Philly High School Possibly Named in Tribute to Father Coughlin and His Approval of German Actions at Kristallnacht

I had to wonder when I randomly ran into this looking at some other matter, what happened to the local girl's high school in Philly, when its name got changed from its original designation of "Northeast Catholic High School for Girls" to "Little Flower High School". Something and things along the timeline from October 1938 when building permits were issued in the original designated name to dedication on August 27th 1939, five days before the invasion of Poland and the beginning of war in Europe.

There was already in place a tradition of West Catholic High for Boys first followed by West Catholic High for Girls. Only four blocks apart near University City in west Philly.

Little Flower as the compliment female school to Northeast Catholic High School for Boys was three miles apart. (The Northeast still the edge of the burbs and farms in pre-War Philadelphia County).

The working name on Little Flower may have been N.E.C.H. for girls but looking at the timeline I have to wonder about Dennis Dougherty and his still standing fatwa on the Ethnic Group the "ran Hollywood" still in place forbidding all Catholics in the AD of Philly from attending the cinema which he never rescinded. (Thank the Catholic Gawd that the good cardinal had a movie projection setup to view Hollywood movies in private in his 45-61 room (depending on estimates) mansion of his quaint home base surrounded by 10 acres on City Line Ave. in Philly. )

October the building permits:

And then Kristallnacht in November 9-10 and America's most powerful media voice of Father Charles Coughlin getting more racist to up his ratings the closer Europe crept toward War.

Charles E Coughlin

For years, Coughlin had publicly derided “international bankers,” a phrase that most of his listeners understood to mean Jewish bankers. In the days and weeks after Kristallnacht, Coughlin defended the state-sponsored violence of the Nazi regime, arguing that Kristallnacht was justified as retaliation for Jewish persecution of Christians. He explained to his listeners on November 20, 1938 that the “communistic government of Russia,” “the Lenins and Trotskys…atheistic Jews and Gentiles” had murdered more than 20 million Christians and had stolen “40 billion [dollars]…of Christian property.”

In a series of articles published in Social Justice during 1938, Coughlin lambasted “Jewish” financiers and their control over world politics, culminating with a story recounting his own version of the infamous 20th Century forgery, the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purported to be minutes of meetings of Jewish leaders as they plotted to take over the world.

As Europe crept toward War. 

Philadelphia Inquirer 28 Aug 1939

On same page as LF dedication photo below.

Following two major radio stations in NYC, dropping Coughlin's broadcasts after his praise of Kristallnacht, followed by protests making the national papers of pro-Coughlin supporters outside NY radio staions, somewhere in that timeline between beginning of Construction of Northeast Catholic High School for Girls in October 1938 and the Dedication of Little Flower High School for Girls in August 1939, Cardinal Dougherty did a name change on the high school, perhaps out of sympathetic views shared with the American Papal Nuncio Cicognani and Father Charles Coughlin the head of the Radio League of the Little Flower, and his shrine in Michigan to Saint Therese of Lisiveux, a recently canonized 24 year old ? "Doctor of the Church". 

Coincidence or devotion.

Wikipedia Commons

Shrine of the Little Flower Basilica

Charles Coughlin

Philadelphia Inquirer 28 Aug 1939

It is possible that Cardinal Dougherty was indeed devoted to the worship of the Little Flower saint but more likely he had to hedge a bet or a loan to Coughlin to build his cash cow shrine in Michigan, with the radio transmissions drying up with contributions. Better to have a local Wink. Nod. Michigan shrine reminder in Philly to back up offshore tax free loans to Royal Oak?

Ted Cruz’s Senior Hating On the Jews and Catholics in Northeast USA

Ted Cruz’s Senior Hating On the Jews and Catholics in Northeast USA and Fucking JFK in the Grave too while his little wetback ass from Cuba and Canada is at it. 

East Coast Jews and Catholics inferior to Western Jews and Catholics.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/rafael-cruz-jews-catholics-democrats

"Unfortunately, in the northeast, the Jews are Democrats first and Jews second," he said at an event on Saturday held by the Palm Beach County Tea Party. "This is what has happened to a great many in the Catholic church. They are Democrats first and Catholics second."

Rafael Cruz said that Americans "need to put principle above tradition."

"There are people voting Democrat because, 'My grandfather or my father voted Democrat.’ Let me tell you something. The Democratic party today is not the Democratic party of John Kennedy. John Kennedy would be a Republican today," he said.

He made the comments in response to a remark from an audience member lamenting that leaders in the Catholic church have not helped the Republican cause. The comments were flagged by the Democratic group American Bridge.

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Father Coughlin - Msgr Hawks - Tea with Franco, Hitler and Mussolini

Father Coughlin

One of the things that kept the various American Fascist groups in the late 1930s and into 1940, 41 from succeeding was that the only thing they had in common was their anti-Semitism.  

The various German, Italian, Ukrainian fascist groups would not unite over and above ethnic identity and so too the Ku Klux Klan and other Protestant fronts would not unite with groups like America First and definitely not with the Catholic fronts like the Christian Front or Father Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Coughlin

National Union for Social Justice founded in 1934, spawning Social Justice Magazine in 1936.

