Bishop McFadden of Harrisburg Drops Dead – His Legacy in Philadelphia Child Abuse Glory Hole Days Played Down in Eulogy – Liked Basketball – No Mention of Children

Bishop McFadden of Harrisburg dropped dead on May 2 at a Pennsylvania Bishop’s Convention / Conference.

They brought in the green temporary bishop of Allentown John Oliver Barres to give a flowery eulogy to a monster that appears to have been there when as personal secretary to Cardinal Krol, cases of child abuse in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia got filed away rather than be addressed.

Krol with his Polish friend in the Vatican that owed his papacy to king maker Krol would cover up for him same as for Marcial Maciel. What are friends for if not to help cover up corporate mismanagement and or downright evil?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._McFadden

“It was during McFadden's service as a secretary to Cardinal Krol that Krol is believed to have excused and enabled the sexual abuse of hundreds of children within the Philadelphia Archdiocese.” (Wikipedia)

I must say that officiating at his funeral was Archbishop Chaput who I think was wise not to deliver the eulogy and or did not want to touch the Krol-Belivaqua-Rigali child abuse regimes/era toxic waste site in the form of the corpse of Bishop McFadden.

http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/allentown/index.ssf/2013/05/allentown_bishop_john_barres_d.html

“Allentown Diocese Bishop John Barres today recalled Harrisburg Bishop Joseph P. McFadden's gentle nature and love of basketball as Barres delivered the homily at McFadden's funeral Mass…

…Joseph McFadden may have been a kind and gentle priest and bishop, but he always played to win,” said Barres…

  

…And his way to win as a priest and bishop with a rich interior life and a vibrant missionary spirit was a nonstop full court press for the glory of God and the salvation of souls,”…

(Sniff. Sniff. Not a dry eye in the house.)

Bishop McFadden as monsignor preceded Monsignor Bill Lynn as pastor of St. Joseph’s “Rich Bastards” parish in Downingtown, Pa.

Bishop McFadden as auxiliary bishop of Philadelphia was also instrumental in the closing of the two best High Schools in the racially mixed city, Northeast Catholic and Cardinal Dougherty in Philadelphia owing to the changing minority demographics within the city limits. His vision of the burbs only for new RC high schools in Philly I also think belongs to McFadden as part of his legacy.

Thanks to “Dave” for the Allentown link.

RIP Bishop McFadden. (I don’t really mean it. Just a press statement of sorts on the topic of your funeral like the so many press releases you signed off on in your lifetime. lol)

Joe McFadden true legacy comes from District Attorney Seth Williams at the conclusion of the Monsignor Lynn trial:

"Many in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia hierarchy had dirty hands. They failed to realize that the church is its people."

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The Changing Face of Religion = St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Philly looks to Lease out Property to Wal-mart, Home Depot, Jack in the Box?

Well somebody has to pay the child abuse lawyer bills from the decades long drunk on the blood of martyrs and saints party by power hungry, greedy Cardinals Krol, Bevilacqua and Rigali. 

Who better to pay the bills than a carpetbagger like Archbishop Charles Chaput who, where he comes from in Kansas and Denver, Wal-mart, Home Depot and Jack in the Box etc. are considered a “good thing” - the only thing. Duh!

Whatever. 

Welcome to the new secular global culture! (no need for the sacred when it can be replaced with the $ecular)

http://articles.philly.com/2013-03-09/news/37564098_1_seminary-enrollment-seminary-board-seminarians

Theology is shrinking its footprint at the intersection of City and Lancaster Avenues in Lower Merion. 

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia said Thursday that it would explore selling or leasing 45 acres of the St. Charles Borromeo Seminary campus in Lower Merion, consolidating in older buildings on 30 acres in the back of the property. The move follows Eastern University's relocation last year of its Palmer Theological Seminary from the southwest corner of that intersection to a rented space one-fifth the size in King of Prussia. Over the next three to five years, St. Charles Borromeo Seminary will vacate the palatial college building that was built in 1928 and dominates the view of the property from Lancaster Avenue, the archdiocese said. 

 Proceeds from selling or leasing underused land and buildings will be used to help pay for renovations of existing buildings, parts of which have been mothballed for 35 years, officials said. 

 "St. Charles Borromeo Seminary is the heart of our church in Philadelphia, and we remain dedicated to not only maintaining its presence in our community but strengthening it for many generations to come," Archbishop Charles J. Chaput said in a news release. 

