Remnants of Justice in the Center City Jogger Case

   The Philadelphia Free Press, January 22, 2020, City Safari  

   While rummaging through my archive of old documents, I came across a legal deposition (interview) I did with attorney Fred Ambrose and a detective associated with his law firm. The date of the two part interview was February 1, 1999. The script was published by the Esquire Deposition Services. The topic: what I saw and knew of the Kimberly Ernest murder of November 2, 1995, also known as the Center City jogger case.

 21st and Pine Streets, Philadelphia. Decades & decades before the jogger murder. 

   In 1995, two suspects were arrested for that murder, Richard Wise and Herbert Haak, both known for their attacks on blacks and gays in Center City.  While Wise and Haak were arrested for Ernest’s murder, a DNA mismatch led to a not guilty verdict in court. 

   Richard Wise and Herbert Haak then sued the city for 75 million, causing their lawyer (Ambrose) to charge a Center City drug dealer, John Lambert, with the murder. Ambrose’s contention was that the city was protecting John Lambert because his father was a powerful Center City attorney.

   Fred Ambrose contacted me for information related to Lambert, a tall long haired habitué of 17^th and Pine Streets. I knew Lambert in passing. He seemed a gentle giant of a guy, soft spoken and intelligent despite a chronic heroin problem. I’d often run into him while on my way to my apartment at 21^st and Pine.

   After being contacted by Ambrose, I received an impromptu visit from two detectives from the Ambrose firm. Both men were aware that I had written of my experiences with the jogger case. Not only had I known Lambert but I had become acquainted with one of Ernest’s boyfriends. The fact that I lived at 21^st and Pine, where Ernest’s body was discovered in a stairwell, was also an inducement.

    Ambrose and his staff dug deeply into what I had written about the case, especially when they put forth the claim that John Lambert was the real killer of Ernest.

John Lambert

  Ambrose invited me to his office in Bala Cynwyd where he shared some intimate details of the case not reported in the press. He also showed me the horrific photograph of Ernest’s body propped up in the stairwell. I filed my report for a newsmagazine I was writing for at the time, and thought that was the end of it.

   But Ambrose’s detectives wouldn’t stop hanging around my apartment. One day I found them waiting for me on my stoop. Thinking I was helping the cause of justice, I invited them inside although once inside they ceased to behave professionally. “What do you know that you’re not telling us?” they demanded, their manner turning gruff.

   They assumed that because I knew Lambert that I was somehow intimately connected with him and knew secret details of the murder. Initially, of course, Ambrose and his staff were polite. They did not let on that they suspected me of hiding facts.

17th and Pine Street Hustler witness

   From the audio tape, February 1, 1999:  

   Ambrose: “Sir, what do you remember about the morning of November 2^nd? Do you remember hearing or seeing or whatever?

   Nickels: “In the wee hours before dawn I remember being jolted wide awake by some screams in the street, sharp and piercing screams.”

   Ambrose: “Could you make out any of the words that were being spoken?”

   Nickels: “No words, just jolting screams…”

    Ambrose: “A combination of male and female screams?”

    Nickels: “It could have been.”

    Ambrose: “Kimberly had a checkered sort of background. She, like all young people I guess, got involved with the drug scene. Just before her death she was trying to get herself straightened out.  We think that while she was in her wild phase she encountered John Lambert and people like him who hang out at 17^th and Pine. Kimberly went through a heavy clubbing phase where these people hang out, some of the shadier bars like Dirty Frank’s and Westbury.”

      Nickels: “So you’re accusing Lambert of this crime?”

    Ambrose: “We’re trying to gather evidence for Municipal Court.”

