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Thom Nickels: Junipero Serra and the new iconoclasts

In early September, I participated in a “Feast of Reason” dinner at Carpenters’ Hall. The model for the dinner was Thomas Jefferson’s own “Feast of Reason” dinners where guests gathered at Monticello to discuss controversial issues of the day in a polite manner. Potential guests were asked to state where they stood on the political spectrum: Right, left, or somewhere in the middle. Twenty-four people would then be selected to participate in the ‘Jeffersonian’ meal, a moderately priced ticketed event. The topic of the dinner I was chosen to attend was: How should communities decide what monuments should stand and what should be taken down? An official briefing included the following reminder: “In the mid-2010s, there was a growing movement to tear down monuments to Confederate heroes. Many of these monuments had been erected in the early twentieth century to commemorate the ‘lost cause’ of the Civil War. Debates continue about monuments to people with controversial legacies, i.e., Columbus and Jefferson. ‘ To my surprise, the conversations around monuments at the meal were not very contentious. Many attendees seemed to agree that the emotions surrounding controversial monuments are time and issue-bound. This implies that monuments should not be destroyed or moved based on the revolutionary heat of the moment.

The 24 diners broke up into small groups of four or five. This tranquilized and “hid” disagreement to some degree. In my own group there was little disagreement. Overall, a lot of time was also wasted on Monument Lab’s somewhat didactic presentation. The event was heavily structured; at times it had the feel of an eighth-grade classroom. There was not enough time for general discussion, but that’s another story. The Virginia wine served by the Carpenters’ Hall staff was terrific. A few days following the dinner, I had thoughts of the statue of St. Junipero Serra, the 18th-century Catholic saint canonized by Pope Francis in 2015. The social justice warriors who defaced and then pulled down a statue of Serra (who believed in self-mortification) at Mission San Rafael Arcangel in San Rafael, California on October 12, 2020, would have a hard time understanding the concepts of “harsh asceticism” and the mortifying of the flesh in the name of a Supreme Being. Leftists, after all, don’t do things for God; they do things to advance a revolutionary social agenda. Serra, the first saint of the Catholic Church to be canonized on American soil, was a professor of philosophy before taking up the crusade of evangelization (“Go ye into the whole world and preach the gospel to every creature”) and founding five (Franciscan) Catholic missions in southern California. The Philadelphia essayist Agnes Repplier, in her biography of Serra, wrote that the missionary had “the qualities of those emotional, penitential, and migratory years, when endurance was the keynote of existence, and when the love of life was balanced by the honor paid to death. His harsh asceticism, the boards on which he slept, his meager diet, the cruel mortifying of his flesh, all savored of the Middle Ages; and so, too, did his habit of putting his mind and soul into his work.” The San Rafael statue wasn’t the only image of Serra that was destroyed in 2020.

On June 19, a statue of Serra was torn down in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Then on July 4, rioters dismantled a statue of Serra in Sacramento. Serra’s “crime” was “imperialistic colonialism” or “cultural genocide,” both labels for the “forced” imposition of Catholicism and European culture on Native Americans. That imposition, rioters claimed, involved the “problematic” introduction of foreign animals and plants by European conquerors into the southern California ecosystem, an activist analysis that has more to do with a contemporary understanding of science than what was known in the 18th century. The Serra statue destroyers also condemned the saint’s method of dealing with Roman Catholic converts/natives who may have changed their minds about their conversion and then made attempts to leave the missions. Serra, the extreme ascetic who slept on boards and denied himself food, might be described as someone who was as hard on himself as he was on the natives under his charge. Leftist critics like to point out how he once worked as a field agent for the Spanish Inquisition, an association that looks worse on paper than how it played out in reality. While Serra’s halo in the leftist media is referred to as a “halo stained with blood,” the saint’s strictness never involved outright cruelty. In fact, his “medieval” way of dealing with issues like runaway convert natives was considered normal by 18th century standards, yet when viewed through a contemporary lens that behavior appears skewed, unreasonable, and “bloodstained.” Maureen Tilley, Professor of Theology at Fordham University (known as a Catholic woke thinktank), writes that once the natives were baptized, they were confined to mission territory, even though their families may have lived outside the mission. “If they tried to run away, they were brought back and punished. Serra tried to mitigate punishments, tried to keep the Spanish soldiers from preying on Native Americans.” Again, by 18th-century standards, the habit of restricting newly baptized natives to a confined territory implies a catechumen-like state that may have had more to do with ongoing religious instruction, a protection against the influence of pagan families (Pachamama) on the outside. While this “lockdown missionary mentality” would never fly in the 21st century, it still does not merit the scorn and contempt that has been heaped on this saint as if he alone were responsible for the multiple atrocities that occurred in the missions after his death in 1784. Of course, the notion that a newly baptized person should be sheltered against persuasive outside pagan sources may appear to be quite insane to secular leftists who are clueless when it comes to the concept of souls being saved for eternity. “Saved from what?” they would surely ask.

