There are moments when the mask slips. When evil stops whispering and starts shouting. What happened at Seton Hall—a Catholic university hosting a “Drag Bingo” event during Lent—wasn’t just another culture war skirmish. It was a clarion call. A theological scandal wrapped in glitter, sponsored by a university that claims to be built on the Cross. And if we still have eyes to see and ears to hear, we’ll recognize what this moment demands of us….
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In a move that has left faithful Catholics both dismayed and galvanized, Seton Hall University—a Catholic institution in New Jersey—plans to host a “Drag Bingo” event on April 8. This event, featuring performer drag queens–with one being featured as “Hanukah Lewinski”–has prompted faithful Catholic students to organize a Rosary protest in response. One student, who wanted to remain anonymous, had this to say:
“The hosting of this drag bingo event exposes the unfortunate reality: that Seton Hall and many other Catholic universities around the country are caving to the DEI mob when in reality, they should be spearheading the attack against this destructive, degenerate culture through forming countless young people into holy and virtuous men and women,” he said.
The student called on the university to return to its roots as one of America’s oldest Catholic colleges.
“I came to Seton Hall anticipating to receive an education with a constant undertone of the timeless truths of our Catholic faith,” he said. “I urge those at Seton Hall to reclaim the university’s Catholic identity and crush the head of this serpent.”
The controversy underscores a profound and troubling pattern that continues even after all the “winning” we are celebrating under Trump: the infiltration of secular ideologies into sacred spaces, a phenomenon that echoes the very confrontations faced by Christ in the Gospels and the warnings issued by Pope Pius XI during his pontificate from 1922 to 1939–take inventory of where those dates fall in relation to the geopolitical realities raging at the time.
In the Gospel of St John, Chapter 8, featured yesterday on Passion Sunday in the Traditional Mass, Jesus engages in a heated discourse with certain Jewish leaders who claim Abraham as their father. Christ challenges their lineage, stating, “You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you will do.” He identifies the devil as “a murderer from the beginning” and “the father of lies.” One Fr Henry James Coleridge elucidates this passage, noting that Satan’s original rebellion was marked by a desire for destruction and deceit:
Satan’s rebellion against God implied the insane desire of the destruction of God. When he misled the thousands of angels who shared in his revolt, he misled them to their own destruction. When he tempted Eve, his desire was the destruction and murder of the whole human race, and as long as the world lasts, he will be occupied in the work, as far as it is permitted him, of murdering souls by sin and of desiring the destruction of those whom he is not permitted to murder.
This confrontation reveals a timeless truth: those who reject divine authority often become instruments of chaos and falsehood. The frightening thing is that God will allow it in order both to punish the sinner and to urge him back to the bosom of holiness–a reality called the “operation of error” I explored in some recent work.
“And the Lord answered him: He that hath sinned against me, him will I strike out of my book: But go thou, and lead this people whither I have told thee: my angel shall go before thee. And I in the day of revenge will visit this sin also of theirs. The Lord therefore struck the people for the guilt on occasion of the calf which Aaron had made” (Exodus 32:32-35).
coupled with…
“And in all seduction of iniquity to them that perish; because they receive not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. Therefore God shall send them the operation of error, to believe lying, that all may be judged who have not believed the truth, but have consented to iniquity” (2 Thessalonians 10-11).
We learn this through even a cursory study of the Book of Job. Not that Job applies here as a cultural Marxist or even someone who refuses to fight against it, but the fact that Satan must obtain permission from God first before he afflicts Job. God knew it would result in a greater measure of glory for himself and Job by allowing it, but also an even more ignominious moment of shame on Satan when he failed. This same basic dynamic exists for the sinner–but frighteningly, oftentimes the sinner doesn’t realize the intended glory.
Indeed, God shall suffer them to be deceived by lying wonders, and false miracles, in punishment of their not entertaining the love of truth. As punishment for their sins, he’ll make even the worst of deceptions seem like the truth to those who never sought out Truth himself in the first place. And oftentimes he’ll allow it after some time passes, so that the wicked will not recognize the lesson.
They only wallow in the deception–and assume it is the truth. And that is the consequences of sin and the eternal reality of God’s justice even I personally have had to fight through and repent over.
