St. Mary’s School in Platteville Wisconsin – a Valuable Lesson in Humility?

Fr. John del Priore

Fr. Faustino Ruiz

                                                 

You can sometimes judge a story by the way the local press deals with a story as in the case of St. Mary’s School in Platteville Wisconsin which I believe is now closed.  I say the local press has not gone much beyond the handed out press releases or public letters of Bishop Morlino of Madison Wisconsin, Paul Ryan’s local bishop, because there are no good visuals or images of St. Mary’s available on the Internet.

The skinny and or gossip is that Bishop Morlino imported some nice looking white boy priests from Spain, some sort of Jesuits to man the factory floor, mass factories in his diocese.  Looking at a diocese site there they actually have pictures of the clergy there and the parish listing and a limited work history.  Kind of like an Internet dating or religious meat rack.  I guess you want to see what color the priest is in the local Catholic church before you set foot in.  Want you to feel all comfortable in your warm comfort zones and prejudices. 

Well the skinny on the skinny of that is that I only count one or two dark faces and the rest of the priests of Madison County Diocese are white even if they have Hispanic and or Spanish sounding names.  It’s the visual that Madison Avenue has us trained on these past decades.

I have read about South Asian Priests and African Priests being imported to places like the Allentown diocese. I have to wonder if the mail order catalogues the bishops get their priests overseas from have their pictures posted or maybe the importation fees listed next to the pictures is a more important consideration, the money that is and not the look, on that in every diocese devoid of native son priests.

That is why celibacy is not an issue with the locals RC bishops. Priests are an interchangeable part even if you can’t decipher their fractured English or strange outlooks on life based on their native cultures. Celibacy is not an issue.  If Americans don’t want to be priests, plenty of starving third world types to fill in the personnel gaps.

With St. Mary’s they say that the imported priests would have none of the altar girls in the sanctuary thing. The cultural preferences or prejudices of the Spanish culture get put under labels or categories like Conservative Catholics? Etc.

The people in the pews rebelled and voted with their pocket books, even signed a petition to the bishop and the Bishop’s response was a typical these days in America – Fuck You.

The dissenters at St. Mary’s get threatened with excommunication or something close to it – “interdict” – and Paul Ryan gets a free pass on his temporary masturbation love, flirtation with Ayn Rand atheism.

No money. They close the school. The respect the landlord, the bishop, the guy with the deed gets goes a lot to do with the bishop’s generosity in extending financial help to keep a school open. 

No respect, no kissing of Morlino’s stinky toes and the local Catholics in Platteville Wisconsin are taught a valuable lesson about Christ – the golden rule – they that have the gold make the rules. 

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St. Mary's Catholic School Platteville Wisconsin

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Spanish Miners Protest Austerity Cuts - Madrid

Babies as a Commodity for Cash in the Catholic Church – Videla sentenced in Babies for Crime and Profit Scheme

The aging ex-Argentine dictator gets yet another sentence of 50 years added to his imprisonment in a baby stealing ring among his cadre of military thugs.  An estimated 13,000 pregnant prisoners of Argentina’s “dirty war” disappeared.  It is now thought that those women were executed once they gave profit to a profitable commodity like a new born baby.


Ex-Argentine dictators Videla, Bignone convicted of having babies stolen from slain dissidents

The baby thefts set Argentina’s 1976-1983 regime apart from all the other juntas that ruled in Latin America at the time. Videla other military and police officials were determined to remove any trace of the armed leftist guerrilla movement they said threatened the country’s future.The “dirty war” eventually claimed 13,000 victims according to official records. Many were pregnant women who were “disappeared” shortly after giving birth in clandestine maternity wards. 

Videla denied in his testimony that there was any systematic plan to remove the babies, and said prisoners used their unborn children as “human shields” in their fight against the state.

My mind is thinking how the Media, the MSM reports these facts and then sort of drops them off at a dead end street or parks them in a 1960s VW van on some cul-de-sak somewhere in the hopes that the public does not make any connections, speculations on where 13,000 babies disappeared to in the middle of a military junta regime in Argentina.


I prefer to follow timelines.  I see that the theft of children in Argentina took place within a similar timeline when Catholic Hospitals in Spain sold 300,000 babies stolen from their mothers in the 1960-1986 timeframe as quoted in the press.


The time frame in Argentina is 1976-1983 with the 13,000 number.  Did the dictator’s commanders and soldiers just post index cards on barracks bulletin boards, “Wanted: Baby for a Childless Military Family”?


