Wrath of God - Charlestown SC - Great Fire of 1861 – Cathedral of St. John and St. Finbar

The picture above of the devastated Catholic cathedral of St. John and St. Finbar was taken in 1865.  Not much had been done in Charleston since the great fire of 1861 that destroyed one third of that city.  The fire spread due to the fact that most of its firemen had enlisted in the Confederate Army and only unskilled slaves were left to man the fire pumps and ladder companies in the city.  A touch of irony, in that the fanaticism of the Southern cause, whereby blind patriotism is not worth a pitcher of spit to throw on an out of control urban firestorm.

Because the pictures are dated in 1865, many times the destruction of the fire of 1861 which had not been restored by 1865 is mistaken by some historians and or southern propagandists, in that these photos are assumed to be the direct cause of Northern hostilities and bombardment etc.

While the Catholic cathedral of St. John and St. Finbar was not struck down by lightning from the Almighty, it did on April 14, 1861 celebrate a mass of thanksgiving, marking the surrender of Union Soldiers at Fort Sumter in the harbor, the official start of the Civil War, the mass followed by the singing of Te Deum, the national anthem of the RCC.

Patrick Neeson Lynch

Jefferson Davis’ Confederate Ambassador to the Vatican Bishop Patrick Lynch encountered a few obstacles in his career.  Pius IX refused to receive Lynch as Ambassador, since the Vatican had not given full diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy. The winds of defeat were in the air in 1864 and Pius did not want to be identified with a losing cause.  Lynch was received in private audience with His Holiness as a "bishop" only.

Bishop Lynch defended slavery and the Confederacy in the press north and south.  There were many quotations in the war of words between himself and northern abolitionists and northern bishops centered on the 1839 Papal Bull Supremo Apostolatus condemning slavery. Lynch and other slave owning bishops in the south interpreted the bull as merely condemning the slave trade and not the institution.

In Supremo Apostolatus

In Supremo Apostolatus is a papal bull issued by Pope Gregory XVI regarding the institution of slavery. Issued on December 3, 1839 as a result of a broad consultation among the College of Cardinals, the bull resoundingly denounces both the slave trade and the continuance of the institution of slavery.

Once in Europe, he traveled extensively to seek aid for the Confederacy and even got an audience with Napoleon III of France. Because the war was going so bad for the South in the final months of the American Civil War, few ships were available to run the Northern Blockade and fewer still that would transport someone traveling under Confederate credentials. Lynch got stuck in Europe for a long time.

Lynch tried to get a visa under President Andrew Johnson’s general amnesty following the war but Lynch was refused based on his history.  He made application to the American Secretary of State for an exemption and downplayed, lied about all his anti-abolition writings and instead emphasized his inflated role in the Church’s humanitarian aid to Northern POWs, hospital aid to battlefields etc. 

Once back in Charleston, Lynch and the South were penniless.  He went on a wide tour in Europe and in Northern states begging for money to rebuild the loss of many buildings, schools, convents, orphanages lost in the great fire of 1861 and through the war itself.

After the passing of the Archbishop Dagger John Hughes of New York City, a friend of abolition and Abraham Lincoln, Lynch who had kept up a courteous but frosty correspondence with Hughes during the war went there and did a complete PR makeover in NYC.  (You know how that goes, turning a sow’s ear into a silk purse even to this day. Wink. Nod. LOL).  

Lynch was now famous in the North as the Catholic humanitarian who traveling across enemy lines with diplomatic humanitarian papers bringing medical supplies, aid and succor to the Union soldiers, imprisoned down south. Just your typically dedicated politically active freedom loving, money raising American bishop. Whatever. The paperwork for Bishop Lynch's recently revived future sainthood is pending somewhere in committee at the USCCB as I understand things.

The Charleton cathedral eventually got rebuilt by the beginning of the twentieth century, a pale reflection of its past. The Irish Saint Finbar got dropped from the name to a simple St. John the Baptist. 

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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."

Vatican Plot to Kill Lincoln?

Robert Redford had done a great social service in shedding some fresh light on a forgotten darkened corner of American history in directing The Conspirator.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0968264/

The movie centers around the trial for treason/murder of civilians and or spies in times of war in a military tribunal.

The movie is a bit too thoughtful for the average dumbed down American but then again I could be wrong.  The young these days of course get their history from the cinema, and not from any boring dumbed down classroom and for that I am grateful that Mr. Redford has kept an ember of our history alive in this historic period piece to all that seek it.

This is perhaps both a movie review of sorts and a social commentary on the state of America then and now.

Lincoln was the bastard that suspended Habeas Corpus in time of war, same as what Obama did a week or two ago regarding the so-called PR War on Terror.  Of course John Wilkes Booth, an actor, killed Lincoln, made him a martyr, made him a saint, and a demi-god as only republics can make gods by giving him a Zeus like temple for worship and remembrance  on the Mall in Washington D.C..

Redford, with this script, touches very briefly on the fact that one of the main conspirators in the plot to kill Lincoln, John Surratt, was given sanctuary by the RC church and whisked off to Europe to serve in the Pope's personal bodyguard in the Vatican.

The Conspirator reveals a less than glorious defense of the secular plot to assassinate Lincoln by a nest of Confederate spies at Mrs. Mary Surratt's boarding house in Washington D.C..

If it was a new line of defense to tell the story, okay.  But as a  story line to say that Mary Surratt did not deserve to be the first woman officially hanged in the United States, not okay.  And of course there were those witch hangings in Salem Massachusetts around 1690 before there was a United States as an aside.

The line is that John Surratt, son of Mary Surratt, as a Confederate courier/spy had only plotted with John Wilkes Booth to kidnap Lincoln and not kill him is weak at best.  That Booth probably did at the last minute conceive of the assassination as revenge for the surrender of General Lee to General Grant is the probable truth and he, Booth quickly gathered his former kidnap conspirators to join him in this last minute enterprise.

The story does go against possible perjured testimony that saw John Surratt outside Ford's Theater on the night of the assassination. That Surratt was out of town, and already in Montreal on his way to Rome? That his mother, playing the Catholic martyr, did not push for her son to return. That she in fact was a scapegoat in a much larger unseen international political plot involving the U.S.A., the C.S.A and the Vatican.

Kevin Kline gives a very powerful performance as micro-manager Secretary of War Stanton who held the government together at a critical moment of potential national crisis.  That Stanton orchestrated the trial of civilians in a military court is the underlying message of Redford's film. That we must give heavy thought to the consequences of signing away Habeas Corpus as two former corporate lawyers Lincoln and Obama did.  To not surrender our rights so lightly or carelessly.

That Mary Surratt was taken from her house and imprisoned and tried on the direct orders of Stanton, I do not disagree with.  That a kangeroo like military court was convened to satisfy the blood lust of a nation confused by a confusing ending to a confusing corporate war between the northern industrialists and bankers against the southern plantation owners and their European/Vatican bankers.  That in reality if Stanton had not done what he did, a mob would probably have hung Marry Surratt from her own tree or the nearest city lamppost.  Enough said.

As for the Vatican conspiracy, no doubt Pius IX was glad to see Lincoln dead.  I don't see anything more than tea, sympathy and perhaps a little enabling gold from the Vatican to the South on any real plot to kill Lincoln.

My seeing the movie and subsequent research makes me think that perhaps some historian has already noted the timeline thing with a possible Jesuit worldwide spy network telling special friend and Catholic educated Jefferson Davis of Lincoln's intention to sign the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863.

That Jefferson's September 1862 Letter to Pius IX and Pius' unbelievably quick December 1862 reply to his dear friend and President of the Confederacy Davis was an attempt to offset Lincoln and his propaganda victory regarding the theoretical freeing of the slaves in the South by that executive proclamation.

Oh well.

I only recommend the movie if you are a heavy history buff.

Have a nice day.

John Surratt photo in his Vatican Uniform

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Edgardo Mortara – Pope Pius IX’s Pet Jew-ish Project

Il Casa Mortara - an Opera

Nowhere more bizarre in my studies of Constantine’s Catholic Cult Church (CCCC) is the story of Edgardo Mortara, an Italian Jew who accidentally got baptized as a baby by a superstitious Catholic servant and who got seized as Pius IX’s personal property and personal project for salvation.  

It also was a way to get close enough to a real live (former) Jew to measure and probe and plot future strategy in the declared and or implied mission statement = conquest of the world by the Vatican Monarchy.