 Since arriving in Philadelphia from Denver in September 2011, Chaput has been working to improve the church's financial health by selling real estate, trimming operations, closing schools, and consolidating parishes. 

 An open question until Thursday was what the archdiocese would do with the seminary, founded in 1832 and moved to its current location in 1871. Deliberations included moving it to a new site.

Location, Location, Location -  Retail, Retail, Fast Food (GoogleMaps)

Soon to be Lost Iconic  85 year old View From City Ave. (GoogleMaps)



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Bulletproofing and Alarm Systems Finished on Benedict XVI’s Retirement Xanadu in Vatican City

Ratzinger Palace, Vatican City

The last of the nuns got kicked out at the end of November in Benedict’s Golden Parachute retirement palace.

Retiring Vatican Mafia Don Joe Ratzinger has to stay within the imaginary political state of Vatican City and claim diplomatic immunity until death regarding his role as Pedophile Clergy Enabler, Protector both for himself and his key role in the Worldwide Child Abuse coverup for his former boss John Paul II.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree :

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/cross-reproach-puts-vatican-on-edge/story-fnb64oi6-1226577099316

Indeed, the Vatican said that the Pope's retirement was foreseen when restructuring work began on the Mater Ecclesiae convent, within the Vatican, where he will live after the last nuns moved out in November.

I am reminded of a story I came across somewhere about how when Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia retired in 1988, he stayed in the premier living space of the 40 plus room Bishop’s Mansion on City Line Avenue in Philly.

Cardinal Dougherty Bishop's Palace Philadelphia

That newly appointed Archbishop Bevilacqua had to settle for whatever else secondary space was available in the big house. Notes to the Vatican regarding protocols for retired senior clergy were met with polite non-reply. 

Krol had after all been John Paul II’s kingmaker in the papal election of 1978 as official liaison for the American delegation and unofficial liaison for the CIA.

Rank, through indebtedness and or blackmail involving a pope, has its privileges.

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Cathedral Grounds in Philadelphia Haunted? – Built on Ancient Potter’s Field and Execution Site

222 N 17th Street (foreground right) - Rear of Cathedral (background left) Google Maps

I can remember in the seventh grade going downtown after school with some classmates to pick up some boxes of plastic icons of the Virgin Mary down at the Archdiocesan offices behind the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul in Philadelphia and returning uptown to make delivery to the local convent of these items before returning home. 

I can remember those buildings, townhouses behind the Cathedral that had many various departments crammed and housed in Victorian building space.

I can remember when they tore those buildings down and in a weekend or was it a week it seemed, they put the prefabricated tinker toy like steel girders snapped into place of the “Archdiocesan Office Building” out of some kit do doubt sent from overseas. 

Then the prefab sheathing of windows and faux stone filler went up. The resulting 13 story office building would provide plenty of office space for decades to come in this new Chancery.

No doubt with Cardinal Krol’s campaign for the papacy and Cardinal Bevilacqua's grand child abuse cover up schemes with future bishops Cistone and Cullen and Rigali's follow up with want a be bishop Msgr. Bill Lynn one must take one’s breath, think of Cardinal Rigali’s using the address as a mere mail drop for his real full time digs in Rome next to the Swiss Guard’s Barracks (wink, nod), one might give pause to the thought how isolated and lonely it is at the top of the Philadelphia Catholic Hierarchy in the 13^th floor penthouse suite of the Archbishop’s office.

In that corner office overlooking the copper dome of Sts. Peter and Paul’s, the Parisian style grand public buildings of Logan Square and the magnificent Greek style temple of the Philadelphia Museum of Art beyond, one might wonder if one was at least on the slopes of Parnassus is not on mighty Mt. Olympus itself. 

Indeed even the five star Four Seasons Hotel could only be built here on Logan Circle as the premiere gateway to the cultural heart of the city.

Of course it was not always like this. There was a time when the Cathedral was first planned for and built, Logan Square was quite isolated and not a desirable or fashionable part of the W.A.S.P. culture city further to the east. Logan Square was the ideal out of the way place to build a Papist temple without upsetting the Protestant elites of Philadelphia.

That and Logan Square was the potters field, one of several in the city and adjacent to the gallows once there. That like all things official and or unofficial in the past, the potter’s field, a burial place for the poor, the low lifes, prostitutes, criminals and executed prisoners, the boundaries of a designated city square haphazardly overflowed its boundaries onto the future cathedral site. 

The nearby legitimate Quaker burial grounds would also have had an overflow of graves for the poor who brought their dead and those in the middle of the night that just dumped dead bodies in the general vicinity of the whole general area of death.