Did the military ratline reach back to the remnants of Franco’s Spain to help out or was the business mechanism already in place in Argentina for the sale and placement of babies as in the Catholic Hospital System in Argentina?


Makes you wonder where Videla’s conviction the other day could lead if we had real journalists left to lead on such a story.


I am reminded of all this of late American religious liberty and religious freedom talk in this election year. It starts back earlier than the present USCCB PR campaign of “religious liberty”.  I think having to do with losing the very lucrative baby adoption process that Bishops in Illinois had to give up because of discrimination against Homosexual/Gay Couples who want to adopt children, a civil right.


That Catholic Charities does not start at home but at the bank vault it would seem and the well is drying up for many bishops there who can no longer exclude gays from the adoption economic equation of Catholic Charities subsidized by Uncle Sugar (Fed Gov).


Whatever


To refresh your memory:

300,000 babies stolen from their parents (Spain)

And the American Skinny on the Illinois Adoption Bottom Line:

Bishops Say Rules on Gay Parents Limit Freedom of Religion

In Illinois, Catholic Charities in five of the six state dioceses had grown dependent on foster care contracts, receiving 60 percent to 92 percent of their revenues from the state, according to affidavits by the charities’ directors. (Catholic Charities in the Archdiocese of Chicago pulled out of foster care services in 2007 because of problems with its insurance provider.)

When the contracts came up for renewal in June, the state attorney general, along with the legal staff in the governor’s office and the Department of Children and Family Services, decided that the religious providers on state contracts would no longer be able to reject same-sex couples, said Kendall Marlowe, a spokesman for the department.

The Catholic providers offered to refer same-sex couples to other agencies (as they had been doing for unmarried couples), but that was not acceptable to the state, Mr. Marlowe said. “Separate but equal was not a sufficient solution on other civil rights issues in the past either,” he said.

Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Rockford decided at that point to get out of the foster care business. But the bishops in Springfield, Peoria, Joliet and Belleville decided to fight, filing a lawsuit against the state. (NYT 12-28-11)

Of course all this present article, of making possible connections along a time line came together for me while looking up the Argentine Papal Nuncio during the Videla Regime in Argentina in the person of Cardinal Pio Laghi.

From left to right, Cardinal Paolo Bertoli, dictator Jorge Rafael Videla and Pio Laghi


Pio Laghi

Laghi was named Nuncio to Argentina on 27 April 1974. His six years in Argentina coincided with the worst excesses of the military dictatorship in what was known as the dirty war. Many in Argentina believe that the church hierarchy supported the generals in their misrule, and that Laghi - who played tennis regularly with one of the leaders of the junta, Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera - turned a blind eye to the murder and disappearances of thousands. "Perhaps I wasn't a hero", Laghi later said of his time in Buenos Aires, "but I was no accomplice".^{[citation needed]}The debate that his conduct generated was enough, however, to ruin any chance he ever had of becoming pope.^{[citation needed]} 

Pope John Paul II transferred him as Apostolic Delegate (10 December 1980) and later (26 March 1984) Pro-Nuncio to the United States, where he was entrusted with emplacing conservatives in key positions, such as Bernard Francis Law in Boston and John Joseph O'Connor in New York.

Pio Laghi was BTW Primary Consecrator to the level of Bishop in Rapid City South Dakota of – Charles Chaput – in his salad days out west being groomed no doubt for speeches on “religious liberty” just like the one he delivered as key note speaker in Washington DC on July 4 as culmination of the USCCB’s attack on the Department of Health and Human Services, the guys who cut the checks for “Catholic Charities”.

Golden RULE = Their Gold.  Their Rules (HHS).

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Supreme Knight Carl A. Anderson – Ronald Reagan’s Go-To Guy on Catholics, Abortion, Contraception, AIDS, Catholic SCOTUS Nominees

I don’t hear Supreme Chaplain of the Knights of Columbus Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore complaining about Obama's war on religious freedom regarding the very private Catholic practices of Monsignor Lynn of Philadelphia or Coach Jerry Sandusky, a Knights of Columbus Awardee, of Penn State.  

No doubt the secular end of reality has beaten poor Bill Lori down to a frazzle. But luckily he has a friend not in Jesus but in Supreme Knight Carl A. Anderson of the Knights of Columbus Catholic charity cult.

Doing some reading, I have found on the Ronald Reagan Library site a list of files in the Carl Anderson section of that archive.

