On the Holy Land (The Garden Tomb is a Protestant Invention)

When I was in Israel eight years ago, I traveled with a group of seven female health and wellness journalists. They wrote for spa and fitness magazines. I was approved for the trip despite the fact that my travel writing at the time had nothing to do with fitness or analyzing the attributes of body massages. Massages are something you do, not write about. I wanted to see the Holy Land, float in the Dead Sea, maybe bring back some rock salt from Sodom and Gomorrah, while imagining myself 2,000 years ago on the Sea of Galilee. I also wanted to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. I never got the rock salt because our press bus whizzed past the site of Sodom. We were at least able to smell the scent of sulfur, which penetrates the Dead Sea area; sulfur is also known to be the scent of Lucifer. Our tour director didn’t dare guess as to where Lot’s wife may have stood when she was changed into a pillar of salt. Certain aspects of that Israel trip hit me as significant long after I returned home. This was the harmonious relationship between Israelis and Arabs we encountered as we traveled about the country. It seems no matter where we went – restaurants, roadside cafes, farms that doubled as hotels, and even in the Dead Sea spas where we received those mud massages – there always seemed to be an evenly mixed number of Jews and Arabs living together and getting along peacefully. We never asked one another after a visit to a particular spa, “Were you massaged by a Jew or an Arab?” Then there were the children of these mixed marriages: a large swath of the population identified as Israeli-Arab. This was especially noticeable in many of the restaurants we frequented, where the waitstaff generally came from this group. This pointed to tremendous possibilities for a permanent peace among the two groups. At least the scent of peace was in the air. At the time of the trip — 2018 — there were high tensions between Israel and Middle Eastern countries. The Israel-Palestine conflict of 2018, or the Land Day Protests, began on March 30. The clash resulted in the deaths of 32 Palestinians and thousands of injuries (Israelis included) at the Gaza border. Two years prior, in 2016, there were multiple-armed attacks in Tel Aviv, including shootings and stabbings. Our press group was briefed on possible international friction during our ten-day sojourn. Some journalists who originally signed on for the trip opted to cancel at the last minute. One woman from Dallas told the group she had to keep the trip a secret from her family. Had they known she was going to Israel they would have done an intervention along the lines of “handcuffing” her to a chair. We laughed when she told us the story, but we weren’t laughing when our tour bus traveled along the West Bank, then the location of a lot of violence. We were told to sit on the left side of the vehicle should somebody from the Arab settlements — these consisted of shacks on land dotted with broken machinery, bicycles and burnt automobile wreckage — throw rocks or bombs. Other tour buses had been hit in the past but, as our illustrious Jewish tour guide explained, “Our driver is p-a-c-k-i-n-g.” At the Western Wall, I donned a white skullcap and stood in the male line. Separation of the sexes at the Wall was implemented soon after the Six-Day War in 1967. I was there not as a worshiper but as an historian. I was fully aware that the Wall was not part of the original temple destroyed in 70 AD by the Romans, a destruction that was prophesied by Christ when in Matthew 24:2, He said, “See ye not all these things? there shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.” Even Josephus, the Jewish historian and eyewitness to the event, recorded that the Romans who destroyed the temple left so little behind that anyone who came to the spot afterwards would hardly know that the area had once been the site of a great city. The Western Wall, in reality, was a retaining wall, built as a landscaping and anti-erosion tool when King Herod expanded the complex that included the Temple. The retaining wall has nothing to do with the temple of Solomon. The holiest site in Judaism is really the Temple Mount, the site where Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son, Isaac. In my white skullcap (which looked more papal than Jewish), I went to the Wall without a note to slip into the cracks but studied the crevices in the rocks, thinking of the 17-year-old survivors of the Roman siege who were sent to Egypt as slaves. Confession: I’ve always thought of myself as Jewish in spirit. When I was 20 years old nearly everybody in Boston assumed I was Jewish. These comments were frequent enough that I eventually went to my German great-aunt and asked her if we had any Jewish relatives on the Nickels side. She hesitated, hesitated some more, and then admitted she didn’t know. After visiting the Wall, I returned to the large area where the tour guide was waiting for me. We chatted a few seconds when suddenly I noticed a pair of flailing arms behind me. Accompanying the arm motions were a series of grunts and frog-like sounds. For a second I assumed it was one of the women journalists playing a joke on me, but when I saw the worried look on the tour guide’s face, I knew it wasn’t. “Don’t turn around,” she whispered, cautiously. The flailing arms then twisted into snake-like patterns, coming very close to touching my body. I quickly turned to see a chubby Israeli schoolboy, probably 12 or 13, who reminded me of the original Spanky on The Little Rascals. He wore a school uniform of sorts and a small knapsack on his back. I humored him at first, smiling – a signal that I was cool and could take a joke – but then I saw that his smile had twisted into something else. He went on like this, dancing around me in circles, his arms now enveloping the air above me, ascending and descending in great swivels as if he was performing a ritual. I backed away from him, after muttering a few phrases like “What’s up?” or humoring him further with comments like, “I feel like dancing myself,” when the vibe changed to something vaguely threatening. Not for a second did I think a chubby schoolboy like this could be a danger to anybody, but when he would not stop and actually began body bumping me, the tour guide and I moved a good distance from him. Thinking Spanky had had his fill of harassing tourists, when he followed us with his little snake dance, the tour guide yelled at him and called security. Even this didn’t stop the little bugger, although when security arrived (in less than a minute), he retreated in fear. What caused this schoolboy to react to me the way he did? I’ve thought about that many times since the incident. Although I had a small gold Russian Orthodox cross around my neck at the time (the cross was hidden under my shirt), at best he could only see the back of the chain at the nape of my neck. For all he knew it could have been the Star of David. Or an Aleister Crowley pendant. I recently did a bit of research about strange occurrences at the Western Wall and came up with quite a number of so-called anti-Christian incidents. The bulk of them seem to have happened from 2023 onwards, and perhaps my 2018 experience was a precursor to them. What has come to be a common occurrence, according to an article in Christianity Today, are encounters between Jewish radicals and evangelical Christians at the Wall. These confrontations are usually accompanied by chants of “Go Home!” What struck me as interesting about these reports is that the “Go Home” chanters are usually very young people, some as young as 13. If I had a chance to talk to Spanky today – imagining him as a mature, intelligent adult – I would tell him that even I have a beef with evangelical Christians, rather than Christians in general. “They invent stuff,” I’d say. “They invented the Garden Tomb, which they say is the burial place of Jesus Christ. It is not. The only reason they invented the Garden Tomb is because they don’t like the fact that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where Christ died and was buried, is on the site of a Catholic and Orthodox church. The evangelicals couldn’t stand this fact of history, and so they did what evangelicals do best: They make stuff up. “I’d tell people like that to go home too!”