Christian Front – bastard child of Coughlin’s inspired radio messages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Front_(United_States)

The Christian Front was founded in November 1938 in response to the prompting of radio priest Charles Coughlin, who had called for a "crusade against the anti-Christian forces of the Red Revolution" in the May 23, 1938, edition of his newspaper, Social Justice.^[1] Its membership numbered several thousand and consisted mostly of Irish-Americans in the New York City area. They sold Social Justice, organized boycotts of Jewish businesses, and held parades and rallies. They made no distinction between "Reds" and Jews.^[2] Their rallies welcomed attendees from like-minded organizations like the German American Bund, and Crusaders for Americanism. They heard speakers denounce Jews as international bankers, war mongers, and communists, mock President Roosevelt as Rosenvelt, and praise Franco and Hitler.^[3] Bishop Fulton J. Sheen backed the Front.^[4]The Roman Catholic Bishop of Brooklyn, Thomas Molloy was a prominent supporter and his diocesan newspaper, the Tablet once addressed the charge that the Christian Front was anti-Semitic: "Well what of it? Just what law was violated?"^[5]

The Front also targeted organized labor and tried to replace union officials, deemed too radical or Jewish, with "Christian leadership".

When the war came, the FBI rounded up about 3,000 of the worst agitators of these foreign and domestic funded groups and locked their heineys up in detention camps etc. for further processing and interrogations. (eternal shades of Gitmo) (no priests rounded up at that time that I know of)

The present  Catholic Front, Religious Liberty Front, Fortnight of Freedom Front does not outwardly advocate the same anti-Semitism of  1930s America as much as they advocate veiled racism, misogyny and anti-gay hatred. They of course feel comfortable these days hanging out with the Mormons, John Birchers and Fundamentalist Right, though I don’t think those righties feel the same comfort having to hang with the papes.

In any case, the old game plan, game book from the 1930s works best on a purely money, power and greed basis regarding any temporary political alliances across diverse groupings of thugs.

Following through on the fascism of the Irish Parish of my youth, St. Joan of Arc Harrowgate, Philadelphia and the founding pastor, an Episcopalian priest turned papist, I have to reexamine some of the childhood myths I had constructed by word of mouth and set forth in some of my writing.

I had written a short story illustrating the anti-Semitism that existed in my old neighborhood before my birth via the oral history of a visitor to our house in my youth who had once lived in our house.

In that story I make a man I never met, Msgr. Hawks out to be some sort of hero in that he fought anti-Semitism in that neighborhood of the 1930s in his dealings with a local Jewish tailor. 

I was greatly shocked when I did further research recently to see that Msgr. Hawks had quite a track record amidst the fawning admirers and apologists for Franco, Hitler and Mussolini.

It comes on back of some recent comment from another writer about how all families have ghosts and or skeletons of things left unsaid over the decades and centuries of family histories.

I am thinking right now how oral tradition reached me from my father how his parents were regular listeners of the infamous Father Coughlin of fascist anti-Semitic radio fame of those turbulent late thirties and early forties in America.  

In fact I remember my father pointing out some rural site on one of our Sunday family drives in the country and can remember him describing the place as once having been a popular summertime picnic grounds for a local Bund group.  It went over my head at the time. I do have quite a memory and now that he is dead I cannot go back and ask for further details. Such is life.

But getting back to Msgr. Hawks at St. Joan of Arc.

I was rather amused at this passage from an online book regarding the right wing groups in Pennsylvania before mid-century.

Further research on the net is limited. Not much except that Father Brophy sounds like a Father Edward F. Brophy of the Church of the Most Precious Blood in Long Island City (Queens), NY.  I believe he was part of the Christian Front as well as the CDCR.

CDCR – Committee for Defense of Constitutional Rights - sounds like a Tea Bagger Party Front from modern day.

Thomas J. Blisard Jr. I cannot find any reference on the net to except a passage in a Marxist Socialist newspaper.

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1939/v3n19-mar-28-1939.pdf

Agitation against the fascists right to meet at the Met Opera House on North Broad St., built by Oscar Hammerstein I, grandfather of Oscar II of Rogers and Hammerstein fame.  (Still standing in genteel decay.)

And Jew hating, communist hating baiting Bessie Burchett.

http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Bessie_R._Burchett

Bessie Rebecca Burchett Ph D. (born 1879) was the head of the department of foreign languages in the South Philadelphia High School for Girls. She wrote a book, Education for Destruction, documenting the communist infiltration of the Philadelphia public school system in the 1930s.

She earned the moniker "Two Gun" Bessie because she carried two pistols to defend herself. 

And the cultic Knights of Columbus Bund Fraternity organization. 

http://frragan.com/pdf2/kofc-history.pdf

(No mention of any nasty Irish anti-Semitism there as part of that anti-Communism “Crusade” in their own propaganda. God bless their "charitible" hearts.)

