Who Truly Won in the Papal Elections of 1978 - the CIA or the KGB?

Downtown Philadelphia Street Corner Billboards 1971 *

Putting aside some truly false and or misleading family oral history about a very distant cousin and the Archbishopric chair in Philadelphia, I have to reconsider making some real and or (my?) imaginary cross referencing of facts "sacred" and or profane "secular".

Two glaring facts stick out in my mind in the last two years, with consideration of the long term plannings of the RC church and the Czar's Private Secret Police, the KGB. Isn't it a marvel how institutional or ganizations like the RC church and or the Czar's gatekeeping Bodyguards go on and on like a law of physics, once set in motion.

And since all politics and religion are LOCAL, let me mention two things.

The official PR line of a snake like Donald Trump that he took a million dollar loan from daddy and starting flipping trash properties in Philly while a student at Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania is total bullshit.

The extra truth that many liars throw into the story, any story, is that Donald's name is not on any Philly deeds or records is because he did not want to make the prices go up. A real flipper would want the name thing to go around, to start a trend, and then have other real estate investors get on a gentrification Ponzi scheme of sorts and the first in to cash out as the later investors come along pay much more.

Like I say, I lay claim to it, that Trump paid back daddy with profits from money laundering probably first with the Philly mob, the Angelo Bruno crowd, and very familiar with the then Police Chief and later Mayor Frank Rizzo back then in 1967. And then when Donald got in over his head, like he does on every thing he does, he found a friendly front for the KGB and or they found him is more accurate and the M.O. of Trump INC was established with the brilliant Wharton Student Trump and the gentlemenly "Cs" (never really earned in any way shape or form) of an I-V school @Penn, and an "ivy league school" being in folk or origin myth being one of seven or eight American college institutions in existence before the American Revolution and or break with British Rule.

So getting back to Vatican murder and backstabbing and the usual shit thereabouts in Rome, I always wondered why one of my distant cousins, as a popular Irish American auxiliary bishop of Philadelphia did not succeed Cardinal O'Hara upon his death. ???

And then all of a sudden, the Polish Catholic minority in Philly, and not the Irish majority of RCs takes front stage with an auxiliary bishop from Cleveland (Cleveland !?) taking over the archbishop's chair in Philly.

Joe McShea did not have to bear any or much  embarrassment as a very popular auxiliary bishop in Philly, who delivered the eulogy at (Saint) Mother Katherine Drexel's funeral, and serve the new Pollack archbishop by getting an almost instant consolation prize of five northern counties (mostly coal country) of the Philly archdiocese in "upstate" Pennsylvania, by being named First bishop of the newly created Diocese of Allentown Pennsylvania. Or the grand duchy of Allentown as a reward to Joe from his once time boss, Papal Nuncio to the United States for 25 years, 1933-1959.



Amleto Giovanni Cicognani (24 February 1883 – 17 December 1973)


And also a good friend of Amleto's older brother Gaetano to whom Joe McShea as a seminarian in Rome would nightly read in private to the poorly sighted Gaetano in his papal apartments, or so the might be faulty family oral history goes. (in that family history, the older brother was much older, not two years older, and almost legally blind and could no longer read lengthy dogmatic documents without assistance etc.)


Gaetano Cicognani (26 November 1881 – 5 February 1962)


No problem for Secretary of State Amleto Cicognani of the Vatican to carve out a new diocese in Pennsylvania and move a few chess pieces around the American political landscape like auxiliary bishop John Krol into Archbishop John Krol of Philadelphia.

All well and good, and I have written about John Krol being one of the foremost starters of the American Culture War about Birth Control and Abortion after Humanae Vitae, RC encyclical regarding Command State Economy control over the reproductive product of the female part of the male / female unit of the species aka Man.

I say all this to condense with what I have stated many times and in many ways over the years here on my blogs, about how Archbishop John Krol wanted to be the first American pope and how he relentlessly campaigned years after year and took trips to third world countries where First Pennsylvania Bank and the infamous John Bunting was loaning money to the third world for fees and bonuses and no longer making little mortgages and little to moderate to large size business loans in Philadelphia. The money was in the fees and bonuses and the State Department implied no doubt in private off the book meetings with Bunting that the U.S. Government would never let John or First Pennsylvania go under giving loans that would never, could never be repaid from countries the U.S. Government had once looked kindly upon in the hopes of thwarting the spread of godless and capitalist-less belief systems.