The Low Tide of Pride

Things don’t look good for the future of Pride month. Not only has a new Gallup poll found that support for same-sex marriage and relationships in the US has fallen after two decades, it was also revealed that about 65 percent of US adults believe same-sex marriage should be legal, down from 71 percent in 2022 and 2023. In 2025, 39 percent of companies backtracked on supporting Pride compared to 2024. On the other hand, several San Francisco Giants baseball players were called out by the MLB for covering up their baseball rainbow-decorated Pride caps with Bible verses. The impetus behind the warning was that any writing on baseball uniforms was forbidden, but no one is buying that excuse, especially when the entire Giants team were forced to wear the rainbow caps for Pride Night. Why would anyone who is not gay be forced to wear a Pride cap?

Senator Josh Hawley asked the same question when he wrote to MLB, reminding them that the league in 2020 put up political slogans and created patches to be sewn on uniforms that read “Black Lives Matter” and “United For Change.” Hawley also wrote that the league “suspended its own equipment rules so that players could display progressive political slogans on their cleats.” Baseball, to its credit, has always maintained a degree of common sense when it comes to far-left talking points, unlike the NFL, which long ago fell into the woke cesspit. The Pride baseball cap controversy, however, promises to accelerate the downward spiral of LGBT acceptance not only among baseball fans but among Americans who answer Gallup polls. When the question of eroding LGBT acceptance in 2026 was posted on reddit, scores of gays and lesbians seemed to agree on the root causes.

“Kids doing puberty blockers, and boys in girls’ sports are 100 percent the cause of the push back,” one man posted. “Gays are just the accepted collateral damage. The movement has been hijacked by the 1 percent who demand attention at the detriment of everyone else. This has brought backlash to the community, causing a relatively large split. Gender ideologues + ‘queer’ straight people have ruined things.” A woman posted: “What the general society doesn’t understand is the whole non-binary, gender fluid weird sh-t. It freaks them out and makes them think there’s a movement to make everyone genderless. Calling people ‘they’ is awkward and strange. I believe in respecting everyone’s wishes, but it’s that part of movement that freaks people out. And it annoys me that simple gay rights are being re-evaluated because men in dresses get upset when you call them ‘sir.’” Most Americans feel some confusion when it comes to trans issues, despite the fact that transgenderism has taken over the gay and lesbian movement. The idea that one can become the opposite sex by getting hormone therapy and making an identification wish (“I identify as a woman”) is just bad science fiction. Biological sex is not a social construct, although you can say that every human being is a composite of male and female qualities and/or mannerisms that “surface” at different times. Perhaps the most famous sex change in modern history was Army vet George William Jorgensen’s transition in 1952. Jorgensen, after becoming Christine, became an instant celebrity. In interviews after her surgery, Jorgensen expressed concern that too many people were clamoring for sex-change operations in a fad-like way. She was adamant in cautioning prospective transsexuals to be very careful before taking this irreversible step. She also stated that there were very few “real” transsexuals. In today’s world, there’s far less caution than there was in Jorgensen’s time when it comes to trans issues. Jorgensen’s warning has been forgotten. Children as young as six or eight are coming out as transgender, and they are being encouraged to do so by parents who supply them with hormones, call them “they,” or send them off as teens to sex reassignment mutilation rooms. As a boy, I sometimes took bed sheets from the family laundry closet and dressed up as a nun. I enjoyed sneaking into the woods and fields behind our country home in a long flowing veil. Indulging in such behavior did not prevent me from dressing up as a Native American chief in a full war bonnet or pretending that I was Davy Crockett in a coonskin hat. But just because I fantasized about being a nun for 30 minutes twice a year when I was 8, didn’t mean that I wanted to become a girl. Yet suppose I was that same 8-year-old boy today with woke Democratic parents who saw my nun costume as proof that I was really a girl. It’s unlikely they would dismiss my indulgence as Kiddy Fun Theater; it is more likely they would search for a physician who would ask me if I felt like a girl trapped in a boy’s body. A study at Vanderbilt University and London’s Portman Clinic of Children, reported that 70 to 80 percent of children who come to identify with the opposite sex lose these feelings over time. The startling fact is that too many children in the throes of gender role-play are assumed to be transgender and then put on hormone therapy routines.