That the present chancery of 222 N. 17^th Street might have been part of a stockade off Logan Square to house the convicted about to die on the gallows as a staging area to send them off to their fates and a place to hold or store executed bodies after until a means of burying them could be organized or arranged.

Sounds a bit odd but I am reminded of the scene in the movie The Sixth Sense where the psychic child who can supposedly talk to and see the dead sees a place of execution that history does not record but the child witnesses the dead dangling from the gallows that held even children, those whose only crime might have been the capital crime of stealing bread to survive back then in the past.

So it is rumored that before they built the present day fashionable bits of upscale downtown Philadelphia, in the past, the dark past, the underside function of a city dealing with death used to be practiced and had a place here and around Logan Square (now Logan Circle).

It is little wonder that some say the building at 222 N. 17^th Street, the Chancery is haunted with death and evil from the past and passing all the way, reinforced, to the present day there.

1895 Map (PhilaGeoHistory)

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Catholic Fascism in America – 1933 – the Movies, Media and Mind (Crowd) Control

Future Seat of Power in United States? Washington DC

Reading some of the data below made me recollect that I never saw my father go to the movies.  Our mother took us to the movies on occasion but for the most part it was just us siblings that made the trek to the local art deco palace, the Midway Theater in Philly, on most Saturday afternoons.

Midway Theater Philly under construction 1932

In fact my father never had a kind word for Hollywood when the topic would arise and his non-praise of the industry often contained descriptives that were in fact anti-Semitic.

Having done some research, apparently there was a cultural divide whereby I think the impact of talking motion pictures in the late 1920s and early 1930s and the standard violence of gang mob movies of the era got combined in the minds of the consumer with movies about divorce and infidelity.

The Christian Right was a little behind on this curve back then and it was the Catholic Church at the point in trying to gain control over the “artistic” abilities of a new industry.  These days, many complaints about videos games, violence, sex and the product does not fit into any old standard niche. Which leaves some to protest and want to control Content.

The movie industry that was new was trying to sell a product and did not want control from the church crowd or even the FDR big government crowd.  Somewhere in all the cultural war over movies came the Catholic Legion of Decency out of Chicago. But it did not have any legs or arms until outsiders came into play and manipulated the scene to gain power over the present then situation.

Having grown up in Philly, I had heard about the mighty Cardinal Dougherty who apparently did not issue a mere appeal for a Movie Code but a full Catholic Fatwa in 1934 against the whole movie industry, forbidding all Catholics to totally boycott all cinema.  A fatwa that he never bothered to rescind.

Ironic that about this time in 1935, Dougherty bought his humble forty plus room palace on the Philadelphia Main Line with its nine acres of privacy that had a private movie theater for hisself and his cronies to watch Hollywood movies.  Hypocrite!

Cardinal Dougherty Palace - Philadelphia

  

My father, the son of a church sexton, do doubt had the fear of God of being seen anywhere near a movie theater.  His father’s reputation and possible livelihood rode on the shoulders of a young teenager, a feeling I think that never left him. This looking over your shoulder is a feeling I think a lot of people in the present world, the recent and past world, speaks against the concept of freedom and for a government controlling the lives of its people in a fascist state. 
   

Hollywood picked up on the sexual laxity in the country and began making movies that depicted scenes that offended the Church. American Catholics were used to being told when to stand, sit and kneel, so when Cardinal Dennis Dougherty of Pennsylvania declared that Hollywood’s movies were entirely based on sex and violence and forbid all Catholics to attend movies on pain of serious sin. Catholics listened and movie attendance dropped dramatically. Catholics did what they were told. 

When the movie moguls threatened to close all movie theatres in Philadelphia and put 15,000 people out of work in the time of the depression, the Cardinal said–Good, close them! They didn’t! The ban remains in effect to this day. The League of Decency came into being as Catholics drifted back to the theatres to face the threat of placing one in a state of an occasion of sin. 

That the guiding force that gave the American Catholic Bishops the push to do the most and take on Hollywood was none other than the recently appointed Papal Nuncio Amleto Giovanni Cicognani.  Cicognani was appointed Nuncio to coincide with the new FDR administration by Pius XI, the pope who signed a treaty with Mussolini to settle territory disputes from 1870 and to create the bizarre political state of the Vatican.  Pius XI also gave away Catholic political rights in Germany to the new Hitler Administration in exchange for private church perks and privileges. 

