The Third Rail Our Hierarchy Avoids

The gender ideology madness is infiltrating the Church, because our "Shepherds" refuse to be the guides that Christ intended them to be!

From Crisis

By Kevin Wells

Few clergy will address, in specificity, the broadening third rail of LGBT ideologies, that each day seem to add to our multifaceted civilizational moral collapse.

Yet again at around 3 p.m. today, for the 1,993rd year in a row, the Starved Man will make His plea. He’ll feel the same collapse of his lungs, and the familiar panic will rise. He will suffocate soon.

Time is running short on the salvation of mankind. So with His consciousness fading, He begins to twist and reposition His body—that has already been writhing on the Cross like an eel trapped in a barrel.

But He must breathe it out again. 

I thirst.

For the 1,993rd year in a row, the words will fall from the Cross, emerging as an inelegant croak discordant to the ear. Few, save those blood-covered few venerating Him, will even hear His words. 

His mother, though, has already gathered them into her heart, where she has begun the work of re-categorizing them into a type of last epistle or unwritten Fifth Gospel.

Like those beneath the Cross that day, it is so hard, all these years later on April 2, 2026, to hear His I Thirst plea. Just like then, when Golgotha turned on a dime into a place of havoc, darkness, and seeming ruin, we struggle within the noise to ponder and oblige Jesus’s final plea for relief.  

Calvary was untamed in 33 A.D. Dead people were stepping from tombs beneath skies covered over with black flapping wings. Horrified onlookers raced for their lives, sidestepping disintegrating boulders hurtling down the hillside. Jewish leaders screamed for Elijah to rescue them, as they too dashed down the brow of the quaking hill on the blood-slickened trail, where they careened wildly into the spectators and quiet believers.

All the while, though, Mary kneels in the mud and unblemished blood, a shadow of a thin reed illuminated by the flashes of lightning. The Roman soldier, tasked to supervise and see the execution of the Jew until the end, finds himself unable to take his gaze from the Mother, as she cocks her head and looks serenely into her Son’s side, as if she were a small child again praying at her bedside. 

He had just thrust his spear into the Jew’s side, but now has found himself pulled into the heart of a mystery. The soldier is staring at the most singular disassociative image he had ever beheld—the Mother’s ringed eyes seem overfilled with joy. Tears of hope streak her cheeks. As the women beside her wail, the Mother keeps her neck craned to her Son’s unbeating heart, where an unseen paroxysm of angels gather the last of the spotless blood. 

Uneasy with the image, the centurion moves his line of sight to the lone man to walk the end of the line, the loyal friend who risked his own life so he might become a steady handhold for the Mother to make it up the hill. This gentle man, too, seemed to the soldier to be at complete peace within the upheaval and gruesomeness. 

All at once, recognition bursts to life in the soldier’s soul, as if a seed had suddenly died and, in dying, planted knowledge in his heart. The incongruous image of tranquility radiating from both the Mother and Beloved John has given birth to something that rises in him like a poisonous gas: He has just overseen the killing of the Son of God. 

All of a sudden, he is no longer blind to what was ordained from the beginning of time. This crucifixion and death of the Jew, he saw through the eyes of Mary and John, demanded a type of sweet violence, a masterpiece of love. This type of offering had to be attached to something raw and violent, and that true love always demanded this type of cost and death. 

The words that had been curdling in his gut, finally rose like a slow-moving wave into his throat. He coughed it out: “Truly, this was the Son of God.” 

But for Mary, who was looking at the soldier now, no one heard him. 

Her welling eyes met his, where they brimmed with love. He knew that she saw him trembling beneath his armor. That instant, he understood what the Mother knew: “The lost have been saved now, and this was the measure of love that it took.” 

Tonight, thousands upon thousands of worldwide bishops and clergy will wash the feet of parishioners to commemorate Jesus’s humble act before the Last Supper. It is a wonderful tradition that brings us, in a way, into the intimacy of the activities of the Upper Room.

Few of this same group tomorrow, though, will agree to take to the hard wood of the Cross, at least as it concerns addressing the monsters swallowing Catholic children whole each day, from the moment they rise until they slide into bed for sleep. 

Few clergy will address, in specificity, the broadening third rail of LGBT ideologies, that each day seem to add to our multifaceted civilizational moral collapse. The prophetic voice of the Roman Catholic Church has mostly vanished; and the worldwide softening of the proclamation of the Church’s moral doctrines has led to its piecemeal re-engineering. 