Since Jorgensen’s time, there’s been a major cultural shift, as evidenced by the San Francisco Giants being forced to wear rainbow baseball caps and four years of the Biden administration’s love affair with transgenderism. ‘Coming out’ today often means coming out as transgender, not gay or lesbian. The latter is old hat; the truth is that many so-called progressive parents would rather their child be trans than gay. A trans identity comes with conventional framing: a very pretty son who would otherwise come out as gay in 1969 can now suffer the delusion that “she” fits in as a “heterosexual” faux female. The parents can also entertain this fantasy without admitting they have a homosexual son. When I think about the general public’s acceptance of LGBT issues, I recall the now famous video with the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro and reporter trans activist Zoey Tur. The topic was a Courage Award given to Caitlyn Jenner. Shapiro, who maintained a gentlemanly demeanor throughout the discussion, stated that transgenderism was a mental disorder, while stating that he respects Zoey as a human being but his beef was with “the philosophy” of transgenderism in general. Yet Tur called Shapiro’s criticism of transgenderism hate speech and told him, “You can cut that out or you’re going home in an ambulance.” The general audiences in America hear this sort of rhetoric, and they take note. I have watched a fair number of online videos of FTM and MTF transitions. In the MTF videos the MTF speaker often seems captivated by the cosmetic glamour of being a woman. These young men in their 20s are generally more concerned about looking sexy, than they are about the more substantive aspects of being a “woman.” The looksmaxxing fixation on cosmetic beauty (blue hair, Vogue accents, etc.) is daunting, as if being a woman was only about fashion and beauty. The focus in most of these videos is superficial and narcissistic. Ordinary Americans watch these videos, take in the message, and silently draw their own conclusions. This is especially true when a video touches on the sensitive subject of whether one should ask a trans person whether they still have a penis or a vagina. Generally, the official woke canon states that questions like this are unacceptable. The question is immediately put down as being in bad taste or “gross,” as if having a penis or a vagina had nothing whatsoever with being a man or a woman. This is what America is finding it harder and harder to accept and support. Former University of the Arts professor and author Camille Paglia addressed this question when she wrote: “Sex reassignment surgery, even today with all of its advances, cannot in fact change anyone’s sex…. You can define yourself as a trans man, or a trans woman, as one of these new gradations along the scale. But ultimately, every single cell in the human body, the DNA in that cell, remains coded for your biological birth.” Paglia added: “…. History is cyclic, and everywhere in the world you find this pattern in ancient times: that as a culture begins to decline, you have an efflorescence of transgender phenomena. That is a symptom of cultural collapse.” Regarding cultural collapse, it might be wise to recall what St. Augustine said: “It was pride that changed angels into devils; It is humility that makes men as angels.”

Rome vs. SSPX, the true Catholic Church

The visionary Marcel Lefebvre, the founder of the traditional Catholic priestly fraternity of Saint Pius X (SSPX) in 1970, saw the future of the Catholic Church and was inspired by the Holy Spirit to do something. The Society he founded was dedicated to the preservation of the Latin Mass, and opposition to some of the Protestant innovations of Vatican II. By 1970, the pastoral Second Vatican Council (it was not an Ecumenical, dogmatic Council), had already unleashed a terrible revolution in Catholicism. Some today compare that revolution to the French Revolution in its destructive power that was not immediately apparent, although at that time anyone with “eyes” to see could have predicted what lay ahead. What happened after the closure of the Council on December 8, 1965, was tantamount to an atom bomb: Catholic seminaries, monasteries, and convents emptied out. The nuns that stayed in the Church ditched traditional habits and adopted secular dress as well as the social gospel of “inclusion” and “equity.” Liturgical life became a hodge podge of traditional and Protestant elements; church architecture was transformed as high altars morphed into Ikea kitchen tables; the Sacrifice of the Mass lost its mystical character and became a communal meal; from this concept, Communion in the hand developed.

Receiving the Body and Blood of Christ became a manufactured assembly – line process with lay people handing out the “meal” as if passing out peanut butter crackers. Some years passed, and then surveys revealed how millions of Catholics no longer believed in the Real Presence. Big shock. When you dumb down the Mass to a McDonalds-like meal celebrating “the people of God,” what you get is a shared snack devoid of mystery and reverence. Archbishop Lefebre, a true prophet, saw all of this coming. The Modernism that Pope Pius X condemned but was now being hailed as something inspired by the Holy Spirit, but a different Spirit than the One that inspired Lefebvre: clown Masses, puppet Masses, jazz Masses, Argentine Tango Masses, eucharistic ministers, altar girls, the end of Gregorian chant and its replacement with cringe sappy and sentimental hymns like, “Mary Did You Know?” Then came a deeper but just as important crisis, encouraged by Pope Francis’s Synodal Church, which was and continues to be a further radicalization of Vatican II – a Council without end – currently being championed by Pope Leo XIV who promised, come hell or high water, that he was going to continue the work of Francis. The revolutionary Synodal Church continues to elevate and promote clerics who support Jesuit James Martin’s School of Theology, making pro-LGBT theology the new Synodal standard: blessing homosexual couples without “really” blessing the relationship but blessing the “aura” around the relationship, further confusing an already confused laity who no longer believe in the Real Presence or pre-Synodal teachings on abortion, marriage and divorce, premarital sex, contraception, etcetera. It’s also true the laity don’t believe because the priests and bishops don’t believe any of these things themselves. They’ve led the way while persecuting traditional Catholics who want to preserve 2,000-year-old teachings. Consider how casual Catholicism is nowadays. You can go to Mass and receive “the symbolic snack” from an overweight lay woman with exposed cleavage the synodal Church calls a minister. Come to think of it, who needs a priest?

