What happened last week at St. Patrick's Cathedral at a funeral that forced the archdiocese of New York to order its pastor to conduct a Mass of Reparation? Readers wondering the answer to that question should look elsewhere than the mainstream media. Since the funeral of transgender activist Cecilia Gentili, the media has suggested that the outrage over the funeral relates entirely to Gentili's 'identity,' rather than the behavior of the participants.

Today's report from the Associated Press provides a good example of this narrow coverage. Nowhere in the opening three paragraphs is there any reference to what actually happened at the funeral Mass:

The funeral of a renowned transgender activist in a New York cathedral elicited a denunciation of the event by a senior church official, who called the mass a scandal within one of the preeminent houses of worship in U.S. Catholicism.

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York condemned the funeral of Cecilia Gentili, which was held in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan and drew a large audience on Thursday.

Gentili was known as a leading advocate for other transgender people, as well as sex workers and people with HIV. A post on her Instagram account announced her death on Feb. 6 at the age of 52.

The first mention of behavior only comes in the fourth paragraph, and only in a quote from the pastor of St. Patrick's Cathedral. In fact, the only reporting on any behavior in the entire article at all is in the fourteenth paragraph, and is as generic as possible:

Videos of Gentili’s funeral mass show an estimated audience of more than 1,000 celebrants, including transgender people and other friends and supporters chanting her name, applauding, singing and offering praise of her stature as a leading light of the city’s LGBTQ+ community.

Want to know what really happened? Catholic News Agency offers more specific reporting than AP on why the funeral was so outrageous and offensive to Catholics. In the first place, the funeral organizers deliberately hid Gentili's biological sex from the parish in order to secure access for the funeral, a fact first reported (in fairness) by the New York Times:

Organizers reportedly did not disclose to the cathedral that Gentili, who died Feb. 6 at age 52, was a biological man who identified as a woman.

“I kept it under wraps,” Ceyeye Doroshow, the service’s organizer, told The New York Times.

We'll get back to that deception in a moment. It served to open the door of the cathedral to a mockery of the Catholic faith, its teachings, and its saints during the liturgy itself. Among the lowlights:

Many of the 1,000 in attendance wore drag and scanty outfits. At the foot of the altar stood an image of the Argentinian-born Gentili with a halo, surrounded by the Spanish words for “whore,” “transvestite,” “blessed,” and “mother.”

Trans activist Oscar Diaz told Time it “felt appropriate” to say farewell to Gentili with a funeral service at St. Patrick’s, describing the event as an act of bestowing “sainthood” on the transgender advocate. ...

A rendition of the “Ave Maria” by the cathedral cantor was interrupted when an attendee shouted “Ave Cecilia!” and danced down the center aisle.

A mid-liturgy lay reflection given from the sanctuary compared Gentili’s advocacy for normalizing sex work and lobbying for gender-related health care to Christ’s ministry to prostitutes and outcasts.

In another reflection, Diaz described the deceased as “this whore, this great whore, St. Cecilia, mother of all whores.” Those assembled stood and applauded as Father Dougherty remained seated in the presider’s chair, his chin in his hand.

That's a lot more than just "singing and offering praise" to Gentili. This despicable demonstration of twisted theology and political activism in a Catholic sacred space is an assault on its community of faithful, conducted under deception. It even drew a rebuke from LGBT advocate Fr. James Martin, who initially endorsed holding the funeral at St. Patrick's but backpedaled after details of the event emerged. 

The media wants people to think that the outrage is an act of bigotry, when the real story is the acts of bigotry by the participants. That anti-Catholic animus and the targeting of the parish of St. Patrick's are what's at issue here. And the media will try to bury that aspect of the story as much as possible.

However, there are more important aspects of this story than just the media's refusal to report it correctly. What took place was an assault on the church and on faith in God, and deliberately so. If Gentili's friends wanted a funeral service for their demonstration, they could have held it at any number of secular venues, especially since Gentili was a self-professed atheist in the first place.

So why did the organizers seek out St. Patrick's Cathedral, and lie to get access to it for this demonstration?

Doroshow said that Gentili’s friends requested that the funeral service be held at St. Patrick’s because “it is an icon,” which is how they thought of Gentili.

They sought out this venue because it's an icon -- an icon in the theological sense. Catholics, and even more so Orthodox, see icons as art that has special meaning in faith that allows devotion to flow to the Lord. These are sacred because they transcend material reality and orient us to the spiritual kingdom of God. 

The organizers of the funeral deliberately chose a theological icon in order to debase it and promote their materialist sense of iconography. The degradation of the faith and the church was the entire point. In that, there's little difference between this and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, which is why Catholics got angry with the Los Angeles Dodgers for honoring their insulting bigotry and intolerance with a community award last year. The SPI and the contingent at St. Patrick's Cathedral mock our beliefs so as to orient people to the material rather than the spiritual and to their reordering of Creation to their own uses and appetites.

All of this is a battle which has been going on since the Garden of Eden. Whether we worship a Golden Calf or indulge in idolatry to be welcoming and open to our neighbors, it's still the same spiritual battle. As we have seen since Sodom and Gomorrah, since the Roman empire, and are experiencing anew now, the popular culture will always tempt us into abandoning our spiritual salvation by debasing its precepts and mocking those who remain faithful to them. It's long past time for the Christian Church to recognize the danger of secularism and especially the explicit hostility and destruction preferred by the trans/queer activist movement. 

Because as our friend Chad Felix Greene reminds us, they certainly know what they're doing. 

LGBTQ activists seem uniquely obsessed with attacking Christianity as a significant part of their activism and identity.

— Chad Felix Greene 🇮🇱 (@chadfelixg) February 19, 2024