Problem with Bunting was that he was not I-V league. A graduate of local Temple. He actually had commuted to college. No network of I-V buddies at State or Treasury to help a guy out when the real bills came due at his Philly bank, one of the oldest in the country btw.

And I have written how Archbishop Krol was bankrolled on his trips to Asia, and Africa, and making substantial in those days contributions of like 50k to start RC hospitals and RC colleges and RC seminaries in these very poor, poor nations. And in the hopes of swaying some local Asian and or African Cardinal to vote for him as pope once Paul VI died. etc.

That Krol was bankrolled by a Polish American Multimillionaire and businessman John Piszek, originally from Chicago and later Philadelphia who was a founder of Mrs. Paul's Frozen Seafood, a business started btw while on strike to make some off the books cash selling crab cakes at local bars in Philly on weekends. And the business took off but they named the business after his partner Mr. Paul because it was an Anglo sounding name and not Polish which was thought not to be a good PR name to sell frozen seafood with. Piszek with the millions rolling in starting in the 1950s after he bought out Mr. Paul, his partner, was forever bitter that his name, an immigrant name, was not good enough to make it big in American business. He compensated and began to give money away to all causes Polish, locally and abroad. Archbishop Krol and getting him as the first Polish American Pope to be elected and which is why I speculate that the Papal Nuncio saw some merit in giving Krol the first Archbishop's seat that became available and that usually got a red hat with it eventually, was a logical thing, and after much cash no doubt got funneled into Polish RC church projects and charities in Poland behind the Iron Curtain. etc.

And then with all the cash rolling into the Vatican for projects in Poland, they gave Amleto Cicognani a dispensation to become Cardinal, it not being allowed under the rules that sent the RC into a tailspin in the Reformation, because his brother was already a Cardinal. Brother, Nephew, what was the difference in giving power to your crony relatives. And Amleto becomes Secretary of State of the Vatican in 1961.

I have often wondered considering the almost miraculous, with no mortal help, in the rise of auxiliary Bishop John Krol to become a contender in the 1978 papal elections, if he had the dream on his own or if somebody had whispered in his ear the dream that he could one day become the first Polish American Pope with a little help from his friends like John Piszek and Amleto Cicognani. Wink. Nod.

Which makesme wonder, with cash coming into Poland from the west via the Vatican etc. how Karol Wojtyla also may have gotten the idea that he too could become the first Polish Polish Pope with a little help from his friends. While the Vatican made its members pray every Sunday after mass for the conversion of Russia to Christianity, the real big chuck of RC R/E the Vatican would like to start with in that conversion to the Russians from Communism back into Orthodox back into Roman Christians, that the Catholic prize of Poland was possible but maybe the money of Mrs. Paul's fish sticks was not enough and maybe other sources of funds would have to be found to create networks to revive and or sustain unions that would likely first be the force to make any real changes in a Worker's State like Poland.

And I have to wonder if the former Papal Nuncio to the United States 1933-1959 had made any worthwhile secular contacts in Washington DC over the years like at the State Department and or the dare I say it - the CIA.

That between the puppet master Amleto Cicognani in the west and the east whispering temptation into the ears of gullible Polish clerics, that maybe the long term planning of the CIA was becoming a match for the old long term planning of the Czar's secret police aka the KGB.

Wojtyla was already a player with the KGB, he could play ball and not threaten the state and the state let him play dressed up cleric for some of the masses and proclaim a free state for all the workers and their perhaps private beliefs. Whatever.

I have often wondered about Wojtyla's resume about being associated with the resistance during WWII and in occupied slave state Poland and his survival as a worker in a stone quarry etc. Anybody can put anything on a resume. Like flipping houses in Philly on the QT and anonymously is just as good as "Freedom Fighter" on the PR releases after the Polish American Cardinal relinquished his block of Pope Votes to the Polish Polish Cardinal in 1978 after the mysterious death of the last Italian Italian pope. And anybody can flip themselves while being played as a pawn in Global Political Chess - flip as in double agents and or triple agents of the KGB etc. - comrades and brothers in Christ?

And the collateral damage, messes to be cleaned up by the masses caused from players, past their prime and also dead, still hanging around from those 1960s - 1970s games of chess here forty and fifty years later.

Whatever.

Shrug.  



