Who Truly Won in the Papal Elections of 1978 - the CIA or the KGB?

Downtown Philadelphia Street Corner Billboards 1971 *

Putting aside some truly false and or misleading family oral history about a very distant cousin and the Archbishopric chair in Philadelphia, I have to reconsider making some real and or (my?) imaginary cross referencing of facts "sacred" and or profane "secular".

Two glaring facts stick out in my mind in the last two years, with consideration of the long term plannings of the RC church and the Czar's Private Secret Police, the KGB. Isn't it a marvel how institutional or ganizations like the RC church and or the Czar's gatekeeping Bodyguards go on and on like a law of physics, once set in motion.

And since all politics and religion are LOCAL, let me mention two things.

The official PR line of a snake like Donald Trump that he took a million dollar loan from daddy and starting flipping trash properties in Philly while a student at Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania is total bullshit.

The extra truth that many liars throw into the story, any story, is that Donald's name is not on any Philly deeds or records is because he did not want to make the prices go up. A real flipper would want the name thing to go around, to start a trend, and then have other real estate investors get on a gentrification Ponzi scheme of sorts and the first in to cash out as the later investors come along pay much more.

Like I say, I lay claim to it, that Trump paid back daddy with profits from money laundering probably first with the Philly mob, the Angelo Bruno crowd, and very familiar with the then Police Chief and later Mayor Frank Rizzo back then in 1967. And then when Donald got in over his head, like he does on every thing he does, he found a friendly front for the KGB and or they found him is more accurate and the M.O. of Trump INC was established with the brilliant Wharton Student Trump and the gentlemenly "Cs" (never really earned in any way shape or form) of an I-V school @Penn, and an "ivy league school" being in folk or origin myth being one of seven or eight American college institutions in existence before the American Revolution and or break with British Rule.

So getting back to Vatican murder and backstabbing and the usual shit thereabouts in Rome, I always wondered why one of my distant cousins, as a popular Irish American auxiliary bishop of Philadelphia did not succeed Cardinal O'Hara upon his death. ???

And then all of a sudden, the Polish Catholic minority in Philly, and not the Irish majority of RCs takes front stage with an auxiliary bishop from Cleveland (Cleveland !?) taking over the archbishop's chair in Philly.

Joe McShea did not have to bear any or much  embarrassment as a very popular auxiliary bishop in Philly, who delivered the eulogy at (Saint) Mother Katherine Drexel's funeral, and serve the new Pollack archbishop by getting an almost instant consolation prize of five northern counties (mostly coal country) of the Philly archdiocese in "upstate" Pennsylvania, by being named First bishop of the newly created Diocese of Allentown Pennsylvania. Or the grand duchy of Allentown as a reward to Joe from his once time boss, Papal Nuncio to the United States for 25 years, 1933-1959.



Amleto Giovanni Cicognani (24 February 1883 – 17 December 1973)


And also a good friend of Amleto's older brother Gaetano to whom Joe McShea as a seminarian in Rome would nightly read in private to the poorly sighted Gaetano in his papal apartments, or so the might be faulty family oral history goes. (in that family history, the older brother was much older, not two years older, and almost legally blind and could no longer read lengthy dogmatic documents without assistance etc.)


Gaetano Cicognani (26 November 1881 – 5 February 1962)


No problem for Secretary of State Amleto Cicognani of the Vatican to carve out a new diocese in Pennsylvania and move a few chess pieces around the American political landscape like auxiliary bishop John Krol into Archbishop John Krol of Philadelphia.

All well and good, and I have written about John Krol being one of the foremost starters of the American Culture War about Birth Control and Abortion after Humanae Vitae, RC encyclical regarding Command State Economy control over the reproductive product of the female part of the male / female unit of the species aka Man.

I say all this to condense with what I have stated many times and in many ways over the years here on my blogs, about how Archbishop John Krol wanted to be the first American pope and how he relentlessly campaigned years after year and took trips to third world countries where First Pennsylvania Bank and the infamous John Bunting was loaning money to the third world for fees and bonuses and no longer making little mortgages and little to moderate to large size business loans in Philadelphia. The money was in the fees and bonuses and the State Department implied no doubt in private off the book meetings with Bunting that the U.S. Government would never let John or First Pennsylvania go under giving loans that would never, could never be repaid from countries the U.S. Government had once looked kindly upon in the hopes of thwarting the spread of godless and capitalist-less belief systems.

