Backstairs gossip about forgotten bigger than life rich Irish Micks of the New York Gilded Age centering on the politics and lives of several generations of Irish immigrants from the Revolution through the Irish Famine and onto the gilded age, intermingled with Tammany Hall, the Civil War, Mrs.William Astor's "400" society circle and the decades long building of one gothic style cathedral on Fifth Avenue. Meet infamous lawyer James T. Brady, Judge John R. Brady, independently wealthy priest of St.Leo's Father Thomas Ducey, eccentric Countess Annie Leary, John Eno the immature embezzler banker who almost brought on a stock market crash in 1884 along with elements of religion, the supernatural, demons and much more. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N9SQQBV .
James Topham
Brady was the son of Irish immigrants who first settled in Newark, NJ and then
in New York City. Brady received a privileged education and, in 1831 while
still a student, he aided his father, a lawyer, in various trials. Brady gained
admittance to the New York bar in 1836. His first case dealt with the
controversial topic of slavery, and "though he was unsuccessful his
handling of the matter was masterly . . . He was endowed by nature with a
facility of speech, which, assiduously cultivated and molded by long study, and
embellished with felicitous classical quotations, became well-nigh irresistible
with a jury, whilst his arguments, clear, logical, never verbose, were put with
a force and sincerity which always impressed the court" (Knott).
Over the
next two decades Brady came to be known as a leader of the New York bar. He was
connected to almost every important case of the time, either as the defense
attorney or the prosecutor (Knott). He became New York District Attorney in
1843, and he was later asked to be the United States Attorney-General, an honor
that he chose not to accept. Brady was fascinated by issues of insanity, but he
was beyond proficient in all areas of the law. In one memorable civil case, he
won an unbelievable $300,000 in damages for his client. He also represented
Mrs. Edwin Forrest in her divorce from her husband (Wilson & Fiske 355).
As a
criminal defense attorney he won fifty-one out of fifty-two murder trials; four
of those acquittals were won during the same week. Brady's prowess in the
courtroom was unmatched: "It has been said that he never lost a case in
which he was before a jury for more than a week; in that time they saw
everything through his eyes" (355)…
In a whole new world out there in modern
business regarding exploitation and brainwashing of employees, mostly immigrants, not native Brits, in
London etc.
Pret doesn't merely want its employees to lend
their minds and bodies; it wants their souls, too. It will not employ anyone
who is "here just for the money." Noting that one Pret worker in
London got fired soon after he tried to start a union—the company maintained it
was for making homophobic comments—Myerscough suggested the worker's true
offense was being unhappy enough to want to start a union, since "Pret
workers aren't supposed to be unhappy." The sin commenceth with the thought,
not the deed.
*Emotional labor is not itself new. Prostitutes
have faked orgasms for millennia. With greater sincerity (one hopes),
undertakers calm the grieving, nurses comfort the sick, and migrant nannies
lavish on other people's children the love they aren't present to furnish back
home. Flight attendants, in the pre-feminist era, calmed jittery flyers by
being pretty, friendly, even a little bit flirtatious; this ended with
deregulation in the early '80s as airlines stopped competing on service and
started competing on price.
In all these instances, emotional labor served
(legitimately or not) identifiable emotional needs. That's not true at Pret.
Fast-food service is not one of the caring professions. The only imperatives
typically addressed in a Pret shop are hunger and thirst. Why must the person
who sells me a cheddar and tomato sandwich have "presence" and
"create a sense of fun"? Why can't he or she be doing it "just
for the money"? I don't expect the swiping of my credit card to be
anybody's vocation. This is, after all, the economy's bottom most rung.
Archbishop Charles Chaput (left) evangelizing the faith.
The best of the best New York’s Cardinal Timothy
Dolan has quoted the best of the best wordsmith Archbishop Charles Chaput of
Philadelphia declaring Philly to now be
“Mission Territory” after decades of crime and coverup under the Cardinals
Krol, Bevilacqua and Rigali crime regimes.
Timmy, in typical alpha male mode for the USCCB has
volunteered the Archdiocese of New York as “Mission Territory” as well and is
likely petitioning the Congress at this very moment for tens of thousands guest
worker visas for Catholic missionaries from South America, Africa and South
Asia to swarm over North America and save it and or offer it up to the
oligarchs on a silver platter for a good price or place at the table in the new
world order of things.
There was a time when Rome used to send the best of
the best of Europe to missionary territories in the New World and up against the dominant Protestant Christian Culture of the young United States.
What have you done to my (Philly) church?
