Big Frank Rigali and his Religious Crime Family in Philly

Ascension Church Philly - Out of the God Business - October 1, 2012

St Jerome's Parish in northeast Philly must be a great bed and breakfast kind of place. Great at least for a few priests involved in the current criminal Catholic sex abuse scandal to have lived there. One, the current Bishop of Saginaw and one, the “Smiling Padre” Edward Avery.

Smiling Padre

Somewhere on the timeline between Joe Cistone's hanging out at St. Jerome's and smiling Ed Avery's hangin out there, I went to my aunt's funeral there which was her parish.

Of course Joe Cistone was only in residence there working his ass off in the Chancery downtown shuffling pervs all over the archdiocese and Ed Avery was on “no child” duty as a chaplain at the nearby Nazareth hospital. The “no child” duty as chaplian did not somehow prevent him from hearing children's confessions at St. Jerome's as a resident of the rectory there. Oh well.

I look at last week's clergy sex abuse indictments in Philadelphia, that festered and festered over decades of neglect and cover-up, and have seen all this before.
 
Catholic sex abuse cases
 
Looking at all this I have to agree with Canon lawyer Thomas Doyle that:

...Doyle said of attempts to reform the Catholic Church that it was like "trudging through what can best be described as a swamp of toxic waste".

From stats, I know that few people bother to read what I write on this subject. Not that they want to look away, they are probably just disgusted and can only take so much diarrhea overflowing the cups of catholic bishops and their criminal conspiracy to hide this ongoing situation.

And the catholics do not have a monopoly on this but the Celibacy bullshit, not specifically spelled out in the gospels, is a thousand year old problem with the Romans who split with the Orthodox church a thousand years ago and went to one sex only, males (unmarried!), in its clergy thing.

The comments in the first article above seem to typify the situation as most people see this ongoing spiritual mismanagement of criminal activities by the Vatican on a worldwide scale.

-What was it Rigali said on As Wednesday? "The safety of children is paramount". I wonder when that policy began????
 
 -...I know, that whenever I see a catholic priest, the first thing I think of is, how many little boys is he molesting.
 
-The church needs to take a long, hard look at their practices. The church has become a hiding place for men with sexual problems of all sorts. Reevaluate the requirement for priests to refrain from marriage and you will see a change in the men who come into the priesthood.

I am tapped out on comment and anger and indignation. I see the recent Philly scandal in terms of allegory or metaphor or parable in looking at it.

I see retired Cardinal Tony Bevilacqua as playing some part in a Soprano like soap opera like “Uncle Junior”.

...yoos can't indict me. I'm senile.

And “Big” Frank Regali, the de facto head of the archdiocese gang, a religious crime family, and its irregulars, like the infamous Tony Soprano seeing a shrink but knowing all along he is a total bastard.

No doubt Frank Regali knows Tony Bevilacqua's consigliere Ed Cullen who got promoted to Bishop of Allentown Pa. No doubt Frank misses one time enforcer or enabler Joe Cistone who also got a promotion within the crime family as Bishop of Saginaw Michigan after taking over Ed Cullen's old job.

But then you gots to feel for Frank Rigali's current Capo, Billy Lynn, aka the “Monsignor” who got indicted last week as an enabler of the rank and file priests who touch and feel occasionally but are all getting a bad rap in the media.

Imagine, Monsignor William Lynn, under indictment and thinking to himself like Brando in On the Waterfront

“I could a been a contender” (bishop) if these whining bleeding hearts in the D.A.'s office had only looked the other way for a few more years.”

I can only imagine how many pervs in the ranks got promoted to Saginaw or Allentown when the heat was on regarding some private sexual habits of some really special priests or they just got to hang out at a St. Jerome's type bed and breakfast for naughty priests.

To finish, I go with an allegory or parable with the words of a visitor to a once great city on a hill structure of Ascention Church in Kensington-Harrowgate in Philadelphia (pictured above), to describe feelings about both the bishops and clergy in the upper church, the laity in the lower church and the general outlook of the sick sister of the Christian faith – the RC church in general.

As I stated in an earlier blog, I do not want attack the RC church. But my original image of it was formed during a period when the neighborhoods of Kensington-Harrowgate in Philly were filled with full churches, full catholic schools, full factories and full working class simplicity. That simplicity lasted two, three or even four generations floating in time somewhere between the the 1880s and Vatican II.
 
Ascension of Our Lord church

The upper church is, in the words of Pastor Michael Chapman, a “disaster” and is totally off-limits, even to visitors. The Project tried very hard to get a glimpse, but even I was denied. … The lower church is supposedly still in use, but a good chunk of their masses instead take place at the rectory chapel. That’s where ...(I)... found (my)self this past week. Nice, but not exactly what I had in mind when I dropped by for a visit.

It’s really a sin, because Ascension looks to have been really wonderful at one time. It’s a good-sized behemoth that’s notable for its red-tile roof, Greco-Roman-style colonnade, and elaborate stone banisters and staircases. Some of those design elements, particularly the banisters, are not seen anywhere else in the city.

Unfortunately, this church has seen better days. The roof is caving in, there is visible water damage and cracks everywhere, a couple of broken windows and even graffiti on all the side doors. Even worse, the front portion of the church is blocked off by a chain link fence, where the front banister wall is crumbling. Huge chunks of concrete are just lying on the sidewalk, and what’s left is warping and buckling. You can still get glimpses of its past glory, but mostly you just see a desolate husk rotting before your eyes. Despite the fact that it’s still an active parish, it feels more like a ghost town.

 And so it goes.