"Baron" Charles Baker de Bowery – Funeral Service – St. Leo’s Mortuary Chapel NYC – 16 January 1904

Image Source: King’s Notable New Yorkers 1896-1899

 (original copyright expired)

Source: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1904-01-17/ed-1/seq-10/#

And the “Baron” had a befitting burial.

Entrance Green-Wood Cemetery Brooklyn

Find a Grave:

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSmcid=48425874&GRid=129965779&

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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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Thatcher – Last of the Cold War Triumvirate Antichrist Dies - Eulogy

Cold War Warriors - Triumvirate - Antichrist?
-Thatcher - Reagan - Wojtyla

It sounds a bit ridiculous. But after we defeated evil in World War II, we adapted the tactics of our enemies to fight our enemies.  

This of course has spiraled in seventy odd years to corporate wars paid for by U.S. Taxpayers and torture and suspension of habeas corpus in secret oversea dungeons like Guantanamo.

One has to wonder if Hitler and or the Soviet Union were Satan, then what equal force of evil was needed to defeat them. In the 1980’s I think of no other PR force in the media as the Three Part Antichrist of Reagan, Thatcher and Wojtyla to defeat the thought that people and the production of the people belongs to the people if only in theory and not practice.

Something about deficit spending on the military, secret Contra wars against peasants in Central and South America, along with the breaking of unions, workers' rights, and the obliterating of livelihoods of workers in the north of England at the expense of enriching the wealthy in London and we end up with the Vatican Bank as the money launderer of western empire and ambitions and the plight of buggered children ignored by a Moral in Mask Only papacy on marionette strings pulled by the CIA as three components of evil that live on to this day of these past thirty years to cause, the source, of so much rot in our social and moral systems.

Was the Soviet Union as evil as the collateral damage caused in the West to defeat them?

The airwaves yesterday were pretty much filled with the accomplishments of Margaret Thatcher,the deceased former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. She being the last living component of the Triumvirate Antichrist chosen as acceptable evil to fight so-called evil in the East.

Reading the papers today, apparently she died alone in a hotel room, an expensive hotel room no doubt at the Ritz. A first class nursing home / space by any other name. The original press releases gave the impression of her two children being at her side. 

But today, her two children living abroad in Switzerland and Spain, not liking what Britain has become are being searched out for PR statements about their arrival at Mummy’s funeral. 

One also gets the impression that the nursing home room at the Ritz may have been the result of her dear children selling her mansion out from under her in her late stages of dementia and dumping what was left of the Iron Lady into the care of some hourly no benefits paid nurse on call at the hotel front desk?

Not a pretty ending to the great woman the press is trying to paint as the Savior of Britain??? But an ending never the less. We all come to some end in our end.

I give her the fact of being a woman successful in a man’s world and making it to the top of the political heap.  

No doubt the wussification of the male population in Britain since WWII was evident in her rise.

She was a harsh lower middle class grocer’s daughter with harsh lower middle class cares for her white neighbors only in small village Britain of nostalgic thought. Though I cannot remember seeing her ever shaking the hands of a Pakistani merchant or grocer in the less Toni sections of London.

The American Cable news yesterday propped her up as part of a reason to resurrect the tin god of Ronald Reagan from the grave to somehow tout whatever he was supposedly good at, which I think was deficit spending in face of the great evil empire of the Soviet Union that one morning simply faded away.

That the collapse first of the Soviet Union under a system of crony socialism and economic unfairness and inefficiencies merely marked the first system to collapse.  

Our system, that did not retool for peace after the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Has merely gone on to invent enemies that we stir up like hornets’ nests by droning them and their neighbors as collateral damage in a new Cold War like model based on some Pentagon Dr. Strangelove mindset run amuck on the world stage.

 

Growing pains of a new global culture?

Thatcher broke the unions and aborted the native coal industry in favor of outsourcing energy to cheap petroleum imports.

In fact on the coal, energy and union thing, I begin to believe that one of the important historic aspects of the Harvard Brown Wharton Global Spreadsheet mentality is that no one from Ivy League colleges or the London School of Economics in their business models want to get their hands dirty, create anything, let alone sit down to a table of human beings, union members and negotiate fair wages and benefits for workers.  

This whole global spreadsheet thing is exporting sweat, dirt and labor further and further down some ladder into hell?

Thatcher did not negotiate. It was not in her nature. In fact the only good thing she did was challenge the bullies of the Argentine Junta that stole the Falkland Islands and started that war.  

Of course, the world was fast changing then.  A mere thousand dollar off the rack French Exocet Missile could if it hit the right spot destroy a billion dollar (a lot of money back then) air craft carrier. But the Brits lucked out with an little bit of unofficial US spy satellite info and the Junta Generals were a bunch a morons, tripping over their own medals, after all was said and done.

The Argentinians, the people, got a measure of freedom from dear Margaret’s middle class shopkeeper demeanor, emphasis on the mean part perhaps. Collateral damage of Maggie’s war. Lol.

At least somebody benefited besides the rich of England, benefited from her arrogance and lack of personal humanity to her own greater native peoples of Britain.

Whatever.

Rest in Peace.

They are going to cremate her. No friendly earth in England to accept her bones? No safe place to hide from getting pissed on in death in your grave?

Where I wonder will her two brats dump her ashes?

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Sabbath Tales

I have met and know of some remarkable men in my life.

The man who baptized me or more accurately the man who was founder and pastor of my parish in Philly was a fanatic of sorts. He started out life as an Episcopalian, changed Christian registration to R.C. when in the seminary and went on to start a new R.C. parish. The parish was sort of in between a lot of other established parishes and the land in between those other churches began to be developed, houses built, and there was a need for a new church, school etc. in the first decades of the twentieth century in that part of Philly.