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Cardinal George of Chicago Questions Rahm Emanuel’s Jewish Values – Chick-Fil-A

Cardinal George of Chicago, a Christian Evangelical Conservative has come down on the side of Dan Cathy’s conservative Christian hatred of gays and the funding of gay hate projects, some co-sponsored by the Catholics.

These days, the conservative Catholic Hierarchy have in all but exact word and deed negated the brotherhood and sisterhood generated towards other faiths out of Vatican II.

Along with forgetting Vatican II is the negation Pope Paul VI’s wrongful Catholic blame of the Jews for the mythical figure of Jesus and his death. Read Cardinal George's revised remarks below on that chestnut. RIP Paul VI.  RIP Vatican II.

So when I hear Heir George speak about Rahm Emanuel’s values I know what the coded anti-Semite message is (wink, nod).

Prove me wrong! Show me one photo of Cardinal George standing next to Mayor Emanuel, shaking hands and "smiling".

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/07/31/cardinal-to-emanuel-just-what-exactly-are-chicago-values/

http://slatts.blogspot.com/2004/02/cardinal-george-encourages-people-to.html

Cardinal George on Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ flick:

…There is a priest in the archdiocese who has a lot of experience in filmmaking, and he has sent out to the parishes all the information on the film and how to participate in viewing it. I have sent out the documents from Rome and the USCCB on how to read the Passion stories in the Gospels. I would encourage people to see the film. 

I would then say something else. We should see it not only as Christian believers; we should try to watch it with the eyes of the Jewish people. 

The history of anti-Semitism, a very sorrowful history, has made many Jews very sensitive to any recognition that even some Jews were involved in the death of Jesus. Obviously some Jews were involved in the death of Jesus. He had enemies among his own people. His apostle Judas betrayed him and some of the leaders of the people were against him. Read the Gospels. At the same time, all Jesus' friends were Jews, as were the first apostles and disciples - everybody was a Jew within this story, except the Romans who, in fact, killed him. They killed him in their own fashion - a terrible execution, torture. And all of that torture is attributed to the Romans in the film. 

But the push to have him condemned is attributed to some of the Jewish leaders, even though the Romans are primarily responsible. Jesus had enemies among his own people. He also had friends and disciples among his own people. Jesus was a Jew. And you can hardly tell the story of Jesus' life, certainly not the story of his death, without saying that some Jews did this and some Jews did that.

 – Cardinal George 13 February 2004 - St. Vincent Ferrer Parish, River Forest, Illlinois

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The End Days of the Anti-Semite Pope Benedict the German

You people remind me of the good old days of my youth.

The Vatican has long been said by those who know it to be a nest of vipers. But, recently, the poison has been laid bare for everyone to see as leak after an embarrassing leak has revealed an institution at war with itself.

Already this year we've read about documents warning of a death threat against the Pope, widespread nepotism and corruption, exiled whistleblowers, gay smear campaigns and embarrassing revelations about the Vatican's tax affairs….

Another Vatican watcher, Robert Mickens of The Tablet, has a simpler take the Holy See's woes: "It's arrogance. The people in charge still think the Vatican is above ordinary laws."

Observers also point to the Vatican's decision to censure nuns in the US for daring to "disagree with or challenge positions taken by the bishops" on key social issues.

"All these things are symptoms of a bigger problem. The structure of the Vatican - which is an absolute monarchy - is no longer suitable for the modern world," says Mickens….

The Pope's overtures to the extremist and anti-Semitic Society of Saint Pius X's, with which he shares a love of traditional Catholic Mass, is thought to have angered many Church figures….

Read more: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/news-analysis/outdated-vatican-is-an-institution-ripping-itself-apart-16165719.html#ixzz1wS4z4ZFB

Benedict XVI's New Church – Bully the Nuns and give Power to the Anti-Semites SSPX (Party)

The political arm of the American Empire since the mysterious death of John Paul I has been the Papacy.  General Wojtyla (JPII) did whatever it took to defeat the Commies and ultimately now the Christians, the few real ones left in that of late money laundering child buggering institution, through his hand picked Wehrmacht bred successor Benedict the German.

The American He-she Bishops’ new target to get anti-Christ comformity for their new masters, the GOP/Koch brother oligarch types, is the Nuns

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/apr/24/bullying-nuns/

The Vatican has issued a harsh statement claiming that American nuns do not follow their bishops’ thinking. That statement is profoundly true. Thank God, they don’t. Nuns have always had a different set of priorities from that of bishops. The bishops are interested in power. The nuns are interested in the powerless. Nuns have preserved Gospel values while bishops have been perverting them. The priests drive their own new cars, while nuns ride the bus (always in pairs). The priests specialize in arrogance, the nuns in humility….

Now the Vatican says that nuns are too interested in “the social Gospel” (which is the Gospel), when they should be more interested in Gospel teachings about abortion and contraception (which do not exist). Nuns were quick to respond to the AIDS crisis, and to the spiritual needs of gay people—which earned them an earlier rebuke from Rome. They were active in the civil rights movement. They ran soup kitchens….