* Culture War Billboard Philadelphia

RC Church Allentown PA / Lehigh County Intitutional Bigotry – Vic Mazziotti and Andy Baker in Bed Together on Bigotry Issues But Definitely “Not Queer” or so they claim?

Msgr. "I Wanna B Bishop!" Andrew Baker - Commissioner Vic "I Ain't Queer" Mazziotti
(In some Roman Catholics Circles - Being anti-gay Bigots is the New Black)

My civilised (British spelling) friend Dave sent me a link to remind what I am missing and what is it like sometimes to live among the Neanderthals in Northeast Pennsylvania.  lol

Bishop Barre’s Consigliere Rev. Andrew Baker Defends Lehigh County Government’s Bigotry toward Same Sex Couple Benefits.

The Republican big guy in Lehigh County recently made it clear that same sex couples, married in other states, have no right to marital benefits if working in Lehigh County government, both because same sex marriage is not yet a civil right recognized in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania but more importantly, the Roman Catholic Church has ultimate veto power over Commissioner Vic Mazziotti to even use his brain (theoretical presence assumed there) in the matter. The church thinks for him. May I suggest Vic send his paycheck from the County straight to the Vatican. LOL

And the Bishop’s right hand yes man stooge Msgr. Andy Baker in charge of the Italian Cathedral, is backing up Vic Mazziotti’s right to bigot up the place in name of Holy Mudder Church. 

What a bunch of Neaderthals living in northeast Pennsylvania.

Visitor’s beware.

http://lehighvalleyramblings.blogspot.com/2013/12/allentown-priest-worries-about-gay.html

Even its most strident cheerleaders will agree there are many problems in Allentown. Violent crime. High unemployment. Terrible schools. Extreme poverty. Hunger. Homelessness. It's a place where a church, any church, can do so much good. So what does one Allentown priest do? 

 Attack the gays. 

 In a snippy letter to the editor, a Catholic Allentown pastor has taken aim, not at any of Allentown's real problems, but those damn queers. Andrew Baker, a Bishop wannabe housed in comfort at Allentown's Cathedral, calls same sex benefits a "potential harm to the common good" and likens them to extending maternity benefits to men. 

 Gays, incidentally, are manufactured in Greece by Satan and then shipped all over the world. 

 Baker has condemned the gay menace before. In 2002, while doing a stint at the Vatican with all the other Bishop wannabes, the obscene wealth did not trouble him a bit. But he sure was bothered by gay priests. In an essay, Baker called homosexuality a "disorder" and worried that gay priests could ruin the good gig priests have at places like St. Catharine of Siena, where rich people can pretend they're just like Jesus Christ. Except cleaner. 

 I'd be a little more worried about pedophiles. 

 If you google Baker, you'll learn that he's very concerned about gays and "religious freedom." But not much about poverty, illness, homelessness, violence. 

 Make that man a Cardinal! 

 Baker does not speak for the Church. Nor does Vic Mazziotti, a Lehigh County Commissioner who hid behind Baker's robes to justify a vote denying same sex benefits in that County.

http://articles.mcall.com/2013-11-13/news/mc-lehigh-county-2014-budget-override-20131113_1_executive-matt-croslis-republican-commissioner-percy-dougherty-2014-budget

For a second time, Lehigh County commissioners on Wednesday struck down a provision in the 2014 budget that would extend benefits to same-sex spouses. 

Republican commissioners blocked Democratic Executive Matt Croslis' veto that would have restored funding for the new program, which the commissioners eliminated in a budget amendment... 

Republican Commissioner Vic Mazziotti said he opposed the expansion because the state does not recognize same-sex marriage, and for a religious reason.

 "I'm a Catholic, and in the Catholic Church individual members of the church aren't permitted to determine what is appropriate and not appropriate," he said. "The church's position on same-sex marriage is clear. 

They do not support it. Were I to vote for this, I would be cooperating with behavior that my church does not condone. … No faithful Catholic could vote for this amendment." 

 In defense of all the cuts, board President Lisa Scheller argued that the county has a spending problem and decisive action is needed to avoid a tax increase in 2015. 

 While the benefits were allotted $219,000 in the original budget, Croslis readjusted the estimate down to $50,000, based on evidence from other large employers. 

 "I'm a practicing Catholic as well," Croslis said. "When it comes to this, our policy discriminates."

