Pride Month ends today, and although it seems its popularity is waning, children have again been the principal victims — and in some cases even the explicit target.

Cities around the world have staged LGBTQ parades, promoting an agenda that revolves around not only sexual depravity but also child genital mutilation.

But instead of being classed as a vulnerable group warranting protection from such evil insanity, children worldwide have been welcomed to such events while in their daily lives they are exposed to the depravity, even in schools where they face indoctrination.

At a parade in New York, drag queen marchers chanted, “We’re coming for your children” — a chant LGBTQ activists said has been used for years but insisted was taken out of context, according to a report in the New York Post.

Meanwhile, Catholic Church leaders, with very few notable exceptions, were silent about Pride Month throughout the month of June, and in some cases actively participated in what’s become akin to an annual “liturgical” celebration in the secular world. 

“Pride Masses” took place in some U.S. cities such as Washington, D.C., though some bishops, notably including Bishop David Zubik of Pittsburgh, disavowed such a Eucharistic service in his diocese, leading to its cancellation. 

Adding to the complicity of some Church leaders were Belgium’s bishops, who publicly approved same-sex blessings and said the Pope was behind them. The Vatican responded with silence, while the working document for the upcoming Synod on Synodality spoke uncritically of welcoming LGBTQ persons. Newswires conveyed the impression that the Vatican was calling for the “radical inclusion” of LGBTQ people.

At the same time, one of the few bishops brave enough to take a stand against the ideology, Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, was placed last week under Vatican investigation.

The silence, inaction and complicity in the face of the agenda has existed for decades but is now more visible than ever, permitted through tolerance of homosexual cliques within the priesthood, through poor formation, and by a host of other reasons.

These factors have helped the ideology to become entrenched, not least in schools. In 2017 the bishops of England and Wales indirectly approved of an LGBTQ lobby group providing “training” in Catholic schools. A Catholic friend of mine told me the ideology has now become so ingrained in U.K. schools that a couple he knows, after their child brought home graphic homosexual literature from a sex education class, were considering emigrating to Italy.

“They fear if they say something, their daughter may be taken away from them,” he told me. “That is how scared faithful Catholics are in the U.K.”   

Children are also not just victims of this wicked scourge but many other ones, too, whether they be human trafficking, high divorce rates, easily accessible pornography, experimental vaccinations they don’t need, and, of course, real threats to them in the womb. 

Ideologies such as LGBTQ are part of a spiritual battle, which Cardinal Karol Wojtyla (the future Pope St. John Paul II) said in 1976 was “the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel versus the anti-Gospel” and which Cardinal Carlo Caffarra described in 2017 as a Satanic attempt to generate an “anti-creation.” 

Our Lady has called on the Church to offer prayers of reparation for these and many other grave sins of our time, but will Church leaders remain silent in the face of them? 

Given recent precedent, many likely will. 

But if the lives of vulnerable children and the eternal salvation of those souls caught up in this ideology are not enough to stir them into action, perhaps they need reminding that they will be judged for their silence and, as St. Alphonsus Ligouri once warned, “be imputed all the sins that they could have, but have not, prevented.”