Carl A. Anderson is named in that site as Ronny Reagan’s go to man on all things Catholic. Talk about the pope in the basement of the White House thing with the John Kennedy Presidential Campaign, the church did not get the pope in the White House but it did get –

ANDERSON, CARL: Files, 1985-1987Office of Public Liaison (Domestic Policy, Catholics, Family Issues)  

http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/textual/smof/andersca.htm

Carl started out life as working as “an assistant to John Svahn, Assistant to the President for Policy Development (OPD). The Reagan Library does not currently have a Carl Anderson collection for his time in OPD.” 

The lack of files is explained away as the files moved over in his promotion to Office of Public Liaison (Catholics Etc.) or he didn’t do any paperwork in the brief stint under John Svahan. (how do you spell paper shredder?)

John Svahan, by the way, has since moved on to senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank founded by two uber-catholics following the fallout of the Nixon Watergate scandal.

Co-founder of the Heritage Foundation is Edwin Feulner, whose pet project outside of American politics is the Fundacion Burke http://www.fundacionburke.org/actividades/ , a political education organization for young Spanish men to learn Conservative values and even get into Internship programs in conservative think tanks stateside in the United States. 

Getting back to Supreme Knight Carl Anderson, some of his Reagan White House files are available in the Reagan archive. Half of about a dozen and half “Abortion” files are available, the rest are probably not imaged and would probably only be available through a Freedom of Information request.

All four files on AIDS are listed as available.

The sixteen files on Reagan Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork remain sealed.

In fact, Carl Anderson’s usefulness or worn out welcome at the White House came almost exactly with the Senate shooting down Bork’s nomination in October 1987.  No doubt sneaking Opus Dei parishioner Anton Scalia into the Supreme Court in 1986 was too much of a lucky thing that Reagan / Anderson and Company had to push the limits of credulity, greed, Senate gullibility, so much so that Teddy Kennedy, who was not always a stupid man, had to put the full force of his political prestige against the Robert Bork appointment.

Carl went onto a decade of grand knight in charge of the Washington D.C. Knights jurisdiction before becoming Supreme Knight in 2000 just in time for George W. Bush’s election and “Faith Based Initiative” handouts to the Catholic Bishops among other dying member base religious organizations.

One other Supreme Knight laurel not mentioned in Wikipedia is as Vice President and Board Member of the money pit appendage of Catholic University, the shadowy John Paul II Institute (front for the CIA?/Opus Dei/Legion of Christ), an organization that seems to be a clearing house for Spanish speaking priests that need some American language, political orientation, PR polish before being put into lower echelons of future power in Catholic Church Institutions such as Seminaries, Schools, Universities in the decades to come.  I think Archbishop Chaput is someone, one of several, now in that process of recycling Legion of Christ members into future positions of American Catholic power. It is a big job. So many loyal priests and so little time to place them strategically elsewhere. 

Have a nice day.

Charles Chaput – I love FOX NEWS and Franco too?

Culture warrior Charles Chaput got into full Burkite (Ray Burke) cult propaganda mood and attacked the Media at the recent World Youth Day in Madrid – namely CNN, MSNBC and The New York Times as being “untrustworthy” in reporting religious stories.  (They are not as pure as FOX NEWS which is fair and balanced towards Tea-Vangelism and Fascism???)

God, what a hypocrite!  The Media gave the buggers in that church a free, don’t report it in the press, pass for decades until the media changed and it was no longer as simple as in the past to threaten to pull advertising from the press by businesses owned by Catholics, like in the long standing silence of the NYT and Cardinal Spellman’s openly gay life style and non-stop party with all the chorus boys on Broadway.  Christ, we heard about that all the way in Philly about Franny boy without any newspapers reporting it.

Charlie boy better get his attitude in check and his history facts in order before he takes over in the most historic city in the U.S., Philadelphia.

It is a good thing the cathedral there is built like a fortress, no windows on ground level and parapets along the roof to reflect the age in which it was built in the period of the “Know-Nothing” politics and riots of the 1840s.

I doubt that the builders ever imagined that somebody as hateful and ignorant as Archbishop Chaput would be defending the fort and defending Medieval superstition and ignorance over knowledge and tolerance in the twenty first century.

World Youth Day and Religious Freedom

I want to start by sharing a story. 

Once upon a time, a student at one of the world’s oldest universities took a break from her studies to visit the Catholic chapel on campus. As she sat there in silence—praying for a sick relative or trying to settle her nerves before a test—the chapel suddenly filled with noise. A mob of about seventy fellow students charged in chanting anti-Christian slogans. They shouted obscenities against the Church and insults about the Pope.

