As the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants prepared to battle it out on the field at LA’s famed Dodger Stadium Friday night, thousands, largely Catholic, gathered outside the park to protest an explosively controversial award given by the team on Pride Night. The Dodgers were honoring a deliberately provocative LGBTQ group, The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, with the Community Hero Award, and chose to do so on the occasion of this year’s celebration of what Catholics call Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Dodgers and the LGBTQ Community
The Dodgers invited the trans Sisters weeks ago only to uninvite them in the face of protests and requests from the Catholic community – then, caving to LGBTQ demands and threats to boycott the MLB team and games, they reinvited them. The team honored the group for its services to the gay community, but the pre-celebration, which included food, drinks, and music, proved not to be very successful. The stands were mostly bare, a rare occasion for a game between the Dodgers and Giants, and there were some in the crowd who booed as the Sisters were being honored.
This tweet from Savanah Hernandez shows the empty stadium at the time of the celebration. In a later post, Hernandez showed the full stadium and said: “To those questioning my observation regarding the empty stadium for the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, it was a comparison of how there were thousands of Catholics protesting outside (4.5 hours before the game was set to begin). The Dodgers have ONE Pride night a year, where were the supporters for the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence inside?”
The Dodgers have been celebrating Pride Night for ten years, but the Catholics have been celebrating the month of June for centuries, and this specific night, Friday June 16, happened to fall on an important Catholic holiday, making the trans nun celebration on the same day an even graver insult.
Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus
The Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus is designated as the Friday following the second Sunday after Pentecost, according to Catholic Culture, which happened to be June 16 this year, though the entire month is known as the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
“The feast dates back to 1673, when a French nun who belonged to the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary (Visitandines) in eastern France began to receive visions about the Sacred Heart,” the Catholic Telegraph explained. “On June 16, 1675, Jesus told Sister Margaret Mary to promote a feast that honored his Sacred Heart. He also gave Sister Margaret Mary 12 promises made to all who venerate and promote the devotion of the Sacred Heart.” The site added:
“He [Jesus] said: ‘I ask of you that the Friday after the octave of Corpus Christi be set apart for a special feast to honor my heart, by communicating on that day, and making reparation to it by a solemn act, in order to make amends for the indignities which it has received during the time it has been exposed on the altars. I promise you that my heart shall expand itself to shed in abundance the influence of its divine love upon those who shall thus honor it, and cause it to be honored.’”
The feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus is a solemnity, the highest-ranking feast in the liturgical calendar, The Telegraph explained. In 1765, the Vatican granted the feast to France, and in 1856, Pope Pius IX “designated the Friday following the feast of Corpus Christi as the feast of the Sacred Heart for the universal Church. Ever since, the month of June has been devoted to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and his immense love for us all.”
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence
Members of this organization dress in drag, wear thong underwear while marching in Pride parades, and blatantly disrespect what nuns represent. They claim to do charity work on the same level as those they mockingly portray, yet some even wear devil-looking horns on their habits. Sister Electra-Complex told ABC7 Eyewitness News during the Dodgers game:
“The idea of being a fake nun is also a little problematic, mostly because we do take vows of service to the LGBTQ community for nonprofit work and it is the kind of vow that you take for the rest of your life, so it is very similar to the kind of care work a nun would do.”
On its website, the trans organization has a list of planned events, including Juneteenth beer bust at the Onyx and Clownf—er at Beaux. The group’s choice of costumes and events are a far cry from what being a nun stands for. And if those aren’t enough to cause offense, take a look at some of their names:
(Photo by Meg Oliphant/Getty Images)
- Father Fellatio
- Sister Mysteria of the Holy Order of the Broken Hymen
- Sister Sermonetta of the Flying Phalus
- Sister Sleaze du Jour
- Sister Anal Receptive
- Sister Porn Again
- Sister T’aint A Virgin
- Sister Boom Boom aka Sister Rose of the Bloody Stains of the Sacred Robes of Jesus
“We call on Catholics to pray the Litany of the Sacred Heart on June 16, offering this prayer as an act of reparation for the blasphemies against our Lord we see in our culture today,” the US Conference of Catholic Bishops said in a statement. The bishops added:
“This year, on June 16 — the day of the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus — a professional baseball team has shockingly chosen to honor a group whose lewdness and vulgarity in mocking our Lord, His Mother, and consecrated women cannot be overstated.”
It’s not just the clergy who were upset by the honoring of trans and queer nuns. “The Dodgers are not honoring their own policy,” Michael Galarza told ABC News. “They have a dress code. I can’t go in there dressed in ways that would offend other people. This is offending people.”
About a week after the Dodgers reinvited the sisters to the game, they announced they would be holding a “Christian Faith and Family Day” at the stadium on July 30. Too little too late – or insult added to injury?
