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A few years ago a learned Russian Orthodox priest-acquaintance of mine told me what he thought of a certain nun who was making waves in Europe with her radical political views.

The nun in question was located in Vienna, and her name was Sister Vassa, a Russian Orthodox sister educated at Fordham University, a Jesuit school noted for its progressive theological views.

“You must be careful with nuns,” the priest said, ponderously. “Many of them drift into areas that are far away from anything having to do with their original religious vocation.”

It wasn’t long before Sister Vassa’s role as political activist eclipsed her vocation as a nun; as a result, she was defrocked by the Russian Orthodox Church.

Recently, another attention-seeking Orthodox nun kicked her religious vocation to the curb to become an anti-Israel political activist.

She is a little nun with a mustache, Mother Agapia Stephanopoulus, who has lived in the Holy Land since 1996 and who created a firestorm of sorts as a result of her recent interview with Tucker Carlson on what life is like for Christians in the Holy Land.

Mother Agapia’s message: life is horrible for Christians in the Holy Land, and it’s all Israel’s fault.

Watching the show, my first thought was: who is this vintage troll doll dressed as a nun who makes controversial statements and lies with such a wide smile?

Words poured out of her effortlessly, yet Tucker did not challenge or contradict her in any way. He barely asked her anything about her background, such as why she left the United States in the mid-nineties under suspicious circumstances.

No questions about how, in 2000, when she was Sister Stephanopoulos, she barricaded herself inside a Russian Orthodox property in Jericho until she had to be forcibly removed.

Writer Daniel Mael recapped that incident for The Geopolitical Maelstrom:

“U.S. diplomats were forced to intervene after she allegedly leveraged her brother George’s White House connections. A local real-estate fight became an international incident. The method was clear even then: insert yourself into conflict, cloak it in religious language, and trust that drama and family connections would amplify the cause.”

Mael goes on to write that two years later, in 2002, Sister Stephanopoulos circulated a grotesque story claiming Israeli soldiers had raped Palestinian girls.

“The source turned out to be a Palestinian schoolboy’s invention. Even the conspiracy-friendly WorldNetDaily, not known for pro-Israel sympathies, retracted it. This was no misunderstanding. It was a calculated smear intended to inflame hatred. She never apologized, never retracted, never admitted the damage that such a charge could inflict.”

After the Tucker interview, journalists were calling Mother Agapia a Russian Orthodox nun, but Orthodoxy tends to cause confusion — even among those who think they know everything about Christianity. The woman is Greek Orthodox.

Greek, as in Stephanopoulus.

Her famous brother, the contentious George, the so-called Greek Orthodox media star (sued by Trump) who supported Kamala Harris and her party’s anti-Christian stand on abortion and gender ideology, seems to be cut from the same cloth as Mother Agapia.

Their father, the now-deceased) Protopresbyter Father Robert Stepanopoulus (“Father Bob”), was the Dean of the GO Archdiocesan Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in New York. Their paternal grandfather was yet another Greek Orthodox priest, Fr. George Stephanopoulus, the media star’s namesake.

Tucker’s interview with Mother Agapia was a disaster from the start. How could anyone living in the Holy Land since 1996 not know that the Wailing Wall is not a part of the original temple destroyed in 70 AD?

As a first time tourist in Israel ten years ago, I encountered this “Israel for Dummies” fact blurted out by our able tour guide. The Wailing Wall was not part of the temple itself, but rather a retaining wall for the Temple Mount upon which both the first and second temples stood.

Tucker, perhaps mesmerized by the ‘talking’ movement of the nun’s mustache, let her ramble on. As the sister of George, the media star, it was only a matter of time before she brought up Trump. And it didn’t take long.

She said she was no fan of Trump, and Tucker let that comment slip by without jumping in and asking if she, as a person in religious life, favored the Democrats and their pagan agenda over the obviously more Christian Republican platform. How could he let that fly by?

Then Mother Agapia referenced October 7 as “the October event,” and that Hamas was a resistance group.

Traditionally, the phrase “resistance group” has a noble, romantic connotation; one tends to think of the French Resistance during WWII and martyrs dying for a worthwhile cause. And yet here was a person in religious life calling Hamas a resistance group — as if their cause is noble.

“I don’t think it’s Islamic terror that’s taking place in the first place,” she said, justifying Hamas for the “October event”.

“Hamas are people who have had their homes taken from them, who, if they live in Gaza, have…basically been in an open air prison for certainly the last 20 years going on…”

I was certain at this point that everyone named Stephanopoulus must be Trump-hating contrarians, and that their lack of awareness about the state of the world can be detected in the thickness of their Neanderthal eyebrows.

The pro-Palestinian activist nun then went on to claim that Israeli Defense Forces intentionally bombed the church of the Holy Family In Gaza.

“You can’t make a mistake….nothing is an accident,” she said, despite a later investigation by Israeli authorities that termed the hit “a misfired munition.”

Then she claimed that Israelis hate Americans — despite a recent Pew Research Center poll indicating that 83% of Israelis have favorable opinions of the United States.

Another big claim she made was that Israel was responsible for the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 — when in fact the opposite is true. Israeli leaders at that time wanted the Bush administration to focus on the Iranian nuclear threat, not Iraq. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon even urged President George W. Bush not to invade Iraq in a meeting in Washington.

When the Tucker interview was first published, it not only went viral, but created a slight sensation on Orthodox social media.

On one Facebook feed the Orthodox administrator warned those making comments to not criticize the little nun’s looks, meaning of course that she had a mustache and even seemed to wear it with pride.

“How can she not know she has a mustache?” one commenter wrote, while the Facebook page administrator warned it is never correct to make fun of a monastic person’s looks even though the monastic in question, as many have observed, proved to be a prime example of religious authority driven by political hatred.