That old time joke, “Is the pope Catholic?” now has real meaning. The pope is Synodal, meaning he wants a new Church to supplant the old, when attitudes change. That is not Catholic according to tradition. Archbishop Lefebvre “saw” all of this coming down the pike. Perhaps he even had an inkling that the future Church under the direction of a quasi-Marxist pope (Robert Prevost) would attempt to blend with the world and its globalist robotics while championing criminal migrants and the overrunning of Europe with Islamists who would eventually seduce Catholic bishops into calling mosques sacred places and even to make room for Islamists in their churches and then call them holy spaces. Pope Leo will meet and cavort with Bad Bunny, Robert De Niro or Spike Lee and even go so far as to call the Hollywood film industry “a workshop of hope,” but he won’t meet with the SSPX. Instead, he has his Vatican henchman, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, head of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, and author of the booklet “Heal Me With Your Mouth” (which sexual organ His Eminence wants to heal is anybody’s guess), issue a formal statement regarding SSPX’s plan to consecrate four bishops on July 1, 2026, and indicating that such an action would be schismatic because it defied Rome. As CRISIS magazine noted recently, “If defying Rome is all you need for schism, then parts of the Church have been in schism for decades. In large, metropolitan cities in the United States, ‘LGBTQ+’ parishes have been openly flouting Church and papal teaching on sexuality for decades – without interference. The German Synodal Way has promoted heresy and radical forms of governance that are closer to schism than anything the SSPX has indulged in – without being disciplined. The Potemkin ‘Patriotic Church’ of the PRC appoints bishops without any regard to Rome whatsoever or public protest from the Vatican.”

Meanwhile, the SSPX continues to grow. The Society’s magnificent cathedral, The Immaculata in Kansas, was built with contributions from 40 countries and 50 states. Its religious orders, seminaries, and convents are booming, all of them traditional (no nuns on the bus; no nuns in hoop earrings and pant suits, and no priests who preform stunts around the altar). CRISIS concludes, “The SSPX keeps growing not because its priests and their lay adherents are horrible monsters lusting to foment schism but because they practice a recognizable form of the Catholic Faith as it has been known historically in the West…. More to the point, the late Hans Küng published a book denying papal infallibility but still died in communion with the Church. It is difficult to see how consecrating bishops without the Holy Father’s permission is worse than denying a solemnly defined dogma concerning papal authority.” In a famous 1969 radio broadcast, Pope Benedict XVI (years before becoming Pope), predicted that the Catholic Church would undergo a massive crisis and shrink significantly. He stated, “From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge—a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning.”

The Church that will become small is not the new Synodal Church, but the SSPX, the true Catholic Church under siege. Thom Nickels

NCC Liberty Medal 2026 Robert Prevost aka Leo XIV

Pope Leo XIV is due to receive the National Constitution Center’s 2026 Liberty Medal this July 4th. I am no fan of Pope Leo for a lot of reasons although I had great hope for his pontificate immediately following his election. While it’s true that he dressed and said Mass like a traditional pope, his appointments and political statements to the press over time revealed that he was Pope Francis 2.0 and that his total goal was to follow Francis’s agenda, that being the creation of new synodal “listening” Church, ready to water down teachings and possibly doctrine to “get with” contemporary culture and to be loved by the world. Catholics who wanted someone like Pope Benedict to succeed Francis — a traditionalist who appreciated the value of ancient rites who would not strive to become a popular icon celebrated by the likes of Rolling Stone magazine — were disappointed, since Leo’s election all but guaranteed that the Catholic Church in ten years’ time will be unrecognizable from the historic Catholic Church of the ages.