   Ambrose stated that he believed the city would reopen the case and charge John Lambert with murder. He then asked if John wore a ponytail and if I ever saw him wearing jogging outfits or hooded shirts. “Somehow his clothing stood out,” I responded. “Hack and Wise were framed,” Ambrose offered. “The confessions were either a combination of coercion and fabrication. “

     Ambrose stated that an eyewitness saw Lambert at 17^th and Pine about the time that Ernest was out jogging shortly before her murder. “We believe that John encountered Earnest at 17^th and continued the encounter, touting her, all the way to 21^st and Pine.” Ambrose then asked me if I ever saw Ernest jog past my apartment at 21^st and Pine. “I saw her from my kitchen window a few times,” I said. “She jogged in the afternoon. She would jog down to the river on my side of the street and return on the other side of the street past the same stairwell where her body would be later found.”

   He asked me what kind of clothing she was wearing when she was jogging. “The first time I saw her she wasn’t wearing much clothing at all: A black tank top, very form fitting and skimpy.”

   “What about her pants?”  

     “I don’t recall. The top was very low cut and she had this great head of hair flying every which way.”

       Ambrose: “Would her hair normally have been in one of those things you put on the ponytail?”

      “Her hair was down. It was massive. It was Amazon curls.”

        “How tall would you say she was?”

        “As tall or taller than I am. I’m 5’11”. Her head phones may have added some height.”

          I asked Ambrose if he thought that John Lambert hid in the stairwell for Ernest to pass so he could attack her.

       “The stairwell where the body was found was really the only hiding place on that block.”

          We then spoke about Lambert’s father, a partner in the firm of Duane, Morris & Heckscher. I asked Ambrose if he thought that Lambert’s father was trying to thwart his investigation of his son. Ambrose said no. Ambrose returned to the eyewitness, a male street prostitute, who says he saw Ernest with Lambert and that the two of them got into an altercation, after which certain things happened. 

   While Ambrose was in pursuit of me, John Lambert was in custody for unrelated charges. Ambrose told me that he visited John in jail. “He has the good sense to listen to his lawyers and not say anything,” he said. “I think the fact that she was sexually molested by her attacker is a given fact but the DNA did not match Haak and Wise.” (According to a City Paper article after John Lambert’s death in jail of an overdose, Lambert’s DNA was also a mismatch). While Lambert was alive, Ambrose was unable to get his DNA. “I’ve spoken to his father and his mother as well but absolutely nothing.”

    Ambrose was quick to point out that John Lambert once beat his sister so badly that she had permanent brain damage. The assumption was that if he could beat his sister, he could beat Kimberly Ernest.

   When I couldn’t give Ambrose any more information, he charged me with withholding crucial evidence.

   I felt as if I was being charged with being an accessory to a murder. It was an odd feeling. “I wish I knew more,” I said, “but I don’t.”  

   The detectives turned so hostile I had to ask them to leave the apartment.    

   Ambrose’s case went up in smoke after John Lambert died in jail. Yet not long after John’s death I received a call from his attorney father. The father said he was embarking on his own legal battle, the defense of his son’s name, and asked if I would testify in court. I said I would.  We had several meetings prior to the court date.

   Under the senior Lambert’s direction, Ambrose’s absurd claim that John Lambert was a murderer was crashed like recyclable perishables. The able patrician attorney thanked me profusely.       

  Little did I realize that one year later I would need the attorney’s help when two Philly bike cops sued me for describing them too accurately in a story about police harassment.

   The elder Lambert squashed the bike cops’ case as if he had stomped out bugs crawling on an Ambrosia carpet.  

Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor   

                   

    

The Los Angeles Death of My Youngest Sister

    This past weekend was spent saying good-bye to my youngest sister Carolyn. Carolyn, the youngest of six (I’m the eldest), spent the last five years of her life in Los Angeles. She moved to LA because of a job opportunity after having experienced a severe bout with breast cancer that led to a single mastectomy. I always felt there were other reasons for the move but these reasons were never addressed.  Carolyn made it a point to visit her family back east on at least two occasions, and her daughter, Alyssa, who lives in Manayunk, certainly made frequent trips out west to be with her mom.