It is a miracle and by God’s grace alone that I have been able to see my past self in the mirror.
Fast forward to the 20th century and more political, universal concerns. Pope Pius XI, like most of his predecessors going back to the 18th century (and beyond, really) observed the rise of atheistic communism and its insidious spread into various facets of society. In his encyclical Divini Redemptoris, he describes this ideology as a “satanic scourge” that seeks to dismantle the very fabric of Christian civilization:
[T]he struggle between good and evil remained in the world as a sad legacy of the original fall. Nor has the ancient tempter ever ceased to deceive mankind with false promises. It is on this account that one convulsion following upon another has marked the passage of the centuries, down to the revolution of our own days. This modern revolution, it may be said, has actually broken out or threatens everywhere, and it exceeds in amplitude and violence anything yet experienced in the preceding persecutions launched against the Church. Entire peoples find themselves in danger of falling back into a barbarism worse than that which oppressed the greater part of the world at the coming of the Redeemer.
This all too imminent danger is bolshevistic and atheistic Communism, which aims at upsetting the social order and at undermining the very foundations of Christian civilization.
In the face of such a threat, the Catholic Church could not and does not remain silent. This Apostolic See, above all, has not refrained from raising its voice, for it knows that its proper and social mission is to defend truth, justice and all those eternal values which Communism ignores or attacks.
He warns of the deceptive allure of such movements, which promise liberation but deliver bondage, echoing Christ’s depiction of Satan as the ultimate deceiver.
And for my non-Catholic readers, realize the same infiltration of worldwide governments has been happening inside the Church since Christ ascended. It reached its current chapter sometime in the first half of the 1700s. In short, much of what you assume is Catholic inside the Church is not Catholic at all.
It is made to look that way by the deceivers–including the Bolsheviks, the atheists, the Communists.
Think about it–these are all items on the early 20th century geopolitical card, and on top of that, we weren’t taught the truth about the Bolsheviks, their Revolution, or the millions upon millions upon millions of Christians that were brutally slaughtered because of it.
Our historical focus has always been directed to something else.
The parallels between then and now are striking. Just as the adversaries in John 8 cloaked their intentions under the guise of religious fidelity, modern secular ideologies infiltrate religious institutions under the pretense of inclusivity and progress, a most hideous religion all unto itself. The “Drag Bingo” event at Seton Hall is emblematic of this trend—a manifestation of cultural Marxism’s attempt to subvert and redefine moral and spiritual values within the Church.
And this is the aspect of it that no Executive Order by Trump can touch. It is we who must change, we who must fight this most insidious evil that has its roots in Genesis for humankind, in the original fall of the angels if you go back to the very beginning.
When Lucifer said, “I will not serve.” Non serviam.
Pius XI, in another encyclical, Vigilanti Cura, addressed the corrosive influence of immoral entertainment, emphasizing the responsibility of the faithful to resist such incursions:
These considerations take on greater seriousness from the fact that the cinema speaks not to individuals but to multitudes, and that it does so in circumstances of time and place and surroundings which are most apt to arouse unusual enthusiasm for the good as well as for the bad and to conduce to that collective exaltation which, as experience teaches us, may assume the most morbid forms.
The motion picture is viewed by people who are seated in a dark theatre and whose faculties, mental, physical, and often spiritual, are relaxed. One does not need to go far in search of these theatres: they are close to the home, to the church, and to the school and they thus bring the cinema into the very centre of popular life.
Moreover, stories and actions are presented, through the cinema, by men and women whose natural gifts are increased by training and embellished by every known art, in a manner which may possibly become an additional source of corruption, especially to the young. Further, the motion picture has enlisted in its service luxurious appointments, pleasing music, the vigour of realism, every form of whim and fancy. For this very reason, it attracts and fascinates particularly the young, the adolescent, and even the child. Thus at the very age when the moral sense is being formed and when the notions and sentiments of justice and rectitude, of duty and obligation and of ideals of life are being developed, the motion picture with its direct propaganda assumes a position of commanding influence.