Two females in the mob climbed on top of the altar. Then, according to the student who was trying to pray, the women stripped off their shirts and boasted about their homosexual tendencies. The young Catholic student, and several others, left the chapel in fear.

People tend to think of Spain as a Catholic country. But this example of anti-Catholic bigotry happened right here, in this beautiful city, at the Complutense University of Madrid. And it didn’t happen in the 1930s, or even in the 1960s. It happened earlier this year—in March 2011. So today is a good time to talk about religious freedom. And Madrid is a good place to do it.

Once upon a time Spain had free elections and the right wing did not like freedom so they took power and ignited the Spanish Civil War to preserve the wealthy status quo and the church.  Half a million people died.  Small price to pay for "religious freedom" and fascist dictatorship bringing stability to the nation for another forty years. 

Complutense University in Madrid was on the front line of fighting for much of that civil war. In the end the Fascists under Franco and the Catholic Church won.  Priests were put back on the state payroll. Ain't nothing as sweet as Franco style, state sponsored, corporate welfare. 

On the devastated land in the middle of campus, Franco did some rebuilding…


Complutense University of Madrid

… It was eventually decided, however, that the area should be restored and rehabilitated as a symbol of the new regime, albeit with some alterations - chief amongst them the new plans for a monumental main building with a Sistine Chapel-type interior, and a large church. While those two particular plans never came to fruition, the direct involvement of Franco in the rebuilding of the University meant that, though the original plans were largely followed, chapels were now incorporated into each of the buildings. Today, this creates a curiously contradictory situation, whereby one has certain buildings, such as the School of Philosophy, with streamlined architecture that epitomizes the liberal spirit of the 1920s and borrows heavily from Weimar Germany, and yet features a first-floor chapel which, fitted into a highly art-deco setting, seems implausible as a place of serious spiritual reflection.

Franco's influence on-campus was not limited to the imposition of his Catholic ideals. As a result of the war, as could be expected, the staff was purged of all liberals and Republican sympathizers, and replaced with members of the Falangist movement. What's more, the University charters were altered to compel all students to reside either in government-sanctioned dormitories or personal family homes. The dormitories staffed with members of the falangist movement, the regime aspired to be able to oversee all aspects of the student's lives, hoping to mold them into devotees of the "nationalist movement".

If a bunch of secular students in a supposedly secular university want to protest injustices generated by the RC church in one of General Franco’s personally ordered five state chapels on campus, built on blood soaked land,  maybe these symbols of fascism are a good place to start.

Charles talks about “Religious Freedom” but it always seems to come down to being free to impose Catholic Sharia Law aka Humanae Vitae etc. on the subjugated population.  Can’t you keep your members in line?  Can’t they refuse to have an abortion without outlawing abortion for everybody else on the planet – oh fan of Franco?

Was it disrespectful what these protestors did in this state chapel?  Yes.

Anti-Christian?  Absolutely not!     


(The protest in one of Franco's Blood Chapels, Capillas de Sangre, "Stasi" HQ on campus was the result of a recent attack on students and faculty on campus by ultra-catholic thugs who seem to have disappeared into the woodwork afterwards.  The university and the civil authorities did not investigate or seem to care.  They, the civil authorities, pressed charges against four protesters for violation of sacred territory, a strange concept to me in America where secular universities are just that and not privileged remnants of dictator regimes and their largess to the RC church.)

But Charles seems more concerned with tits being exposed in public and lesbians’ natural right to exist than he is really concerned with just another chapel, paid for by the state.  If the RC church had to pay rent and electricity on campus, that space would have been turned in a Starbucks a long time ago.

Philadelphia is a Quaker city and can remember when one of a few legal  Roman catholic churches in the whole English speaking world existed down a dark alley in the colonial town and only on the say so of the Quaker founders and by their charter and mega capacity of tolerance.

Archbishop Chaput, you are coming to Philadelphia with the wrong mindset and attitude.  That your worldview is 1957 Kansas when you entered the junior seminary at age 13 is perhaps not a worldview needed in this desperately needing humanity over dogma global culture.

I give you eighteen months before you become such an embarrassment to even the Vatican with your unproductive zeal and empty sound bites (tinkling cymbal, sounding brass) that they are forced to hand out a "promotion" to Rome and hide you appoint you as Cardinal Burke’s assistant.

Have a nice day.