Last week, following an assessment by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican stripped the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, representing most American nuns, of its powers of self-government, maintaining that its members have made statements that “disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.” Archbishop Peter Sartain of Seattle has taken control of the Conference, writing new laws for it, supplanting its leadership, and banning “political” activity (which is what Rome calls social work). Women are not capable, in the Vatican’s mind, of governing others or even themselves. Is it any wonder so many nuns have left the orders or avoided joining them? Who wants to be bullied?...

It is typical of the pope’s sense of priorities that, at the very time when he is quashing an independent spirit in the church’s women, he is negotiating a welcome back to priests who left the church in protest at the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. These men, with their own dissident bishop, Marcel Lefebvre, formed the Society of Saint Pius X—the Pius whose Secretariat of State had a monsignor (Umberto Benigni) who promoted the Protocols of the Elder of Zion. Pope Benedict has already lifted the excommunication of four bishops in the Society of Saint Pius X, including that of Richard Williamson, who is a holocaust denier. Now a return of the whole body is being negotiated.

None of the anti-Semitic ties of the Pius X crew matter to Rome, since that crew holds to the hard line against women priests, gay marriage, and contraception. They have also retained the Latin Mass, which Rome has been inching back toward. All these things, you see, are the work solely of male hierarchs, distrustful of the People of God—who are the church, as defined by the Second Vatican Council. Those Lefebvre defiers of the Council are all the things the nuns are not, and all the things Rome wants to restore. The real Gospel must be quashed in the name of the pseudo-Gospel of papal monarchs. Poor Anne O’Connor—she thought caring for the poor was what Jesus wanted. She did not live to see that what Rome wants is all that matters.

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Criminal Cartels, Goldman Sachs, Drug Lords, Vatican

Having seen firsthand the dark and shady nature of business in both the Mortgage and Brokerage businesses I have to concede that it is a breath of fresh air that accompanies the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) indictment of Goldman Sachs.

Goldman Sachs packaged shit as securities and then sold the “securities” to their best customers and then took out insurance on the shit already planned to fail in the mortgage business. It says a lot about the moral state of the money changers and money lenders in our midst in our day.

Goldman Sachs fraud case stunning in its indictment of Wall Street culture

In an appropriate metaphor to explain the current indictment at Goldman Sachs:

Described another way, Paulson handpicked sick, diseased pigs to be made into sausage, then bet millions that the resulting sausage would make people sick. Goldman, for its part, made the poisoned sausage (and got paid), sold that sausage to its own unwitting customers (and got paid again), and. like Paulson, bet millions that those customers would get sick (and got paid yet again).

It says a lot about how criminal cartels whether they be drug lords in Columbia or Wall Street executives or even bishops of holy mother Church.

The words “criminal cartel” came to mind with the reading of this article below about how a Vatican bureaucrat Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos sent a letter of praise to a French Bishop for his harboring and hiding a priest rapist from the wrath of the public and civil law. Cardinal Hoyos had also orchestrated the return of the Piux X cult last year, tricked another cardinal into signing off on it. You remember Richard Williamson, the rabid anit-Semitic bishop of that cult?

French bishop lauded for shielding priest

The Sept. 8, 2001 letter from Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, then the head of the Vatican office in charge of priests, praised bishop Pierre Pican for risking prison time to defend the Rev. Rene Bissey.

French Catholic publication Golias published a copy of the letter on March 30. The Vatican has faced accusations of secrecy that allowed priests to rape and molest children unchecked for decades.

Of course after 2001, that bureaucracy no longer had charge of priests and priests issues such as buggery. That the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (for centuries called the Office of the Inquisition) under Cardinal Ratzinger could and did change the pro-priest, anti-people corporate culture in a snap of his fingers. Yeah right.

It does takes time for large corporations to change a corporate culture. It takes years, perhaps decades, and not mere months to change centuries old secret hidden traditions attached to celibacy and the like. I say hidden in that denial of a problem and its constant cover-up for centuries is an embedded problem when brought to light in a modern age of human rights and enlightenment.

Which bring me to another article that when I read it I was struck by the thought of how the RC corporation was able to shift pedo-priests all over the globe and back again.

AP: Priests accused of abuse shuffled around globe

"The pattern is if a priest gets into trouble and it's close to becoming a scandal or if the law might get involved, they send them to the missions abroad," said Richard Sipe, a former Benedictine monk and critic of what he says is a practice of international transfers of accused and admitted priest child abusers. "Anything to avoid a scandal."

Church officials say that in some cases, the priests themselves moved to another country and the new parish might not have been aware of past allegations. In other cases, church officials said they did not believe the allegations, or that the priest had served his time and reformed.

That with hundreds of priests helped in their escape from civil justice for crimes against children that there must be some central inquiry board within the Vatican to advise where there is a desperate need for priests in the various parishes of the planet. If not that, then there must some paid consultants that for a fee will advise a bishop as to where to apply for the export of troublesome priests out of their diocese.

In any case, the advice recently of the pope for Christians to pray for repentance of their sins in reference to this pedo-scandal of its pedo- priests and pedo-protecting bishops, why do I have to pray for the pope’s and his crony bishops’ many, many, many sins?