Bishop (Saint) John Neumann, a Sudetenland German, as fourth
bishop of Philadelphia missionary territory laid the foundation vision that built the largest, superior
Catholic education system in the United States, perhaps the world, that stood
for almost a hundred years until the Krol, Bevilacqua, Rigali regimes started
to strip the wealth of the Philly church, shipping cash over to Solidarity in
Poland for General Wojtyla to oppose the Russkies etc. along side CIA allies
and Ronald Reagan (bow your head).
These problems kill a Christian love of poverty and
zeal. They choke off a real life of faith. They create the shadows that hide
institutional and personal sins. And they encourage a paralysis that can burrow
itself into every heart and every layer of the Church, right down to individual
Catholics in the pews. The result is that Philadelphia, like so much of the
Church in the rest of our country, is now really mission territory–again; for
the second time...
First, religious freedom is a cornerstone of the
American experience. This is so obvious that once upon a time, nobody needed to
say it. But times have changed. So it’s worth recalling that Madison, Adams,
Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, Jefferson–in fact, nearly all the American
founders–saw religious faith as vital to the life of a free people. Liberty and
happiness grow organically out of virtue. And virtue needs grounding in
religious faith...
We’re becoming a nation where, as Ross Douthat
describes it, “a growing number [of us] are inventing [our] own versions of
what Christianity means, abandoning the nuances of traditional theology in
favor of religions that stroke [our] egos and indulge, or even celebrate, [our]
own worst impulses.” And it’s happening at a time when the Church is
compromised by her own leaders and people from within, and pushed to the
margins or attacked by critics without...
In the middle of media
disaster after disaster at the Vatican and all the stabbings in the each others' backs and power plays in Benedict
XVI’s brief corrupt rule, apparently it’s Timmy Dolan to the rescue with a
recommendation from Knight of Malta Rupert Murdock’s FOX NEWS.
Greg Burkes, who has
done no real reporting except as the FOX NEWS Vatican correspondent in the past decade, is a
member of Opus Dei. That means he flagellates
himself regularly for spirituality and has trouble dealing with the opposite
sex.
All in all, your
typical well rounded two dimensional cardboard FOX journalist.
ROME -- In an effort to
shore up its communications strategy amid a widening leaks scandal in a
troubled papacy, the Vatican has hired the Fox News correspondent in Rome as a
senior communications adviser.
The correspondent, Greg
Burke, 52, who has covered the Vatican for Fox since 2001, will leave the
network to help improve and coordinate the Vatican's various communications
operations, Mr. Burke and the Vatican spokesman said.
Some Vatican watchers
called the move a power play by media-savvy Americans -- including Cardinal
Timothy M. Dolan, the archbishop of New York and the president of the United
States Conference of Catholic Bishops -- inside a Vatican hierarchy run by
Italians whose most frequent communications strategy is to accuse their critics
of defamation.
Mr. Burke is a member
of the conservative Opus Dei movement, and his hiring underscores the group's
role in the Vatican.
As far as I can see he
is not a nephew of Cardinal Raymond Burke.
He is more like a temporary consultant like Gotti Tedeschi was at the
Vatican Bank.
The insiders in the
Vatican will have Greg Burke for lunch. LOL
If anything, all future
media press releases supposedly coming from the Vatican will likely originate
in Roger Ailes' bunker (he's afraid of colored folks and gays) at 49th Street and Sixth Avenue in New York City, FOX NEWS HQ.
On this official first day of New YorkState’s Equal Rights Marriage Law for same sex couples, I ran into this document, perhaps guided by the great spirit.
Apparently, long before the Christian Right Haters got together with their manufactured “Christian” Public Relations Sharia document of the Manhattan Declaration, there were some divinely inspired souls out west, ahead of the humanity curve, who came together and write The Phoenix Declaration.
“We stand in solidarityas those who are committed to work and pray for full acceptance and inclusion of GLBT persons in our churches and in our world. GLBT persons are condemned and excluded by individuals and institutions, political and religious, who claim to be speaking the truth of Christian teaching. This leads directly and indirectly to intolerance, discrimination, suffering, and even death. Political and religious rhetoric has monopolized the public perception of the stance of Christian persons on this issue. This stance continues to cripple the spirit of innocent people. The Christian faith compels us to be part of the healing for the souls wounded by this tragic, violent, and destructive hatred. Therefore:
We stand withthe countless Christian ministers, scholars, and laity who, from prayerful study of the scriptures and Christian tradition, find no rational biblical or theological basis to condemn or deny the rights of any person based on sexual orientation. The essence of Christian life is not focused on sexual orientation, but how one lives in relationship with God with compassion toward humanity….”
Long before there were words on any paper, there was Jesus in the flesh, preaching and practicing his special humanity.
