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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was nowhere to be found on Feb. 6 when Archbishop Roland Hicks was installed as the leader of the city’s 2.5 million Catholics. A City Hall spokesperson blamed a “scheduling conflict.” It marked the first time in nearly 100 years that a sitting NYC mayor missed an archbishop’s installation.
That alone would have been notable. But the absence wasn’t an isolated oversight — it was the latest in a pattern. Mamdani excluded Catholic priests from his inauguration. He left them out of his interfaith breakfast. And he appointed to his inaugural committee a trans activist who helped orchestrate what St. Patrick’s Cathedral itself called a “sacrilegious” event inside its walls.
For a city with 2.5 million Catholics, the message is hard to misread.
A pattern, not a scheduling conflict
Archbishop Hicks, 58, became New York’s 11th archbishop since 1850, taking over the Archdiocese from Cardinal Timothy Dolan. His installation was not some obscure ceremony tucked into a weekday afternoon. It was a major civic and religious event in one of the most Catholic cities in America — the kind of occasion where a mayor’s presence isn’t a favor to the Church but a basic act of civic duty.
Every modern mayor has attended. Mamdani chose not to.
The inauguration told the same story. No Catholic priests spoke. At the interfaith breakfast — a tradition established by Mayor Bloomberg in 2002 at the New York Public Library — no Catholic clergy were included. Compare that to last year, when then-Mayor Eric Adams hosted the same event with Monsignor Kevin Sullivan in attendance and Father Ryan Muldoon delivering the invocation, as New York Post reports.
One missed event can be a scheduling conflict. Three consecutive exclusions are a decision. And decisions reveal priorities.
The Doroshow appointment
Before the inauguration, before the snubbed installation, there was the inaugural committee. Mamdani appointed Ceyenne Doroshow — the same activist at the center of a scandal that rocked St. Patrick’s Cathedral in February 2024.
That month, a funeral was held at the Cathedral for transgender activist Cecilia Gentili. Approximately 1,000 mourners — described as wearing miniskirts and fishnet stockings — honored Gentili as “St. Cecilia, mother of all whores.” The event took place as Lent was beginning. The Cathedral said it had been deceived into hosting what it believed was a standard funeral Mass for a Catholic. Rev. Enrique Salvo issued a statement afterward:
“The Cathedral only knew that family and friends were requesting a funeral Mass for a Catholic, and had no idea our welcome and prayer would be degraded in such a sacrilegious and deceptive way.”
At a subsequent news conference, Doroshow didn’t express regret. She flipped the script entirely, demanding the church apologize:
“Apologize for the decades of degradation and hate you have put on our community.”
So the sequence is worth spelling out plainly. A cathedral is deceived into hosting an event that desecrates its own sanctuary. The people responsible demand the cathedral apologize to them. And then the new mayor of New York City appoints one of those people to his inaugural committee.
Catholic League President Bill Donahue connected the dots for The Post, saying Mamdani:
“Not only wants nothing to do with Catholics,” he hires “vile anti-Catholic bigots.”
It’s a sharp accusation, but Mamdani’s own choices make it difficult to argue with. When you appoint someone who participated in the desecration of a church and then demanded that church grovel for it, you aren’t sending a subtle signal. You’re sending a loud one.
The belated meeting
Mamdani and Archbishop Hicks did eventually cross paths — at the State of the NYPD address on Tuesday. They spoke on the phone afterward. Mamdani’s press secretary, Joe Calvello, offered this account of the exchange:
“They discussed their shared values and hopes to work together for the betterment of the people of this city. Additionally, the Mayor and the Archbishop discussed pizza — deep dish versus the dollar slice, with the mayor recommending Koronet as a great place to go.”
The pizza anecdote is doing a lot of work. It’s the kind of detail a press shop drops to make a belated, damage-control encounter feel warm and human — just two guys bonding over slices. But charm isn’t the issue. The issue is what Mamdani did — and didn’t do — before anyone noticed the pattern.
You don’t skip a historic installation, freeze an entire faith out of your inauguration, and then fix it with a phone call about pizza toppings. That’s not bridge-building. That’s reputation management.
What “interfaith” means in Mamdani’s New York
Councilwoman Joann Ariola, a Catholic Republican from Queens, didn’t mince words:
“I wish I could say I’m surprised, but Communism knows no faith. He’s already shown his disdain for our Jewish neighbors, and now he is showing it for Catholics as well. Little by little, the mask is starting to slip, and we are seeing who this mayor really is — and what he really thinks about New York’s faithful.”
Ariola’s point lands because it identifies something broader than a single religious slight. This isn’t a mayor who forgot to send an invitation. This is a mayor who held an “interfaith” breakfast and systematically excluded the largest faith community in his city. The word “interfaith” doesn’t mean much when you get to pick which faiths count.
Princeton professor and Catholic intellectual Robert George offered a drier assessment to The Post:
“I am grateful for his candor in making clear to New York’s Catholic community that he has no respect for their faith and is no friend of theirs. This way, they know where they stand with him and his administration.”
There’s a certain clarity in being openly dismissed. No ambiguity. No pretending the door is open when it’s been bolted shut.
The real calculus
New York’s progressive political class has spent years treating Catholic teaching as an obstacle — on life, on marriage, on gender ideology. The institutional disdain isn’t new. What Mamdani has done is simply drop the pretense of respect that his predecessors maintained. Bloomberg showed up. Adams showed up and brought priests to the table. Even politicians who disagreed with the Church on every policy question understood that acknowledging the spiritual leadership of 2.5 million constituents wasn’t an endorsement — it was governance.
Mamdani couldn’t be bothered.
The left lectures endlessly about inclusion, about respecting communities, about the violence of erasure. They build entire policy frameworks around the idea that ignoring a group’s identity is itself a form of harm. But those principles apparently have a carve-out for Catholics — and for anyone else whose beliefs conflict with progressive orthodoxy.
No Catholic priests at the inauguration. No Catholic priests at the interfaith breakfast. No mayor at the archbishop’s installation. An activist who helped desecrate St. Patrick’s Cathedral given a seat on the inaugural committee. Each choice reinforces the last. Each silence speaks.
Two and a half million New Yorkers now know exactly where they stand.
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