Tilley and other Serra scholars also agree that what abuses did occur in the California missions happened post-Serra and were government-imposed penalties unrelated to Serra’s original mission to bring the natives to Christ. The leftists’ real beef with Serra comes down to the saint’s zeal for evangelization, or his daring to presume that the jimsonweed-hallucinogenic cult practiced by the Gabrielino-Tongva tribes of southern California was inferior to Christianity. When Pope Francis canonized Serra in 2015, the leftist media reported that many Native Americans felt his canonization was an affront to their culture and history. “Their culture” in this case means a pagan culture since Christianity is viewed by leftists as a European import item on a par with foreign animals and plants. “Who’s a Saint, anyway?” The Atlantic magazine asked in 2015, while Vox upped the ante and declared that Serra was a “brutal colonialist,” and then went on to ask, “So why did the Pope make him a saint?” These 2015 progressive media hits against Serra made the soil ripe for the string of Serra statue attacks in 2020. First, you print distortions and lies, then you double down on character smears, and then you go out and tear his statue down. Thom Nickels

THE POPE OF VANITY FAIR AND ISLAM - Frontpage - Thom Nickels

Traditionally, a religious leader should stand outside the orbit of worldly spheres. He should represent a set of values apart from Hollywood, the talking points of the DNC, and the philosophical swagger of New York icons like Patti Smith, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. Robert Prevost, or Pope Leo, is full of empty, blabbering swagger. He has declared that for Christians, “Islam is not the enemy.” He has put these words into action with his regular meetings with Islamic leaders in order to thank them for their peace-building efforts. In April 2026, he visited the Great Mosque of Algiers during his tour of African nations. He has stated that people who are fearful of Islam tend to be people who are against immigration (like the left, he dignifies illegal migration as ‘immigration’). And yet he utters not a word about the thousands of Christians being slaughtered in Nigeria but instead calls for “communion with Muslims.”

More blabbering swagger surfaced when Patti Smith visited Pope Leo XIV in July 2026. During that visit, Smith was as giddy as a high school girl on her first date. Here she was, an artist who lived with Robert Mapplethorpe, cavorted with poet Allen Ginsberg — and even prayed Buddhist prayers for him as he lay dying in New York City — here she was, a great lover of a certain school of French literature, mainly the novels of Jean Genet, being received in Rome for a 40-minute chat with Leo as if she were the First Lady of a small empire. Now, Patti Smith is probably the one artist who achieved fame for being at the right place at the right time. It’s not her talent necessarily that got her there, but the manner in which she made connections and used them to her advantage. She made the New York art scene her own, thanks to photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and today she’s a regular visitor at the Vatican. She met Pope Francis in 2013 and performed for him in the Vatican. She’s a genius at self-promotion. It’s ironic in many ways that the first lady of punk and Jean Genet — Genet’s homoerotic novels of male prostitution, anal intercourse and criminality, like Our Lady of the Flowers and The Thief’s Journal, still command a wide literary audience — should be welcomed into the papal apartments while traditionalist Catholic organizations like the Society of St. Pius X, are refused entry.

