Philly High School Possibly Named in Tribute to Father Coughlin and His Approval of German Actions at Kristallnacht

I had to wonder when I randomly ran into this looking at some other matter, what happened to the local girl's high school in Philly, when its name got changed from its original designation of "Northeast Catholic High School for Girls" to "Little Flower High School". Something and things along the timeline from October 1938 when building permits were issued in the original designated name to dedication on August 27th 1939, five days before the invasion of Poland and the beginning of war in Europe.

There was already in place a tradition of West Catholic High for Boys first followed by West Catholic High for Girls. Only four blocks apart near University City in west Philly.

Little Flower as the compliment female school to Northeast Catholic High School for Boys was three miles apart. (The Northeast still the edge of the burbs and farms in pre-War Philadelphia County).

The working name on Little Flower may have been N.E.C.H. for girls but looking at the timeline I have to wonder about Dennis Dougherty and his still standing fatwa on the Ethnic Group the "ran Hollywood" still in place forbidding all Catholics in the AD of Philly from attending the cinema which he never rescinded. (Thank the Catholic Gawd that the good cardinal had a movie projection setup to view Hollywood movies in private in his 45-61 room (depending on estimates) mansion of his quaint home base surrounded by 10 acres on City Line Ave. in Philly. )

October the building permits:

And then Kristallnacht in November 9-10 and America's most powerful media voice of Father Charles Coughlin getting more racist to up his ratings the closer Europe crept toward War.

Charles E Coughlin

For years, Coughlin had publicly derided “international bankers,” a phrase that most of his listeners understood to mean Jewish bankers. In the days and weeks after Kristallnacht, Coughlin defended the state-sponsored violence of the Nazi regime, arguing that Kristallnacht was justified as retaliation for Jewish persecution of Christians. He explained to his listeners on November 20, 1938 that the “communistic government of Russia,” “the Lenins and Trotskys…atheistic Jews and Gentiles” had murdered more than 20 million Christians and had stolen “40 billion [dollars]…of Christian property.”

In a series of articles published in Social Justice during 1938, Coughlin lambasted “Jewish” financiers and their control over world politics, culminating with a story recounting his own version of the infamous 20th Century forgery, the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purported to be minutes of meetings of Jewish leaders as they plotted to take over the world.

As Europe crept toward War. 

Philadelphia Inquirer 28 Aug 1939

On same page as LF dedication photo below.

Following two major radio stations in NYC, dropping Coughlin's broadcasts after his praise of Kristallnacht, followed by protests making the national papers of pro-Coughlin supporters outside NY radio staions, somewhere in that timeline between beginning of Construction of Northeast Catholic High School for Girls in October 1938 and the Dedication of Little Flower High School for Girls in August 1939, Cardinal Dougherty did a name change on the high school, perhaps out of sympathetic views shared with the American Papal Nuncio Cicognani and Father Charles Coughlin the head of the Radio League of the Little Flower, and his shrine in Michigan to Saint Therese of Lisiveux, a recently canonized 24 year old ? "Doctor of the Church". 

Coincidence or devotion.

Wikipedia Commons

Shrine of the Little Flower Basilica

Charles Coughlin

Philadelphia Inquirer 28 Aug 1939

It is possible that Cardinal Dougherty was indeed devoted to the worship of the Little Flower saint but more likely he had to hedge a bet or a loan to Coughlin to build his cash cow shrine in Michigan, with the radio transmissions drying up with contributions. Better to have a local Wink. Nod. Michigan shrine reminder in Philly to back up offshore tax free loans to Royal Oak?

Father Coughlin - Msgr Hawks - Tea with Franco, Hitler and Mussolini

Father Coughlin

One of the things that kept the various American Fascist groups in the late 1930s and into 1940, 41 from succeeding was that the only thing they had in common was their anti-Semitism.  

The various German, Italian, Ukrainian fascist groups would not unite over and above ethnic identity and so too the Ku Klux Klan and other Protestant fronts would not unite with groups like America First and definitely not with the Catholic fronts like the Christian Front or Father Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Coughlin

National Union for Social Justice founded in 1934, spawning Social Justice Magazine in 1936.