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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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St. Joseph’s Church Bethlehem Pa. – Parking Lot – 1905 Law

(The future St. Joseph's Bethlehem Pa.?)

As predicted, St. Joseph’s Church in Bethlehem Pennsylvania's journey into a parking lot to be used by Lehigh University students is on a slow but steady path to becoming reality.

St. Joseph’s Bethlehem Pa – New LU Parking Lot?

I get a bit of a silly out of watching my cousin’s gerrymandered diocese being carved up into quarterly spreadsheet dividends and bonuses for the guys in charge up there in Allentown.

Speaking of which, I can remember when I predicted that the new temporary bishop John Barres was only there to bring his specialized child abuse settlement MBA into play in Pennsy after being the heavy hitter in wiping up the Delaware sex abuse mess.

New Temporary Bishop - Allentown - John Barres

I called John Barres temporary, I never thought he was also going to be a part-time bishop as well of Bishop McShea’s consolation prize, the Allentown diocese, a gift from his cronies in the Vatican back in ‘61 for favors rendered.

I say part-time in that I have read that retired Bishop Cullen is still performing confirmations up there?   Bishop Cullen is chained to his dining room table reviewing every line of his secret clergy sex abuse files from his role as caretaker of such files when he was Cardinal Bevilacqua’s pointman on that when he worked in Philly, in the same job they have indicted Monsignor William Lynn doing after Cullen’s promotion to Bishop of Allentown?

Bishop John MBA Barres is too busy to do confirmations?  Too busy with the flowcharts,  pay out settlement possibilities and overall economic health of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, as an unofficial clergy abuse settlement consultant to Philly, preparing paperwork, in lieu of these attacks on “Religious Liberty” by the sheer audacity of civil courts indicting “innocent” priests and their keeper, handler, enabler – the innocent until proven guilty Monsignor Lynn???

Whatever.

It takes money to build spreadsheets and pay lawyers for depositions and Bishop Cullen’s timely review and refiling of his Philly files? – I guess if you can’t tear down St. Joseph’s in Bethlehem, I guess you can sell part of the property.  Rectory and unattached parking lot for sale $220,000.

Diocese of Allentown selling rectory, parking lot of Bethlehem church in legal battle

The handful of parishioners at St. Joseph’s  have got some sort of ruling from some cubbyhole in the Vatican that they are entitled to worship in a sacred place.  The Church is sacred.  The rectory and auxiliary parking lot are not.  Splitting hairs and definitely not the spirit of the matter.

I have never been to St. Joseph’s but I am willing to bet that it has a chapel.  No doubt when the spreadsheet guys need more cash, the sacred space at St. Joseph’s will likely be reduced to the chapel.  It is probably possible to tear the old church down and leave the Chapel in place in the middle of the new LU parking lot?

 

One has to wonder if public access to the chapel will be provided or that parishioners in order to gain access to their sacred place of worship will have to pay a parking fee and park near the chapel etc.

Whatever again.

I see that there is a laity based concept floating around the liberal Catholic think-osphere.  I believe the concept is based on the French "1905 Law" that separates church from state.

That some catholics and legislators in Connecticut, in reaction to the abusive draconian treatment, and attitude of the Bishop/Inquisitor of Bridgeport, is pushing for state law and I would imagine state chartering of businesses to separate the clergy from the money end of the operation of the catholic church/businesses in Connecticut.

"...Bishop Lori has opposed legislation by Rep. Michael P. Lawlor and Sen. Andrew McDonald that would remove control of the diocese from the bishop and place it into the hands of laymen. The legislation had been written with the help of liberal Catholics, including Connecticut attorney Thomas Gallagher, a contributor to the group Voice of the Faithful.

Similar Separation of church and state legislation was adopted in France in the early 20th century, which is called the 1905 law..."—William E. Lori, Wikipedia

This is something I think the people in Bethlehem and Pennsylvania should look into.

Have a nice day. 

Bloodbath in Jerusalem just around the corner?

If they ever rebuild the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, how many sheep, cows, pigeons are going to get their throats cut on an hourly, daily basis? How much blood will get splattered onto the sacrificial altar all day long? How much smell of burning carcasses thrown into the fire will fill the air all day long in that ancient heathen town? How much barbecue gets sliced up with the tourist worshipper and how much burned flesh gets doled out to the new priest class that needs to be supported?