Why did Robert Prevost, who also has a thing for the earth goddess, Pachamama, give 40 minutes of his time to a woman who once said, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine,” but not to a traditionalist wing of his own Church? A cautionary note about Patti Smith: She was not always so “cool” and “liberated.” A documentary on Tubi on the life of Robert Mapplethorpe shows the two of them meeting in New York as young artist-wannabes. Mapplethorpe, unsure of his sexuality at that point, has an affair with Smith but he is soon attracted to New York City’s gay leather bars. When Smith discovers Mapplethorpe’s secret life, she reacts much like any housewife in the 1950s: she’s hurt, scandalized, and spends an inordinate amount of time crying. She walks out on Mapplethorpe in an angry huff. Smith’s visceral reaction to Mapplethorpe’s homosexuality brought out the superficiality of her bohemianism: Her idea of being a rebel did not include breaking society’s standards when it came to the rules of coupledom. With Pope Leo, it is understood that “meeting people where they are” is an important part of the papacy. The pope is also a head of state. But meeting pagans, witches, communists, feminists, Father James Martin and Democrats who venerate abortion or drag queens who may have sold their soul to Satan, doesn’t mean that he necessarily agrees with these people. This is what Vatican officials say, anyway. But when he constantly meets with people like this, you begin to sense lies. You begin to sense an agenda. Something is truly rotten in Rome.

If he were really a true representative of Jesus Christ, he wouldn’t be afraid to use “strong arm” methods in attempting to convert the assorted lot of celebrities who cross his path. But Robert Prevost is afraid to do that because it would only upset the secular media, who would then cancel culture him. There would be no Vogue or Vanity Fair articles on his fashion sense. His wearing of Nike sneakers under his cassock (what happened to the standard fashion rule that one should never wear sneakers with dress pants?), or his casual love of American baseball caps (“So cool,” say Chicagoans, unmindful of the fact that Leo considers himself first a citizen of Peru and lastly, an American citizen) would no longer be idolized. Robert Prevost smiles that wide, crooked smile of his and lets Patti Smith be Patti Smith; he lets an atheist stay an atheist and a pagan, a pagan. One word of recrimination, a plea to change your ways — like Christ did to the Samaritan woman at the well or the woman caught in adultery — will get you in trouble with the world. Vanity Fair will cancel your photo ops. With the “coolness” dead, you will be known as the mean pope who is too rigid. Readers surely remember the media fuss over Pope Benedict XVI’s red shoes, called Ruby Red Slippers in some circles, which did not tickle the fancy of Vogue or Vanity Fair editors if only because the red shoes came to symbolize inflexible Catholic dogma and Pope Benedict’s holding the line regarding traditional Catholic morality. Esquire magazine, however, was the notable exception when it listed Pope Benedict as “accessoriser of the year.” Esquire theorized that Benedict’s red shoes were probably made by a famous Italian fashion house. A lot has changed since 2008. Consider ABC News’s story on Pope Benedict’s shoes versus the media’s handling of Pope Leo’s fashion style. “While the Vatican had never confirmed or denied if the shoes were Prada,” ABC reported then, “continued chatter about the pope’s dress sense led the Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano to print a condemnation of media stories it said trivialized the head of the church.” L’Osservatore Romano stated that the inclusion of the pope on its best-dressed men’s list was, “of a frivolity that is very characteristic of an era that tends to trivialize and does not understand.” “The pope’s shoes,” the article continued, “like his range of flamboyant hats, are nothing to do with vanity but all to do with tradition…The Pope, in summary, does not wear Prada, but Christ,” it said. So far, L’Osservatore Romano, run by Jesuits, has been silent on the “trivialization” of Pope Leo re his Nike sneakers and baseball hats. When Robert Prevost met and prayed with the female Archbishop of Canterbury, the secular photo-ops captured the moment in its most superficial glory: Here is the pope playing nice with the Church of England; being respectful, etc., so how can this be wrong? The meeting itself was not wrong, but what the secular observers did not realize was that Pope Leo’s namesake predecessor, Pope Leo XII, declared that Anglican orders are invalid, meaning that Church of England priests and bishops are not priests and bishops at all but more like costume wearers on Halloween, or outright imposters. This is still the doctrinal language of the Catholic Church, despite the handshaking and crooked smiles of the current Bishop of Rome, who seems to be working overtime to change the Catholic Church forever.