Problem with Bunting was that he was not I-V league. A graduate of local Temple. He actually had commuted to college. No network of I-V buddies at State or Treasury to help a guy out when the real bills came due at his Philly bank, one of the oldest in the country btw.

And I have written how Archbishop Krol was bankrolled on his trips to Asia, and Africa, and making substantial in those days contributions of like 50k to start RC hospitals and RC colleges and RC seminaries in these very poor, poor nations. And in the hopes of swaying some local Asian and or African Cardinal to vote for him as pope once Paul VI died. etc.

That Krol was bankrolled by a Polish American Multimillionaire and businessman John Piszek, originally from Chicago and later Philadelphia who was a founder of Mrs. Paul's Frozen Seafood, a business started btw while on strike to make some off the books cash selling crab cakes at local bars in Philly on weekends. And the business took off but they named the business after his partner Mr. Paul because it was an Anglo sounding name and not Polish which was thought not to be a good PR name to sell frozen seafood with. Piszek with the millions rolling in starting in the 1950s after he bought out Mr. Paul, his partner, was forever bitter that his name, an immigrant name, was not good enough to make it big in American business. He compensated and began to give money away to all causes Polish, locally and abroad. Archbishop Krol and getting him as the first Polish American Pope to be elected and which is why I speculate that the Papal Nuncio saw some merit in giving Krol the first Archbishop's seat that became available and that usually got a red hat with it eventually, was a logical thing, and after much cash no doubt got funneled into Polish RC church projects and charities in Poland behind the Iron Curtain. etc.

And then with all the cash rolling into the Vatican for projects in Poland, they gave Amleto Cicognani a dispensation to become Cardinal, it not being allowed under the rules that sent the RC into a tailspin in the Reformation, because his brother was already a Cardinal. Brother, Nephew, what was the difference in giving power to your crony relatives. And Amleto becomes Secretary of State of the Vatican in 1961.

I have often wondered considering the almost miraculous, with no mortal help, in the rise of auxiliary Bishop John Krol to become a contender in the 1978 papal elections, if he had the dream on his own or if somebody had whispered in his ear the dream that he could one day become the first Polish American Pope with a little help from his friends like John Piszek and Amleto Cicognani. Wink. Nod.

Which makesme wonder, with cash coming into Poland from the west via the Vatican etc. how Karol Wojtyla also may have gotten the idea that he too could become the first Polish Polish Pope with a little help from his friends. While the Vatican made its members pray every Sunday after mass for the conversion of Russia to Christianity, the real big chuck of RC R/E the Vatican would like to start with in that conversion to the Russians from Communism back into Orthodox back into Roman Christians, that the Catholic prize of Poland was possible but maybe the money of Mrs. Paul's fish sticks was not enough and maybe other sources of funds would have to be found to create networks to revive and or sustain unions that would likely first be the force to make any real changes in a Worker's State like Poland.

And I have to wonder if the former Papal Nuncio to the United States 1933-1959 had made any worthwhile secular contacts in Washington DC over the years like at the State Department and or the dare I say it - the CIA.

That between the puppet master Amleto Cicognani in the west and the east whispering temptation into the ears of gullible Polish clerics, that maybe the long term planning of the CIA was becoming a match for the old long term planning of the Czar's secret police aka the KGB.

Wojtyla was already a player with the KGB, he could play ball and not threaten the state and the state let him play dressed up cleric for some of the masses and proclaim a free state for all the workers and their perhaps private beliefs. Whatever.

I have often wondered about Wojtyla's resume about being associated with the resistance during WWII and in occupied slave state Poland and his survival as a worker in a stone quarry etc. Anybody can put anything on a resume. Like flipping houses in Philly on the QT and anonymously is just as good as "Freedom Fighter" on the PR releases after the Polish American Cardinal relinquished his block of Pope Votes to the Polish Polish Cardinal in 1978 after the mysterious death of the last Italian Italian pope. And anybody can flip themselves while being played as a pawn in Global Political Chess - flip as in double agents and or triple agents of the KGB etc. - comrades and brothers in Christ?

And the collateral damage, messes to be cleaned up by the masses caused from players, past their prime and also dead, still hanging around from those 1960s - 1970s games of chess here forty and fifty years later.

