(GOP towing the Catholic Party Line - September 28, 1969, was declared Cardinal Karol
Wojtyla Day in Pennsylvania at the National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa
in Doylestown. Left to Right, Cardinal
Krol of Phila., Karol Wojtyla, Gov. Ray Shafer (R) of Pennsylvania.)
The Catholic Culture War Against the Vagina Continues – Forty Years
Later
I sat through a few minutes of the CSPAN-2 the other day with
speeches from the floor of the United States Senate delivering the same crap I
heard in the Catholic church in the late sixties about Birth Control that drove
me forever from that church. That
Senators Roy Blunt and Kelly Ayotte sounded today like the cookie cutter no
thought priests of that faith forty years ago.
Here is a repeat of my previous blog:
Historic Beginnings of American Culture War – Philadelphia –
1970s
I had a nightmare last
night. I dreamt that State Senator Martin P. Mullen had come back from
hell to inflict more inhumane legislation on not only the people of Pennsylvania but the whole planet.
I don’t know how the culture war in America took shape in
various other parts of the country, but like New Hampshire where the shot heard
round the world that supposedly started our American Revolution, the culture
war in America has no better historic model than Philadelphia and Pennsylvania
in the 1970s.
I drift back forty years to the point where I, as an eighteen
year old, decided that I did not want to hear anymore boiler plate sermons
about Satan from the local priest in Philadelphia and I never set foot in that church
again.
All around me was a world where the War in Vietnam was wrapped in a flag. That
fucking war was so important to all the middle aged losers who hated their
lives and had served so faithfully and or really had no choice but serve in
World War Two.
The basic cultural war in the minds of Philadelphians then,
if you were young, was if your draft number would come up and you would have to
serve, fight in a war that made absolutely no logical sense.
On another level, there was the creeping fear that blacks
would try to cross the invisible border, south on Lehigh Avenue, and try to
invade your beautiful turn of the century row house paradise, built for factory
workers.
Oh there were factories in the neighborhood, and they employed
blacks, but in retrospect I can remember all the blacks lined up at the 5 bus
stop after work waiting to get back to wherever it was that they lived outside
our perfect white lower middle class bubble existence. In retrospect, the
image of Apartheid comes to mind and is superimposed on those distant scenes.
I have seen or heard comments from people who lived there at
the same time. The thing that destroyed Philly, they usually say, was
“Section 8” housing, which is of course code talk for racism and welfare.
In a way, the inability of people to recognize and love your
neighbor is what destroyed that old Currier & Ives idealized brain image of
the slums where I grew up in Kensington - Harrowgate in Philly.
Where was I? Oh yes, the war, the blacks and yeah Vatican II. Well Vatican II did not
change anything in a neighborhood of mixed Irish and I-talian catholics.
Oh there were protestants out there. We saw their churches dotting the
landscape. Never saw who entered those houses of worship on
Sundays. Didn’t care. The predominant local culture was of Irish
Catholic factory workers and Irish Catholic churches and schools.
In a way, my parents were intelligent, and liberal.
They got into the ideal that blacks should have equal rights. But
somewhere along the timeline, people like my parents got scared about what they
saw on the tube with black militant groups, war protestors and the rapid
decline of a normal society into chaos around 1968. They never told me
directly but my so called liberal parents voted for George Wallace in 1968,
I figured that out later along the timeline.
I guess I stayed there, going along my own liberal timeline,
and did not realize how secular I was and in relation to terms of also being a
Catholic from birth. Did not feel the difference until they shot Martin
Luther King.
I can remember to this day, the priest Father Locke, freshly
minted from the seminary, stumbling for words, almost apologetically, from the
pulpit that next Sunday, stating something to the effect that he did not know
if it would be proper but would not forbid personal prayers for a Protestant
(after all, only Catholics go to heaven- your prayers are probably wasted on
him), for the slain civil rights leader. Huh?
It was there that I got the clue that maybe Catholics were
not really Christians like people like MLK who called themselves
Christian. Christian was not a word I heard often in the first eighteen
years of a Catholic life. I heard the word but in conjunction with other
words like Christian Doctrine etc.
(An aside - Reminds me of my own Irish Catholic joke I told
to a former boss in the 1980s, also Irish Catholic – “I was twenty-one before I
realized that Protestant and bastard were two separate words.” – My boss howled
in laughter.)
Oh yeah, getting back to Vatican II, I wrote some thoughts on
that in my earliest blogs here, but let me get to the point and back to my
nightmare about the late great Martin Mullen of the Pennsylvania State
Legislature.
