Pittsburgh is more beautiful than Philadelphia!

What about Pennsylvania’s other great city, the city of Pittsburgh? Is life in Pittsburgh better than life in Philadelphia? Is Pittsburgh’s downtown section more pleasing to the eye than Philadelphia’s?

My first glimpse of “the steel city” was from a Greyhound bus at 18 when I took a cross country trip to San Francisco. I’d been napping in my seat when the driver announced “Pittsburgh.” I woke with a start and spotted the Golden Triangle. For a second I felt what Brigham Young must have felt when he first laid eyes on the place that would later be called Salt Lake City: “This is the place!” I wanted to get out and explore, but the bus headed off into Ohio. I never saw Pittsburgh again. That changed a couple of years ago when I teamed up with friends Tom and Diana who were headed to Pittsburgh to visit their son and daughter-in-law for a 3-day visit. I didn’t have to think about it when they asked me if I wanted to join them. I packed my bags and before I knew it we were on the turnpike (with occasional detours on the Lincoln Highway) until at last Pittsburgh’s spectacular skyline came into view. There it was, just as I had remembered it from the Greyhound bus window, only the view was nicer: newer and taller skyscrapers, mountains and buildings perched on the tops of the great hills that surround the city. Most spectacular of all, were the multiple multicolored bridges in the middle of the city. So many bridges! Pittsburgh’s bridges have a fairyland quality to them and they contrast nicely with the houses, buildings and onion domed gold churches perched on the hills surrounding the downtown area. Philadelphia’s flat topography cannot match this singing, striking landscape. “Pittsburgh looks great from this angle,” Diana said, “but you wouldn’t want to live here.” I asked ‘why not?’ and was told that Pittsburgh is a very small town where everybody knows everybody, a kind of Mayberry with skyscrapers. Funny, I thought, this is what they say about Philly. Pittsburgh is also a huge sports town but we’re talking all consuming sports as in sports-as-a-reason-to-live and sports-as-religion. Nearly every bar and restaurant in the city has a big screen TV for any game that happens to be on. It doesn’t matter what kind of game—hockey, football, baseball or tennis—as long as it is…sports. Both Tom and Diana hate sports, and I can’t say I am a fan either. First impressions of a city are important. At first glance, Pittsburgh seems far less diverse than Philly. Tom and Diana told me that there are more redneck types in Pittsburgh than in Philly—I should note that both Tom and Diana are Democrats and tend to lump conservatives in with “rednecks.” Pittsburgh has made many “best lists” since the year 2000. Forbes Magazine, for instance, rates Pittsburgh as the nation’s most livable city. Pittsburgh beat out Honolulu, which came in second. The Farmers Insurance Group also voted Pittsburgh as third on a list of ten as the “Most Secure Places to live in the United States.” But the real topper is the city’s inclusion in one of the ‘hottest cities of the future,’ lists where it is called “The Next Hipster Haven.” (Philadelphia is also on this list as a city of art (murals) and culture.) Philadelphia isn’t the only city to call itself “the city of neighborhoods” because Pittsburgh uses the same line. Our first night on the town gave me a sense of the city’s smallness in comparison to Philadelphia’s never ending flat streetscapes. Pittsburgh is a big city in miniature, with miniature crime, miniature graffiti (or no graffiti at all), a highly walk able downtown section and of course all of those multicolored bridges and Byzantine churches. The city is ranked among the smartest in the nation. It’s been called a city of bookworms (despite the emphasis on sports). It has the best hospitals in the country, and (best yet) the most affordable housing. Many refer to it as a “hidden gem.” When travelers think of Pennsylvania they tend to think only of Philadelphia. ‘The Economist’ has rated Pittsburgh as the most livable city in the United States. When we visited Pittsburgh’s waterfront area, Three Rivers Park, where the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio Rivers meet, it was refreshing not to have to cross an I-95 (think Penn’s Landing) in order to get there. I also liked the way the waterfront piers meet the water as opposed to the elevated piers at Penn’s Landing. During my stay, I saw little or no graffiti nor did I spot a single homeless person with a cardboard sign. Perhaps I was in the wrong section of town, because I’m sure Pittsburgh has plenty of homeless people, but I couldn’t find any. The town has a 1960s’ time warp quality about it. As Tom, Diana and I watched the motorboats come and go along the piers, Tom reminded me that Pittsburgh isn’t really a Northeastern city at all but primarily a Midwestern city, then an Appalachian city and only lastly somewhat of a Northeastern city, but only somewhat. The Midwestern flavor of the town is probably why artist Andy Warhol left Pittsburgh on a Greyhound bus after his graduation from Carnegie Mellon. He needed a monolith badass city like New York, and he got it. After his death in 1987, his home town honored him with the Andy Warhol Museum and even a small bridge named the Andy Warhol Bridge. The Warhol Bridge is just down the street from the Andy Warhol Museum. People either love or hate Andy Warhol but in the museum there is only love. I saw large families with little children, teenagers, elderly folks on walkers or canes, and even a few people in wheelchairs inspecting the Campbell’s soup can paintings, the Liz, Marilyn and Elvis portraits, and even checking out the dicey Joe Dallesandro film stills and the Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers album covers. I think Warhol would have approved of the museum staff. Most are college students decked out in Warhol T-shirts and although observant and focused, the staffers don’t have that TSA-style museum security guard harshness that one sometimes encounters in standard art museums. The museum houses the complete set of Warhol’s 160 time capsule boxes and many photographs of Warhol’s youth and family, his early paintings and his later films and videos. In the Warhol video room I watched a black and white film that Warhol made of Lee Radziwill, John, Jr. and Caroline Kennedy a few years after JFK’s assassination. The movie was made one summer at the family’s private beach at Hyannis Port. We see John, Jr. peering into Warhol’s camera making goofy faces and then doing strange zombie contortions with his eyes. John, Jr. is about nine years old and Caroline is 11 or so. In another scene Warhol’s staff buries John, Jr. in the sand up to his neck and then (with sand) they make him a mermaid body from the neck down, even giving him big sand breasts and then arranging seaweed (as hair). John, Jr. is on a non stop giggle. At one point he complains that he just washed his hair and can’t get it dirty; then he announces that he has a head itch. A very slender Lee Radziwill walks along the surf in her barely modest string bikini, her wet pony tail looking oddly chic and very “New York.”