Papal Nuncio Amleto Giovanni Cicognani (center)

The German Concordat and the Lateran Treaty gave legitimacy to Italian and German Fascism by the Catholic Church for the sake of the private political agenda of the global Catholic Church.  Many say these two treaties are the basis, remote enabling factor, of the 50 million deaths in World War Two including the estimated six to twelve million victims of the German Concentration Camp Archipelago.

During World War II, Cicognani expressed reservations about Zionism. In a letter dated June 22, 1943 to American representative (to the Vatican)  Myron C. Taylor, he said: "It is true that at one time Palestine was inhabited by the Hebrew Race, but there is no axiom in history to substantiate the necessity of a people returning to a country they left nineteen centuries before …… If a 'Hebrew Home' is desired, it would not be too difficult to find a more fitting territory than Palestine. With an increase in the Jewish population there, grave, new international problems would arise.”

The fact that a Papal Nuncio was the spark to an internal secular matter regarding the movie industry controlled largely by banks and Jewish CEOs and managers makes me think that in the early thirties the RCC could do favors for Italian government and German government power agendas courtesy of an accommodating pope.

After more than three years of unholy and unwholesome screen fare, Catholics formed an organization to beat back the plague. Its official name was the National Legion of Decency—morally upright Protestants and Jews might enlist as well—but the group was known as the Legion of Decency or, more ominously, simply “the Legion.” 

A notion that had percolated in Catholic circles for years, the Legion took formal shape in October to November 1933, after Archbishop Amleto Giovanni Cicognani (American Papal Nuncio), speaking at the National Conference of Catholic Charities in New York on the authority of Pope Pius XI, denounced “the incalculable influence for evil” exerted by the motion picture screen. 

“Catholics are called by God, the Pope, the bishops, and the priests to a united front and vigorous campaign for the purification of the cinema, which has become a deadly menace to morals,” said the bishop. Within a matter of weeks, the Legion of Decency congealed into the most feared of all the private protest groups bedeviling Hollywood. 

Backed by a coordinated network of Catholic weeklies whose front-page headlines, editorial broadsides, and scare-mongering cartoons fueled parishioner outrage, the Legion lanced Hollywood’s hide with pitiless zeal. It had numbers, focus, energy—and a blunt instrument. “Worn out by promises, tricked by pledges, deceived by codes, and dismayed by filth, the Church has finally decided to take action in the one way left for it—boycott,” warned Chicago’s Catholic weekly, the New World. 

The Legion was as good as its word, and it put its word into writing with a brilliant tactical device, the Legion pledge. A prayer-like pact, the Legion pledge was a contractual avowal signed by parishioners and recited in unison at Sunday masses, Knights of Columbus meetings, Ladies Sodalities gatherings, and parochial school assemblies. 

“I condemn absolutely those debauching motion pictures which, with other degrading agencies, are corrupting public morals and promoting a sex mania in our land,” affirmed the pledger. “Considering these evils, I hereby promise to remain away from all motion pictures except those which do not offend decency and Christian morality.”

The picture at the top of the page is the Papal Embassy in Washington DC, home of the current Papal Nuncio / Embassador Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò who you might remember is persona non grata these days in the Vatican and the basis of a great deal of dissent within the Vatican Curia regarding the dictatorial and extremely corrupt Bertone/Ratzinger administration, framed in the media under the title "Vatileaks".  

Which means the control from Rome no longer filters through a papal embassy but rather directly to the papal foot soldiers of the USCCB ready to take away our secular civil liberties through fascist propaganda “religious liberty” PR campaigns and such.

While I do not think that the RCC will ever have the dictatorial powers of a Cardinal Dougherty to attack the “Jews in Hollywood” like the 1930s, the RCC Rome can send millions of dollars into PACs and try and manipulate the American Election in 2012 via bishop/cardinal puppets, Dolan etc. following allegiance not to the United States but the King of Rome, Benedict XVI.

Cicognani BTW was American Papal Nuncio for twenty five years. He was instrumental in helping my cousin, his one time protégé, to carve out five counties of the Philadelphia Archdiocese into the new duchy diocese of Allentown Pennsylvania.  

The Allentown Diocese was a consolation prize for my cousin for not getting the Cardinal’s chair in Philly.  (Or so the family oral history states.)  That Philly chair in terms of papal and American politics got taken away from the traditional Irish American holder of said territory in favor of a new ethnic/economic center of power in America, perhaps negotiated by a Papal Nuncio, in the form of the Polish American future king/pope maker, John Krol.