LInsday Clancy: The Heroic Male Juror Who Stood Up to Toxic Feminists

America has a new hero in the fight against radical feminism: the lone male juror who would not capitulate to the myth that Lindsay Clancy was not responsible for murdering her three children. One can only imagine the stress he was under during jury deliberations, as the nine women jurors, some of whom were wearing pink, turned on the heat and tried to get the last man standing to buckle and adhere to the tenets of their cult: women are not to blame. He was the only juror to understand that murder is criminal. As for the other two men on the jury who voted with the women, perhaps they were male feminists with soy boy accents. Massachusetts, after all, is an over-the-top woke Democratic state. So woke, in fact, it’s astounding why the prosecution allowed nine women to be on the jury. Those lawyers have obviously not been paying attention to how liberal women have changed the culture. Massachusetts was like this in 1971 when I couldn’t keep count of all the abortions filtering through the operating room where I worked. There were so many “therapeutic abortions” at Tufts New England Medical Center the discarded fetuses (babies) were stashed in a large medical waste dumpster behind the hospital.

Scandalous, to be sure, but this was the era of Gloria Steinem and the beginnings of feminism. (Almost a decade before, in 1963, Gloria Steinem went undercover at the Manhattan Playboy Club and then went on to write a scathing piece for ‘Show’ magazine on Hugh Hefner’s “misogynic” empire.) Feminism has come a long way since the 1970s. The Lindsay Clancy mistrial showed pretty clearly where that road has taken women. Many are now saying that what came out during the trial – the large numbers of women outside the courthouse demanding that Clancy go free – will have an adverse effect on women’s rights because of certain precedents set by the defense in the case, namely that Clancy was not responsible for her actions because of postpartum mental illness. She couldn’t help it; out-of-whack hormones made her do it. “Lindsay Clancy could have been me!” as the women outside the courthouse told reporters. If it becomes an established fact that women will be seen as not being responsible for their actions if they are hormonal, then women are in trouble. One can easily imagine an employer asking a female job applicant, “Are you currently hormonal?” As one woman on X stated: “One bad hot flash and boom!” This is more than disastrous for women, considering their own gender just established in court that hormones can make you kill three people. Down the line this could mean that women should not be judges, police officers, and they should certainly never be elected to the U.S. presidency. The first woman president argument has come up a lot since the Clancy trial. The argument is that a woman cannot be fully held accountable for her actions because hormones, postpartum psychoses or her biological condition can affect her judgment. Then why should we risk having a woman president?

The feminists supporting Clancy said as much: She’s not guilty of murder because she didn’t know what she was doing. Ironically, many of the women asking the “Can a woman be president?” question cannot be dismissed as rabid misogynists. In 2016, the Daily Mail quoted Cheryle Rios, founder and CEO of GO APE Marketing, who came out and said she could not vote for Hilary Clinton for president. “With the hormones we have, there is no way a woman should be able to start a war,” she stated, adding that she supports equal rights for men and women but cautioned that “There’s an old biblical sound reasoning why a woman shouldn’t be president.” Rios received so much flak for her view that she had to clarify things: “I didn’t say that women should be abused, or that they are stupid or can’t be lawyers, doctors or run successful businesses. I fully know and support that they can as I have done that. I mentioned one position only the Head of our government, the Head of State, the Commander in Chief, the President…” The Clancy trial has brought this old argument back into the public sphere. And when you review the comments on X, you’ll see that almost the majority of them are from women who believe as Rios does. Frankly, I was astonished at how many women were saying things like this: “Lindsay Clancy’s trial is exactly why we will never have a female president!” “If they let her walk, as a woman, I say repeal the 19th!” “If hormonal changes can cause a woman to kill her own children: can a woman be trusted as a police officer, or with owning a firearm?” Columnist Ann Coulter went further when she stated in 2021 that women should not have the right to vote “because women see the government as their husbands.”

Coulter then told Media Matters: “If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president.” It wasn’t until 1975 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Taylor v. Louisiana that systematically excluding women from juries violated the constitutional right to a fair cross section of the community. In 1972, TV talk show host David Susskind told feminist Germaine Greer that a woman cannot be president because of hormonal changes. Greer lambasted Susskind, telling him that hormonal changes “was not a mental illness.” A recent September 2026 Pew Research Center study announced that “Americans have grown more skeptical that a woman will be president in their lifetime.” The study concluded: “While Democrats and Republicans have similar views on the likelihood of a woman president, they differ widely in seeing this as personally important. Three-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say it’s extremely or very important to them that a woman is elected president in their lifetime. This compares with just 5% of Republicans and GOP leaners.” Feminists argue that no single woman who has run for president so far has been young enough to become pregnant. As in the abortion debate, the men are told to not enter into conversations about women’s bodies or hormones. The men are called “loud and opinionated.” On the other hand, if Lindsay Clancy is found not responsible for her actions because of hormones and prescription drugs, how can any woman argue she should be CEO, president, or in charge of anything at all? Full equality – a word the Left loves to abuse – means holding women accountable for their actions. Thom Nickels

Pope Leo and Patti Smith - but NOT the SSPX

Traditionally, a religious leader should stand outside the orbit of worldly spheres. He should represent a set of values apart from Hollywood, the talking points of the DNC, and the philosophical swagger of New York icons like Patti Smith, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. When Patti Smith visited Pope Leo XIV in July 2026, she was as giddy as a high school girl on her first date. Here she was, an artist who lived with Robert Mapplethorpe, cavorted with poet Allen Ginsberg — and even prayed Buddhist prayers for him as he lay dying in New York City — here she was, a great lover of a certain school of French literature, mainly the novels of Jean Genet, being received in Rome for a 40-minute chat with Leo as if she were the First Lady of a small empire.

Patti Smith is probably the one artist who achieved fame for being at the right place at the right time. It’s not her talent necessarily that got her there, but the manner in which she made connections and used them to her advantage. She made the New York art scene her own, thanks to Robert Mapplethorpe, and today she’s a regular visitor at the Vatican. She met Pope Francis in 2013 and performed for him in the Vatican. She’s a genius at self-promotion. It’s ironic in many ways that the first lady of punk and Jean Genet — Genet’s homoerotic novels of male prostitution and criminality, like Our Lady of the Flowers and The Thief’s Journal, still command a wide literary audience — should be welcomed into the papal apartments while traditionalist Catholic organizations like the Society of St. Pius X, are refused entry. Let me say upfront that I generally like Patti Smith and much of the bohemian culture she represents, but I think Pope Leo has his priorities wrong when he refused to meet with a traditionalist wing of his own Church but gave 40 minutes of his time to a woman who once said, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.”

Yet even in the secular world, Patti Smith was not always so “cool” and “liberated.” A documentary on Tubi on the life of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe shows the two of them meeting in New York as young artist-wannabes. Mapplethorpe, unsure of his sexuality at that point, has an affair with Smith but he is soon attracted to the thrill of New York City’s gay leather bars. When Smith discovers Mapplethorpe’s secret life, she reacts much like any housewife in the 1950s: she’s hurt, scandalized, and spends an inordinate amount of time crying. She walks out on Mapplethorpe in a huff. Smith’s visceral reaction to Mapplethorpe’s homosexuality brought out the hypocrisy of bohemian life: Acting like a rebel does not include breaking society’s standards when it comes to the rules of coupledom. With Pope Leo, I understand that “meeting people where they are” is an important part of the papacy. The pope, one must remember, is also a head of state. But meeting pagans, witches, communists, feminists, and Democrats who venerate abortion or drag queens who may have sold their soul to Satan, doesn’t mean that he necessarily agrees with these people. If he were to use “strong arm” methods in attempting to convert the assorted lot of celebrities who cross his path, he would only upset the secular media, who would then cancel culture him. There would be no Vogue or Vanity Fair articles on his fashion sense. His wearing of Nike sneakers under his cassock (what happened to the standard fashion rule that one should never wear sneakers with dress pants?), or his casual love of American baseball caps (“So cool,” say Chicagoans, unmindful of the fact that Leo considers himself first a citizen of Peru and lastly, an American citizen) would no longer be idolized. Pope Leo’s job is to let Patti Smith be Patti Smith; to let an atheist be an atheist and a pagan, a pagan. One word of recrimination, a plea to change your ways — like Christ did to the Samaritan woman at the well or the woman caught in adultery — will get you in trouble with the world. Vanity Fair will cancel your photo ops. With the “coolness” dead, you will be known as the mean pope who is too rigid.