   Carolyn’s closest age related sibling was my brother David, born just a year before her. David and Carolyn grew up as a set; they were toddlers together while we, the older siblings, were pretty much in a different orbit. David was diagnosed with severe mental retardation before his first birthday. Mental retardation was the term they used then. Today’s term is developmentally disabled, which really doesn’t explain a whole lot. Developmentally disabled is a cumbersome word and does not explain the depth of the “disablement.” David’s classification was ‘severe-profound,’ meaning that he would always have the mentality of a 3 or 4 year old.

   The news of David’s disability hit the family like an atom bomb. My mother was especially affected. David’s childhood was rough on everyone. He’d throw his dinner around the kitchen, run and scream and bang his head against the wall. Other times he would fight my mother as she changed his diapers. These spells or tantrums were part of his mental malfunction, and they were horrific. It finally got so bad that he had to be sent to a private school for MR children.  

  David spent several years at home before he was sent away to school. This meant that he and Carolyn grew up as proxy twins. Carolyn’s childhood can then be classified as unique. Because of David’s condition—he had to be watched all the time—Carolyn probably experienced those early years as a time when she received less attention than David. It’s also probably true that she felt the trauma connected with David in a more direct way than anyone else in the family.

Alyssa, Carolyn's daughter

    Carolyn married twice, her first marriage resulting in a boy child, my godson. Her second marriage produced a girl. Her second marriage lasted 23 years; she and her husband lived in a large house in Pottstown, a country house next to a vast cornfield. After that marriage ended, she began life as a single woman in an apartment complex in Roxborough just off Henry Avenue.

Christopher, my godson, aka The Joker 

   She hated being a single woman. Like my mother before her the prospect of going through life as a single woman without a man just wasn’t tenable. My mother remarried a crazy Welshman. That marriage lasted until my mother’s death, after which the Welshman did his best to traumatize the family.   

   Carolyn acquired a boyfriend, a Korean-Hawaiian-English mixed heritage guy with a love for guns, extreme right wing politics, and 24/7 weed obsession. I liked him at first despite certain eccentric behaviors like showing off his stash of guns, some of them assault weapons that he kept hidden in the bedroom. The boyfriend, or G, loved talking about the coming New World Order, an apocalyptic time when globalist police forces would confiscate all guns and implant chips in American citizens. The signs and symbols were all over, G said, beginning with the fact that Michelle Obama is really a man. One of G’s favorite obsessions was looking for photos of Michelle Obama in form fitting dresses that seemed to show a penile bulge.

Christopher, my godson, aka The Joker

    “It’s coming, it’s coming,” he’d say when I’d dine with the two of them.   Carolyn went along with G’s exhortations to keep the peace but during the process she couldn’t help but believe some of G’s pronouncements.

   

   While dining in Carolyn’s apartment, G would show us the new guns he purchased. Some were rifles, some handguns, some assault weapons. G stashed them in beautiful boxes as if they were valuable jewelry. Watching G display his many guns often made me wonder what pleasure he derived from keeping so many of them, especially since he could never fire them because he didn’t belong to a shooting range. I had to remind myself that he was preparing for the coming Apocalyptic war.   

Michelle Obama is a man!

  Lonliness in life is a terrible thing. All of us want to be loved and most of us want a special someone, a “we,” to complete the singular isolation of the stand alone “I.” But this human need sometimes causes many mismatched unions, and getting out of a mismatched union is often one of the hardest things to do in life.

 Good times

   As G kept getting weirder and weirder, I kept trying to see what Carolyn saw in him but I eventually gave up because I reminded myself that Carolyn’s needs were not my needs. Having crazy beliefs is not a crime, after all.    

   Carolyn’s death was not an easy one. At the time of her death she was living with G in LA. She’d been quite sick for a couple of months before G realized that he had to contact her daughter.  The family knew that Carolyn wanted nothing to do with costly hospital treatments and operations that wreck the body just to extend life by six months. When she had breast cancer five years ago she refused chemo and radiation but opted for a Canadian drug which worked to keep her healthy until just recently. She liked to say that her refusal to go the chemo route kept her brain and intelligence intact. “Chemo brain” was often the subject of her jokes.

