “Their country is so bleak and gray, they need Romanian beauty,” he said. We drove to Timisoara (the birthplace of the 1989 revolution) via the Olt River Gorge, then visited the Cozia Monastery, then headed out to Cluj Napoca and later to Gura Humor, passing large abandoned factories built during the communist era. These buildings reflect the ugliness and barrenness of communism. They sit like dark monoliths in an otherwise beautiful terrain. Some of these abandoned factories are twenty stories tall with eerily small windows reminiscent of prisons. Even in Bucharest, once known as the Paris of the East, one can see many large scale communist buildings, some of them falling apart and rotting. Even if one knew nothing about communist ideology and how it works, the bounty of leftover ugly communist architecture all over Romania stands as a testament as to why a country should never go communist. Bran Castle, once owned by the Romanian royal family and cherished as a favorite family residence by Queen Marie, was robbed of most of its furniture by the Stalinist reformers who wanted to destroy all traces of royalty. A few authentic pieces of furniture managed to escape the plunder, such as Queen Marie’s breakfast table and the bed of King Ferdinand, but for the most part what visitors see are replica replacements. The castle is also filled with tacky Vald Dracula paraphernalia, such as a Dracula dummy placed upside down in a coffin, installed by boardwalk commercialists in a bid to attract tourists. (For the record, Vald Dracula never set foot in Bran Castle.) Traveling throughout the country, I learned from my guide that most Romanians celebrated the election victory of Donald Trump. Although Romania joined the European Union in 2007, many Romanians are now questioning that alliance. Currently, under the direction of the EU, the country is undergoing an expansive road building explosion which is causing multiple traffic detours in and out of Bucharest. “Why the need to build new highways?” my guide asked as we drove through the Olt River Gorge. “The roads we have are fine. They just need repaving. All this construction is not necessary.” On numerous occasions we were stuck in long lines of traffic with scores of trucks, unwieldy detours that went on for miles and miles. An even bigger issue for Romanians in the May 2025 elections is immigration. While going through Romanian Customs when I first entered the country, I was shocked to see large numbers of migrant-types from Muslim countries and West Africa. I mentioned this to my guide who supported Calin Georgescu in the last election and who told me that migrants from Ukraine are given free stays, including meals, in many Bucharest hotels. At the Berthelot Hotel Bucharest where I stayed two nights, he pointed out several cars in the parking lot with Ukraine license plates. On another occasions while driving down one of Bucharest’s main thoroughfares, he pointed to Turkish and Middle Eastern immigrants hanging out in the streets in groups of five or ten. “They do nothing all day long. They gather in groups and do nothing, nothing. It gets worse all the time.” The Middle Eastern immigrant street scene made me ask: Is Romania a United Kingdom in the making? The National Salvation Front (FSN) was the first post-communist political party established in Romania. In 1993, FSN split into two parties, the largest being the Social Democratic Party (PSD), a leftist mirror image of the Democrat party in the United States. The current Romanian Prime Minister, Ion Marcel Ciolacu, has been the leader of the PSD since 2019, and much like his leftist cohorts in the Social Liberal Humanist Party, is likely to label anyone who challenges the EU and its policies a “right wing extremist.” Yet Romanian polls have former PSD leftist-turned conservative, Victor Ponta, running for president as an independent, coming in second in the first election round after conservative conservative nationalist George Simion, who’s considered the favorite. With two conservatives in the lead, it is likely that Romania may get its own Donald Trump. Donald Trump Jr. in fact is scheduled to visit the country in late April ahead of the May 4 election. Yet Romania’s top court has been quite active in barring nationalist politicians like Diana Sosoaca from this year’s and last year’s annulled presidential election. Sosoaca might be called Romania’s Marine Le Pen. Ruthless in her comments, she once said, “The EU and NATO destroy everything they touch….Europe is corrupt from the very tip. “Serbians,” Sosoaca continued, “are the bravest people in all of Europe. Most Serbians do not wish to be part of the EU because they’ve seen what happened to Romania and to what extent Romania has been destroyed.” Other candidates in the May 4th runoff include pro-EU Bucharest mayor Nicusor Dan, a member of the liberal USR party, and Elena Lasconi, a former journalist and the leader of the Save Romania Union Party. The American left-wing Politico had this to say about the Romanian elections: “The Eastern European country of 19 million people borders Ukraine and is one of NATO’s key eastern flank members, with access to the Black Sea. A victory by a far-right candidate in the presidential election threatens to bring Bucharest more in line with U.S. President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement while harming EU plans to continue aiding Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s full-scale invasion.” Romania, without a doubt, seems to be on the brink of a MAGA revolution.