We ate in a lot of restaurants and found the food and ambiance to our liking. Popular are pubs with the kind of bar food you’d find at Standard Tap in Northern Liberties, only you won’t find breaded smelt, probably the most awful dish in the western hemisphere in any Pittsburgh pub. In Pittsburgh, as in Center City or Fishtown, popular restaurants mean long lines, especially at those places that do not take reservations. At one highly prized French eatery the lines were so long that patrons lingered outside with drinks or sat at the bar until called. Our wait was so long that the bartender offered us an apology. “I am so sorry about this,” she said. “I don’t know why these people aren’t moving. They have their checks but they won’t move. They won’t go home.”

The chronic sitters didn’t seem to care that other people had been waiting in line for more than an hour. We humorously suggested the restaurant print on its menu that customer occupation of a table not exceed two and a half hours. We found that one upscale Pittsburgh Korean restaurant in the Squirrel Hill area has this request printed at the bottom of their menu. Please do not allow your dining experience to exceed two and one half hours. When I returned to the City of Brotherly love, for at least a week I kept thinking of Pittsburgh’s beautiful multicolored bridges. Thom Nickels

Philadelphia AIA Lewis Mumford Architectural Journalism Award, 2005

Author of Philadelphia Architecture Honored With AIA Journalism Award The Philadelphia Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, a group with more than 1300 members, annually bestows this award "...on a regional journalist who has written articulately, responsibly, and with foresight on the contributions of architects to the built environment." The award will be given tonight at Davio's restaurant, 111 South 17th Street, from 6:00 to 7:30 pm. We are happy to say that much of Thom Nickels' writing has, for many years, found its way into our publications and that this award couldn't have come at a better time. In architecture, timing is, if not everything, extremely important. Ask them over at the Kimmel Center (or ask their attorneys). Just now Arcadia Publishing, a company which has become the largest publisher of regional history books in North America, publishing more than 3,000 titles, has released Philadelphia Architecture by Thom Nickels, a walk through Philadelphia streets past and present, highlights the richness and diversity of the city's architectural history. Besides being a journalist, Nickels is poet, and author of eight books, including Gay and Lesbian Philadelphia and Manayunk. It's not surprising that he came from a family of architects, growing up around drawing boards and architectural blueprints in the farmlands of Chester County. From a very early age, he read about architecture in his father's architectural magazines, and was fascinated, but his aversion to math prevented him from pursuing a career as an architect. During his alternate service during the Vietnam War, Nickels met famous Bauhaus architect, Walter Gropius. Gropius was dying at the time and needed a life-saving operation. Nickels struggled with a hospital physician to remove Gropius' bed from the small hospital room and roll it through the poorly designed hospital door. It was a scene of high irony and intensity: the world famous father of the Bauhaus School, which taught that form followed function, left this world "witnessing" a very bad function. Nickels knew at that moment he would someday write about architecture. During the 1970s, Nickels became a newspaper columnist and began to write a column in Philadelphia's Welcomat, one of the first gay-issues oriented columns in a large city weekly in the nation. He soon began publishing books in the mid-1980s. Nickels says that an Arcadia editor actually suggested one of two projects for him, "Philadelphia Architecture," or "Famous Philadelphians." Considering his family background, the first choice seemed best. He hasn't ruled out a book about famous Philadelphians. After taking the assignment, it took Nickels about a year to get the material together. Along the way Thom says he discovered that one of architect William Strickland's earliest known works is a Romanian Orthodox church in Northern Liberties. He tells us that, "This building has fallen into a state of disrepair and was/is largely hidden on a quiet neighborhood street. By including the building in my book," he asserts, " and by writing about the building for a newspaper where I am on staff I think I may have helped it secure publicity and hence some needed funding for restoration." Nickels maintains that doing the book caused him to have a new appreciation for Strickland in general. This appreciation went into high gear when he discovered that a club owner in Old City had painted another Strickland Greek Revival building a lurid blue. He adds regretfully, "An article I wrote about this in the Weekly Press attracted some attention and outrage but unfortunately the club owner has not yet been forced to remove the blue paint job." Our Contributing Editor tells us that he discovered that many of Philadelphia's great buildings were controversial when they were proposed or built. "In many cases," he says, "the rhetoric bantered about then (I am thinking especially of the uproar surrounding the design of the PSFS building) reminds me a great deal of the criticism I hear today when a new downtown skyscraper is proposed. It is only lately that Philadelphia has shed its oppressively conservative skin. The results of this can be seen in the city's striking new skyline." For Thom Nickels, buildings are like houses we have once lived in. "They are, he says, "a part of our present, past, and future. They comprise our world. They can be the mental repository of our emotions." There's a book signing party for the newly published Philadelphia Architecture, Wednesday, December 7, 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. at La Creperie Cafe, 1722 Sansom Street, given by Joseph Fox Bookseller, 1724 Sansom Street. From The Weekly Press (by Robert Christian) 8 December 2005

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