   Something happened between Carolyn and G during the last year or so. At one point they stopped being partners. G’s endtimes obsession had eaten into his brain. He became one of those crazy psychotic hermit types who have lost touch with reality. 

   With Carolyn’s cancer now resurfacing as lung cancer, G let the days and weeks pass so that her sickbed came close to being her deathbed. At the 11^th hour G told Carolyn’s children: “If you want to see your mother alive, you had better come to the apartment now…”

   The children arrived in a flash and convinced Carolyn to go to the hospital. G opted not to accompany Carolyn to the hospital although he found the energy to remind her children that he was taking Carolyn’s car once the inevitable happened.

   Carolyn died the following day at Harbor UCLA. Her children were in the room with her when she died.  G was home alone, preparing to ward off the children when they came around for a few of their mother’s belongings. When that happened, G finally had a chance to use his guns when he warned them not to take anything out of the house. The police were called. G was apprehended but  no shots were fired. 

   The Apocalypse that G had been waiting for had finally arrived, only in a way that he did not expect. 

Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor

         From The Philadelphia Free Press, City Safari Column, January 16, 2020

  

Rock Ministries Kensington Macho

City Safari: Rock My Soul In The Bosom Of Kensington

                       Philadelphia Free Press   *   Thom Nickels

Book, Rock of Kensington

By Thom Nickels• Wed, Jan 08, 2020

Walk down Kensington Avenue to 1755 and you’ll see a storefront church/enterprise known as Rock Ministries. Rock Ministries was founded in 2004 by an ex-boxer champion, Mark “Buddy” Osborn, as a way to help poor, disadvantaged teens attain focus and direction in their lives. Osborn’s way to attract the teens was to offer free boxing lessons provided the teens agreed to participate in a Bible study.

Osborn, who is upfront when he says that when he was younger he ran afoul of the law, found Jesus and his life changed. Judging by the growth of Rock Ministries, one might call Pastor Osborn (as he is now called) a wildly successful man. Acting as both pastor and boxing instructor, the combination has worked to attract heretofore ‘churchless’ youths who might otherwise be a danger to themselves and to other people if left free to run wild in the streets. Over the years, Rock Ministries has grown into a mega Church enterprise, hosting services and multiple programs at the Rock Calvary Chapel, like Adult Bible Study, Sunday services at 11 a.m., Wednesday Prayer Night, Women’s Breakfast, Men’s Night and a program called Firm Foundations Addictions Study. Rock Ministries also sponsors an annual Rock the Block festival that includes sporting spectacles like boxing, body grappling (or wrestling) exhibitions, free food, preaching and more Bible study.

The mixture of brawn and macho with Jesus Saves Bible messages is appealing to youths who would otherwise never attend a conventional church. The Ministries website, for instance, showcases Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Submission Grappling, sports definitely not for fey guys, budding pianists, poets, skinny soy vegan guys with beards or ballet dancers. Boxing is manly stuff, even if it often means a broken nose and an occasional missing tooth, but when you combine boxing and wrestling with Bible verses what you get is a muscular Christianity, befitting the rugged war-torn streets of Kensington where one’s manhood has to be defended or proven again and again. Rock Ministries YouTube videos show boys as young as six or seven in boxing helmets moving about the ring like Joe Frazier at the height of his career. In one video Pastor Osborn is seen leading group callisthenic exercises while an instant later he puts on his preacher’s hat and sermonizes about Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. It’s an odd juxtaposition, but is it a dangerous one?

Rock Ministries has grown so big that its evangelical arm has been expanded to include missionaries or missionary families. The missionaries move into dilapidated houses Rock Ministries is able to purchase or that the city is able to donate. The goal is to have a Rock Ministries missionary family living on every block in Kensington to win hearts for “The King.” Or, as one Rock Ministries spokesperson on YouTube explained, “Where new converts can be discipled,” after “moving in, spanning out and evangelizing and discipling.”