The Civil War Inside the Catholic Church - From Frontpage Magazine by Thom Nickels

At a Catholic funeral Mass for the father of a good friend, I watched as the priest in a white alb paced the sanctuary for at least an hour prior to the ceremonies, his half-detached Roman collar swinging like a broken door jam around his neck as he attended to the details of the service. When the time came to put on his vestment, he pulled the polyester liturgical poncho over his head in front of the congregation as if he was putting on a sweat shirt in Planet Fitness. The priest’s behavior was fairly typical of many Novus Ordo clergy: Low on ceremony, high on ultra casual. His attitude could be summed up this way: Let’s-get-this-ceremony-over-with-because-I’ve-got-things-to-do. In many ways it seems priests like this are weary of the priesthood. (Let me add that in my twelve plus years as an Orthodox Christian I’ve never seen an Orthodox priest vest this way; Orthodoxy proscribes a very formal and prayerful manner of vesting.) This is a small example of what has happened in much of mainstream Catholicism, but when a million small examples crowd the amphitheater of liturgical practice, what you get in the end is a totally new script. As Pope Benedict XVI once observed, “The Church stands or falls with the liturgy.” Truer words have never been spoken but far too many Catholic bishops and priests still don’t get it. They wonder and agonize over Pew polls reporting that 69% of Catholics believe the bread and wine at Mass are only symbols while a mere 39% of Catholics believe the Church’s teaching on Transubstantiation. They have no idea why only 20 to 25% of Catholics identify as practicing Catholics (this survey was taken in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia). Like clueless detectives, they form study groups to find out how to bring people back to Church while turning a blind eye to how the Church may have caused the problem. When you have lay people distributing communion; when you have communion hosts being handed out like tokens in a casino (communion in hand); when you have Masses in which there’s no ringing of bells at the consecration or when the priest refuses to raise the host and chalice high in the air but keeps it low and casual in the manner of that funeral priest’s detached collar; when you have show-off cantors who raise their arms and perform all sorts of narcissistic theatrics as if performing on ‘America’s Got Talent’; and when you have a Church that has basically forgotten its rich tradition of Gregorian chant and replaced it with tacky sentimentalism of songs like ‘On Eagles Wings,’ what you get is a pedestrian service with no zero sacred appeal. Recently the situation got even worse. In Charlotte, North Carolina, Bishop Michael T. Martin, OFM, appointed by Pope Francis in 2024, has declared that the traditional Mass in the Extraordinary Form will no longer be allowed in parish churches in the Diocese of Charlotte. Now, Charlotte happens to have a large TLM community, one of the largest and most vibrant in the nation. Pope Francis – who hated the Latin Mass, the English language and the entire Anglophile world – must have known this when he appointed Martin to carry out his iconoclastic revolution. Martin, in his pursuit of a more Protestant-style Catholicism, has decreed that as of October 2, 2025, the Latin Mass community of Charlotte be relegated to an obscure, out-of-the-way chapel, a former Protestant church called the “Freedom Christian Center,” located a good 45 minutes outside the city. Martin’s selection of this Church is telling in other ways: it shows his hatred of traditional Catholic Church architecture, for not only is he punishing traditional Catholics in his diocese by isolating the Latin Mass to a tiny chapel in the sticks, in effect he doubled down when he chose this chapel for the TLM community because it will have no high altar but will in fact will be outfitted in an extreme minimalist way: IKEA table altar, bare walls with minimal to zero sacred decoration; in other words a Catholic Church that doesn’t look Catholic at all. Reaction to Martin’s decree has been swift and explosive. “This is a particularly painful enforcement because the diocese of Charlotte had several thriving communities built around the TLM, ‘the National Review observed. “Charlotte is a fast growing diocese as more and more Catholics move to the American South.” Martin, who likes to make banal statements about “talking and listening to everyone like Jesus did,” went further in his liturgical war against tradition in the Charlotte Diocese. Here are Martin’s new orders regarding the Novus Ordo Mass: Novus Ordo Masses must never use Latin. There shall be no kneeling for communion. Altar rails are banned in the construction of new churches. Communion on the tongue is outlawed. Classical vestments are banned. Altar crucifixes