Christian Front – bastard child of Coughlin’s inspired radio messages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Front_(United_States)

The Christian Front was founded in November 1938 in response to the prompting of radio priest Charles Coughlin, who had called for a "crusade against the anti-Christian forces of the Red Revolution" in the May 23, 1938, edition of his newspaper, Social Justice.^[1] Its membership numbered several thousand and consisted mostly of Irish-Americans in the New York City area. They sold Social Justice, organized boycotts of Jewish businesses, and held parades and rallies. They made no distinction between "Reds" and Jews.^[2] Their rallies welcomed attendees from like-minded organizations like the German American Bund, and Crusaders for Americanism. They heard speakers denounce Jews as international bankers, war mongers, and communists, mock President Roosevelt as Rosenvelt, and praise Franco and Hitler.^[3] Bishop Fulton J. Sheen backed the Front.^[4]The Roman Catholic Bishop of Brooklyn, Thomas Molloy was a prominent supporter and his diocesan newspaper, the Tablet once addressed the charge that the Christian Front was anti-Semitic: "Well what of it? Just what law was violated?"^[5]

The Front also targeted organized labor and tried to replace union officials, deemed too radical or Jewish, with "Christian leadership".

When the war came, the FBI rounded up about 3,000 of the worst agitators of these foreign and domestic funded groups and locked their heineys up in detention camps etc. for further processing and interrogations. (eternal shades of Gitmo) (no priests rounded up at that time that I know of)

The present  Catholic Front, Religious Liberty Front, Fortnight of Freedom Front does not outwardly advocate the same anti-Semitism of  1930s America as much as they advocate veiled racism, misogyny and anti-gay hatred. They of course feel comfortable these days hanging out with the Mormons, John Birchers and Fundamentalist Right, though I don’t think those righties feel the same comfort having to hang with the papes.

In any case, the old game plan, game book from the 1930s works best on a purely money, power and greed basis regarding any temporary political alliances across diverse groupings of thugs.

Following through on the fascism of the Irish Parish of my youth, St. Joan of Arc Harrowgate, Philadelphia and the founding pastor, an Episcopalian priest turned papist, I have to reexamine some of the childhood myths I had constructed by word of mouth and set forth in some of my writing.

I had written a short story illustrating the anti-Semitism that existed in my old neighborhood before my birth via the oral history of a visitor to our house in my youth who had once lived in our house.

In that story I make a man I never met, Msgr. Hawks out to be some sort of hero in that he fought anti-Semitism in that neighborhood of the 1930s in his dealings with a local Jewish tailor. 

I was greatly shocked when I did further research recently to see that Msgr. Hawks had quite a track record amidst the fawning admirers and apologists for Franco, Hitler and Mussolini.

It comes on back of some recent comment from another writer about how all families have ghosts and or skeletons of things left unsaid over the decades and centuries of family histories.

I am thinking right now how oral tradition reached me from my father how his parents were regular listeners of the infamous Father Coughlin of fascist anti-Semitic radio fame of those turbulent late thirties and early forties in America.  

In fact I remember my father pointing out some rural site on one of our Sunday family drives in the country and can remember him describing the place as once having been a popular summertime picnic grounds for a local Bund group.  It went over my head at the time. I do have quite a memory and now that he is dead I cannot go back and ask for further details. Such is life.

But getting back to Msgr. Hawks at St. Joan of Arc.

I was rather amused at this passage from an online book regarding the right wing groups in Pennsylvania before mid-century.

Further research on the net is limited. Not much except that Father Brophy sounds like a Father Edward F. Brophy of the Church of the Most Precious Blood in Long Island City (Queens), NY.  I believe he was part of the Christian Front as well as the CDCR.

CDCR – Committee for Defense of Constitutional Rights - sounds like a Tea Bagger Party Front from modern day.

Thomas J. Blisard Jr. I cannot find any reference on the net to except a passage in a Marxist Socialist newspaper.

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1939/v3n19-mar-28-1939.pdf

Agitation against the fascists right to meet at the Met Opera House on North Broad St., built by Oscar Hammerstein I, grandfather of Oscar II of Rogers and Hammerstein fame.  (Still standing in genteel decay.)