“The Mission Field in Kensington is ready for workers,” another video proclaims.

While much of the work of Rock Ministries appears to be good—Rock Ministries puts up a massive heated tent for those (especially veterans) wanting to detox in a supervisory environment—something about the group’s un bridled enthusiasm and eagerness to expand causes me to pause or at least move my hand near a sound alarm labeled: Could this be the beginning of a cult?

I’m afraid it could be the beginning of a cult. For one thing, some of the attributes of a cult are there, such as an insatiable eagerness to expand and win over the whole of Kensington and beyond. Missionary work is very big with Rock Ministries. Certainly, these missionary disciples have an eye out for many of Kensington’s homeless, addicted males. Getting them drug treatment is one thing, but is combining drug treatment with the tenets of fundamentalist Christianity--fundamentalist as in taking the Bible literally—a good thing for Kensington and society? I’m thinking of the combination of extreme macho, brawn and a love for fighting laced with the strict judgmental views of fundamentalism: could this produce fanatical street hotheads ready to “box” people into their version of “righteous living?” Could it produce a kind of Christian fundamentalist Sharia mentality?

Unlike Kensington’s Roman Catholic-run Saint Francis Inn that offers free daily hot meals for the homeless, Rock Ministries central focus seems to be proselytizing for new members. The Franciscan brothers at Saint Francis Inn do not proselytize or try to win souls for Catholicism; they fed the hungry, allow the hungry to take away leftovers and leave the rest to God.

Boxing may be a way for some to relieve the stresses of life, but boxing too well can also lead to the human hands, a boxer’s hands, becoming lethal weapons.

I met one such boxer a couple of years ago. This former local boxing star who fought professionally and had his name on hundreds of prize fight posters, ended up with a drug problem and homeless on the streets of Kensington. Many homeless males carry hidden knives or clubs to protect themselves against violent predators, but this man needed no weapons. His fists proved to be a stellar defense against the most horrendous assaults, so much so that when he told me that the city had classified his hands as lethal weapons, I believed him, despite the fact that the registration of body parts as ‘lethal weapons’ is pure urban legend. His hands were lethal weapons in every other sense because, when I witnessed this man in action outside a local Wawa, I thought I had stepped into a Marvel comic book. The guy was nothing less than a superman; his opponents fell like chess pieces.

Since very few men make it as professional boxers, once the first flush of youth has passed where will all of these Rock Ministries heavily trained boxers go, especially if their hands become as good as lethal weapons?

The mixing of fighting with Christianity is perplexing and seems to go against the peaceful message of the Gospel. As the Book of Isaiah says, “…. And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

Cults do not spring into action overnight but can take a long time to form. Jim Jones of Jonestown infamy began as an altruistic preacher. Hopefully Rock Ministries can avoid this deadly trap although there are many accounts of just invented contemporary churches going down the cult sliding board.

In an article entitled The Punk Rock Church That Could Be a Cult, Ryan Katz writes in Topic Magazine:

“The punk-rock church, with its charming leader and its willingness to accept outcasts, became an obsession for some followers, many of whom were looking for guidance. Daniel Cathey started attending DBC while couch-surfing with friends in high school. “I was just a poor kid with a skateboard and a Mohawk,” he says. Another former member, Clay Warren, had battled a predilection for angel dust until he found DBC. For years he crashed with four DBC dudes in a hideous, neon-pink one-bedroom apartment a mile from the church. Warren ate, slept, and breathed DBC. “I would have done anything for Cletus [the pastor] Warren says. “And I mean anything.”

An article on San Diego YELP, titled The Rock Church Attracts Morons, cited the Rock Church with “preachers hate and intolerance (and a large congregation of haters). “

Let’s hope that Philadelphia’s Rock Ministries does better.