452 Madison Ave NYC, Archbishop's Townhouse
(Residence of the President of the USCCB)

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In the Loop with Archbishops Dolan, Chaput and Ross Douthat of the New York Times (wink, nod)

Archbishop Charles Chaput (left) evangelizing the faith.

The best of the best New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan has quoted the best of the best wordsmith Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia declaring Philly to now be “Mission Territory” after decades of crime and coverup under the Cardinals Krol, Bevilacqua and Rigali crime regimes.

Timmy, in typical alpha male mode for the USCCB has volunteered the Archdiocese of New York as “Mission Territory” as well and is likely petitioning the Congress at this very moment for tens of thousands guest worker visas for Catholic missionaries from South America, Africa and South Asia to swarm over North America and save it and or offer it up to the oligarchs on a silver platter for a good price or place at the table in the new world order of things.

There was a time when Rome used to send the best of the best of Europe to missionary territories in the New World and up against the dominant Protestant Christian Culture of the young United States.

What have you done to my (Philly) church?

Bishop (Saint) John Neumann, a Sudetenland German, as fourth bishop of Philadelphia missionary territory laid the foundation vision that built the largest, superior Catholic education system in the United States, perhaps the world, that stood for almost a hundred years until the Krol, Bevilacqua, Rigali regimes started to strip the wealth of the Philly church, shipping cash over to Solidarity in Poland for General Wojtyla to oppose the Russkies etc. along side CIA allies and Ronald Reagan (bow your head).

These problems kill a Christian love of poverty and zeal. They choke off a real life of faith. They create the shadows that hide institutional and personal sins. And they encourage a paralysis that can burrow itself into every heart and every layer of the Church, right down to individual Catholics in the pews. The result is that Philadelphia, like so much of the Church in the rest of our country, is now really mission territory–again; for the second time...  

First, religious freedom is a cornerstone of the American experience. This is so obvious that once upon a time, nobody needed to say it. But times have changed. So it’s worth recalling that Madison, Adams, Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, Jefferson–in fact, nearly all the American founders–saw religious faith as vital to the life of a free people. Liberty and happiness grow organically out of virtue. And virtue needs grounding in religious faith... 

We’re becoming a nation where, as Ross Douthat describes it, “a growing number [of us] are inventing [our] own versions of what Christianity means, abandoning the nuances of traditional theology in favor of religions that stroke [our] egos and indulge, or even celebrate, [our] own worst impulses.” And it’s happening at a time when the Church is compromised by her own leaders and people from within, and pushed to the margins or attacked by critics without... 

http://robertaconnor.blogspot.com/2012/07/full-text-chaput-fortnight-for-freedom.html

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Monsignor Lynn Begs for Mercy – Let the Bastard Rot in Prison! - Archdiocese of Philadelphia

Monsignor William Lynn is begging for mercy from the courts, to be released to house arrest until his official sentencing.  The Judge involved in the decision is not unsympathetic but she realizes what cowards and pussies the RCC clergy are who foster protection to pedophilia and its enablers in the ranks – bishops.  

They have a tendency to run off and hide in the Vatican and the Vatican officials will smack their cheeks and say something clever in Italian to the effect and waving their arms – “They are not here. We don’t know what you are talking about”.

Pa. monsignor seeks prison release, plans appeal

I dare say even to this day, Cardinal Law of Boston, if put into a position of unprotected contact with the public on Boston Commons would be probably be torn to shreds by a just and angry mob of Boston citizens in real time judgment of real time people of a bag of human shit protected by a Vatican Passport under protection of a German Pontiff who has buggered, directly and indirectly through official cover up, more than a few altar boys in his time.

 

I dare say Bill Lynn pulled a Nuremburg Defense in that he was “only following orders”.

Show Monsignor Lynn as much mercy as all the pedophile priests, bishops and cardinals in Philadelphia have shown all their sexual victims – which is NONE!

I’ll pray for your soul Bill but I think it a total waste of my time.

Have a nice day.  Have a nice life in prison. 

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Cedric Tornay - Vatican’s Lee Harvey Oswald? - Swiss Guards Murder Coverup?

Cedric Tornay - Murderer or Hierarchy Scapegoat?

Warning: This a not a conspiracy theory but it is, as I favor things in studying history, a timeline thing that may or may shed some light on a chain of events on that timeline, events that may or may not be as they officially seem. 

http://www.phillymag.com/articles/catholics_in_crisis_sex_and_deception_in_the_archdiocese_of_philadelphia/page6   Page 6-7

Yet there are whispers that even timid Justin Rigali may have gotten into a bit of hot water in Rome. He was working as secretary of the Congregation for Bishops, which is the number two position in the second-most important congregation in the Vatican; that congregation recommends candidates for bishop. 