Criminal cartels – Goldman Sachs – Columbia drug lords – RC bishops and “celibate” buggering priests – the world is indeed full of evil. Beware!

The Perfect Storm - Vatican City Meltdown

It is totally ironic that the Archbishop of Canterbury – a legitimate religious figure – has to state the truth and state the obvious.

The head of the Anglican church expressed regret Saturday for comments he made about the Irish Catholic Church, which included saying that the Irish Catholic Church has lost "all credibility" following the abuse scandal, his press office said.

In an interview to be broadcast Monday, Archbishop Rowan Williams called the issue "a colossal corporate trauma" for the Catholic Church, especially in Ireland. CNN

Rowan Williams did unfortunately back off a little later in the press when his moral words were felt to cut too deeply.

It is true. This “colossal corporate” failure in Ireland has produced one or two resignations from the failed corporate executives running that sham of holiness - by these third rate "second-handers" and religious crony parasites.

Across on the continent, the pope’s private preacher stated something appalling about media scrutiny and demand for accountability by making a rediculous delusional and grossly untrue reference to the Holocaust.

Pope Benedict XVI's personal preacher on Friday likened accusations against the pope and the Catholic church in the sex abuse scandal to "collective violence" suffered by the Jews. ASSOCIATED PRESS

Sure, let’s victimize the Jews one more time – Standard Catholic Church Operating Procedure when in need of a scapegoat in times of Executive Mismanagement at the Vatican through the ages.

I find it strange that the pope’s private preacher also possibly identifies the pope and company with the Pharisees and high priests of the gospels and not the victims of children and or Jesus.

Latest off the press is how soon to be Saint John Paul the Great personally interceded and blocked the investigation of a pedophile cardinal.

John Paul ‘ignored abuse of 2,000 boys’

Allegations that the late pontiff blocked an inquiry into a paedophile cardinal, promoted senior church figures despite accusations that they had molested boys and covered up innumerable cases of abuse during his 26-year papacy have cast a cloud over his path to sainthood.

The most serious claims related to Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer, an Austrian friend of John Paul’s who abused an estimated 2,000 boys over decades but never faced any sanction from Rome.

The victims here are first the children corrupted by an untouchable and unmovable hierarchy answerable only to their god, whoever and whatever that god is over and above pride and greed for power and gross abuse of power.

Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna seems to be the pope’s Ventriloquist dummy lately in leaking or making statements for his friend Joe the Pope. That anything dumped on John Paul is supposed to relieve Cardinal Ratzinger who did not speak out and save children in favor of his own personal gain and power.

Complicity is also a crime here. Silence over conscience is complicity. Is a crime - Joe - is a crime.

The Nuremburg defense of “I was only following orders” is no good Joe the Pope.

We have now moved into the Nixon Defense of “ Anything I do is no crime.”

The little that Benedict did to stem child abuse by clergy has been too little and too late. And with no heart or passion in the task of building a path to true justice, resolution or closure. No closure is in sight yet on this modern day abomination that has caused this desolation and stain on the Christian character in this modern secular world.

Where is moral authority to be found in the modern Christian equation? I must stand and speak for myself. Authority in the hands of failed and corrupt corporation executives is unacceptable to this modern world.

Like Nixon Joe - It is time to go amidst this perfect storm of your own making, your own voluntary participation in these crimes against children who, by the way, are in fact humanity.

Time to resign !

Time for the true “People of God” – the Laity - to reform and rebuild that church.

Time for the long reign of Constantine to come to a final end.

Time for a rebirth (resurrection) of Christian faith everywhere.

A Real Jesus and Simon Bar Kochba

I have mentioned The Jesus Seminar in several of my articles. At first I was reluctant to accept that this long term scholarly deconstruction of the faith was necessary. In many ways, the future Christian church and it will exist in the centuries to come, will be based on a new foundation. The old foundation gave way not unlike the old St Peter’s in Rome that had stood there a thousand years and was torn down around 1500 C.E. to make way for the present structure.

Besides the crumbling foundation being examined and the engineers of The Jesus Seminar trying to determine how to best assess the damage, there is also separate from scholarly review the cancer setting into the Christian Faith from a worldwide RC hierarchy covering up priest abuse and the whole question of celibacy as a major factor in that abuse issue.

Another part of the cancer on the faith is the rigid thoughtless absolute bible hugging notion that the Bible is the unerring word of God as in the unerring opinion (tin god punditry) of fundamentalists. Yeah right.

The Jesus Seminar has moved on from the five gospels (Thomas for the sake of argument was included) and is now dissecting The Acts of the Apostles.

Seminar on the Acts of the Apostles

I invite you to read some of their reports and their blackballing of Acts as more of a second century document than a reflection of first century Christianity as we think of it and or have come to know it.

I eagerly await their seminar on Paul.

In my own amateur studies of esoterics and religion I feel confident to move on with my own brand of Cultural Christianity.