Pius IX is the pope BTW that personally hacked off all the penises of the ancient Greek and Roman statues in the Vatican Museum with a hammer and had them replaced with fig leafs.  I haven’t yet been able to research it, but Pius IX probably was the first guy to take credit for and or the invention of fig leafs on statues along with Infallibility (I am God on Earth and will be worshipped as such) and buying millions in Vatican gold of Confederate States of America Bonds, still listed on the Vatican Bank's balance sheet as assets, to be cashed in when that Confederacy is one day resurrected etc. (long term planning)

BTW, Pius IX, the model pope to be emulated, is Blessed and soon to be a Saint. LOL (but sadly true). You would think that sane men would prefer to forget this recent unpleasantness on the history timeline by forgetting this crazy uncle in the attic pope.  But oh no. Crazy uncle Giovanni's business model and personal style lends credence (the only credence) to the ongoing campaign for the sainthood of Eugenio Pacelli - Hitler's pet pope.

Edgardo did the full Catholic Monty, denied his officially God given sexuality, endured decades of brainwashing, memorized the Council of Trent catechism, the real Catholic bible/Book of Mormon, and became a Constantine Church Priest. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgardo_Mortara

http://www.amazon.com/Kidnapping-Edgardo-Mortara-David-Kertzer/product-reviews/0679768173

“Ricardo Mortara, his brother, visits later on to ask Edgardo to return to his father’s deathbed and recite the Kaddish thereby giving comfort to his ailing mother. He turns his back on his blood relations and refuses. Ricardo coldly reminds him that the people who surround him will remind him he is a Jew. Fast forward to 1940, when Edgardo at 89 years old is on his own deathbed having visions of his long-deceased mother. As he lies dying, Nazi soldiers burst in with papers proving his Jewish roots. Curtain.”

Read more: http://blogcritics.org/culture/article/opera-review-nyc-il-caso-mortara/#ixzz1cvKn1zvU

Honestly, you just can’t make this insane bullshit up.
 

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Happy Belated Birthday Jefferson Davis

I missed it.  Jefferson Davis’ birthday.  Yesterday?

Yesterday was an excuse for lazy state workers in Alabama and Florida to cheat taxpayers out of a day’s work in favor of a fake Monday, three day weekend holiday. 

He was actually born on June 3 which was Friday.  Tennessee has its official state holiday on June 3 and Mississippi celebrates Jeff’s birthday on the last Monday of May – Last Monday of May?  Memorial Day?  I thought Memorial Day was for all the dead of the Civil War.  And don’t give me the revisionist title “war between the states” bullshit. 

I have stopped trying to research this fake messiah birthday item state by state in the old southern states of the Confederacy.  Why bother?

I, did while researching, run into a blatant lie in of all places a government web site on the U.S. Senate.

January 21, 1861 Jefferson Davis' Farewell

“Tall, slender, and gaunt at the age of 52, Davis had been confined to his bed for more than a week….”

Tall?  Tall?  He was a shrimp! (Sorry)

Forty years ago I saw the “dress” he was captured in, in a display case at the Civil War Museum in Philadelphia.  It was not a dress but a silk paisley dressing gown.  How metrosexual for the times guys!  Did I mention how small this article of clothing was?  Like when I first saw it.  I thought it was for a child, the gown was so petite.

 (click on photo to enlarge image)

I researched it.  He was five foot four inches tall (162 cm).  I guess he was tall in the Senate and compared to the other senators?  Perhaps if he were alive today, Jeff would be driving or have one of his slaves driving him in a Hummer to offset psychological physical short comings if you know what I mean etc.

As I have stated before in this or some other blog, Jefferson Davis, as one time Secretary of War had the blueprints and plans for a southern route of a national transcontinental railroad, the projected moon shot space project of its day, to be financed by the federal government.

The lawyer for the northern railroads and the northern railroad transcontinental route lobby groups in the form of Abraham Lincoln signaled the end of the expansion of slavery on the continent.  Davis’ plans to build the southern route with cheap slave labor would have given him a shot at becoming the nation’s first billionaire.

 

How many dead darkies per mile would it have taken to make Jeff and his cronies’ multi multi millionaires building this dream of a southern railroad cash cow to the Pacific? Who would care?

Strange thing is that most “Christians” don’t really know their neighbors let alone love them as commanded by one long forgotten mystic and seer. 

Odd thing was that Jeff was educated in a Catholic school along the way, even though not catholic.  Which is why I think Pope Pius IX had such a fondness for Jeff, and his brave stance defending the honorable age old institution of slavery. Whatever.