A lot of questions. It is part of a lot of fundamentalist Christian preachers’ idea that the Temple should, in fact must, be rebuilt. Of course it means scraping thirteen hundred years of history off the Noble Sanctuary and turning it back into Temple Mount and reopening the charnel house of animal bones and reinstituting the holocaust (place of fire and sacrifice).


Reality check. Time check.


That all sounds gruesome, but this is for many fundamentalists Christians and Jews a requirement for the return of or the first time appearance of the Christ, the messiah etc.


I hope I am using these terms correctly. I do not have a degree in theology or doctorate in divinity. Just using all these terms and invoking these images kind of scares me. I am not necessarily an animal rights person but I can see where the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem will in its own way elevate the souls of animals, of God’s creation in general, to new higher global standards of respect in reaction to such revived ancient cruelty.


Can you imagine the smell of barbeque, the smell and chatter of the tourist crowds, the noise of the money changers, the occasional blaring of trumpets and bang of drums? This is what Jesus would have seen in his day. This is what Jesus was in rebellion against.


When did a simple, formed in the desert, concept of a single deity, of one God get turned into such a circus and business machine? (Jesus wept.)


Well as I say this is what some say is what is needed to bring the stage actor, plastic Jesus thing to earth to enhance the already stage presence and drama of public worship of the local deity also know as God, Yahweh, Jesus, Allah, Mohammed, Buddha, Shiva etc.


It is easy to forget that the whole Greek drama thing, the theatre thing, the entertainment thing, the thing that fills a majority portion of our entertainment time to this day aka as TV, the box, Cable – how it all started as religion – as sacred morality plays – of men and their flaws living their lives and being judged or rewarded by the gods, the many gods of antiquity.


Indeed, we monotheists, primarily have our Trinity god – Yahweh/Jesus/Allah carved out of our local beliefs and backed up by our local deities, sacred texts and other Modus Operandi.


Drama, drama, everywhere and not much sanity in sight.


Someone sent me a piece about some White Bread Fundamentalist preacher from White Bread Town aka Pasadena that spoke, preached, that Osama Bin Laden went to Hell because he did not repent of his sins or accept Jesus as his exclusive official broker to get into Heaven. Poor Osama.


But wait a minute! Osama did not die in Pasadena. Thank Allah!


He died in Pakistan where he was hiding off the grid and with the help of his local friends at the military academy that recognized that it was good for local business, the military academy, salaries, promotions, pensions, loot, spoils of war, the local military industrial complex and atomic bomb making thing – that these things were a good thing for the local economy and under the local deity of Allah.


Osama was a martyr in that part of the world and went straight to his sixty odd virgins in Paradise. What happened to the seventy two virgins, as it is stated in the Koran? Hell, Osama’s agent gets ten percent of the action. Right? (business is business).


My fear about dying is where do I end up? Pasadena or Hell? Is there a difference? ( a little attempt at humor )


Well anyway, this week I talked to several people whose local ethnic church in Bethlehem, Pa. has come onto the real estate market for the sake of cash flow in the Allentown diocese. Problem with the catholic thing is that the local bishop has the deed to St. Joseph’s Church.


That is one reason bishops and or priests can’t get married. You don’t want all these deeds and properties to get confused with a priest or a bishop’s personal estate going to his wife, boyfriend, or children and get confused with the diocese bank accounts etc. (sorry, getting off subject here).


Studying that situation, I would not be surprised if St. Joseph’s RC church gets sold, scraped of ornamentation and turned into the Yusuf Mosque and Islamic Center for the Muslim students at the nearby Lehigh University. Probably more Muslims on campus than surviving members of the Slovenian community on the border with that ever growing, ever land consuming, urban institution.


I am just kidding myself on that. Whatever Lehigh University has planned for that property it is not a recycled and or new Islamic center for Lehigh students. Maybe another chemistry lab above a tiered parking garage and to be used for animal testing. A new Temple of Science? Whatever.


Science has no conscience and therein lies the rub between traditional values, myths, local belief systems and the new atheist world (global) view of things.


Times change and we all apparently willing or not have to change with them.


The Catholic thing is celibacy and no deed for the local church. The Prot thing is to keep the deed local and in the hands of the preacher. In a way the local god of Rev. Whomever in Pasadena is not much of an improvement over the minds of men and women in need of the simple love of one’s local and global neighbor.