The secretary almost always serves at least five years. But Rigali was moved out after four years and one month—that’s when he was sent to St. Louis, to oversee the archdiocese there. One theory has it that Rigali may have gotten too aggressive in pushing his choices for bishops—that he might have, in other words, crossed someone in the Vatican with enough power to undermine his career. 

There are also repeated, though unsubstantiated, rumors—ones cited by several Vatican or Rigali observers I spoke to—that there might have been another reason he left Rome. While at the Vatican, Rigali became chaplain for the Swiss Guards, the ex-military guys, young and unmarried, who provide security there. Uncharacteristic of a man dedicated to carefully building a Vatican career, Rigali befriended them, drank with them, and was involved with them to an extent that appeared unseemly to many. “Princes of the Church do not drink with the hired help,” one longtime Vatican observer says. (The archdiocese also said it will not dignify questions about Rigali and the Swiss Guards with a response.)

In 1999, in frail health and on his way home from Mexico, Pope John Paul II would make an unprecedented stop in St. Louis to see his long-time Vatican worker bee. It seemed to be a clear message: You are still one of us.

The cardinal, now 76, appears to want to get back to Rome—where his gray presence is suited for behind-the-scenes work. “He runs off to Rome every two weeks,” says a local priest who worked in the archdiocese’s office and got to know Rigali when both of them were at the Vatican two decades ago. “His work there is more important to him than here—it’s a terrible thing for the parishioners and clergy.” Many observers believe that the Vatican will soon find someone new to run the Philadelphia archdiocese. 

Clinton, JPII, Rigali, St. Louis January 1999

http://www.catholicsupply.com/pope/pope1.html

St. Louis' Archbishop Justin Rigali announced the visit (John Paul II) to the St. Louis media on Thursday, April 22, 1998.

Cedric Tornay, Gladys Meza (Estermann), Alois Estermann

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2057916/Pope-told-investigate-Vatican-murder-suicide-amid-claims-cover-up.html

A murder-suicide (May 4,1998) involving the Swiss Guard that rocked the Vatican in a mystery worthy of a Dan Brown thriller is back in the spotlight after Pope Benedict XVI was asked to intervene and reopen the case.

Swiss Guard Cedric Tornay, 23, shot dead the famous unit's commanding officer Alois Estermann, 43, and his wife Gladys Meza before turning the gun on himself - allegedly in a fit of rage after being overlooked for promotion.

Within hours of the triple deaths in 1998 - the first violent deaths on Vatican soil in decades - officials closed the case saying it was a simple case of corporal Tornay having gone mad after being given medication for a brain tumour.

…Mr Brossellett added that he had found 'inconsistencies' in the official autopsy report provided by the Vatican after they had a second one carried out in Lausanne when the body was returned to his native Switzerland.

…He said:'Our autopsy showed that Cedric Tornay was turned at the time of the shot but the Vatican one said he was on his knees and facing forward. So their reconstruction is wrong.'

Mr Brossellett also said that they had discovered the night of the murders a friend of Estermann's had called his apartment and had heard 'bangs and shouting' and that he thought four people were in the house at the time of the killings.

Mrs Baudat said:'As far as I am concerned the original investigation is full of lies and contradictions and was carried out at such a speed so as to hide the real truth. It was a murder carried out to get Estermann out of the way and then helpfully blame it on a dead madman.'

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(No doubt when Cardinal Law dropped the ball in Boston in 2002 and the bigger picture of institutional abuse and cover up became apparent nationwide, John Paul II was eager to appoint a loyal soldier, Rigali, who may have owed JPII a Vatican favor or two or three (?), to keep a lid on the Krol/Bevilacqua abuse cover-ups in Philly.  While John Paul II owed little to Bevilacqua, he owed his very papacy directly to John Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia.)

John Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia - King Maker

http://thisculturalchristian.blogspot.com/2011/04/john-paul-ii-king-maker-edward-piszek.html

Now we have the Monsignor Lynn Child Endangerment trial going on currently in Philadelphia. Etc. One thing follows another? 

So it goes.

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Catholic Cultural War Against the Vagina – 40 Years Later

(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.

http://thisculturalchristian.blogspot.com/2011/07/historic-beginnings-of-american-culture.html

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