New Bronze Age - Twentieth Century - Thatcher / Wojtyla / Reagan

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Pope Francis - Inconvenience of the Resurrection of that nasty Liberation Theology stuff thrown over the cliff by Reagan, Thatcher and Wojtyla - History of Silence

An old fashioned style do nothing Holy Card Pope?

In the back of the Attention Deficit brain of the dumbed down since Reagan mindset, there lies that CIA secret war on Terror (of Terror?) in Central and South America that never officially took place (Iran Contra – Wink Nod) that us proud fair-minded when it comes to rich white heterosexual people only, freedom luvin Americans are proud of when we see the flag and play the national anthem kind of thing.

And then there is that nasty gritty Allende/Kissinger Junta Coup de Tat Chile Sauce stuff that has to get reduced to ten second sound bites and spoon fed to us by Brian Williams on NBC nightly national news every night.

Well they elected a genuine Argentine as pope, but that’s is okay. His dad and granddad were born in Italy, (he is white, sort of, for an Italian, Wink Nod). 

And the RC church is now goin to recruit all them lost millions of sheep of South American Pentecostals back from all that Pentecostal demon stuff once Pope Francis gets up a head of steam into his estimated five to six year reign of power to turn around the Cold Gray Lady of the Vatican and it's bureaucratic Gay Porn loving bureaucracy, around to the concept that Jesus loved the po' folks or at least tried to put up with their smelly po' folks way of doing things, "takers" on welfare kind of thing and all that.

And there are those who say that Cardinal Bergoglio actually saved some people from the Gestapo Junta and he deserves to be made a saint too like Saint Pius XII that saved all them Jew folks in WWII.

And then again there is reality.

http://consortiumnews.com/2013/03/19/liberation-theology-haunts-pope-francis/

Blase Bonpane, who served as a Maryknoll father in Guatemala until he was expelled by the right-wing military in 1967, was among the priests and nuns who believed in the teachings of liberation theology, which held that the Catholic Church must address the plight and marginalization of the poor. 

 Bonpane, now director of the Office of the Americas and host of “World Focus” on Pacifica Radio, expressed grave concerns about the silence of the new Pope Francis, who as Father Jorge Mario Bergoglio did not speak out publicly against the Argentine junta as it conducted a “dirty war” killing some 30,000 people, including 150 Catholic priests. Bonpane was interviewed by Dennis J. Bernstein.

DB: Talk to us about the new pope Francis, who has been portrayed widely as a pope of the people, who rides the bus, love sports and has a lot of sympathy for the poor How would you describe his background and his relationship, if any, to the Argentine “dirty wars.”

 BB: I would say that he is a populist conservative. But we have a problem that is structural within the church, and that is that the church has generally been subsidiary to the state and has generally gone along with the state in its history since the Council of Nicea in 325 AD.

 There seems to be no exception in Argentina where most of the reports we received during the “dirty wars” were of the clerics not speaking out as they should have. And many of them opposing individual priests that were liberation theologians. In certain cases this led to the arrest of priests, such as Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalic who were kidnapped and practically killed by the Junta.

 Afterward, Orlando Yorio spoke about the situation of surviving months of imprisonment. He felt it was because the church had said he was a liberation theologian and they didn’t want to approve of him and his work in the slums of Buenos Aires. So yes, there are many accusations, most of them in the book The Silence, which refers to just that, the fact that silence is complicity and in some cases there is direct participation of clerics together with the junta.

[Junta leader Jorge Rafael] Videla could go to holy communion anytime and would be well received by the higher church in Argentina. This is tragic. But look at the situation in the U.S. Are our bishops speaking out against Guantanamo and that people are being held there? Are they speaking out on behalf of Bradley Manning? No. There’s a silence here as well.

 There is a history of silence. The Church supported Franco in Spain. We have the terrible situation with [Pope] Pius XII and his relationship to the Germans in the period of the Third Reich. It’s not unusual. It’s been a subservient church in many ways. The new pope has not been comfortable with liberation theology. It is possible to speak on behalf of the poor without supporting the real fundamental changes that are present with liberation theology.

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Polish Joke - John Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia

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

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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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