When looking at the Gospel of Mark recently and in a new format, line by line -

Bible, King James Version (KJV)

It struck me that Jesus if he ever existed did not live on the timeline they claim that he did. In my opinion, Jesus and or his ministry happened after the destruction of Herod’s temple in 70 AD.

I say this because I already believe that the Gospel of John is at least two small gospels welded together in the middle to suit a political agenda and claiming legitimacy of the Peter Clique of Christians as the one and only authorized Jesus name brand.

That looking at Mark I see road directions, markers that want the reader to believe in these events occurring in a certain time period. That the beginning of each synoptic gospel has different timeline markers designed for different intended audiences. Mark has John the Baptist. Matthew has Herod the Great and the Persian Magi. Luke has a census ordered by Augustus, with a timeframe not easily found or reconciled anywhere else in writings from antiquity.

And looking at Mark the whole Pilate marker is an amateur writer in the early second century wanting to use a recognizable figure such as Pilate in that he on a verbal or oral scale was somebody the Jews were still talking about decades after his transfer out of Palestine.

The trial with the high priest in the gospels is so phony. An orthodox Jew says he is the messiah and the high priest tears his clothes. In real life the high priest would have most likely said something like “Of course you are the messiah, and so is my nephew and half the people I meet everyday”.

The amateur nature of Jew on Jew and noble Roman letting Jew kill Jew is not early first century drama but early second century drama. Simon Bar Kochba and his Revolt and recycling of Hadrian’s Temple of Jupiter as the new Third Temple was a very short lived but real drama. There are coins of this two, three year era when the Jews almost broke the back of the whole Roman army and deserved a Josephus Flavious to write ripe propaganda about it.

Alas there are no records, very few about Hadrian bankrupting the Roman Empire in his desire to subjugate a foreign people and destroy a unique belief system. Who would want to keep records of the genocide of hundreds of thousands of Jews?

Jesus and or his sayings as in the Gospel of Thomas got written into a post apocalyptic script and backdated to be in the old antebellum Temple before 70 C.E. and to fulfill a hundred real or imagined prophetic conditions of a messiah. A simpler setting in a simpler time was needed to explain the teachings of Jesus and not with the backdrop of the chaos and thunder of the collapsed Jewish Dream in 135 C.E..

A simpler setting but the anger and rancor and political Jewish State infighting appear not to be disguised. The Pharisees as a class were a far more important factor in every day Jewish life after the destruction of Herod’s temple in the year 70 that before its demise.

After Bar Kochba and the total destruction of the Jewish State, some had to backtrack and decide or fabricate who the real messiah had really been if not Bar Kochba. Jesus of Nazereth?

We live in a wonderful age. The words of Jesus, the real words of Jesus and their love, humanity and quest for justice will echo through the centuries to come and not be filled with the hate and anti-Semitism of the hack spec writer scripts of the synoptic gospels.

Sabbath Tales

I have met and know of some remarkable men in my life. Since it is Friday and tonight at sundown marks the start of the traditional Jewish Sabbath, let me tell a few tales.

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.

Good Sabbath.

Secular Sense vs. Hate

The same way that a majority of American Catholics believe in pro-choice in terms of birth control, I believe that a near majority of Americans, at least in bigger cities, have come to tolerate the LGBT population of our country. Having Secular Sense is the common sense of decent people.

I would believe that the tediousness of this round after round and wave after wave of hate financed in part by the vast far right conspiracy in this country is running out of steam. Running out of steam but apparently not out of money.

With the steam going out of Gay Hate for the moment – no imminent Gay Bashing Propositions on any local ballots within sight, some groups are falling back on centuries old anti-Semitic Jew-Hating.

One group in particular has refocused its hate programs away from Gays and onto Jews because ”… Jews have been carrying the water for the homosexual agenda."

I dislike naming this group that pours 300 % of its energy into hate at this one particular Clubhouse (not a church) in Topeka KS. This is the group that “protests” outside the gates of cemeteries of slain U.S. Military Personnel - service men and women. They say they are glad that these fallen heroes are dead and they hate war and they hate soldiers and after twenty years of gay hate, when nobody will pay attention to them anymore, they fill the gaps in their time and very expensive traveling schedule to hate Jews here and there.

Even if they are using the church bus, they must need an awful lot of cash for gasoline and service station cokes. It is always a question in mind of who finances these lunatics?

They of course have a first amendment right to “assemble” and “protest”.

Anti-gay church sets its sights on Jews

“This is more about generating ink and outrage than it is about attacking Jews per say," said Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project. "But their language is absolutely Hitler-esque. They talk of filthy Jews and Jews murdering Christ."

Since April, … members have protested more than 200 Jewish institutions and sent thousands of anti-Semitic faxes to American Jewish officials. "I guess they felt it was a successful tactic," said Deborah Lauter, the national civil rights director for the Anti-Defamation League.

Hate is hate and with nationally financed Hate Agendas to cause distractions as ”Bread and Circus” - it keeps the greedy in power for a while longer until the house of cards falls in the end.