And Jew hating, communist hating baiting Bessie Burchett.

http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Bessie_R._Burchett

Bessie Rebecca Burchett Ph D. (born 1879) was the head of the department of foreign languages in the South Philadelphia High School for Girls. She wrote a book, Education for Destruction, documenting the communist infiltration of the Philadelphia public school system in the 1930s.

She earned the moniker "Two Gun" Bessie because she carried two pistols to defend herself. 

And the cultic Knights of Columbus Bund Fraternity organization. 

http://frragan.com/pdf2/kofc-history.pdf

(No mention of any nasty Irish anti-Semitism there as part of that anti-Communism “Crusade” in their own propaganda. God bless their "charitible" hearts.)

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Franco Shrine to Close in Philly – Saint Joan of Arc Church Harrowgate

I find it extremely ironic that Francophile Charles Chaput with his blue ribbon committees and bankers to derivative-ize / bundle the Archdiocesan real estate portfolio before his next promotion, would could overlook this Sufi-like shrine in Philly to the secretly sainted Generalissimo.

I also find it ironic or even questioning the management style or lack of it from a temporary Vatican hack in the form of the Canadian American person of Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philly waiting around for his next real and or important assignment by the Vatican after this temporary Hatchet Job (hand job) gig in the city of brotherly luv.

Saint Joan of Arc Church will close on June 23 at noon.  It’s founder Msgr. Edward F. Hawks was quite a writer and defender of General Franco and his regime in Spain during and after the Civil War there. 

Hoods and shirts: the extreme right in Pennsylvania, 1925-1950

“Franco’s armies are good to the people, and Franco is especially kind towards the children.”   
~~ Msgr. Edward Hawks, St Joan of Arc Parish, Harrowgate Philadelphia.

 

Edward F. Hawks

(PAHRC – Phila Pa)

http://www.pahrc.net/index.php/catablog/hawks-rev-edward-f-papers-1900-1952-mc-15/

“…After converting, Hawks left his home in Canada and became a priest in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, where he served for several years as a parish curate. During World War I, he served as a chaplain in the Canadian army. When he returned to Philadelphia in 1919, he established St. Joan of Arc parish, where he remained until his death.  He was also the founder of the Catholic Evidence Guild, an organization designed to attract converts and lapsed Catholics.

Hawks was a well-known writer and lecturer. For more than 30 years, he wrote a column on current events for the diocesan paper The Catholic Standard and Times. From 1936-1938, after becoming a domestic prelate, he toured Spain to gather accounts of the Civil War for his column. His efforts on behalf of the Nationalist cause won him decoration from the Spanish government. …”

I never have quite understood the whole Father Coughlin thing in the depression era except that the Canadian priest had such a powerful media grip through radio on the American people and the love of Germany and Spain and Italy as fascist regimes along with anti-Semitism was a growing political threat to FDR and that the Boston wing of the American Catholic church through Joe Kennedy on behalf of FDR had Coughlin silenced through then Bishop Spellman and through then Cardinal Pacelli (later Pius XII) and his intervention via the Vatican in that silencing.

That in all the writings of I have seen, you see the fascism part of the Catholic Right in America, the emphasis of the love of fascism was also a means to confront the Reds and or Communist movement in Europe and in America.

Now that Communism is a threat to no one, the Right Wing of the Catholic Church in America serves up love of fascism as nostalgia and or support of pure anti-human market place capitalism.

I see that the Boston wing may have silenced Coughlin but the Philly wing under Cardinal Dougherty and via the Archdiocesan Newspaper and Msgr. Hawk’s pro-Franco, pro-fascist weekly column, that not all regions of the US RCC always acts in unison.

I also find it strange how the fascist saints of Saint Joan of Arc and Saint Thomas More got resurrected in the 1920s and continue to this day as coded symbols in the advancement of power at the ultimate expense of humanity.

That and the Knights of Columbus involved in right wing politics in the 1930s continues all the way to today.

(pax)

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USCCB – Bully Pulpit – U.S. Catholic Bishops - Lobbying War on Women and Gays continues…$$$ 26 millions worth

(Father Charles Coughlin Bishop William Lori)

$26,000,000 in bribes, fees paid by the USCCB, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, is a lot of chump change, a lot of little old ladies’ dollar bills in the collection plate on Sunday, to lobby Congress with in the ongoing discriminatory war on women and war on gays. 