As a former paid news journalist, I took note of the story that broke in the sports world this week, when NBA guard Jaden Ivey, 24, said on his live Instagram account that the league’s promotion of June’s Pride Month was “unrighteous.” Calling his conduct “detrimental to the team”, the Chicago Bulls released him. Ivey is now a former NBA player.

He had already just learned that the Bulls had shut him down for the remainder of the season because of a sore left knee. On Feb. 19, Ivey did not play in a game against the Raptors; the Bulls called his benching a “coach’s decision.” It marked the first time in his career he had been a “healthy scratch.” In the locker room after, Ivey said that perhaps he “wasn’t the same player as he used to be,” and then spoke to reporters about his faith and his devotion to Jesus.

“I’m not the J.I. I used to be. The old J.I. is dead,” Ivey is reported to have said that night. “I’m alive in Christ no matter what the basketball setting is.”

ESPN reported that Bulls staff had begun to describe Ivey as “preachy” in the locker room.

When informed of his release from the Bulls, he said, “[The Bulls] said my conduct is detrimental to the team,” Ivey said. “Why didn’t they just say, ‘We don’t agree with his stance on LGBTQ’? Why didn’t they say that? … How is it conduct detrimental to the team? What did I do to the team? What did I do to the players?”

All this brought to mind May of 2023, when the Los Angeles Dodgers honored “The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” at their 10th Annual Pride Night. The group, a drag charity organization known for satirical depictions of Catholic nuns, was given the Dodgers’ 2023 Community Hero Award. 

I recalled the work of Gus Lloyd then, the former Seize the Day Sirius XM Catholic Channel host, who took call after call from those angered at Dodgers management. More importantly, I recall him * teaching * those callers who saw no issue or harm with what the Dodgers had allowed. Even now, I remember his poise, tone, charity, and nonpareil work at teaching seemingly non-believers the immutable moral truths of the Catholic faith.

So I turned on Sirius XM yesterday morning and listened to Lloyd’s morning replacement, host Katie McGrady, taking caller’s best April Fool’s Day pranks. No mention was made of Ivey by Katie. To my knowledge, no Catholic Channel host mentioned Ivey yesterday.

My words are not an attack on Katie. However, as one once trained and paid to write breaking stories for a major daily newspaper, I know what makes a compelling story. The intersection of faith, sports and the consequence of what the LGBT leviathan has dropped into Ivey’s life is a big Catholic story. No one, though, in Catholic media, or virtually no one, will touch it.

Why? Leadership in the the Roman Catholic Church has virtually blacklisted or verbally contracepted from the ambo the mention of the sin of active homosexuality, gay marriage, or anything else in which the LGBT machine has staked its claim. The straightjacketing of the Church’s once-powerful prophetic voice has helped to suffocate the voices of Catholic television, radio, and podcast hosts, who’ve gone virtually radio silent on every worldwide third-rail moral issue.

The grave misfortune is that clergy and media seem to have collaboratively forgotten what Gus Lloyd knew the summer of ‘23, when he opened up every phone line, hoping to teach someone who disagreed with the moral thought and mind of the Catholic Church. Gus used his platform then to entertain and to catechize—and on a good day, to lead a listener to perhaps want to become Catholic.

Yesterday, I spoke with a high-ranking member of Catholic media about the reluctance of Catholic media to address the Ivey story.

“It’s a shame that we shy away from these stories, but I do believe part of it is because our Church shepherds have retreated from the dangerous fields where shepherds must unbendingly stand and protect,” he said. “They are a far cry from St. John Paul’s encouragement to call evil by its name. If they are unwilling to die to themselves, then, really, bishops might want to consider laying down their croziers and permitting the Holy Spirit to raise up laity unafraid to address society and its ills, good-hearted people willing to speak aloud to help sustain and protect the Church.” 

Another member of the Catholic media said this: “Above all else, stories like Ivey’s offer great opportunities to teach others about Truth; it has nothing to do with judgment on gay marriage or Pride Month, et cetera. It is proclaiming, charitably, what the Catholic Church teaches,” he said. “When cowardice and lack of conviction prevent hosts from speaking on stories like Ivey’s, they’ve simply decided to drop the ball. They’ve allowed fear of the world to prevent sharing the Gospel.” 

The centurion saw it on the Cross, and converted on the spot. He knew what the cost of saving demanded—and when he turned his eyes to Mary and John; he saw that they were enveloped in peace after enduring until the end of the line. 

The centurion knew then that half-measures do not redeem and save. Cowardice never works, as ten of the apostles soon came to realize.

Silence cannot, nor ever will, quench Jesus’s long thirst.