and altar candles are banned. Martin’s heretical agenda generated outrage among conservative and even centrist-liberal Catholic podcasters. Petitions were organized by Charlotte’s traditional priests and Catholics. Reaction intensified when Martin made it known that the reforms he was proposing were essential for the unity of the Church. This unity – a false equivalency since his actions in effect alienate a good portion of Catholics in his diocese – was so important he said he didn’t care if Catholics stopped attending church or stopped contributing funds to the Charlotte Diocese. Let them go elsewhere, is his attitude; which, of course is what has been happening over the last several decades. Many sincere Catholics, fed up with the liturgical wars and the assault of modernism, have either stopped going to Mass altogether or have gone over to Eastern Orthodoxy, where it’s unlikely you’ll find a bishop like Martin who wants to rewrite the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom or declare war on the veneration of icons. Everything Bishop Martin advocates was fairly typical of 1970s Catholicism, the worst decade for the celebration of the liturgy in the Church’s history, and the worst decade for Catholic Church architecture. This was a time when sacred imagery in churches was replaced by felt and burlap banners, altars in the round and priests who encouraged guitar and jazz Masses. As one parishioner from the Charlotte Diocese wrote: “When giving communion, he stands in front of the altar rails, if the church has them, and refuses to let parishioners kneel inside their church that they are paying to participate in. He has placed his zuchetto (Bishop’s hat) on a female and several male students as if it is a party hat….. The Diocese of Charlotte was flourishing and this guy is running it into the ground… We don’t trust him.” It’s no longer enough for conservative Catholics to be passive and silent and take out their frustrations in prayer and petitions, hoping that Bishop Martin will change. Bishops like Martin very often don’t respond to prayer and Hallmark card politeness. Only a harsh and decisive censure from Rome will do the job. If this doesn’t happen, one thing will be made clear: The Roman Church is really no longer Catholic. Avatar photo

Insurrectionist LA Should Not Host the 2028 Olympics by Thom Nickels

Insurrectionist LA Should Not Host the 2028 Olympics With 1,000,000 illegals in the city, what could go wrong? June 23, 2025 by Thom Nickels From Frontpage Magazine Los Angeles, the city of angels, bad actors and “peaceful” protests where rioters recently threw rocks, bottles, chunks of concrete, and exploding mortar-style fireworks at law-enforcement officers is not a place that should be hosting the 2028 Olympics. Besides that, it’s a city I’ve always associated with bad luck. My sister moved to LA with a boyfriend and died within a year and half. An acquaintance, a promising filmmaker, moved there from Philadelphia to begin his film career, got hooked on drugs and has been dealing with bouts of homelessness ever since. A woman friend in the entertainment business, who moved there with her New Yorker husband, tells me she feels trapped in a city she no longer recognizes as “livable.” Her Hollywood friends are violently anti-Trump; it’s nearly impossible for her to find a kindred spirit. Los Angeles is home to over 1,000,000 illegal aliens, constituting the largest number of illegal aliens in any US city. This fact alone condemns the city as a “secessionist” sanctuary city swamp, especially when you have a mayor like Karen Bass praising LA, as she did when condemning President Trump’s activation of the National Guard to curtail anti-ICE rioters-as “a city of immigrants.” Democrats can no longer be expected to make distinctions between legal and illegal immigrants. Bass’ twisted logic says because LA is a city of “immigrants,” ICE should terminate its raids: Have some respect. We are California; we are Los Angeles; we are different. We are above the law. This privileged attitude suggests California already sees itself as separate from the rest of the nation. As Victor Davis Hanson and others attest, in California more than one-fifth of the population lives below the property line and nearly half the nation’s homeless sleep on the streets of its major cities. The Left has brought a kind of “civilizational collapse” to the state, intensified in recent days by the Governor’s “reckless surrender of Los Angeles to Foreign National Riots,” where rioting Mexicans waving Mexican flags seemed to celebrate a country they’ve no wish to return to. Just as John F. Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard in June 1963 to force the integration of the University of Alabama, so President Trump federalized the California National Guard to quell LA’s ragtag army of anarchists and rioters. Yet Governor George Wallace of Alabama capitulated almost immediately to Kennedy’s actions, while in California in June 2025, slick-haired Governor Newsome-a cosmetic throwback to vintage TV Brylcreem hair tonic commercials-announced he was suing the Trump administration for activating the National Guard. The mainstream media did its usual anti-Trump number when it labeled Newsome’s comments about the state’s lawsuit, “Governor Newsome’s address to the nation,” as if Trump’s calling up of the National Guard was an assault on his lawless state. The best way to humble the arrogant leaders of this city is to bar the city from holding the 2028 summer Olympics, despite President Trump’s enthusiastic endorsement of LA as Olympic host prior to the anti-ICE riots. Ironically, there was a change.org petition circulating prior to the riots encouraging a boycott of the 2028 Olympics because of the Trump presidency. That petition stated: “It is clear through Trump’s stance on conflicts like the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the conflict in Gaza that he does not stand for peace, but rather for his own selfish interests. In the few months of his presidency, he has broken from US allies in the United Nations and berated president Zelensky, making a disgrace of this country…” One could update that petition to read: “It is clear through Newsome’s stance on conflicts like the illegal alien invasion of California that he does not stand for peace or law and order, but rather for his own selfish political interests. In the few years of his governorship, he has broken from US law and berated President Trump, making a disgrace of his country…” Of course, one could ask: Where were the rioters who attacked law enforcement officers with chunks of broken concrete and other projectiles when Barack Obama deported 2.8 million illegal aliens during his administration? Add to this the effects of looting, torching cars on fire and destroying public property. As UK Mail concurred, “perhaps today’s activists are motivated more by politics than principle.” (Scratch out the word ‘perhaps’ in above paragraph and you have the truth.) Senator Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) recently stated during a Senate hearing that because LA’s liberal leadership will still be in place in 2028, the city is ‘incapable of handling a high-profile’ event like the Olympics. ‘Won’t we be better off as a nation, just to make an acknowledgement of that and move it to someplace that actually will have law and order, that will have the proper amount of protections for American citizens and the tens of millions of visitors that are going to come to both of those events?” Moreno said. The official website of the Games of the XXXIV Olympiad or Los Angeles 2028 promises the Games will be the greenest in history with a so called “Car-Free” Games vision. The event will cost 7.1 billion. Meanwhile in LA it’s a ten-year wait to get a ruptured sidewalk fixed. And as columnist Steve Lopez noted in the insufferably progressive Los Angeles Times: “Tens of thousands of people are homeless, and the agency overseeing homelessness is in turmoil amid damning financial audits, so unless there’s a quick turnaround, the city will be draped in blue tarps for all the world to see. Meanwhile, planned transportation improvements are behind schedule, skyrocketing liability claim settlements are expected to cost $300 million this year… and on top of all that, it suddenly dawned on local leaders several weeks ago that the city was broke.” Economics and the city’s Marxist leadership aside, can a riot-saturated Los Angeles even be trusted to host the Olympics? As home to 1,000,000 illegal aliens, what could possibly go wrong? Some on social media commented: “The 2028 Triple Burning Car Broad Jump will be problematic,” as will “the Molotov Cocktail Toss event.” Some argue LA should be able to host the 2028 Games because the world will get to witness the epic failure of progressive Democrat policies, not to mention that traditionally every city that hosts the Olympics suffers some sort of post-Game trauma. “The Games have a history of damaging the cities and societies that host them,” according to an article in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs. The article cited “broken budgets that burden the public purse…” Recall that in 1980 the U.S.-led boycott of the Moscow 1980 Games had repercussions in 1984 when the Games were last held in Los Angeles. At that time communist countries like the Soviet Union, East Germany, and Cuba, retaliated for the U.S. boycott of the Moscow Games by staying away from the 1984 Games. Their big concern then was the safety of their athletes in what they considered a hostile and fiercely anticommunist environment. Today, that’s all been reversed. The safety of athletes in 2028 in Los Angeles is at risk because of the city’s fiercely pro-communist environment.