With the Gadsden Purchase in hand for a southern railroad Pacific route, the business men of the old south went their way into their brave new world of the Confederacy. With lots and lots of nut cases running around the planet like pro-slavery southern freebooter William Walker taking over countries like Nicaragua, funded by Vanderbilt types, the future seemed bright to fuel the future slave republics of Mexico and Central America in league with the Confederacy.

All Jeff Davis had to do was build the south’s railroad to the Pacific Ocean to be king of the world. 

I am not exaggerating these facts.  Greedy men with ego problems like Jeff Davis have and continue to plague and ruin the world to this day for the rest of humanity, slave or not. 

If you want to have cake with slave master dictators in the old south y’all, go right ahead.  Enjoy.

Have a nice day.

Religious Fright! - Fear of Religion

Rather than move the world forward in a positive manner, many aspects of religion no matter how “peaceful” your one true religion is, many aspects of religion are a redundancy decades or centurties after secular institutions began to function in the place of ancient religious insitutions such as courts, hospitals, universities and civil government.

Indeed, I think that religion here in the west is just hanging around after it has been become obsolete on the secular civil level. As such what good is it except to clutter those secular institutions with superstition and useless remembrances of the past.

The past is the past. The Modern World is now. A Post-Modern world is tomorrow. There seems to be a lot dead weight regarding religion trying to drag us away from modernity.

That dragging people into a mindless past with Sharia Laws, Islamic or Christian, is anarchy – trying to destroy the secular real, functioning, world around us.

In the news I see sad things in that seven people were mowed down in gun fire at a Coptic Christian Christmas Mass celebration in Egypt. Fully 10% of Egypt’s 80 old million souls are Coptic Christian which these days comes close to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in their beliefs.

There are also fire bombings at Christian churches in Malaysia, an Islamic Country, where a court ruling said that it was legal for Christians, a minority, to use the word Allah as the word for their G-d in Christendom. Semantics. Bloodshed. Misunderstanding.

I am looking briefly at the concept of post modern Christianity with various mainstream and evangelical fundamentalist branches of the Christ tree trying to rethink and retool not to a modern world – but a post modern world – whatever that means. The here and now is modern enough for me.

I will say that dialogue if it exists at the high CEO level of church entities doesn’t talk to the little people on the ground on how to rethink and retool- sounds like I am talking automobiles in Detroit – more so than churches – Religion is like General Motors – only the empty factories give evidence of a once great human enterprise. Empty churches – empties factories – Obsolete thinking! Gross mismanagement of purpose.

The RC church, the so-called power house of Christian entities that should be setting the pace on post modernism, if there is such a thing, is still wallowing in the 32 years of Vatican mismanagement. Still languishing in the disaster reign of Pius IX in the nineteenth century who started the war on modernism (like a similar war on terror – it will never end).

In fact, Vatican II and all its negative fallout to this day forty odd years later is partially a result of trying to undo 32 years of RC/Christian gross mismanagement of humanity and its spirituality. The Vatican likes electricity and flush toilets (very modern things) but everything else that is not medieval is Verboten.

Indeed, Benedict’s attack on Islam, a new holy war, his infamously incompetent and tactless reference to Islam in the 14th century in his Regensburg Lecture in September 2006 is something mainstream Christianity will have to deal with in terms of collateral damages for decades and perhaps centuries to come. Perhaps bloodshed in the news today in Egypt and Malaysia has its direct roots in that very same speech.

While one part of Christianity wants to address interfaith issues and improve the perception of Jesus’ message to the ages, bumbling hack Vatican bureaucrats are still debating the bloody Crusades!

There is a point in time long ago where the secular world took over most institutions in the West. Rather than give the devil his due, I would say that most of Christianity lives in the delusion of the past before street lights, electricity, running water, penicillin, birth control and all those other truly evil things of a modern world.

Religion, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism Etc. must look at reality first in the present and assess where they have been or where they are going. Otherwise, the coming rapture happens to them all - as they get whisked away into obscurity and history. Good riddance.

The Coptic Christian killings above is indicative of the dysfunctionalism of Islam in Egypt. Before Obama’s visit to Cairo earlier this year, the hack cronies of the Government decided that the pigs being raised by Christians in Cairo would cause a national swine flu epidemic even though there was little or no scientific data to support such a slap in the face of the Coptic minority population which eats pork.

The pigs were confiscated and destroyed. Compensation from the Government did not materialize. What would you expect – Justice?