One day the hate is anti-female with the abortion issue. Next day the hate is against the Gays with same sex marriage. Today it seems to be the Jews and hate against them - to get the media, MSM, to produce a news story to air or print and ignore the real problems in this country left unfinished on the nation’s table.

One thing more about Secular Sense as I mentioned above. Before, I was only for civil unions but seeing how orchestrated and well financed far right hate has become – it is Gay Marriage – all or nothing - that I will tolerate with my Secular Sense to offset all this negative energy and bad karma from the far right haters in this fair and tolerant land.

Shalom!

Meal Ticket to Heaven

There was a famous BBC documentary series with James Burke called “Connections”. It seemed to ramble all about and show how different historic events, inventions, ideas sometimes came together to form other historic events, inventions, ideas.

I have a similar idea and flow here and it all has to do with food and religion.

Holy Thursday was also in stellar or is it lunar alignment with Passover this year.

As such or by coincidence, the Jewish Seder, or feast meal remembering Passover was held in the White House this year with Jewish staff officiating and the First Family in attendance in the private family quarters. This is no doubt a good political or is it a PC move for a chief executive who last week or in the last few days has mentioned his family links to Islam and in a predominately Muslim country of Turkey. Astute!

Let me go free flow on this. In my article about Saint Paul, I had mentioned my encounter with a Hindu salesman in an Arizona parking lot over a decade ago and his mentioning family and meals as the basis of response for questions I had about his religious background. Perhaps he was secular and did not know or did not want to go into detail with me within the context of a western, predominately in the past, Christian country.

And then there is Mel Gibson, sad soul, a RC traditionalist, that blames the Jews for Jesus’ Jewish mission in life. One of his seeming passions in life is anti-Semitism. That and transubstantiation of the conversion of Bread during the mass into the body of Christ – no satisfactory religious chefs after Vatican II for him. Does he resent the Jewish tradition of Passover or would he rather have had Jesus being secular and eating at Burger King?

Mr. Gibson’s profound anti-Semitism is I think rooted in his Irish Catholic American background not unlike my own. Irish American you say? A side trip to Australia as a young child and into adulthood didn’t much improve his cosmopolitan or lack of it view of the planet. Is it anti-Semitism or a profound lack of the knowledge of Jewish culture?

Moving along, I think of all the nuns who taught me as a child. Was their involvement in the faith profound, spiritual or was it all a meal ticket thing.

Standing behind three nuns in a polling place in the 1976 presidential election, I was surprised to hear that the nuns had legal names and they had to announce them to people running the election polling station. One by one they announced their legal names and one by one I heard the first real name of Mary for each and I don’t remember the other two’s last names but the third one of Mary Clancy – that sure hit a note of recognition of an good sounding Irish Catholic name. Then I thought to myself. All these nuns attached to a religious order that used the name Mary in the title of the order, they were all named Mary as well. Did they choose their vocations or were they steered toward vocations by parents who named them and groomed them for such.

This brings me in thought to Vatican II. I think the lay people did not panic so much then as it was the priests and nuns that jumped ship in droves that began a downward spire in the whole full life RC thing. Perhaps these deserters wanted a whole full secular life thing with sex and all that. Fewer nuns. Lay teachers cost more. Tuition for a RC education and a few decades later no more free Catholic grade schools for the average Catholic.

The priests, after Vatican II, saw the medieval church melt in front of their eyes and standing there Sunday after Sunday preaching the same lame boiler plate religion message just got so unspeakable.

The nuns and the priests for better or worse I classify under the meal ticket thing. That when Catholic families had five, six or eight kids, the parents had to do some futuristic planning about what to do with so many kids. One son for the priesthood and one daughter for the convent took care of two children. The others would marry and reproduce and take care of the parents in old age etc. It seemed like a good plan.

There has always been a percentage of priests and nuns who leave religious orders after their parents die. My aunt who had been a nun for twenty five years gave up the career after her parents, my grandparents died etc. Meal ticket or not, sometimes breathing your own free secular air is what life is really all about.

This brings me to the four gospels and how perception is everything. The Gospel of John seems to have been written by a non-Jew or a profoundly ignorant about his own culture Jew or anti-Semitic Roman Empire type. Only three of the gospels bothers to mentions the traditional Last Supper scene, the Jewish Seder, in the context of the Bread and Wine sacramental thing that has held a great deal of Christianity together for close to two millennia.

If one steps back and looks at these other three synoptic gospels, you realize that the menu is quite sparse there too.

Which makes me think? Did either secularized Jews or Hellenistic Jews write the gospels as “eyewitness” accounts? Or maybe non-Jews wrote them. That or they date further down a timeline well into the second century of the Common Era or got rewritten all the way up until the time of Saint Constantine the Great in the fourth century.

The oldest known existing fragment of the gospels is one page from John and that is in a museum in England and is dated to around 130-140 AD. Those dates triggers off a possible connection to the second Jewish rebellion during which The Third Temple got temporarily dedicated to Yahweh out of the recycled temple stones from Herod's time or the unfinished Temple of Jupiter on temple mount.