Getting back to the animal sacrifice thing. I was looking at the floorplan of the old St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the one that stood there for a thousand years, and there in the front of the church is the altar. Altar. For a sacrifice? Of course, the sacrifice of Jesus (once was surely not enough), his blood, the martyr, the doorway to Heaven etc.


Problem with changing times is that when they destroyed Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D./C.E., they got rid of the live stage thing in the Greek drama. The ideas of the Jewish faith got turned into two different abstracts, one part that stayed Jewish to this day and the other part that got rewritten in the Jesus script/play.


The irony of it all is that Saul of Tarsus was probably trying to convert gentiles to Judaism, a Jewish sect, as it still was in his day and not as he supposedly envisioned it in the later day Roman pagan rewrite of the script.


I saw a picture of the front of St. Joseph’s Slovenian Catholic church in Bethlehem Pa, that I cannot show you here. I was not taken by the predictable gothic architecture or need of sand blast cleaning of dirty old stones. I was impressed by the balance of the handicapped entrance ramp to the front of the church. I saw that whether designed by an architect or done with old world craftsmanship, it looked as if it was a labor of love. It was built with a purpose in mind and to a need of an aging congregation. It shows even to this agnostic type person.


I respect everyone’s right to worship as they see fit to whatever local or universal god they see fit to pray to and not pray to. It is the cornerstone of our written constitution. It is the stone the builders reject in much of the rest of the world. My Jesus, I know, would back me up on that point.


I see how a living piece of European history like St. Joseph’s gets discarded in the new godless, new fangled MBA spreadsheet way of dealing with humanity or in fact eliminating humanity – and eliminating that humanity from the bottom line of Diocese profit and loss statements - and by some green, white bread temporary cleric in charge on Chew Street in Allentown – well I could just about cry.


The world is not getting larger. The world is not getting smaller and or global. The world is getting reduced to decimal points on a spreadsheet for some of us. “Oh! The Humanity!”


Whatever.


And so it goes.

John Paul II – King Maker – Edward Piszek

An old friend, a Catholic in good standing, recently told me that the “Catholic Church is all politics”. The friend, in the middle of some sort of annulment of a previous marriage thing, is going the distance with the RC bureaucrats because of love. Love is a powerful energy in this world. As for the politics thing, I bit my tongue. A friend is a friend.

Being a cousin of the late Bishop of Allentown Pa, I have heard the family stories not published and the stories of the internal Vatican politics it took to carve five counties in upstate Pennsylvania out of the archdiocese of Philadelphia to become the private fiefdom of my cousin who, when his chances to become a Cardinal of Philadelphia got blown in the 1958 election of John XXIII, the consolation prize from his powerful friends in the Vatican was Allentown.

Getting on with the politics in the RC church, they are Beautifying John Paul II, who is on a fast track to sainthood. Of course JPII changed the rules for sainthood, cut out the long bureaucratic wait thing, in favor of streamlining a thoroughly medieval process. And of course, saints and relics and such went out of fashion with the Reformation for us Protestant types. Whatever.

Here is a story of the man, the Polish American Edward Piszek, who was not so much a king maker as he was pope maker in the case of John Paul the Great.

I don’t know if it is not PC to call Edward Piszek a Polack. There was a time when perhaps Polack had a negative connotation in the immigration pecking order of things here in America. The latest ethnic group to arrive always seemed to be at or near the bottom of the pecking order of society. I heard that word used in my youth for the Polish amidst the still strong ethnic enclaves of Philadelphia. More later on that term.

It is perhaps out of a need to succeed as the son of immigrants that John Piszek succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. I remember an article in the Sunday Magazine of the Philadelphia Inquirer in the mid 70s that specifically was tracing out Edward Piszek’s philanthropy role in the great white (papal) hope of Polish Americans at the time in the person of John Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia.

Here you have two Polish Americans, both originally from the midwest and both ambitious and successful in their perspective fields of business and religion in Philly.

The magazine article had its liberal, perhaps cynical, but definitely Wasp-ish, bent openly analyzing the ambitions of two Polacks on the make in a still then Wasp society pecking order of things in Philly.

The article seemed to emphasis how Piszek was upset that the wasp name Mrs. Paul, his business partner wife's name, had the success whereas in the beginning he did not think that a Polish name like Mrs. Piszek’s fish fingers or sticks had much marketing potential. So it goes. Woulda. Coulda. Shoulda.