The Art of the Memoir at the Kelly Family House

      There’s no better place to celebrate 40 years of Irish Studies at Villanova University than at the Kelly House in East Falls. There, amid the still-intact (and still beautiful) examples of Kelly for Brick Work—John B. Kelly, father of Grace Kelly who became Princess Grace of Monaco, was a brick layer—Irish literature aficionados of all ages gathered in celebration: Grad students, writers, College Deans, two bona fide Kelly family relatives, Susan Kelly Von Medicus and John B. Kelly, III, as well as former Villanova professor of theology and religious studies, Rodger Van Allen.

    The upbeat mood in the Kelly House was contagious, outstripping the  solemnities you might expect at an anniversary event featuring a symposium that focuses on Irish writing from a diasporic perspective.

Dylan Thomas

   At the reception following the afternoon panel discussion, live Irish music helped guests circulate and chat with one or all of the evening’s four presenters, such as James Silas Rogers, editor of the New Hibernia Review and Director of Irish Studies at the University of St. Thomas, who looked every bit the poet in his Irish Fisherman’s Crewneck sweater which had the added effect of making him look like Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas.

    The word ‘Welsh’ isn’t too far off the mark because presenter David Lloyd, a Welshman, Fulbright Scholar, professor of English at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York, and the author of ten books, read about his Welsh roots while Dr. James J. Murphy, the son of two Irish immigrants who grew up in Brooklyn and who later became a professor at Villanova as well as the founder and first director of the Irish Studies Program at the school, went on to mesmerize the audience with his dry humored, over-the-top hilarious essay, “A Child’s Christmas in Brooklyn,” a story of the early Christmas’ he knew as a child with his immigrant parents. The memoir brought Dr. Murphy close to tears several times but he was saved from the precipice of sorrow by his wife Kathy, effervescent as a cheerleader, who urged him on from the audience:  “Go on. You can do it!” she said.

  Later, Dr. Murphy would tell me how Kathy Murphy accompanies him on all his lectures, sitting in the front row and urging him on in a similar manner.  

   

    Christine Cusick, Ph.D, an Associate Professor of English at Seton Hall University, shared her memories and thoughts about growing up Irish and Polish.

     Among the guests was Adele Lenbenmeyr, PhD, Villanova Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, an accomplished author herself whose books include studies of Imperial and Revolutionary Russia. Had any one of the featured memoirists fallen ill and a speaker’s space needed to be filled, Lenbenmeyr as well as the evening’s MC, the affable Joseph Lennon, current Villanova Director of Irish Studies, could have easily stepped up to the podium   

     James Silas Rogers told an audience at a lecture delivered at the San Francisco Library, that the Irish are still distinctive. “You might think that the Irish came off the boat and assimilated immediately,” he explained, adding that in Irish literature there’s “a sense of reticence and a great deal of silencing.” An example of this “silencing,” he said, could be found in the photographs one often seen in Irish history books. “They tend to be all the same, something that’s due to the fact that if you’re Irish you should not call attention to yourself.” Rogers believes that respectability is an obsession with Irish Americans, and that on a deep level the Irish believe that they are not the same as other people. He explained that the dancing Irish nun pictured on the cover of his latest book, Irish-American Autobiography: The Divided Hearts of Athletes, Priests, Pilgrims, and More, is Sister Justine from Saint Louis who is not doing an Irish jig at all but dancing the Scottish Highland Fling.

James Joyce

        The six-bedroom Kelly house was built in 1928 by John B. Kelly. John and his wife Margaret raised six children in the home, which was sold by the family in 1973. The house had a number of owners after that, including a deranged cat woman who turned the home into a feral animal farm.  In 2016, Albert II, Prince of Monaco, Princess Grace’s son, bought the house for $755,000 and had it remodeled to look like it did in the 1950s. Many of the original features can still be seen including the famous linen closet door with Grace’s height recorded over the years. 

      In 2017, John B. Kelly, III told CBSNews that, “The whole house, from a brick construction point of view, is amazing, and there’s not a crack in it. He used this great mortar that doesn’t need repointing, and it’s almost a hundred years old.”

     Guests were encouraged to take self guided tours of the home. In the upstairs bedrooms there were freshly painted icons in the Byzantine tradition. The icons are not part of the original Kelly family décor but were painted by Grace’s niece, Susan Kelly Von Medicus, an icon writer and teacher at the Center for Irish Studies and the Department of Theatre and Studio Art at Villanova University. Von Medicus acted as the volunteer bartender during the event, along with her brother John B. Kelly, III or JB.   

      

     Old Kelly family films ran continuously on a wide screen TV in the Kelly House den. Featured were sunburned children playing leap frog in the backyard, vintage 1950s cars and shots of the news media crowding the Kelly brick walled den as Prince Rainer and Grace Kelly gave a television interview after the announcement of their engagement.  

   Adjacent to the den was the old ‘Kelly Tavern,’ the bar that Jack Kelly built to offset the absurdities of Prohibition. The bar in those days was stocked with large kegs of beer. Kelly Tavern was alive with every strand of Irish imaginable:  Blue eyes, red heads, gingers, black Irish, a smart smattering of over 65 white haired gentlemen. Many chatted up Dr. Murphy (who showed them old photos of his family in front of a Christmas tree) while others asked Rogers questions about the New Hibernia Review.

    As the lone reporter on the premises, I did a mental comparison of the predominately Irish crowd to the mainly ‘English’ crowds I had observed at English Speaking Union of Philadelphia receptions. The vibes were similar, yes, only with the Irish everything seems to move at a faster pace. The musicians playing Irish music near the Kelly family video screen helped to accelerate the tempo that at times reached a fever pitch. The melodies even caused Dr. Murphy’s wife, Kathy, to dance a little jig.  

  The Kelly House houses the headquarters of the Prince Albert II Foundation as well as the Princess Grace Foundation USA.   

     

 

Thom Nickels

    

   

           

      

   

CRISIS MAGAZINE

      From the Philadelphia Free Press, December 24, 2019

                               Thom Nickels

    Not long after the disastrous Roman Catholic Synod of Bishops for the Amazon in Rome, I thought about searching for strange objects in local Philadelphia Catholic churches.

   By ‘objects’ I mean the two pregnant female fertility figures (in bright red lipstick) that were on prominent display during the Synod’s religious ceremonies attended by Pope Francis. The use of the figurines so enraged some conservative and traditional Catholics that they were stolen from the Church of Traspontina, near Saint Peter’s Basilica, and thrown into the Tiber River as blasphemous idols.  

   The “thief,” as it turned out, was a gutsy, smart 26 year old Austrian, Alexander Tschugguel, who planned the “theft” after seeing the idols being paraded about and venerated as if they were icons of the Virgin Mary. 

   “I saw in those statues and in those idols … a break of the First Commandment,” Tschugguel said.

E. Michael Jones, born in Philadelphia

   As a follower of all things Roman Catholic (despite the fact that I now attend a Russian Orthodox Church), I was mystified when I first saw pictures of strange Amazon Synod: South American peasants in native war (or peace) paint carrying giant wicker baskets and dancing a kind of two/ three step-- five steps forward, ten steps back—before   going down on all fours in the middle of Saint Peter’s to kiss what many say were false goddesses of Mother Earth, part of a pagan religious belief in South America.

   I tried to imagine such a thing happening in an Orthodox Church, but I could not.   

       At least 100 Catholic priests and lay scholars published a statement protesting the so called pagan worship of Pachamama during the Amazon Synod in Rome. The group called upon the Pope to “repent publicly and unambiguously of these objectively grave sins” and asked bishops’ around the world to “offer fraternal correction to Pope Francis for these scandals.”

  Meanwhile, the Austrian guy who threw the idols into the Tiber went on a US speaking engagement tour calling for a return to true Catholic tradition, especially the Latin Mass.  He spoke in Dallas and later at a swanky wine and cheese gathering of traditionalists in New York City. At both events he announced the founding of a new organization,  Saint Boniface Institute, dedicated to rescuing the Roman Church from the plague of modernism.