Pennsylvania on a map may look like an east coast type of
place. But like the famous political advisor said and is quoted. “Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.” I have already
shared a few thoughts above on my cosmopolitan cultural upbringing in Philly.
There was that other thing, the sex thing and the RC church confusion about
birth control.
Paul VI brought out his Zero Tolerance document on birth
control. Like all life in general, most of us just stumbled into ways of
dealing with our own individual sexuality. (No user manual necessary.)
The cultural war in Philly and Pennsy had a pie-eyed, drunk
on his own arrogance and self importance, fanatic in the form of Martin Mullen
who suddenly was on the black and white TV screen, the chosen mouthpiece of
John Cardinal Krol and his decision to bringPennsylvania under the recent Catholic Sharia Law
(Humanae Vitae) on human sexuality.
PENNSYLVANIA: Bitter Abortion Battle
Mullen,
backed by equally conservative John Cardinal Krol and his Pennsylvania Catholic
Conference, decided that the state, with its 35% Catholic population, was
natural terrain to make a stand against the trend to more liberal laws on
public morality. The battle was joined over the issue of abortion. To counter a
liberal abortion bill, the conservatives proposed a bill of their own that
outlawed abortion altogether except when a panel of three physicians certified
that the mother's life was endangered. It made no allowance for victims of
rape, incest or mental illness. Supporting the conservative bill, the Catholic
Conference ran a long and costly campaign that included weekly pictures of
truncated fetuses and aborted embryos on Page One of the Cathotic Standard
&Times, the official organ of the archdiocese of Philadelphia.
Last June the campaign paid off: the liberal bill was easily defeated, and the
conservative bill was adopted by both houses and sent to Shapp for his
signature. Mullen warned the Governor that if he attempted to stop the bill
through veto or pocket veto he would run against him in the Democratic primary
next year. While
Shapp mulled over what to do, the protest and counterprotest boiled on. In an
unusual turn, Patricia Arney, 32, a divorcee who is a district Democratic
committeewoman, revealed to the Philadelphia Inquirer that State Senator Henry
J. Cianfrani, 49, one of the conservative bill's strongest supporters, had paid
for her abortion in 1970 while they were having an affair, and produced a
receipt for his check to prove it. He did not deny their relationship, but said
that he had given her the money to visit her family in Toledo and did not know that there had been
an abortion. Though the disclosure caused yowls of protest on the floor of the
state senate, letters to the Inquirer ran 10 to 1 in favor of Arney's blow
against hypocrites.
Last week
Shapp, calling the bill "unsound, unenforceable and totally unfair,"
vetoed it. Mullen failed to muster the three-fourths majority necessary to
override the veto, leaving the state functionally without an abortion law of
any kind, since lower courts have declared the present statute
unconstitutionally vague and appeals are pending. With that, Mullen sounded the
charge for his race against Shapp next spring, which could be among the
bitterest elections in Pennsylvania's
history: he called the Governor's veto the result of a "paganistic,
atheistic philosophy."
In reality, few states had laws to deal with archaic or
non-existent laws to deal with modern technology and recent developments in
birth control.
Somewhere along the timeline, the culture war on birth control became the
culture war on abortion. The discussion regarding sexuality was not about
choice in the form of birth control methods to prevent pregnancy, it became all
about abortion and the strategy and the rhetoric of Krol’s hand puppet to the
media in the 1970s has not changed much to this day IMHO.
My leaving my local church, not the People of God, when I was
eighteen was also in reaction to archconservative mean spirited types shouting
at you on the TV like Martin Mullen as Krol’s in front of the curtain media
voice. It was also the loss of the sermons on Satan, a chance to nod off,
that got dropped on Sundays and propaganda spiels from the pulpit that you had
to pick up the mimeographed letter to your state legislature in the church
lobby, copy it in your own handwriting, and mail it to show that you were in
favor of the most current Martin Mullen anti-sexuality law pending in
Harrisburg. Model – Modus Operandi – set for the American future
landscape. Pity.
I have read many a Catholic blog lately and the ones that aren’t
praising, drooling on, the guys in red are the ones that wonder why
priests these days don’t bother to deliver a decent homily. Considering
what I know, the truth is that the thought police might hear something like
love or tolerance being advocated and send off a letter to the bishop to
complain about dogmatic incorrectness that would get back to the priest and
rather than get slapped down, why bother to preach anymore.
After all, isn’t it all just about the ritual and the consecrated
bread? (And the collection plate?)
The American culture wars are far from over. The best, I
fear, is yet to come.
.