Like Francis, Pope Leo is popular among non-Catholics and secular liberal atheists and agnostics. He praises open borders, is vague and wishy-washy on issues related to sexual morality, talks about overturning serious Catholic doctrine when “attitudes change,” and sees all migrants as saints-in-the-making just because they are vagabond-travelers, even those who rape and commit crimes in the countries they invaded. The first American pope who doesn’t even identify as American but Peruvian, baited President Trump relentlessly with prickly comments about immigration until the president, sick of the chronic poking, fired back. Leo loves to talk. His wide grin is a massive political theater. Like Francis, his most contentious statements often come from impromptu airplane interviews. But it makes sense that the National Constitution Center, founded in 1988 when President Ronald Reagan established the Constitution Heritage Act, would award Pope Leo its 2026 Liberty Medal. For years I’ve kept a close watch on the NCC, looking for signs of an obvious political bias there, especially when Jeffrey Rosen was in command – Rosen had a talent for hiding his personal politics during public NCC interviews and seminars – although a profound political bias seems to be true of most of the people who attended NCC lectures and presentations. The vast majority of them seem to be liberal with a disdain for Trump and the overturning of Roe. They are also very left on trans issues, migrant invasions, et cetera. For me, looking for conservative NCC members was a little like looking at a haystack through the eye of a needle. I finally gave up. If there are conservatives at NCC events they are sheepish downlow types who only feel safe whispering their views in-between light fare bites: “Shh, don’t tell my wife, but I voted for Trump.” I’d attend these NCC soirees with a friend but midway through a glass of cold white wine the new people we found ourselves chatting with would reveal their leftist credentials. It was disheartening. Why is Philadelphia always like this? It got so bad I feared the NCC would soon be making land acknowledgment statements before every event. And yet if you Google the NCC and ask about political bias you’ll get guaranteed pledges and promises of political neutrality. Here’s one “non-partisan” entry from the NCC website: “The National Constitution Center is a private, nonprofit organization, the Center serves as America’s leading platform for constitutional education and debate, fulfilling our congressional charter “to disseminate information about the U.S. Constitution on a nonpartisan basis.”

And yet the popular and conservative Catholic podcaster, Anthony Stein, stated on-air that he had to block the NCC from sending press releases to his email because the institution is too left-wing. He mentioned this in connection with Pope Leo being named the 2026 Liberty Medal recipient, while shaking his head in disbelief. The awarding of the medal to Leo is obviously the result of the pope’s beliefs on immigration and migrants, his audacity in stepping out of his lane in attacking President Trump, and his tendency to regard Catholicism as just another religious denomination, equal to other faiths, which has never really been a Catholic belief until popes Francis and Leo came on the scene. These two popes, in case you haven’t guessed are religious revolutionaries. Of course, Leo’s pronouncements about peace and feeding the hungry, as Hallmark card-sounding as they are, also played a part in his being awarded the Liberty Medal. All popes want peace, however, and a pope would never advocate its opposite, unless of course Islamist militants stormed the walls of the Vatican. Given the open attitude of Rome these days, it’s just possible that the modern Church – the synodal Church – would throw down a prayer rug for the invaders.

The conservative meme, “Pope Leo is just another Democrat from Chicago,” fits in perfectly here, and this is why this Villanova grad with the wide grin did a very leftist-authoritarian thing when he recently laicized a Spanish priest for daring to suggest that Pope Francis was a heretical pseudo-pope. Leftism cannot help but be authoritarian. This is also why Pope Leo may excommunicate the SSPX — the largest society of traditionalist Catholics in the world — on July 1st, when four SSPX bishops are due to be consecrated against the wishes of the Vatican. I should note that past NCC Liberty Medal winners included Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, President George W. Bush and Mrs. Laura Bush, the Dalai Lama of Tibet (very chic), George H.W. Bush and William J. Clinton (after the blue dress and stud philandering), and Hillary Rodham Clinton. This gives you a sense of the NCC. Need we go on?

A Day at the Polls: Tattooed Leftist Women

Working the polls on Pennsylvania Primary Day, May 19, pretty much confirmed for me how entrenched Philly is when it comes to far-left politics. As Minority Inspector of Elections, I checked Voter IDs when people came to vote, but spent the bulk of my time maintaining watch and answering questions near the voting machines. The excessively hot temperatures contributed to the slow turnout, although that was also due to the fact that many people on the ballot ran unopposed. At the end of the day, only 90 people from my particular division came out and voted. They came as loners, as couples, with baby carriages, carrying dogs and cats. Many brought their children, mostly toddlers; there were also quite a few infants that entered the voting booth with their mothers. Had I been into statistics, I’d feel confident enough to make some generalizations about how Democrats, Republicans, and the city’s Working Families Party — with largely Democratic sympathies when it doesn’t operate as a completely socialist independent entity — present themselves at the polls. Young left-leaning women almost always had bare shoulders with much of their backs exposed. The female leftist uniform includes multiple tattoos on legs, ankles, shoulder blades, and in many instances full-sleeve tattoos on one of both arms. They often had a very haughty air, and if they were accompanied by a husband or boyfriend – the latter usually lagging behind while modestly dressed in jeans and a T-shirt – the full-sleeved tattooed woman always seemed to be the one in charge, at least based on her walking hurriedly in fro

nt of him as if leading a charge. Older, leftist women tended to have short “helmet” hair and long earrings. This style is a leftist classic and comes from radical fashion from hardcore Democrat Socialist West Philadelphia, Powelton Village, and Germantown. Returning from a break at one point, I noticed one left-wing couple inspecting a ballot issues poster near the front door. They were examining the ballot with dedicated ferocity. Just before I walked out of hearing range, I heard the man say to his female partner, “Yeah, he’s pro-Palestine!” They then proceeded to vote. As the day wore on, I noticed that young progressives – whether ordinary Democrats or the eager communists of the Working Families Party – spent an inordinate amount of time in the voting booth. At one point I was truly worried when one couple, both dressed in shorts and flip flops, spent close to 15 minutes in the booth. Did they both have reading problems? The ballot was not that long. The majority of people spent only a few minutes voting. Finally, when the woman exited first, she went off into a corner where she waited for her male companion who, when he finally emerged, slunk sheepishly over to her where they consulted in hushed tones, both of them looking worried as if they had seen something untoward on the ballot. Or if voting constituted something that actually affected them physically.