Anyway, Cardinal Krol was campaigning to be the next pope as the article outlined. He was not buying votes. He was however making frequent trips to East Asia and Africa and making financial donations to the building of schools and hospitals in the five and six figure money category, which was a lot of bread or fish sticks back then. And of course, the philanthropist Piszek had the check book to make Krol a viable candidate for the papacy, even though he was American and not Italian.

From a source, I cannot remember who in Philly told me this story, this Philly urban legend of sorts; it had to do with the papal election in 1978 after the death of Paul VI. I am told the Italians put up a good and or dirty fight to get a fellow Italian, Albino Luciani, elected John Paul I.

The story goes that when the Italians seemed to be getting ahead on votes in the papal election, votes committed to distant runner Cardinal Krol got released by Krol, asking those released voters to consider, closing up fast runner, Karol Cardinal Wojtyla over Luciani. The story goes that Krol, when he released the votes, told, urged his cronies, to “Give it to the Polack”. Or so I remember the story.

John Paul I only reigned as pope for something like thirty three days. The runner up in the first papal election, Wojtyla, had the momentum and or mojo going to push him across the finish line at the next papal election.

The rest is history. Not much about Piszek on Wikipedia. His role in the politics of making Karol Wojtyla pope and now saint is forgotten in history.

Ed Piszek Obits

Piszek, 87, a Fort Washington resident who died of bone cancer March 27, also told his son to "give God the credit. I was under his tutelage. I was his messenger. I was his Johnny Appleseed."

Two cardinals presided and a procession of priests participated in Piszek's Funeral Mass at the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul, where hundreds came to pay their respects.

Among them were baseball Hall of Famer Stan Musial, who teamed up with Piszek to bring Little League baseball to Poland, Piszek's ancestral home; and former Phillies pitcher Larry Christenson, whom he called "my best buddy."

Pope John Paul II, Piszek's friend for nearly 20 years, said in a note from the Vatican that he was "deeply saddened" by his death. "I am confident that his memory will inspire others to give of themselves freely and charitably," he added.

A self-made man, Piszek turned a mistake into a multimillion-dollar business when he made too many crabcakes during his shift at a Kensington bar in 1946, and decided to freeze some.

He launched Mrs. Paul's Kitchens with partner John Paul. In the 1950s, Piszek bought out his partner and ran the company for about 30 more years before selling it to Campbell Soup Co. in 1982.

I always say you learn a lot more about somebody from his Obituary than you probably already thought you knew. That is not true in this case. In the above Obit articles, I only see Cardinal Krol in one sentence that also mentions Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, a very small understated footnote in history.

Edward Piszek died in 2004 at age 87. He called himself the “Polish Ben Franklin” considering his considerable patronage and philanthropy to the City of Brotherly Love.

If Piszek were still alive, he would be 94, and sitting in the front row as Benedict XVI Beatifies the Polish Pope.

Whether alive or not, I have no doubt that his spirit as pope maker and now saint maker will be in Saint Peter’s square on May 1.

It’s is a hell of lot of story associated with one lonely fish stick or I should say billions of fish sticks.

And so it goes.

Big Frank Rigali and his Religious Crime Family in Philly

Ascension Church Philly - Out of the God Business - October 1, 2012

St Jerome's Parish in northeast Philly must be a great bed and breakfast kind of place. Great at least for a few priests involved in the current criminal Catholic sex abuse scandal to have lived there. One, the current Bishop of Saginaw and one, the “Smiling Padre” Edward Avery.

Smiling Padre

Somewhere on the timeline between Joe Cistone's hanging out at St. Jerome's and smiling Ed Avery's hangin out there, I went to my aunt's funeral there which was her parish.

Of course Joe Cistone was only in residence there working his ass off in the Chancery downtown shuffling pervs all over the archdiocese and Ed Avery was on “no child” duty as a chaplain at the nearby Nazareth hospital. The “no child” duty as chaplian did not somehow prevent him from hearing children's confessions at St. Jerome's as a resident of the rectory there. Oh well.

I look at last week's clergy sex abuse indictments in Philadelphia, that festered and festered over decades of neglect and cover-up, and have seen all this before.
 
Catholic sex abuse cases
 
Looking at all this I have to agree with Canon lawyer Thomas Doyle that:

...Doyle said of attempts to reform the Catholic Church that it was like "trudging through what can best be described as a swamp of toxic waste".