The Catholic Bishops' Lobby and the Moral Center of Catholicism

Recently, I took note of a back-and-forth between Michael Sean Winters and Tom Roberts at National Catholic Reporter, in which Roberts calls into question a persistent meme of Winters' reporting on behalf of the U.S. Catholic bishops.  Roberts notes that Winters's defense of the bishops depends on asserting and re-asserting that Catholics are under "attack" today in secular culture, and that anti-Catholicism in American culture lingers on and feeds the "attacks" Catholics are experiencing. 

Roberts doubts the viability of this meme of anti-Catholic attack when, as he notes, Catholics are "liberally sprinkled" all through "the most powerful quarters" of the nation's political and economic life.  And when the Supreme Court is dominated by (conservative) Catholics.

And now this piece of information comes down the pike, and I think it's going to be even harder for the U.S. Catholic bishops and their centrist spokespersons to keep the victim meme alive: the Pew Forum has just released a report showing that the USCCB ranks number two of all faith-based lobbying groups in D.C., with $26,662,111 (and see Kevin Clarke at America on the Pew report) spent on lobbying activities in 2009.  That's a hefty chunk of change for a victimized little old minority group suffering societal persecution to have at its disposal to try to wheedle and cajole legislators to do its faith-based bidding.

Men Behind the War on Women

A group of men with no real background in law or medicine, but blessed with a strong personal interest in women’s bodies, have quietly influenced all of the major anti-abortion legislation over the past several years. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops may be one of the quietest, yet most powerful lobbies on Capitol Hill, with political allies that have enabled them to roll back decades of law and precedent.

Over the past two years the GOP-controlled House of Representatives has launched one of the most extreme assaults on women's choice the U.S. has seen in decades. Republicans voted twice to slash federal family planning funds for low-income women, moved to prevent women from using their own money to buy insurance plans that cover abortion, introduced legislation that would force women to have ultrasounds before receiving an abortion and, most recently, passed a bill that will allow hospitals to refuse to perform emergency abortions for women with life-threatening pregnancy complications.

But the erosion of women's rights didn't begin with the GOP takeover. President Barack Obama's health care reform law contained some of the most restrictive abortion language seen in decades.

 Lift the curtain, and behind the assault was the conference of bishops.

 In the 1930s, Catholic demagogue Father Charles Coughlin never dreamed of the power that the RCC in America now has, can acquire simply by buying it, here in the future.


But beware bishops:

“St. Irenaeus of Lyon warned early Christians that we’ve been sent like sheep into the midst of wolves. The moment we become wolves ourselves, we lose.” - - Bp. Charles Chaput 

(Bishop William Lori Father Charles Coughlin)

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Francis Spellman - Patron Saint of Closeted Clergy

Looking at the agony of some closeted clergy who can’t leave their job and or vocation, they have no job skills. And quite frankly they have never touched a child or adolescent in the rounds of their duties.

Looking at the heartbreak of young men who cannot lie to themselves about their natural sexuality, who cannot pretend that they are not homosexual in their life outlook or deny their birthright. They do not want to be clergy living a lie. That is one reason the clergy is dying. For centuries it has always been the "odd" son that got foisted off the family meal ticket and into Holy Orders.

Looking for an image to match the hypocrisy of the self serving American Bishops, trying for close to a decade now, to keep throwing shit against the wall in hopes that it will stick and find a sufficient scapegoat, to blame the clergy child sex abuse scandal on, nothing sticks except the truth.

Mismanagement and not caring about humanity has marked the American Catholic Hierarchy for decades.

The magisterium of the RC church has always been trickle down from the top. Arch-conservatives such as Francis Cardinal Spellman set the tone of things to come, failure, in the American Catholic church when he said “Change will not get past the Statue of Liberty” at Vatican II to his cronies.

When the John Jay College/USCCB whitewash talks about priests not properly trained in the 1940s and 1950s and not being able to function, they only scratch the surface of ten more needed studies on human sexuality and the repressed state of it in the RC church.

“Researchers at John Jay College of Criminal Justice said most of the abusive priests were ordained in the 1940s and 50s and were not properly trained to confront the social upheavals of the 1960s.”