Some people after they voted became decidedly giddy. The degree to which politics has become a religion could be seen in many of these people. Their faces would explode with delight when they were handed those little “I just voted” stickers. When poll staffers would say good-bye to them, some would raise their hands in the air in celebratory ecstasy. Some raised their hands over their heads in the manner of Rocky, that fictional character whose statue now rests inside the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I know from experience that many people get a rush of dopamine after they pull the vote lever, but it was interesting to see extreme examples of this. We weren’t allowed to talk politics while working inside the polling station. As you can imagine in 2026, when nearly everything is politics, how do you not do this at least once or twice during a fourteen-hour stint? I had the pleasure of meeting Robyn Bird, Republican candidate for the 177th Legislative District, who is running against incumbent Democrat Joe Hohenstein. Hohenstein, an immigration attorney, was first elected in 2018. Bird handles government affairs for Local 22 of the firefighters and paramedics union. Her campaign has stressed public safety, police and fire support, and criticism of the state’s current immigration and economic policies. Hohenstein, whom I’ve met several times whenever I work the polls, is an engaging individual. He usually shows up with his small entourage; this year he was strangely absent, unless he visited when I took my lunch break. Recently, Hohenstein has become very critical of ICE, like every Philly Democrat, while ignoring the downside of illegal immigration. Like many Democrats, he lumps illegal aliens into the same camp as legal immigrants, and then says he supports “immigration.” Hohenstein is very woke on LGBT issues. He has stated he is the parent of a trans/nonbinary child and emphasized the importance of protecting trans kids. The problem is, what is a trans kid? Would that be a five-year-old? A ten-year-old? Can a ten-year-old know for certain they are trans when they are still debating the existence of Santa Claus? “Trans people are human; however, they are too often attacked for being different and not fitting into our society’s rigid gender structures,” Hohenstein has been quoted as saying. Bird, on the other hand, has the common-sense view expressed by most Americans: If you are an adult and trans, fine; if you are gay, queer, or a nose-ring rainbow gender non-conformist, fine: just leave the children alone. One of my Democrat colleagues working the polls introduced me to Bird. His graciousness surprised me.

The day after the primary, I read that Barney Frank had died of congestive heart failure. When I lived in Boston, Frank was just beginning to make the political rounds when he joined the state legislature in 1972. He was not yet out-of-the-closet as a gay man but he supported the early efforts of the gay rights movement. Ironically, reading one of his obituaries, I was surprised to learn that when Frank spoke to NBC10 Boston earlier in May from hospice care, he took aim at woke Democrat priorities and called on the party to step back from social issues like trans rights. Truly amazing! “That’s the approach the transgender community should take to male-to-female transgenders playing in women’s sports,” he said. “That’s very controversial. Other issues are, I think more important, but also less toxic, like getting good medical care, guaranteeing that for people, guaranteeing people the right to designate their genders, and they should put off the most controversial.” That’s almost a full conversion to sanity, sans his allowance for gender designation, but in the total scheme of things what he said is still what Democrats need to hear if they want to win elections. (Not that I want them to win elections, of course.) Thom Nickels is Broad + Liberty’s Editor at Large for Arts and Culture and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest work, “Ileana of Romania: Princess, Exile and Mother Superior,” will be published in May 2026.

My father died of throat cancer in 1986. At the time I was working in Human Services with the developmentally disabled in Germantown.

I grew up at a time when it was understood that there should be some emotional distance between fathers and sons. My father never held or kissed me in public like I see many fathers doing today with their toddler sons. That kind of closeness then would have been perceived as excessive and unnatural. Tactile kissing and hugging were the business of mothers. As a result, I grew up fearing my father. He was a disciplinarian and a task master. This is not to say he didn’t love me. He did. He just couldn’t show it. At times I’d take revenge on him by posting little notes around the house calling him Hitler. As you can imagine, that didn’t go off very well. I should note here that I was the eldest of six children. Being the first born, you are likely to be the experimental child in your parents’ eyes. My parents were under twenty when they married, so when it came to raising me trial and error was the norm. Not surprisingly, by the time my youngest sister was 15 or 16, she had it much easier than her older siblings. She and my father considered themselves buddies. Discipline was lax; in another sense, sometimes I felt that my sister got away with murder. I’m writing this to lay the groundwork for what would happen later; when political ideology got the best of me when I was in my twenties, and when that ideology dictated certain actions of mine after my father’s death. This action – a blunt refusal to attend my father’s funeral – was the result of my allegiance to gay ideology. In a nutshell, although my father and I became close long before his death, after his death when the funeral arrangements were laid out by my mother, I was told in no uncertain terms that my partner at the time and I could both attend the funeral as a twosome but we could not take part in a special ceremony after the Mass where my siblings and their spouses went to the front of the church and stood as couples around the casket.

