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?