   While I still harbor a love for traditional Catholicism, at the same time I realize that many traditionalists are not nice people. In many cases they can be the first to brandish the word ‘heretic,’ ‘sinner,’ ‘sodomite,’ etc. Recently I submitted an essay on (now deceased) Malachi Martin to the 0nline (conservative) Crisis Magazine. While the work was accepted and published, three days later it was removed from the site.  When I wrote the editor asking what had happened to the piece, he said he had received criticisms questioning its scholarship, so he removed it.

Michael Voris of Church Militant: What a Head of Hair!

  I smelled a rotten tomato right away.

  Scholarship was really not an issue because the essay was based on Martin’s narrative of what took place in a church in Rome in the 1960s. My library of Martin books is extensive and every quote in the essay was verifiable and accurate. So what was the real reason the essay was removed? It took a traditionalist Catholic Facebook friend to suggest that a Crisis reader probably Google- searched my name and discovered that I’d published a number of gay books, most notably Gay and Lesbian Philadelphia. This fact, apparently, was enough to warrant removal of the essay.

  This theory seemed more than plausible. Some years ago I contacted Tan Books, a conservative Catholic publisher/distributor, for a review copy of a book I wanted to write about. I then received an email from someone from Tan Books telling me that my request could not be honored because I had an questionable publishing history. That publishing history, of course, had to do with writing and publishing gay books. As a sort of consolation prize, I was told that I was still permitted to purchase books from Tan (money talks), but review copies were off limits.    

  It pains me to write this, but the uncharitable face of traditional Catholicism is widespread and more often the norm than not. It is especially evident on the Web.  One need only check out videos by Michael Voris of Church Militant, Dr. Marshall Taylor, or author E. Michael Jones to experience the thundering rhetoric of intolerance. I am not talking about religious objections to same sex marriage but about an animus way beyond that.

    Voris has had to explain his own participation in the “homosexual lifestyle” that came to light several years ago. Voris addressed the controversy, said he had repented and was no longer on that road but his confession still hurt him in the eyes of some traditionalists who tend to view him as “forever tainted.” Today Voris seems to operate in overcompensation mode, going out of his way, like a modern day Girolamo Savonarola, to tie sodomites with every evil on earth. 

Oh Mama Oh Mama Oh Mama

  The articulate E. Michael Jones, a Philadelphian by birth now living in Indiana, has said in his videos that since all homosexuals, reformed, celibate or active, are victims of the worst sort of Narcissism, that even Voris, despite his personal transformation, can still be regarded as unstable. In other words, Voris’ Narcissism lives forever, meaning that it affects his reporting and everything he does professionally. Jones might as well be saying that Voris should fold up and retire. 

   

   I got a sense of Jones’ opinion when I viewed a video of Voris traveling to Rome. Decked out in what looked like tight speedos and a form fitting V neck summer sweater over a gym worked body, I had to admit that the Church Militant guy looked every bit the gay man boarding a jet for Fire Island or Provincetown.

   E. Michael Jones seems more homosexually obsessed than Voris. In countless videos he inevitably ends up talking about homosexuals or sodomites. The subject can be Ireland, Logos, US Presidential candidates, Archbishop Chaput of Philadelphia, it doesn’t matter, he always returns to the homo thing.

  In his videos Jones never addresses the homosexual as an individual but merely as a component of a larger societal threat.  He never utters a charitable word or shows any compassion for gay men,such as mentioning those who might be struggling with their sexual passions, namely members of the Catholic group Courage, or gay men who don’t subscribe to a political agenda that calls for an end to the patriarchy or abortion on demand. In Jones’ world, every homosexual is an enemy soldier.

     That Crisis magazine editor, for instance, has no idea how I conduct my life. For all he knows, I could be a stalwart celibate member of Courage, or just one of those guys for whom sex no longer holds any interest.  (“It’s too messy anyway,” as Quentin Crisp once observed). 

     

Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor

  

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