The purpose of the “couples’ line” was to meet and greet the mourners. I had never heard of a ceremony like this; apparently it was one of those post Vatican II ideas that disappeared almost as soon as it was invented. My mother was adamant: “I cannot have you and ‘S’ standing with the other spouses. The family isn’t ready for this. My sisters aren’t ready to see this. You must respect my wishes. ‘S’ can remain in the pews while you come up and join your siblings, but I can’t have ‘S’ standing there with you. Please respect my wishes.” This directive didn’t go down well. Here I was, having spent a few years in Harvard Square and Boston demonstrating with the Gay Liberation Front, writing for underground gay newspapers as a committed dyed-in-the-wool gay activist. Acceding to my mother’s wishes would have meant betrayal of the gay movement. I saw myself as a potential hypocrite, writing and preaching that everyone should come out of the closet while I slinked back into the closet for the duration of a church service just to appease my mother’s sisters, and to prevent them from being shocked, even though they already knew my story. Yet in 1986, standing in front of my father’s casket in church with my partner ‘S’ was perceived as “rubbing it in their faces.” I thought my mother’s request was monstrous, especially since she and my father both accepted ‘S’ at family dinners and holiday gatherings.

“There’s no way that I can do that,” I told her. “S’ is every bit a part of my life as the spouses of my brothers and sisters are. You’re telling me to deny that; you’re telling me to relegate ‘S’ to second tier status. Can’t you stand up to your sisters? Why should they dictate how you arrange Dad’s funeral?” My mother was unmoved. When I talked to a gay friend about it, he told me not to bend to her wishes. “He’s your partner, you can’t betray him. You’re not a teenager living under her roof. You’re an adult. She doesn’t respect your relationship.” I resolved not to go to the funeral. On the day of the Mass, the burial at the cemetery and the luncheon afterwards, I was not present. The cold embrace of stubborn ideology offered few emotional comforts. In my mind I was with the family at the funeral Mass, even as I pushed doubts about my decision out of my mind. I kept telling myself: Yes, I had done the correct thing. After all, I had a message to convey: the equality of gay people. My not going was really an affirmation of that fact. With a small group of friends, we headed to Westminster Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd where my father had just been buried. One of my friends brought incense and some ceremonial Native American paraphernalia. We conducted our own ceremony around the grave. Waving a feather and incense sticks over the earth, we held hands in a circle and said some prayers. At the cemetery, the site of my father’s grave filled me with immense sorrow. The mountainous pile of flowers spoke to the many people who loved him. Doubts about boycotting the funeral flooded my being; they rushed in like shadows and filled me with dread. What had I missed? Had I chosen ideology over properly mourning my father?

It would be a number of years before I realized my mistake. ‘S’ and I never stayed together. We would split four years from the date of the funeral. You only have one father and that father only dies once. I could have given into Mother; I could have swallowed my gay pride and thought of her needs after a marriage of almost 30 years. I could have compromised. The experience caused me to be less critical of ideologically driven young people as they prance about today insisting on pronouns or the correctness of their opinions. I recognize that arrogance because I was once one of them.

That’s a country I inhabited a long time ago. But the past is the past. Thom Nickels is Broad + Liberty’s Editor at Large for Arts and Culture and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest work, “Ileana of Romania: Princess, Exile and Mother Superior,” will be published in May 2026.

The Pope from Chicago (Thom Nickels-Frontpage Magazine)

Leo, the affable smiling pope, is now a bona fide hero of the secular left and legacy media. Not only has he captured the minds and hearts of progressive cafeteria Catholics, pro-choice women, and weak men who voted for Kamala Harris, but various open border groups, like the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The USCCB loves him because he speaks less about Catholicism than he does about the new world order while using “peace” as a buzzword to get more and more people to love him. This first “American” pope who identifies as Latin American, also appeals to atheists and secularists but not to traditional Catholics, many of whom don’t view him as a “holy” pope at all, at least when compared to Saint Pius X, Pius XII, or Leo XIII. Leo is very much a political pope who should be working for the UN and not the Catholic Church. Like his predecessor Francis, Leo loves giving interviews at 30,000 feet on the papal jet.

He also clearly loves being a celebrity, though this was the case since his days as a seminarian. His pre-ordination years included dressing up as John Belushi with slicked-back black hair, black hooligan hat, sculpted sideburns that conjure up sleazy nightclubs, and sunglasses. In another photograph from the same period – which has never been officially published but somehow wound up in the hands of a distant family member of mine – he’s dressed as Groucho Marx, taken when he was a student at Villanova University. Villanova, it should be noted, is a Main Line Philadelphia suburban party school where sports is king. Fast forward several decades after Leo’s time in Latin America as a missionary-liberation theology advocate and communist sympathizer, to the day he was elected on the fourth ballot by progressive cardinals in Rome to put a dent in the Trump presidency. Many were fooled when he greeted the world dressed in traditional vestments, unlike Francis who would go on to make a show of his ostentatious “humility.” Leo smiled, waved, then prayed in Latin, but the intuitively-sensitive picked up a vibe. A vibe that was not good. A little confession here. Immediately after his election I checked out a tarot card reader on You Tube who asked the cards (or “spirit”) what kind of pope Leo would be. I expected to have a good laugh but was taken aback when the reader said the new pope would almost be a pacifist obsessed with peace at any cost and that he would initiate some of the most revolutionary changes in the Catholic Church since its founding. The changes would start off slowly, the reader emphasized, but then accelerate in a manner that would shock many Catholics. I think of that card reader a lot these days as Leo not only turns the Catholic Church on its head but has come forward – as that popular meme so accurately states – like a typical Democrat from Chicago. Leo is more of a secular leader than a spiritual father: blessing a block of ice, honoring Pachamama and Pope Francis’s agenda more than the teachings of Christ, essentially telling Our Lady of Fatima that she was wrong when she told the three shepherds in 1917 that more people go to Hell because of sins of the flesh than any other sin. “That’s not true,” Leo seems to be firing back at the Mother of God. “You concentrate too much on sex, being uncharitable to migrants is the greatest sin, so take your negativity and stop telling children lies.” This is the arrogance of Francis’s Synodal Church.