Whatever.

Shrug.  



* Culture War Billboard Philadelphia

No Vision – Just Ambition – In America Today

http://www.phillyhistory.org/PhotoArchive/Detail.aspx?assetId=80779

I started writing this less than a week ago and I thought Oh No, another sour grapes thing about the RCC in the seventies in Philly that drove the masses out of the churches and schools in time or at least in the inner city as they are now calling my old neighborhood.

As some friend has described to me, with planned or likely closings of RC churches here, there actually, there will be no RC churches in the Frankford and Harrowgate sections of the city soon. 

My own grade school closed in 2003. And the economics of it all is not necessarily racist. The state and city screw things up with popular school vouchers legislation or threat of its passage which from a distance I do not know much about.  

I do know that as soon as you add money to a system with school vouchers or even employer covered health or dental care, you directly or indirectly inflate the basic cost of doing business. That is economics and some politics.

That education in America is big business with student loans, seven hundred dollar college text books etc. That is economics and politics.

The real crux of the matter was that jobs first went south and then overseas and emptied the local factories of very marginal jobs of the average factory workers when those jobs went south. That is economics.

Without a job - you and your environment become dysfunctional. Not rocket science to understand. 

The above bill board in the shabby shopping district of downtown Philly at Third Street and Market Street was where us factory workers went to find bargains that the department stores  further up the street could not offer us. We paid cash. We had no credit.

The money for that billboard came out of the archdiocese’s coffers or some non-profit organization or the obsessive compulsive wallets of Koch Brothers or Mellon Scaife types doing their social experimentation on the masses.

Like I said I started to write this a few days ago, stopped and erased it. I was inspired at first by the historic photo archives picture because of the date and the subject matter – abortion.

1971 was about the time I stopped going to church.  I was tired of the Sunday pulpit demands to write my state legislature to demand that Catholic Sharia Law on Contraception become the law in Pennsylvania.

Science had made a paradigm shift thing and the new chemistry of birth control just overwhelmed the boys in the RC clergy. They have never caught up.

It is a funny thought and I have mentioned it one way or another in the five years since I started this blog, the church left me, us behind when it abandoned spirituality and went straight for the economic and political approach to human sexuality.  

That if an ambitious Cardinal Krol was not hell bent on becoming pope, and attended his flock with some love instead of a Wharton Spreadsheet; maybe the economics and politics of the inner city and the racial divides could have been addressed.  

That some jobs in factories could have been saved, that there would have been less racial fear and less white flight to the suburbs and places like Frankford or Harrowgate would still have catholic grade schools, high schools and even churches there today.

In other words, there was no vision.  There seemed to be only ambition to achieve some corporate religious agenda.

There was no Vision.  There was only Ambition.

And that stagnation, which ignores the heart or the spirit of things and life situations that matter to us locally, could have been addressed by mature efforts and solutions. 

So it goes. 

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Polish Joke - John Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia

The beginning of the end for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia was the arrival of Bishop John Krol from Cleveland Ohio in the early1960s whose only burning driving ambition was to be the first Polish American Pope. He let everything go to hell for power and greed paved the way. Krol did not become pope but he threw his block of votes to the Polish Cardinal Wojtyla. The rest is history. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia and the Vatican have gone to HELL since. Cardinals Bevilacqua and Rigali, successors to Krol were little more than parasites of papal power. Before that, all ruling bishops of Philly were born, educated and ruled locally knowing their neighbors. And their neighbors knew them. And now they have Archbishop Chaput from Denver, his Philly coronet a reward, fresh with blood on his hands of the hatchet job he did on Bishop Bill Morris in Toowoomba Australia. These stooges, henchmen of John Paul II and Benedict the German are all strangers to the people of Philly. Buggering children by their "celibate" ranks means nothing, does not get in the way of their ambitions. Most of them, these bishops, are a bunch of criminals in a mafia style operation that should be dragged before the Hague for crimes against humanity.

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The Papal Foundation – The Pope’s Slush Fund

While something important and moral was going in the secular court system of Philadelphia this week, the pope’s bagman, Bishop Bransfield was in Rome doing the grand tour with all the rich little old ladies who gave so generously to the pope’s private slushfund/charity this year. No doubt some real charity gets done with some of these funds but one has to wonder why money cannot be directly contributed to Vatican Charities and why the Pope needs funds out of the mainstream accounting system of the Vatican. Sounds a little bit like Nixon and his secret stash of cash for the sake of politics to me.

