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

John Paul II – Karol Wojtyla – A Saint and Pope for All Heretics – Gestapo, MBP, KGB, CIA and Knights of Columbus

“I never took a cash bribe from the Gestapo, MBP (Ministerstwo Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego), KGB, CIA, or KoC (Knights of Columbus) that was not HOLY!”

Holy Card Credit - http://massiveenormity.blogspot.com/2013/07/john-paul-ii-patron-saint-of-torn.html

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Growing pains of a new global culture?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whatever.

Rest in Peace.

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

Where I wonder will her two brats dump her ashes?

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Benedict the German’s Legacy - Ungehorsam - Disobedience

He looks tired.

He went to Mexico and the Mexican bishops did not present any clergy abuse victims for him to apologize to.

No clergy abuse in Mexico?  Not according to the Judenrat bishops there.

Well he looks tired and he will die soon and go to his eternal reward.  His judgment for acts here on this earth is between himself and his God.


"The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones."


At the end of an almost thirty year period where he and Karol Wojtyla openly conspired against the faithful, forged an unholy alliance to steal God's good grace from the faithful, and appoint “yes men”, Judenrat boot licking bishops like in Mexico and worldwide, he complains about dissent in the ranks.

“Ungehorsam” “Disobedience” to the Papal King. To the Magisterium – the Papal Mafia Crime Empire.

Disobedience to Evil is no sin. It is a Virtue.

Jesus fought against priests. Priests plotted to kill Jesus. The Priests are still with us.  And now some are disobedient to his imperial majesty.

 

In the old days, disobedience got you shot in the Wehrmacht.

Verstehen? Understand?

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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.