UPENDING PETER'S CHAIR (Frontpage Magazine) Nickels

While walking past Philadelphia’s Immigration and Naturalization Services building a couple of weeks ago, I noticed a sizeable group of prayer warriors on the sidewalk with signs reading, “We are all brothers and sisters.”

A closer look revealed many of the people appeared to be Catholic religious, mainly women or ‘nuns on the bus’ types in secular clothing. “Figures,” I thought. “You’d never see a nun in a traditional or even a modified habit taking part in something like this.” These secular dress sisters were mainly older-hippie-boomer types: white hair, long skirts and pantsuits predominated. Overall, they seemed composed and respectful. I found it ironic that in some sense they still retained a stereotypical nun-like composure. The men among them were few, although I did spot an ashen faced Methodist minister in a rainbow stole. Watching these people, it occurred to me that a seismic shift had occurred in the Catholic social justice sphere. Catholic pro-life protestors at Planned Parenthood clinics throughout the years had almost zero secular or mainline Protestant support. Yet at this ICE facility-in the age of Trump hatred-legacy or woke Christianity was out in spades. Newsflash: Catholic opposition to abortion has been demoted in favor of a new cause: advocating for the “rights” of illegal aliens to do whatever they want in a country they entered illegally. These might include the right to a driver’s license and even voting privileges, depending on the latest social gospel dictates coming out of Rome.

Vigils like the one in Philadelphia are taking place in multiple cities across the nation since Pope Leo’s exhortation to Catholic faithful to fight against Donald Trump’s war on the deportation of migrants. On October 8, 2025, Pope Leo XIV told US bishops that they should address how immigrants are being treated by Donald Trump’s hard-line policies. The pope’s remarks came after a contingent of bishops visited the Vatican with letters from illegal aliens in Catholic communities detailing the hardships they were suffering because of threatened (or real) deportations. The letters were stacked in a small neat pile and tied with twine, so the little package resembled a found object on Robinson Crusoe’s mythical island. Talk about a photo- op spectacular! One of the bishops at the presentation ceremony, Bishop Mark J. Slitz, said he saw the pope’s “eyes watering up a bit” when he was presented with the letters. It was, as they say, a Hallmark Card moment, equal perhaps to most of the banal quotes from Pope Leo himself published almost daily on social media. These generic sayings about “God,” “life,” and “love” are almost always syrupy two or three liners that could have been lifted out of a popular Art Linkletter book from the 1960s.

Not long after the presentation of illegal alien letters, social justice Catholics-the same Catholics who want to rewrite the catechism to reflect the new mores of the secular world-instituted prayer vigils throughout the country. Obedient to Leo’s directive – “You stand with me. And I stand with you” – they took up a woke-shaped cross and began appearing at ICE centers across the country. At the Philadelphia vigil, there were 90 liberal activists including Buddhists, Mennonites, Unitarians, Methodists and Jews. They stood alongside the (secular dressed) boomer Sisters of St. Joseph. A Protestant minister set up an altar composed of a plastic folding table and miniature Doric column theater props. The makeshift sidewalk altar became a toilet for ecumenical offerings to gods and goddesses: Tibetan prayer flags, apples, tangerine and somewhere in the mix a miniature carving of Christ with arms outstretched. The poor Christ image was lost among the other images, reminiscent of Pope Francis’ admonition that all religions lead to God. The protestors cited a January directive by President Trump to eliminate houses of worship as “off-limits” places for ICE arrests. Yet the move by the president was a necessary one mainly because of the leftward tilt of so many Christian denominations. As mainstream Christianity sinks into the pothole of woke-ism, it loses the attributes and blessings that made it ‘Christian’ in the first place. Furthermore, the venerable ‘sacred space’ or church in which runaway criminals used to hide-depicted in old Hollywood movies as shelters for innocent men accused falsely-has been replaced by criminals intentionally breaking the law and then expecting the church to bless their transgressions without ever mentioning that that they may have committed a sin. (Note: As Christianity sheds more and more of its traditional teachings, it needn’t worry about being conquered by Islam, for if present trends continue, it will have destroyed itself long before that happens.) The US anti-ICE deportation initiative responsible for the Philadelphia vigil, was spearheaded by the Jesuits West province, the Maryknoll Network Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, Pax Christi USA, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services and several orders of women religious (those tired boomer ladies who eschew traditional or modified habits). “We defend the sacred, not ICE, not Trump,” New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia co-director Peter Pedemonti told that crowd of 90 gathered before the plastic folding table altar filled with pagan food gifts. Ironically, after the slew of nationwide Catholic prayer vigils there appeared on X multiple “Catholic” posts about how Pope Leo should excommunicate all of the Catholic Supreme Court justices. Calls for their excommunication were based on Supreme Court decisions on abortion, and its willingness to take another look at its landmark case ruling on June 26, 2015 (Obergefell v. Hodges) legalizing same sex marriage. The number of these posts was disturbing and indicated a new form of Catholicism rising within the United States: Social justice/non-theological Catholicism where abortion and all the old traditional Catholic taboos don’t matter. Meanwhile, the so called shepherds of the Church, the bishops, seem to be joining forces with these social justice Catholics who are calling for a total re-making of the Church. As Timothy Flanders on One Peter 5 remarked: I am willing to hazard that there are many orthodox bishops out there. But it seems to me that most of those orthodox bishops are cowardly. They think of themselves as ‘vicars of the Roman Pontiff’ (a concept that Vatican II condemned in Lumen Gentium 27), and they are afraid to excommunicate and issue the anathema, as did the saintly bishops of old. But the saintly bishops of old are slowly being snuffed out and replaced by rainbow stoles and the Sisters of St. Joseph. Avatar photo Thom Nickels Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism.