by Thom Nickels
The planned coup by trans activists didn’t go as smoothly as planned.
The funeral service (not a Mass) at New York’s St. Patrick’s cathedral for 52-year-old trans activist Cecilia Gentili was, in the words of the Rev. James Martin, “wonderful.”
The New York Times called the service “an exuberant piece of political theater,” then segued into how Pope Francis is encouraging the Church to be more open to the LGBTQ community.
But the massive protests outside the cathedral regarding the service had nothing to do with the LGBTQ community or openness to trans people at all. The protests had to do with using a sacred space as a political performance arena to further an agenda.
The organizer of the funeral, trans activist Ceyenne Doroshow, boasted of tricking the cathedral into holding what would become a blasphemous and sacrilegious event.
“I kept it under wraps,” Doroshow told the New York Times.
This is snake-in-the-grass lingo for, “I pulled a fast one on them,” although it’s anyone’s guess why someone in the New York Archdiocese never smelled a rat.
Did Doroshow arrange the funeral by phone, never coming into contact with a cathedral official, and was therefore able to hide his transgender identity?
Or did he show up in person, dressed as the opposite gender?
If the latter, why didn’t the cathedral take the time to look into the matter further? In today’s toxic political climate, anything is possible—especially a woke trans coup to make the cathedral and the Catholic Church look bad.
Holding a funeral service for a trans person is not in itself a bad thing. A trans person is a son or daughter of God and should be afforded as much respect as any person, but holding a funeral to use that trans person’s life and death to score political points and to blaspheme Catholic saints is something else.
Cecilia Gentili, a declared atheist, was well known in New York’s trans community.
Born in Argentina as a male, he entered the U.S. as an illegal immigrant but officially sought asylum in 2012. By that time he had already adopted the name Cecilia.
“Trans people didn’t have any of the opportunities at one time [to make a living] except to be a sex worker,” he told a packed, appreciative audience last year at New York’s LGBT Community Center, where he received the Visibility Award.
Gentili credited the Center with turning his life around and freeing him from a life of homelessness, opioid addiction, and sex work.
He went on to become Director of Policy at GMHC, an AIDS-based organization, and the founder of Trans Equity Consulting, an organization supporting trans women of color. Gentili also landed a role in the TV series Pose as a character named Miss Orlando who advised clients on cosmetic surgery.
Gentili was also famous in the NYC bubble for solo shows like “The Knife Cuts Both Ways” and “Red Ink,” which was due to open this April.
When Gentili died suddenly on February 2 (the cause of death was kept secret and never published), New York Governor Kathy Hochul posted a picture of the two of them on Instagram and wrote: “As an artist and steadfast activist in the trans rights movement, she helped countless people find love, joy, and acceptance.”
But helping “countless people find love, joy and acceptance” does not equate with what happened in St. Patrick’s cathedral.
A thousand mourners packed St. Patrick’s (the cathedral holds 2400) while 4,000 Catholic protesters picketed outside. Videos of the funeral show political activists in halter tops, extravagant fur coats and wraps, outrageous wigs straight out of Andy Warhol or John Waters films, men (biological and trans) who refused to remove their hats (when I was in St. Patrick’s five years ago with a group of friends, I inadvertently forgot to remove my hat and was approached by a sexton who asked me, “Please remove it.”)
The presider, the Rev. Edward Dougherty, the former superior general of the Maryknoll fathers, was all smiles throughout the service and kept referring to Gentili with feminine pronouns and describing Gentili as “our sister.”
During the prayers for the faithful, a reader prayed to the Lord for “transgender rights” and “gender-affirming” health care.
One man in a hat, identified as Oscar Diaz, took to the pulpit and belted out, “This whore. This great whore. St. Cecilia, Mother of all Whores!”
Applause and shout-outs broke out as people stood up to give additional cheers.
Why wasn’t the service terminated at this point by one of the mindless clerics one sees (in the videos) walking about the altar, some of them piously holding their hands over their chest as if in solemn procession?
Where was Timothy Cardinal Dolan, the Dr. Phil of U.S. Cardinals whose sole aim in life seems to be to be well-loved by chic, woke New Yorkers?
Beside the casket was an icon of the deceased: a framed picture of Cecilia Gentili, head surrounded by a Byzantine-style halo.
When Father Dougherty, the Maryknoll priest (the Maryknoll religious Order is second to the Jesuits in terms of radical wokeism and liturgical abuse) read the Our Father aloud to the congregation, nobody in the cathedral joined in.
Instead, this congregation of activists kept silent because this service was not about God nor about the fate of Cecilia’s immortal soul, but a show of solidarity and power, a base political event where the traditional “Rest in Peace” was replaced by “Rest in Power.”
At the end of the service, a frenzied trans woman of color rushed past the casket and proceeded to pirouette down the center aisle—arms flapping like stork wings– in a show of hell-bent narcissism.
This was immediately following the conclusion of “Ave Maria,” which some in the congregation changed to “Ave Cecilia.”
Reaction to the cathedral scandal was swift.
The Catholic News Agency reported:
On Saturday, Father Enrique Salvo, the pastor of St. Patrick’s, said in a statement that Church officials shared in the “outrage over the scandalous behavior at a funeral here at St. Patrick’s Cathedral earlier this week. The cathedral only knew that family and friends were requesting a funeral Mass for a Catholic and had no idea our welcome and prayer would be degraded in such a sacrilegious and deceptive way,” Salvo said.
The pastor stated that the scandal took place as Lent was beginning, a time that reminds us “how much we need the prayer, reparation, repentance, grace, and mercy to which this holy season invites us.”
Father Salvo also said that Timothy Cardinal Dolan had directed that a Mass of Reparation for the blasphemous funeral had been offered.
Meanwhile, there’s been no word about Father Dougherty, who seemed to be in his glory as he stood by and encouraged chants of “This great whore, Saint Cecilia!” echoed throughout the neo-Gothic structure.
Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-woke-desecration-of-saint-patricks-cathedral/
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