You cannot fit Jesus’ heart onto any piece of paper or into any book(s). It is just too big.
(Sadly, the American culture war, or war on humanity, continues.)
Looking at the agony of some closeted clergy who can’t leave their job and or vocation, they have no job skills. And quite frankly they have never touched a child or adolescent in the rounds of their duties.
Looking at the heartbreak of young men who cannot lie to themselves about their natural sexuality, who cannot pretend that they are not homosexual in their life outlook or deny their birthright. They do not want to be clergy living a lie. That is one reason the clergy is dying. For centuries it has always been the "odd" son that got foisted off the family meal ticket and into Holy Orders. Looking for an image to match the hypocrisy of the self serving American Bishops, trying for close to a decade now, to keep throwing shit against the wall in hopes that it will stick and find a sufficient scapegoat, to blame the clergy child sex abuse scandal on, nothing sticks except the truth. Mismanagement and not caring about humanity has marked the American Catholic Hierarchy for decades. The magisterium of the RC church has always been trickle down from the top. Arch-conservatives such as Francis Cardinal Spellman set the tone of things to come, failure, in the American Catholic church when he said “Change will not get past the Statue of Liberty” at Vatican II to his cronies. When the John Jay College/USCCB whitewash talks about priests not properly trained in the 1940s and 1950s and not being able to function, they only scratch the surface of ten more needed studies on human sexuality and the repressed state of it in the RC church. “Researchers at John Jay College of Criminal Justice said most of the abusive priests were ordained in the 1940s and 50s and were not properly trained to confront the social upheavals of the 1960s.” Interesting point. But who was in charge of the American Catholic Church in the 40s, 50s and 60s or set the tone for the whole nation. None other than Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York, first among equals among American Catholic clergy and very clever and very ambitious to push that church’s foreign born agenda. “Franny” was the success role model of every Irish Catholic boy in the Seminary who wanted to be rich, respected and powerful. And yeah there was that ritual and Jesus thing too. But the real power was in raising money from rich friends to build schools, hospitals, universities and churches too. The baby boom of post WWII meant that you had to crank up the seminary machine and spit hundreds and thousands of new priests out on an annual basis to maintain all that new church property, schools, hospitals, universities and churches too. On that point, the John Jay College report may be right. But then again what the Vatican is presently embracing with pandering to the right wing SSPX party in the church is probably a mistake and an unintended cup of hemlock. Grinding out priests out of makeshift seminaries in South America, Africa and Asia is setting the stage for the final refuge of the RC church and also the final death throes of that church using the Spellman model of church business success to sell the product. It is a defective dysfunctional model of that product, because child abuse among untrained and sexually repressed, closeted, celibate clergy will produce the same results in the rest of world that it has done here in America in the past half century. I remember attending the Army Navy Game in 1967 with my father in Philly. The loud speaker made the announcement that Francis Cardinal Spellman, Vicar General of the Armed Forces, had died. The crowd was momentarily silent and then went back to its business. I asked my father who Cardinal Spellman was. He gave me that “don’t ask” non verbal Irish look. It was also the look you might get when asking about uncle Fred who you never met. It was that don’t ask about your crazy queer uncle in the attic look. I shut up. Indeed, Cardinal Spellman’s taste for chorus boys was no secret amongst Irish Catholics it would seem. The MSM complied with the conspiracy to keep quiet as well on the subject of the biggest queen in America, red dress and all, living in the Bishop’s Palace at 50th St. and Madison Avenue in New York City on the grounds of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Perhaps the present political culture wars started in the thirties when people like Joseph P. Kennedy, Eugenio Pacelli (Pius XII) and Franny Spellman sat down to dinner in Boston to plot the silence of radio populist Father Charles Coughlin and plot other political strategy for the 1936 re-election of FDR. But this is not really a history lesson, is it? An aside, I don’t think that J. Edgar Hoover was as big a queen as Francis, as some say. J. might have been a closeted gay and maybe even asexual. I don’t think that he wore dresses. I think those stories about J. Edgar are exaggerated and revenge after that blackmailing bureaucratic snake went to his eternal reward and have been perpetuated by his many, many, many enemies. Indeed, the dysfunction of recent American culture seems to stem from the McCarthy era. Everybody knows that Joe McCarthy was a tortured repressed closet gay and only married to have a beard wife. Another crony of Joe Kennedy, former gangster and bootlegger, and father of a future Catholic (first and only, thank God) U.S. President. The overtone of the present culture war is not so much about gay or suppressed gay sexuality as it is about suppressed sexuality among Christians who have a mindset that all sex is dirty. It is an immature view that the rest of the world is not aware of from a distance. But if the American Empire falls tomorrow and people, future historians, ask why. One primary reason was that honest discourse in the public arena had to always talk around the elephant in the room, and that is the Christian distorted view of human sexuality. Laws against women, laws against gays, they are all laws against God’s gift to humanity – sexuality. In a sense there was one great conspiracy among the RCs or the Irish Catholics in general to get a RC and or Irish Catholic into the White House. And if that meant covering up everybody’s personal flaws - of McCarthy, Kennedy, Spellman, well it worked. Don’t ask, don’t tell worked quite well for centuries among the rich and the elites of governments and church hierarchies. There is an incredible amount of silence and lack of published documentation about Franny Spellman’s open secret sexuality. Even the New York Times kept silent. Now that was power to be feared for the NYT to be silenced back then when that paper still had a backbone. So when the present hierarchy of the American Catholic Church want to blame child abuse on the 40s, 50s and 60s, let’s also have an open discussion about celibacy and closeted clergy and the patron saint of closeted “celibate” clergy, let’s start talking about Saint Franny, our gay uncle in America’s history attic. The truth could set you free.