The official story is something like the pope presents a wish list of all the charities he wants to fund and the American Bishops gather around and vie for favor with the pontiff to get rich catholics to donate money to this fund.  The so-called Peter’s Pence fund collected once a year at mass for the upkeep of the Vatican is for the ordinary catholics in the pews, the people that don’t really count because they don’t have the swag to impress the big boys in the hierarchy.

Peter’s Pence was organized by the crazy pope Pius IX after he locked himself up in the Vatican and lost his income form slave run territories in Italy. One or two old papal palaces in Rome itself but he withdrew from the new secular government of Italy now centered in the capital city of Rome.  Pius found the most secure part of the Vatican in the highest place in the Vatican, the treasury way up in the sky. How Feng Shui. To this day, the papal apartment shares floor space with that old treasury that houses golden tiaras, chalices and jewels centuries old.  No doubt a pope in need to escape the Vatican wants some bling to take along to find digs in a safer place in case of emergencies, angry crowds etc.

The Papal Foundation was founded by Caridinal Krol of Philadelphia, the Polish American from Chicago whose own ambitions to become pope ended when he realized that a Karol Wohtyja of Poland was a better politician and no doubt backed by the CIA in terms of being a pawn to win the so-called cold war. John Paul I was no doubt in the way to that CIA gameplan?  Just speculation on that point.

The Papal Foundation do doubt funded many dissident groups in Poland and contributed to the downfall of the Iron Curtain.  All well and good.  But now that Benedict the German is pope, the same fund is used for “charity” same as wink nod, JPII used it for “charity”.

In a way, Cardinal Krol and his corrupt regime operating out of the office building that he built at 222 N.!7^th Street behind the Cathedral in Philadelphia needed influence in Rome, in corners of the Vatican when his mismanagement of the Child Abuse situation in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia got out of control as evidenced decades later by civil authorities having to try and take control of the criminal enterprise of child abuse and cover up at “222”.

So, the more you give to the Pope and his crony charities, if they are real, the more influence you have in the Vatican to cover up crimes against children? How do you spell Marcial Maciel?


"Follow the money."

Bishops Bransfield Delivers the Goods to Benedict XVI

Vatican Radio 4/19/2012:

http://www.oecumene.radiovaticana.org/en1/Articolo.asp?c=581163

“Each year the wish list gets longer and longer..its' really a wonderful opportunity for the Pope and he responds throughout the world! He doesn't restrict it" says Bishop Michael Bransfield of Charleston-Wheeling, West Virginia, President of the US charitable organisation the Papal Foundation. 

They are the lay Catholic men and women from across the US who each year gift the Holy Father a 'wish list', in short the funds to carry out or sponsor charitable works that are particularly dear to him. On Saturday the Foundation members - who are known as Stewards of St. Peter - will meet with the Holy Father and present him a donation of over 8 million dollars to fund projects throughout the world.

Bishop Bransfield who is accompanying the Stewards on their annual pilgrimage to the See of St. Peter, says they “see this as a vocation, they see this as their ability to help the Holy Father to do things that otherwise he simply wouldn’t be able to do”...


Q: Quite a big difference in the case of the Papal Foundation, how did it all begin?
A: “Early in the 1980’s JPII had a lot of charities that he was not able to fund and a lot of concerns in Easter Europe and throughout the world. So Cardinals and Archbishops who were his friends…Cardinal Krol and Cardinal McCarrick got together and set up a foundation, it started in Philadelphia but immediately spread throughout our country because the Archbishops and Cardinals backed them up and brought in members”. 

Q So how does it work? 
A: “They put together this organisation and asked these people, who really are from all over the States, to give a million dollars each that would stay in the United States and the money that came from that, the income and different grants would come to the Holy Father for the poor of the world and for his charities or works that he wanted done. [The Pope] sends a list over and in November we meet in Washington and its reviewed by the grants committee and then again by the board and they approve what they can fund and what they can do for the Holy Father because the wish list gets longer and longer”. 

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Historic Beginnings of American Culture War – Philadelphia – 1970s

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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 bring Pennsylvania 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.