Readers surely remember the media fuss over Pope Benedict XVI’s red shoes, called Ruby Red Slippers in some circles, which did not tickle the fancy of Vogue or Vanity Fair editors if only because the red shoes came to symbolize inflexible Catholic dogma and Pope Benedict’s holding the line regarding traditional Catholic morality. Esquire magazine, however, was the notable exception when it listed Pope Benedict as “accessoriser of the year.” Esquire theorized that Benedict’s red shoes were probably made by a famous Italian fashion house. A lot has changed since 2008. Consider ABC News’s story on Pope Benedict’s shoes versus the media’s handling of Pope Leo’s fashion style. “While the Vatican had never confirmed or denied if the shoes were Prada,” ABC reported then, “continued chatter about the pope’s dress sense led the Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano to print a condemnation of media stories it said trivialized the head of the church.” L’Osservatore Romano stated that the inclusion of the pope on its best-dressed men’s list was, “of a frivolity that is very characteristic of an era that tends to trivialize and does not understand.” “The pope’s shoes,” the article continued, “like his range of flamboyant hats, are nothing to do with vanity but all to do with tradition…The Pope, in summary, does not wear Prada, but Christ,” it said. So far, L’Osservatore Romano, run by Jesuits, has been silent on the “trivialization” of Pope Leo re his Nike sneakers and baseball hats. What we have today in the Vatican is the politically expedient game of “nice”: Give even those who ruffle your spiritual feathers a pastoral blessing and send them on their way as they are – unchanged. When Pope Leo met and prayed with the female Archbishop of Canterbury, the secular photo-ops captured the moment in its most superficial glory: Here is the pope playing nice with the Church of England; being respectful, etc., so how can this be wrong? The meeting itself was not wrong, but what the secular observers did not realize was that Pope Leo’s namesake predecessor, Pope Leo XII, declared that Anglican orders are invalid, meaning that Church of England priests and bishops are not priests and bishops at all but more like costume wearers on Halloween, or outright imposters. If this language unsettles you, it is still the doctrinal language of the Roman Church, despite the handshaking and wide smiles of the current Bishop of Rome, who probably wishes these old rigid standards would go away.