Competing Visions for Gay and Lesbian Catholics

Sometime in the 1980s, after attending a Dignity USA Mass for gay and lesbian Catholics, I found myself in bed with one of the attendees, a religious guy who firmly believed, as I did then, that the Church’s teaching on same-sex relations was skewed. As we emerged from a tangle of top sheets, “Luke” looked me straight in the eye and announced that he had something to tell me. “Have you heard about the latest message from Our Lady of Medjugorje?” he asked, his look becoming very serious. He was referring to the alleged apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary to six children that began in June 1961 in the small mountain village of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and that have continued to the present on an ad hoc basis with one or two of the original children. Luke informed me that the Virgin’s latest message had to do with the primacy of love in human relationships. The message, according to him, seemed to suggest that if spiritual love sometimes slips into the physical realm, it still maintains its spirituality, even if the physical expression violates the cold letter of Church law. In other words, the Blessed Virgin of Medjugorje approved of our bedroom gymnastics because there was real “love” there, even though there wasn’t real love, because after that experience, Luke moved on to other men, and I went on to forget about him as well. The visions at Medjugorje have never been approved by the Catholic Church. Some Catholic thinkers and commentators like Malachi Martin have always condemned the apparitions as having “suspect” origins. I was an on/off again member of Dignity Philadelphia in the 1980s. At the time I was interviewing Father John McNeil, author of “The Church and the Homosexual,” digging deep into John Boswell’s “Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality,” and going out to lunch with Bishop John Spong of the Episcopal Church to get his take on the “new” theology that freed homosexuality from the sin-drenched world of the Old Testament and the writings of Saint Paul. Simply put, part of that new theology maintained that the sin of Sodom was not about consensual same-sex relationships per se but about the sin of inhospitality and rape, et cetera. In the 1980s, I attended a Hans Kung lecture at Temple University, got the Swiss theologian’s autograph, and reported on the lecture in a way that highlighted Fr. Kung’s views on sexuality: if “love” is in the equation, there’s no sin, gay or straight. (Fr. Kung, who never wore his priestly collar, lived openly with a woman in violation of his vow of celibacy.) In 1979, his status as a Catholic theologian was revoked by Pope John Paul II and the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith because he had “departed from the integral truth of the Catholic faith.” Dignity was founded in 1973 after Sister Jennine Gramick, a co-founder of (the pro-gay) New Ways Ministry along with Fr. Bob Nugent (now deceased), wanted to organize “gay friendly” Masses for a Philadelphia friend named Dominic Rolla, an early gay rights figure in the city. Together with Fr. Paul Morrissey and Fr. Myron Judy, both Philadelphians, the group started to have Sunday evening Masses in local Episcopal churches. Dignity Philadelphia currently meets weekly at St. Luke and the Epiphany at 330 South 13th Street. Dignity Masses originally adhered to a traditional structure: the celebrant was a validly ordained male priest; there were occasional processions with banners. The hymns, however, were always more “Protestant evangelical-style” than orthodox Catholic. Bad Mass music became the norm in Catholic churches after the Second Vatican Council. That’s when exquisite Latin hymns were replaced by tommyrot songs like “On Eagles’ Wings.” For a brief time after its founding, Dignity Masses seemed very much like the parish Masses in most Catholic churches. Over time, many Dignity chapters across the US began to change the Mass, especially as the larger gay movement grew more “woke.” Dignity liturgies followed suit like an obedient servant. In May 2023, Dignity Philadelphia celebrated its 50th anniversary. The event was highlighted in a recent issue of Billy Penn: “Step inside the recreation center at Saint Luke and the Epiphany on Sunday evenings and you’ll find a traditional celebration of mass. Except in this case, the priest is a married woman,” the article begins. The writer neglects to mention that the Catholic Church does not recognize women priests, despite the existence of a worldwide organization known as Roman Catholic Women Priests, or women who have been “ordained” to the priesthood by disobedient rogue Catholic bishops who want to remain anonymous. “…Dignity Philadelphia has been progressive in allowing married people, women, and LGBT people to lead mass, as well as involving lay people in leadership decisions.” In the left progressive world of woke theology, the so-called “priesthood of the people” has become a popular concept, allowing anyone who feels called to say Mass to do just that. This philosophy essentially abolishes the priesthood as it has been understood for 2,000 years. “Hymns and prayers are modified to include gender-nonconforming language,” the Billy Penn article continues. Years ago, at my last Dignity Philadelphia Mass, I heard “Mother God” in conjunction with the traditional “Our Father” at the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer. I resolved then and there never to return to Dignity Philadelphia. Changing the words of the founder