Interesting point. But who was in charge of the American Catholic Church in the 40s, 50s and 60s or set the tone for the whole nation. None other than Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, first among equals among American Catholic clergy and very clever and very ambitious to push that church’s foreign born agenda.

“Franny” was the success role model of every Irish Catholic boy in the Seminary who wanted to be rich, respected and powerful. And yeah there was that ritual and Jesus thing too. But the real power was in raising money from rich friends to build schools, hospitals, universities and churches too.

The baby boom of post WWII meant that you had to crank up the seminary machine and spit hundreds and thousands of new priests out on an annual basis to maintain all that new church property, schools, hospitals, universities and churches too.

On that point, the John Jay College report may be right. But then again what the Vatican is presently embracing with pandering to the right wing SSPX party in the church is probably a mistake and an unintended cup of hemlock.

Grinding out priests out of makeshift seminaries in South America, Africa and Asia is setting the stage for the final refuge of the RC church and also the final death throes of that church using the Spellman model of church business success to sell the product. It is a defective dysfunctional model of that product, because child abuse among untrained and sexually repressed, closeted, celibate clergy will produce the same results in the rest of world that it has done here in America in the past half century.

I remember attending the Army Navy Game in 1967 with my father in Philly. The loud speaker made the announcement that Francis Cardinal Spellman, Vicar General of the Armed Forces, had died. The crowd was momentarily silent and then went back to its business.

I asked my father who Cardinal Spellman was. He gave me that “don’t ask” non verbal Irish look. It was also the look you might get when asking about uncle Fred who you never met. It was that don’t ask about your crazy queer uncle in the attic look. I shut up.

Indeed, Cardinal Spellman’s taste for chorus boys was no secret amongst Irish Catholics it would seem. The MSM complied with the conspiracy to keep quiet as well on the subject of the biggest queen in America, red dress and all, living in the Bishop’s Palace at 50th St. and Madison Avenue in New York City on the grounds of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Perhaps the present political culture wars started in the thirties when people like Joseph P. Kennedy, Eugenio Pacelli (Pius XII) and Franny Spellman sat down to dinner in Boston to plot the silence of radio populist Father Charles Coughlin and plot other political strategy for the 1936 re-election of FDR. But this is not really a history lesson, is it?

An aside, I don’t think that J. Edgar Hoover was as big a queen as Francis, as some say. J. might have been a closeted gay and maybe even asexual. I don’t think that he wore dresses. I think those stories about J. Edgar are exaggerated and revenge after that blackmailing bureaucratic snake went to his eternal reward and have been perpetuated by his many, many, many enemies.

Indeed, the dysfunction of recent American culture seems to stem from the McCarthy era. Everybody knows that Joe McCarthy was a tortured repressed closet gay and only married to have a beard wife. Another crony of Joe Kennedy, former gangster and bootlegger, and father of a future Catholic (first and only, thank God) U.S. President.

The overtone of the present culture war is not so much about gay or suppressed gay sexuality as it is about suppressed sexuality among Christians who have a mindset that all sex is dirty. It is an immature view that the rest of the world is not aware of from a distance. But if the American Empire falls tomorrow and people, future historians, ask why. One primary reason was that honest discourse in the public arena had to always talk around the elephant in the room, and that is the Christian distorted view of human sexuality. Laws against women, laws against gays, they are all laws against God’s gift to humanity – sexuality.

In a sense there was one great conspiracy among the RCs or the Irish Catholics in general to get a RC and or Irish Catholic into the White House. And if that meant covering up everybody’s personal flaws - of McCarthy, Kennedy, Spellman, well it worked. Don’t ask, don’t tell worked quite well for centuries among the rich and the elites of governments and church hierarchies.

There is an incredible amount of silence and lack of published documentation about Franny Spellman’s open secret sexuality. Even the New York Times kept silent. Now that was power to be feared for the NYT to be silenced back then when that paper still had a backbone.

So when the present hierarchy of the American Catholic Church want to blame child abuse on the 40s, 50s and 60s, let’s also have an open discussion about celibacy and closeted clergy and the patron saint of closeted “celibate” clergy, let’s start talking about Saint Franny, our gay uncle in America’s history attic. The truth could set you free.