From stats, I know that few people bother to read what I write on this subject. Not that they want to look away, they are probably just disgusted and can only take so much diarrhea overflowing the cups of catholic bishops and their criminal conspiracy to hide this ongoing situation.

And the catholics do not have a monopoly on this but the Celibacy bullshit, not specifically spelled out in the gospels, is a thousand year old problem with the Romans who split with the Orthodox church a thousand years ago and went to one sex only, males (unmarried!), in its clergy thing.

The comments in the first article above seem to typify the situation as most people see this ongoing spiritual mismanagement of criminal activities by the Vatican on a worldwide scale.

-What was it Rigali said on As Wednesday? "The safety of children is paramount". I wonder when that policy began????
 
 -...I know, that whenever I see a catholic priest, the first thing I think of is, how many little boys is he molesting.
 
-The church needs to take a long, hard look at their practices. The church has become a hiding place for men with sexual problems of all sorts. Reevaluate the requirement for priests to refrain from marriage and you will see a change in the men who come into the priesthood.

I am tapped out on comment and anger and indignation. I see the recent Philly scandal in terms of allegory or metaphor or parable in looking at it.

I see retired Cardinal Tony Bevilacqua as playing some part in a Soprano like soap opera like “Uncle Junior”.

...yoos can't indict me. I'm senile.

And “Big” Frank Regali, the de facto head of the archdiocese gang, a religious crime family, and its irregulars, like the infamous Tony Soprano seeing a shrink but knowing all along he is a total bastard.

No doubt Frank Regali knows Tony Bevilacqua's consigliere Ed Cullen who got promoted to Bishop of Allentown Pa. No doubt Frank misses one time enforcer or enabler Joe Cistone who also got a promotion within the crime family as Bishop of Saginaw Michigan after taking over Ed Cullen's old job.

But then you gots to feel for Frank Rigali's current Capo, Billy Lynn, aka the “Monsignor” who got indicted last week as an enabler of the rank and file priests who touch and feel occasionally but are all getting a bad rap in the media.

Imagine, Monsignor William Lynn, under indictment and thinking to himself like Brando in On the Waterfront

“I could a been a contender” (bishop) if these whining bleeding hearts in the D.A.'s office had only looked the other way for a few more years.”

I can only imagine how many pervs in the ranks got promoted to Saginaw or Allentown when the heat was on regarding some private sexual habits of some really special priests or they just got to hang out at a St. Jerome's type bed and breakfast for naughty priests.

To finish, I go with an allegory or parable with the words of a visitor to a once great city on a hill structure of Ascention Church in Kensington-Harrowgate in Philadelphia (pictured above), to describe feelings about both the bishops and clergy in the upper church, the laity in the lower church and the general outlook of the sick sister of the Christian faith – the RC church in general.

As I stated in an earlier blog, I do not want attack the RC church. But my original image of it was formed during a period when the neighborhoods of Kensington-Harrowgate in Philly were filled with full churches, full catholic schools, full factories and full working class simplicity. That simplicity lasted two, three or even four generations floating in time somewhere between the the 1880s and Vatican II.
 
Ascension of Our Lord church

The upper church is, in the words of Pastor Michael Chapman, a “disaster” and is totally off-limits, even to visitors. The Project tried very hard to get a glimpse, but even I was denied. … The lower church is supposedly still in use, but a good chunk of their masses instead take place at the rectory chapel. That’s where ...(I)... found (my)self this past week. Nice, but not exactly what I had in mind when I dropped by for a visit.

It’s really a sin, because Ascension looks to have been really wonderful at one time. It’s a good-sized behemoth that’s notable for its red-tile roof, Greco-Roman-style colonnade, and elaborate stone banisters and staircases. Some of those design elements, particularly the banisters, are not seen anywhere else in the city.

Unfortunately, this church has seen better days. The roof is caving in, there is visible water damage and cracks everywhere, a couple of broken windows and even graffiti on all the side doors. Even worse, the front portion of the church is blocked off by a chain link fence, where the front banister wall is crumbling. Huge chunks of concrete are just lying on the sidewalk, and what’s left is warping and buckling. You can still get glimpses of its past glory, but mostly you just see a desolate husk rotting before your eyes. Despite the fact that it’s still an active parish, it feels more like a ghost town.

 And so it goes.