It is unfortunate that, in the present state of affairs, this influence is frequently exerted for evil. So much so that when one thinks of the havoc wrought in the souls of youth and of childhood, of the loss of innocence so often suffered in the motion picture theatres, there comes to mind the terrible condemnation pronounced by Our Lord upon the corrupters of little ones: “whosoever shall scandalize one of these little ones who believe in Me, it were better for him that a millstone be hanged about his neck and that he be drowned in the depths of the sea.”
Reader, that was written in the 1930s. Can you imagine what he would say about the entertainment industry of today?
The principle of cultural morality extends beyond cinema; it encompasses all forms of media and events that contravene the teachings of the Church, including the outbursts occurring at Seton Hall and other “Catholic” universities across the nation.
The faithful at Seton Hall, by organizing a Rosary protest, are not merely reacting to a single event. They are confronting a broader, more insidious pattern—the systematic attempt to erode the Church’s moral authority from within–something that has long been robbed not by faithful shepherds, but by the proverbial wolves in sheep’s clothing Christ himself said would rise in the ranks. Their response is reminiscent of Christ’s own zeal in purifying the Temple, a testament to the perennial call to defend the sanctity of sacred spaces against profanation. And the ones who must lead the charge in this are Catholics, because if we don’t care, what other Christians will?
In this context, the words of Fr Coleridge resonate with renewed urgency:
It was [the devil] who had inspired the Pharisees with their jealousy and hatred of our Lord, and these suggestions of his had ripened into their design actually to take away His life, a design which was ultimately, and at no great distance of time, to be successful. This design proved them to be his children as a murderer.
Again, as to lying. The devil invented the lying thought which led to the revolt of the Angels, and he seduced our first parents, by a deliberate lie, telling them that they should not die. All the myriads of swarms of lies by which mankind had been deceived ever since, as in the false systems of religion and philosophy of paganism, came from him.
And the same is to be said of all the heresies by which the children of the Church have been led astray, as well as of all the false glosses of worldliness, sensuality, and the like, by which men have been persuaded to disobey the law of conscience and of God. For no sin is ever loved and committed except under the lying mask of something good or something allowable, and no falsehood is ever embraced except under the guise of truth. To arrange and put forward these masks and false pretensions is the peculiar work of the devil.
The “Drag Bingo” event represents more than a mere lapse in judgment; it is a manifestation of a deeper malaise—the encroachment of ideologies fundamentally opposed to the truth of the Gospel, ideologies Fr Coleridge is specifically spotlighting here.
As cultural Marxism seeks to redefine morality, identity, and truth, the faithful are called to vigilance and action. The battle lines are drawn not on distant fields but within the very heart of the Church. The protest at Seton Hall is a microcosm of the larger spiritual warfare that demands discernment, courage, and unwavering fidelity to Christ.
It is something that Donald Trump cannot do for us, despite all the “winning.”
In confronting these challenges, we must remember that the adversary’s tactics remain consistent—deception, division, and destruction. Yet, armed with the truth of the Gospel and the teachings of the Church, the faithful can stand as beacons of light amidst the encroaching darkness. That is what Lent prepares us to do. That is what these final two weeks of “Passiontide” electrify us to be.
The events at Seton Hall serve as a clarion call. The time for passive observation has passed–it has long passed, even back to a time before we were born, which makes the recognition so difficult now. It is incumbent upon all who profess the faith to recognize the signs of the times, to resist the infiltration of destructive ideologies, and to reaffirm the timeless truths entrusted to the Church.
Our lives–our realities–cannot be just about political victories. It’s not only about reclaiming a cultural narrative robbed from us and bolstered by a complicit entertainment industry.
This is about souls. It’s about our children. It’s about the desecration of God himself and the silence of those charged to defend him.
Us.
Seton Hall is not an outlier. It is a mirror. And if we don’t like what we see, we must begin by casting down our own idols first—comfort, popularity, false peace. All things that have replaced the cross and the commandments of Jesus Christ.
The Rosary protest is more than a student reaction.
It is a battlefield cry. And the response is ours to make.
May everyone named directly or referenced indirectly ask forgiveness and do penance for their sins against America and God. I fight this information war in the spirit of justice and love for the innocent, but I have been reminded of the need for mercy and prayers for our enemies. I am a sinner in need of redemption as well after all, for my sins are many. In the words of Jesus Christ himself, Lord forgive us all, for we know not what we do.
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