In walking distance, it is maybe eight or nine blocks from the extreme northern end of Central Park. It is the crown on top of the so-called fashionable upper west end of Manhattan. It is the southern boundary of the Columbia University campus. I am of course talking about the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine - 112th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, New York City.
All sorts of adjectives and descriptions for this unfinished mish mash of styles, Romanesque and Gothic. The Nave is 600 feet long, the size of two American football fields laid end to end. It is second only in size to St. Peter’s in Rome. I am not certain where that big church in the Ivory Coast fits in, in terms of size, volumes etc.
This perhaps quiet, unforgotten gem of New York City architecture has been in building mode in spurts and stops since 1892. Many say that this seat of the Episcopal Bishop of New York is a dodo bird of sorts. It defies description but its internal space is why I am writing about it. One brief building period in the middle eighties to middle ninties added fifty feet (one third) of the Southwest bell tower in first photo above. It will not be finished in my lifetime.
I first encountered this behemoth structure in the middle of an May rain storm over thirty years ago. Getting out of the rain was indeed a pleasure but I have not stepped into any other such a magnificent space since. I have been in Notre Dame in Paris and only have a vague memory of it except that I thought it rather plain for all the hype. The average tourist never makes it here unless on a tour bus or religious bus tour package. It is as hidden a treasure to native New Yorkers as it is to the accidental tourist who, like me, literally stumbles upon its sheer space and audacity of being.
I have not been there since the fire and the smoke damage that required extensive and expensive cleanup. Less smoke damage would have occured if they has broken the stained glass to vent the fire. The officials at the Cathedral asked the fire marshall not to touch the windows which led to seven years of clean up that now has put the building on par with anything of Medieval European religious gothic architecture in official tourist guide books.
My first impression there had to do with that of the sheer size. The darkness of its soot covered interior walls was a result of having been submitted to fifty years of old New York City coal burning for heat and cooking in the air and reaching inside an open and unfinished church.
That dark space I feel to this day and a sense of what an astronaut must feel floating in outerspace, as I looked up into a seeming infinite darkness. When they finally opened the church in 1941, they put a temporary plywood dome over the unfinished transept expecting to finish the work after WWII. Funny how that temporary roof painted black made for such magic inside with a few electric lights, votive candles and gloomy exterior rain filled light making a faint register through blue colbalt colored stained glass.
Now over a hundred years of coal soot and fire smoke damage and general grime are cleaned up. The building was rededicated in late 2008.
The cathedral, not so crowded as with the huge number of midtown tourists that frequent the likes of St. Patrick's, makes this place a very quiet and meditative sort of place.
There is plenty of artwork, tapestries, icons, statues and it has a Holocaust memorial sculpture. It is an all purpose building that fits into the secular needs of the nearby Columbia University community. It is host to concerts, plays and even the annual blessings for animals small and big as elephants if need be.
It is a place where famous people, well loved people, have their post mortal memorials because of the thousands of people who can crowd into the space. I recall the author James Baldwin's memorial service took place there. It seemed appropriate since the rear of the cathedral sits on a slight hill and overlooks most of Harlem.
A very interesting place.
Here is a dated review of the place from the Ship of Fools website that reviews services and architecture of houses of worship worldwide.
And of course the annual Francis of Assisi Animal blessing.
I close in quote from the first video above.
"It moves me intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. It illustrates what architecture can do to the human animal. What an expression that architecture can be to the human spirit” --Alfred Blanco, Cathedral docent
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