The Problem with Orthodox Christianity

My spiritual journey to Orthodox Christianity had much to do with the liturgical changes in the Catholic Church after Vatican II. Vatican II, despite good intentions attributed to “the Holy Spirit,” ruined a perfectly good Church in so many ways. Prior to the Council, Catholic convents and seminaries were filled to capacity; after the Council, thousands of priests and nuns left what they thought would be a permanent calling. This fact alone should be enough to damn the Council that was all the rage in the 1960s. As a boy at that time, I recall reading the Jesuit magazine America, where articles praising the Council promised a ‘new springtime’ for the Church. I felt only dread reading these pieces written by revolution-happy Jesuits who sanctioned everything in that revolution as “the work of the Holy Spirit.” How convenient: make a radical change, modernize to the extreme, and then call it the work of the Holy Spirit. I left the Church at 19 when the hybrid-transition Mass was in full swing. This was the era of quick changes, when each Sunday brought another liturgical revision or addition. The last straw was when they turned the altars around to have the priest face the people like a performer on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Years of agnosticism finally brought me to a spiritual crisis in my early 20s. I then gave Catholicism another try, and my first Mass after a long absence was in a new Norbertine church on Philadelphia’s Main Line where they had an altar-in-the-round and burlap banners in place of mosaics and statues. I knew instantly that this was not the same church I had been baptized into. I found comfort in the Traditional Latin Mass for a season, but these Masses in Philadelphia were never stationed in one parish for long, even though traditional parishes were established outside the city. In the city, Catholics were either too liberal or apathetic to liturgical abuse and innovation. They went with the flow, believing, as the Jesuits of America did in the 1960s, that all radical reform, was the work of the Holy Spirit. And to question the Holy Spirit was a sin. I had known about Orthodoxy since I was a teenager. The beauty of icons, the majesty of the liturgy of Saint Basil or St. John Chrosystom, the splendor of Mount Athos. In Orthodoxy, there was never any talk of revising the liturgy or making it more pleasing to Protestants. Orthodoxy was inflexible; a living “museum” with muscle, where liturgical tradition doesn’t change with the times. And so, I became Orthodox, although the priest who received me into his Philadelphia parish did so without any ceremonials. He was a former Roman Catholic, as was his wife, and as were many people in the parish. Nearly all had left Rome because of Vatican II. Was this exodus the work of the Holy Spirit? Yet Orthodoxy, despite its beauty, did not seal the deal for me. I came to realize Catholicism was in my DNA. Getting used to priests with wives and families (a house divided; personal attention split in multiples) was odd and off-putting; getting used to priests who worked part-time as lawyers or contractors - most Orthodox priests have dual careers – or priests who never went to seminary (they are not rare in Orthodoxy) were also disturbing factors. Since becoming Orthodox, I’ve noticed that many of the young men converting from Protestantism or agnosticism knew little about Catholicism when entering Orthodoxy. Many of them did a hop-skip-and-jump over Catholicism and went straight to Orthodoxy. Many of them, as I would learn, were afraid to consider Catholicism because of “the pope thing.” Years of childhood brainwashing perhaps had made the pope somewhat of a boogeyman. One young guy from a Mennonite background told me he would consider becoming Orthodox before Catholic because of all the negative things he heard about the pope growing up, and because he thought that Catholics “overdo” their veneration of the Blessed Virgin. “The Orthodox are way up there with the Catholics when it comes to the Virgin Mary, but they are not as bad,” he said. His comments made me want to return to the Catholic Church, bad liturgy notwithstanding. Perhaps it’s the twisted secular age we live in, but since I’ve been a member of this Orthodox Philadelphia parish, I have never heard a sermon on what constitutes a sin in the Orthodox Church. Our good priest will talk endlessly about the importance of going to confession, but he never talks about the heavy sins one may commit that need confession. I can only conclude that he assumes everybody in the parish knows them already, even the “rush through” Protestant converts, but is this really the case? I’m not talking about excessive, fanatical fire and brimstone sermons, but occasional loving reminders that might align to a specific gospel reading. One former priest I know said he never talked about serious sexual sins during sermons because of the possibility of confusing children in the congregation. What he did do, however, was add an occasional ‘Pastor’s Note’ essay to the parish bulletin reminding parishioners of the Church’s official stand on matters of morality. Catechesis should be an ongoing thing. (The priest I am referring to was not Orthodox but an Anglican Catholic priest who spent four years in seminary.) During the 12 or 13 years I’ve been attending this parish, the only sins I’ve heard mentioned from the altar have to do with slander and gossip. Okay, well and good.

But why not abortion? There’s been not one word about pornography, abortion, unmarried couples living together, homosexuality or divorce. Is this because these issues have all become political? Was our good priest told by a higher Church authority to avoid these topics because they have all become politically charged and it might make some liberal parishioners angry? To be woke and Orthodox seems like an outrageous oxymoron, but they do exist (cafeteria Orthodox). As my former Anglican Catholic priest friend did, why can’t a discussion of these matters – ongoing catechesis – be included in a pastor’s note inserted inside the parish bulletin when a particular gospel reading may warrant a reminder on the more serious sins everybody seems afraid to talk about?

As troubled as the Catholic Church is at the moment, there are still Catholic bishops who dare to deny Holy Communion to politicians who support abortion, but that almost never happens in the Orthodox Church. Or if it does, it is rarely reported. Ironically, the Orthodox Church can be intense on externals like the importance of fasting – there are more fasts in the Orthodox Church than in all of Christendom – but it seems to remain silent on the great sins of the age, at least on the parish level. The good priest at my parish likes to sermonize about converting the woke, far left millennial population surrounding the parish, but he never specifies how this is to be done. He thinks that by opening up the church grounds with festivals and neighborhood friendly church events, the agnostic neighborhood women with blue hair who have had 2 abortions and think God is any far-left Democrat candidate running for office, will want to become Orthodox. In a certain sense, people like this would be good conversion candidates, especially if they didn’t know about the sins that are never talked about when it comes to confession. Thom Nickels