Let me call this man Father Ed. He was of the old “God is to be feared” school of beliefs. He was an Old Testament kind of guy.

He was dead by the time I reached first grade. I have heard stories about him. One from a home inspector who related the story about being an altar boy in my parish and being five minutes late for mass. Father Ed ranted into him at the end of service about how you can’t be late for God. The priest also made the boy serve everyday for a year at 6:00 a.m. mass as punishment. That priest made an impression on that guy but I don’t think that Father Ed made a friend.

Then, as it happens sometimes in life, a lady knocked on the door and said that she had been raised in our house and asked if she might get a quick nostalgic view inside. She then got into some stories about the neighborhood. The one story I remember most was about Father Ed.

There was a Russian tailor in our neighborhood. He also did dry cleaning and his store was a block away from our house. We did business with the man. In the story of the visiting lady we finally understood why some of our neighbors took their dry cleaning three blocks away and not use the local guy. The Russian was also a Jew and a good tailor I might add. My parents, for working class, were flaming liberals. Being Jewish did not matter to them. That and my father liked to haggle.

The lady went on to say that as a child, she and her friends used to taunt the man. Let me say anti-Semitism was rampant in America back then in the 1930's, at least in this neighborhood. Well Father Ed got wind of the fact that some of his parishioners and children were harassing the man and boycotting his business. Father Ed made it a point to visit the tailor and bring his dry cleaning four blocks from the rectory. In good weather, Father Ed sat on the store stoop and smoked a cigar together with the tailor as a means to make a statement of sorts to the neighborhood. Apparently Father Ed and the tailor became good friends as the result of this local anti-Semitism.

Which leads me to the story of my next door neighbor in Arizona. Perry had a remarkable life. Left home and dairy farm in Minnesota when he was fifteen in the middle of the depression and headed west. He wanted to be a cowboy and that he became for some years. Then when World War II broke out he went up to Canada and joined the fight. He hit Juno beach on D-Day as a lieutenant in the Canadian army. He married a Brit, brought his war bride home and settled into life in Arizona B.A.C. (before air conditioning).

Perry joined the post office and then worked his way up to postmaster before retirement. I got to talk to him over the fence as a neighbor. Good stories. Went into his house a few times and vice versa. All in all, he was a great neighbor.

Then one day his wife came to us to tell us that Perry had skin cancer, that they did some necessary surgery but that the disease may have spread. I am not sure how all this got started. Perhaps my neighbor’s wife was talking to my wife and then the topic came up about me being an elder in a local church. Apparently Perry had no religious ties. I would have assumed that he might have attended church in his youth in Minnesota. His wife asked if I would talk to him.

I went over to the man in his house and tried to give comfort. I don’t think he wanted me there. Perhaps he was in denial of his own mortality. No doubt he sensed how green I was in giving comfort. I admit it. I couldn’t do him any good. Between his resistance and my inexperience, I did not serve his needs very well sad to say. Perry died suddenly about two weeks later while working in the garden. We went to give comfort to the wife next door that night and then we attended a graveside service a few days later.

This is where I get some reality checks put into my little bubble world of beliefs. I met Episcopal nuns at the graveside. I never knew such an animal existed. They had educated Perry’s children. There were lots of neighbors, relatives and co-workers from the post office. The most interesting person I met was a female Rabbi. Perry was Jewish?

I was a bit taken aback. I had heard the story about how Perry and his war bride had built the second house in this desert housing community in 1948. When I closed on the house next door, I got my deed of title or whatever and included in the paperwork was a covenant of restrictions set on the property when it was built.

That covenant was of course stamped with a label “Null and Void under Federal Civil Rights Act of...” The nasty thing about that covenant was the few pages that made it quite clear in a long range of specifics that no ...”Jews, negroes or dogs...” were allowed in this housing development etc.

As it turned out, Perry had no religious affiliation. His wife was Jewish. I chuckled about how a man like Perry, this cowboy, this war hero, this postmaster must have laughed at the WASP covenant of restrictions. Here was a real individual. Here was an old fashioned American. Here was a man.

Perry had made arrangements with the rabbi to be buried in solidarity with his wife’s belief system. Was Perry a believer, an atheist, an agnostic? I don’t know. In retrospect I don’t care. I knew the man. He was good ethical man. I prayed for him.

Part of being a cultural Christian is that you can embrace people of other beliefs, respect them and still retain you basic feel for yourself and not compromise your basic faith.

America’s greatest strength is and has always been its diversity.

Amidst this eclectic graveside audience, I had an epiphany. I also think that that paradigm shift thing happened.

It was fascinating to hear the twenty third psalm read in Hebrew. I am not certain that the Kaddish was said there but I realized something about my own belief systems. Christianity is wrapped up in a lot of layers of traditions, sacred tradition, faith, grace, propaganda, love, hate and on an on.

There under a blistering Arizona sun, prayers for a Jew were said in the desert. Were these the similar prayers that Joseph of Aramathea read over Jesus’ broken and lifeless body on Good Friday at twilight, eve of Sabbath?

You could be surrounded with stone cathedrals, and stained glass and the gospels could be read from a Gutenberg bible and the minister could be wrapped in gold cloth. But could you get any more from prayers at the end of your life than my neighbor got that day or when Jesus was interred and they rolled the stone in front of the tomb?

It makes you think. It made me think.



http://thisculturalchristian.blogspot.com/2008/06/sabbath-tales.html
 

June 13, 2008