The Moral of the story of Egyptian Muslims harassing Coptic Christians in Cairo - The pigs used to eat the garbage in the streets. The pigs are gone. Now all of Cairo smells of rotting garbage. If you want to be post-modern and or even modern world, start a secular garbage collection bureaucracy before you impose your stinking religious prejudices on the entire world. Think first – cause and effect.

The west and the Christians can learn from the lack of tolerance to others in the smug present world moving into a future world. That world will likely see the decline and disappearance of all religion because the guy in the back end of the Donkey costume does not know how to signal or cooperate with the other guy in front end of the suit. Or vice versa.

We are all interdependent in this world -“joined at the hip”- if it takes a hundred years to start up an interfaith dialogue, guess what, the secular will survive while your religious world crumbles and disappears.

Religions will come and go in the post-modern secular world. Whether there will be any religions left in that post-modern world? Well - one third of the passengers of the Titanic did after all make it all the way to New York.

In the meantime, garbage will continue to be picked up in a timely secular fashion.

Reality is real. Religion frightens me.

No shortage of priests - just penises

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One of the first lines of the standard boiler plate news releases in these R.C. dioceses that are closing churches is that there is a “shortage of priests”.

There are appeals for priests to be allowed to marry as an incentive to recruit a few more good men into the priesthood. Yeah right. Good luck on that point.

There is no shortage of priests, there only is a shortage of penises. There are more than enough women who want to be priests. The only problem is that these women do not have a penis. There are some programs on BBC America following transsexuals and or transgender human beings around and apparently with plastic surgery they can sculpt one of those pingo things onto a female body.

Can you hear the little Deustche boy in the Vatican saying that a phony pingo is not good enough, you have to born that way? Honestly you can’t please some of these bureaucrats.

Before you think that my ranting and raving is the sign of a bona fide lunatic (and it might be), I would like to interject some historical thought about where we are today and where we were one hundred and forty years ago.

The longest serving pope, Pius IX, hung on, I don’t know if served is an appropriate word, from 1846 t0 1878. Before I get to my timeline, this pope invented infallibility and no meat on Friday at the Vatican I council that started in 1868 and broke up because of invading armies into Rome.

(Invading armies – the Italians taking back their homeland, their property, from the papacy.)

That Mess of a Council was never formally closed until the beginning of Vatican II in 1960 – a second disaster to follow the first.

I look at this historic timeline thingy and think about where the United States was one hundred and forty years ago in 1868. The USA was picking itself out of a ditch and recovering from a really big Civil War that was fought to free black men and women. You glide to the present. One of the likely candidates of one of the two political parties in the presidential election is black, African-American, or whatever term is PC these days.

Same timeline, Pius IX is staying up nights dreaming of ways to prove that he is the greatest thing since sliced bread at Vatican I. (Sorry, sliced bread came later.)

Well anyway in 1868 is about the time that Pius IX sends personal autographed photos to two civil war vets Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee.

Pope Pius IX was disappointed that his side, the Confederate States of America, lost their bid to break away from the American union and perpetuate slavery forever. Pius IX was the only crowned head of Europe to politically recognize the Confederacy.

America has come from civil war to civil rights and may even have an African-American president in the near future.

The Vatican still clings to infallibility, the papal states, and bitter disappointment that slavery could not be perpetuated to protect its investment in cotton in the southern American states.

Things change. The world changes. But the misogyny, hatred of women, practiced by the V.C.S., goes on and on and on. And worse than that, the sheep keep taking the incredible mismanagement of church property and spiritual property by these bum bishops in America. Bureaucrats!

Of course, the Vatican these days does not openly admit anything that is not PC except that women don’t have what it takes to become a priest (and that is a penis).

Sorry girls. You know I have read the first five books of the Greek Testament, The Christain Torah, the four Gospels and Acts of the Apostles. I do not see anywhere in print that specifically says that “women cannot be priests” but then again I don’t think the term or the function of priesthood had got officially invented yet. That had to wait for General Constantine and his church as opposed to the Christian Church founded by Jesus of Nazareth, Holy land, not Nazareth, Pa...

So when I read about massive church closings in the Allentown diocese and Schenectady and elsewhere I have only two things to say to the R.C. bureaucrats.

One is that there is no shortage of creatures with souls, women, willing to become priests.

Two, in case you are hiding any assets, and money laundering, which is illegal, if you send ten million to the Vatican in cash, make sure that the bearer bonds that come back to you are not marked “Confederate States of America”.
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