Not a lot of recorded history there. Josephus Flavius was dead and Jewish historian types were scarce at the second most total and most long lasting decimation of the Jewish nation in 135 AD. No doubt Hadrian wanted the facts covered up and did not even try the PR thing altogether. The emperor Hadrian has a favored status among most western historians. His collecting antiques and boy toys gets more mention in history books and you have to dig a lot to find his ranking in holocaust standings.

(If Jews want archeology opened up on the noble sanctuary, mention that you are looking for the Hadrian’s whatnot or the Temple of Jupiter, the west will approve.)

The gospels got written most likely by some Hellenistic Jews in Asia Minor (Turkey), a refugee staging area after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD and the final blow to the nation in 135 AD. That perhaps the anti-rebellion forces within Judaism in 70 and 135 is what laid the basis of anti-Semitism all the way to the present day. The present day anti-Semitism may have its beginnings on a change of internal attitudes and divisions in Judaism and the turning away from the old Judaism, more political than religious, recently passed away in 135 AD.

That said, I do not understand why they tack the Hebrew Testament onto the Greek Testament and have so little, basic knowledge among the common ranks of that long standing world religion and culture of Judaism.

The strength, salvation and possible rebirth of the dying Christian Church lies in the foundation stones of Judaism and Jesus’ (sorry Mel) Jewish mission. Two menus in one restaurant like the Old and New Testament speaks not of good eating but more like competing food court entities at a shopping mall.

Where is the horseradish? Bon appetite.

Cultural Sensitivity Issues 101 - Vatican

There are articles about how Benedict XVI dropped the ball recently with the lifting of excommunication of the Holocaust denying “bishop" Williamson along with other suspect anti-Semite “bishops" from the rogue catholic SSPX (Society of Saint Pius X) cult.

With a big chunk of cult followers, close to five hundred priests and close to three hundred seminarians worldwide, the Vatican did a power grab and would not let viable economic assets (priests/foot soldiers) slip out of its grasps.

With the finesse of elephants in tutus doing a ballet, the Vatican bureaucrats lifted the excommunication of these rogue “bishops” after doing little more than a Google search as a background check before their readmission to holy mother church. (Parents, hide your children!)

The facts of Williamson’s vehement anti-Semitism were evident for anybody who wanted to research the matter.

No doubt Cardinal Giovanni Re signed off on this lifting of the ban as a favor to retiring Cardinal Hoyos, 79, and the big guy Joe Ratzinger, 81. Cardinal Hoyos was cleaning the paperwork off his desk and Cardinal Re’s conscience conveniently slipped into the closet again.

This recent body slap to the face of worldwide Jewry and the human race as inheritors of the legacy of the crimes of WWII was in my opinion done by these two sometimes unrelated, disconnected bodies of power - the papacy and the Vatican bureauacracy.

The general corporate culture of the Vatican seems to be anti-female, anti-sexual, anti-Semitic, anti-Islamic, anti anything that has to deal with cultural diversity or the diversity of individuals in life.

The topic of Cultural Sensitivity Issues comes clumsily to the forefront of the present Vatican Bureaucratic corporate culture so comfortably rooted in the nineteenth and or the ninth century of the common era.

The bureaucracy, the Vatican, is a bunch of religious clerics who have spent their life in the Catholics bubble - family, catholic school, seminary, parish duties, bureaucratic duties and have not necessarily had any real life experience, say as in openly practiced sexual matters like the laity. If they have a problem they consult canon law or Playboy. It is all somehow in a book.

The pope, who in his youth as a Hitler Youth, (forced to do that against his will) and as a member of the Wehrmacht (also forced to do that against his will) has had pretty much the same rule book life as the rest of the Vatican, no life, bureaucracy.

The problem here I think is that the Vatican Bureaucracy has had a free ride for decades on the back of John Paul the Great who was a conscripted laborer in Poland (forced to do that against his will) who also gave occasional but dangerous consent to underground activities in his district.

Other than that, John Paul the Great had a little more street experience in his youth. As a pope, he did a lot of cross reference checking before anything with his signature hit the street.

There is this rule book mentality in Benedict’s background. The German people in their language, civil attitude and civil obedience do not use the subjunctive tense much in their language. You will do this. You are the Catholic. Words like would, could, should, and might only rarely soften the German language.

So too the whole Victorian age, so uptight about everything especially sex, was a rule book society. Prince Albert brought that rule book mentality with him from Germany to his new bride and adopted country. He, and or the literate upper crust of society, wrote, rewrote the rule book(s) for Victoria’s country and worldwide realm.

Aside from that, the lack of individual empathy, insight, touching, or feeling of other cultures and religions is evident as an inept pope passes the paperwork through lazy bureaucratic shits like Cardinal Hoyos and Cardinal Re.

What can I say? The Vatican seems at times to be a failed corporate culture with a failed CEO residing over an inept bureaucracy. And these guys in power are all over seventy. Shuffleboard anyone?

Cultural Sensitivity Issues 101 is yet to be taught in Catholic seminaries?

One can hope. Maybe after Vatican III.