of Christianity was tantamount to the greatest heresy ever. Liturgical corruption and innovation, gender ideology, and the socialist idea that anyone who feels called to say Mass can say it — all of this was certainly not Catholic. Let’s reverse course and take a look at the other gay and lesbian Catholic organization that receives much less publicity than Dignity: Courage and Encourage. The Philadelphia Courage website states that “Courage members are men and women who experience same-sex attraction and who have made a commitment to strive for chastity.” Encourage is for parents, spouses, siblings and friends of people who, as LGBT, “are looking for help to keep the faith and keep their family bonds intact.” You won’t see Courage at June Pride events, but the group is big on annual religious retreats held at various cities in the United States. These three-to-four day retreats include daily Mass, lectures, panel discussions and welcoming receptions. The leader of Philadelphia Courage group, Fr. Chris Rogers, currently pastor of Saint Patrick’s Catholic Church in Kennett Square but who worked as an assistant pastor at Saints Philip and James in Exton, Pennsylvania, where I went to grade school. Liturgical corruption and innovation, gender ideology, and the socialist idea that anyone who feels called to say Mass can say it — all of this was certainly not Catholic. It should not come as a surprise that Courage gets very bad rap in the gay and lesbian press. An article from “Lavender” in June 2010 posits, “…But then, Courage pelvis-gazes in a time wrap. It was formed in 1980 under the aegis of Terence Cardinal Cooke, Archbishop of New York, with Father John Harvey as Founding Director. That was soon after Anita Bryant’s anti-gay campaign galvanized social conservatives, setting the tone for an anti-gay backlash exacerbated shortly thereafter when the AIDS crisis hit…” The odd juxtaposition of Courage with Anita Bryant definitely sets a tone. The writer then attacks the priests who serve the Courage population: “The priests deserve some pity. They don’t know themselves. They supposedly always have held to celibacy, so the expansive nature of sexual awakening healthily channeled is shut off to them — arrested development… In essence, these priests and their adherents have been emasculated.” The writer then makes an awful confession. He admits that he faked his way into Courage membership by telling the moderator he was a Catholic blue collar guy whose breakup with his girlfriend had caused him to experience feelings of attraction to the same sex. Unlike Dignity, potential Courage members usually go through a short screening interview prior to membership. The spy then goes on to critique the men and women he meets in Courage meetings. “A very troubled man in his 20s — who had utter contempt for pro-gay activism — literally seethed with anxiety about social pressures he felt were out there in the world that wanted him to go the way of homosexuality — hence, away from salvation. He had visited various priestly orders on a quest for his life’s purpose. Although he clearly and naturally presented as straight and masculine, he was hyperconscious that others ‘would know.’ It gnawed at him.” In 2012, Hartford’s “The Rainbow” quoted a Dignity member’s view of Courage: “Courage’s falsehood is that gay people cannot live full, loving lives and express themselves [sexually] in a loving way.” Courage is a form of spiritual violence, the Dignity member added. Dignity Philadelphia and Courage are on my mind because of certain developments in the Catholic Church, most notably in Germany, where German Catholic bishops recently endorsed the blessing of same-sex unions. While such endorsements go against Church teaching, Pope Francis has refrained from penalizing the German bishops. The Catholic Church in Germany has been undergoing a woke revolution for a number of years. As a result of this radicalization, the Church there has lost more than a half a million members. People are leaving because the Church no longer has a spiritual dimension. Traditionally, the Catholic Church has always been a force against the culture of the age. This is no longer the case in Germany, where the Church has “married” the culture. In October, the sixteenth General Assembly of the Ordinary Synod of Bishops, or the Synod on Synodality, will open in Rome. Many of the participants have been specifically appointed by Pope Francis. Top on the list for debate are the blessing of same-sex unions and women priests. Critics see the Synod as the beginning of the “Anglicization” of the Catholic Church. Will the Synod approve the blessing of same-sex couples? If so, what will happen to Courage members who are trying to live the tenets of their Faith when it comes to chastity? Should they throw in the towel and join Dignity, where they can feed on gender ideology and delight in a drag queen saying Mass because the drag queen felt called to do so? I asked Father Kyle Schippel, a Courage chaplain, what he thought about the upcoming October Synod and the possibility of support for the blessing of same-sex unions. “Regarding the Synod, I can say that Courage is watching it closely. We know that true freedom comes from following Jesus, so we always want to hold that up as a priority. And living in the right relationship with Him is the key to that freedom. We are confident that Church teaching is timeless and enduring; and that the Holy Spirit remains firmly in leadership of the Church. “We continue to encourage our members to pray for the Synod, of course,” he added.