Since his installation (they used to call it a coronation), Leo has appointed radically-liberal clergy to head dioceses throughout the country: easy on abortion-James Martin acolytes who also hate ICE, and the president’s immigration policies. He refuses to meet with leaders of the SSPX – the voice of the true Catholic Church as opposed to the diabolical Synodal Church invented by Francis – while meeting with the Obama administration’s David Axelrod and feuding with President Trump, and before that with White House Executive Associate Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations, Tom Homan, who has said of Pope Leo and the Vatican, “I wish they’d stay out of immigration.” Homan was correct when he said the pope and the Vatican do not understand the immigration problem the United States is dealing with. “They’re looking at this from an ivory tower perspective while American families are being destroyed by fentanyl, human trafficking, and criminal cartels,” he said. Progressive American Catholics and atheistic leftists don’t care about immigration nuance. The latter camp is happy Leo dislikes Trump and fights the administration when it comes to immigration. Both groups think Homan’s concern is made up or exaggerated, an excuse to “hate” the pope. They also brush off allegations brought by the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) and other advocacy organizations that have expressed deep concern over Pope Leo XIV’s past handling of abuse cases. What happens in Peru, stays in Peru. The Daily Mail reported on a man named Lopez de Casas, a victim of clergy abuse who happens to be the national vice president of SNAP, who accused Leo of failing to address abuse allegations when he was a bishop in Peru. “Staying silent is a sin. It’s not what God wants us to do. Jesus wants us to stop these things, not to make a heathy garden for secular abuse to grow,” he told the publication. This week I read that the National Constitution Center (NCC) in Philadelphia will award Pope Leo its 38th Annual Liberty Medal at a public ceremony to be held July 3, 2026 on Independence Mall. The Center’s website states: “The award recognizes The Holy Father’s lifelong work promoting religious liberty and freedom of conscience and expression around the world, ideals enshrined by America’s founders in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.” The NCC’s logic defies common sense. Every pope in recent times has supported “religious liberty and freedom of conscience and expression.” What the NCC is really awarding Leo for is his standing up to Trump when it comes to immigration and ICE. For years the NCC has walked a haphazard line between conservative and leftwing politics. Former Liberty Medal winners include Bill Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Muhammad Ali, and Ken Burns, so you know where this institution is coming from.

The NCC is also located in one of the most leftwing cities in the nation, where public schools are encouraged and even rewarded for the promotion of Islam and issues related to Palestine. Much like in Chicago public schools, students in middle and high schools are not penalized when they attend anti-ICE protests. In the Philly public school system, no references are made to Easter while every effort is made to promote Ramadan and other Muslim holidays. The NCC’s announcement came on the heels of Pope Leo’s appointment of a former illegal alien to the bishopric of West Virginia, Evelio Menjivar- Ayala, born in El Salvador in 1970. In an interview with (the liberal) U.S. Catholic, Menjivar-Ayala recalls that his impoverished childhood included dreams of one day leaving El Salvador. “I always dreamed of crossing the border to see what lay beyond,” he said. Menjivar-Ayala’s dream was almost realized when he came to the U.S. in 1990 as an illegal alien when he was smuggled unsuccessfully into the country in the trunk of a car. Menjivar-Ayala tried three more times to enter the country. As Monica Showalter writes in American Thinker, “He tried to enter the U.S. three times, getting thrown out each time until he paid a cartel human smuggler to illegally get him in. “After that, he filed a what looks like a typical asylum claim, as many do, an economic migrant claiming to be escaping persecution and being deathly afraid of returning to his home country. “ Menjivar-Ayala was not escaping persecution. That was a lie. In the U.S. he worked a number of menial jobs before becoming acquainted with Chicago’s leftwing clerical cabal. In due time, he was appointed a Deacon by the defrocked sexual predator, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C., accused of molesting handsome seminarians. Showalter questions in her article if Menjivar-Ayala was ever “courted” by McCarrick and then showered with favors (the Deaconate) from the sugar daddy. The appointment of Menjivar-Ayala to West Virginia, a Protestant majority state with only 60,000 Catholics, 90% white and that voted for Trump by 42 points, is also very queer. Obviously, there is a Vatican agenda here to do everything possible to help transform the state politically. Leo’s move is much like the EU’s forced immigration policies that have gone a long way to destroy much of Europe, especially France, the UK, and Ireland. Menjivar-Ayala also told U.S. Catholic: “The church was very instrumental in helping people organize themselves after the watershed 1968 meeting of Latin American Bishops in Medellín, Colombia. That awakened a sense of social awareness and a closeness, a conscious awakening. “People began to join different organizations and to read the Bible from that perspective. Seeing faith from that perspective brings liberation, not only salvation in heaven but liberation from what oppresses you here on Earth.” The last paragraph can be used to justify both the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917. Most of the devastation from this pontificate is yet to come. True Catholics are in for a real heartbreak.