Cables on Church Sex Scandal among those Sent to Wikileaks
Threat Level posted a quarter of the chat logs between alleged Wikileaks leaker Bradley Manning and hacker Adrian Lamo (it didn’t post those with particularly personal or potentially dangerous national security information).
While the logs don’t provide many details about what was in the 260,000 State Department cables that has the government so spooked, they do reveal that some of the cables pertain to the Vatican’s position on the Church’s sex scandals.
(1:45:16 PM) Manning: hundreds of them
(1:45:40 PM) Lamo: like what? I’m genuinely curious about details.
(1:46:01 PM) Manning: i dont know… theres so many… i dont have the original material anymore
(1:46:18 PM) Manning: uhmm… the Holy See and its position on the Vatican sex scandals
(1:46:26 PM) Lamo: play it by ear
(1:46:29 PM) Manning: the broiling one in Germany
Sort of makes you wonder why the State Department is discussing what the Vatican thinks about its pedophile priests, doesn’t it? Unless of course our government is tapping the Pope to keep tracks on the Church’s pedophiles…
Hahahahahahahahahah!!!
Also puts new light on the Elena Kagan via stand in stooge Katyal decision to (apparently without invitation) affirmatively weigh in with a brief seeking immunity for the Vatican’s endless series of child molesters and felchers imposed on the innocent children of the United States.
Katyal has been a terrible disappointment … even worse than the Dawn Johnsen non-confirmation !
F1 makes its only North American stop in La Belle Provence … can a brother get a trash talk thread ?!!Nevvuh Mind !Whaaaaaaaa??
Brother, I been picking up those Canuck vibes you been sending down here all day!
And I do not think Katyal has been that much of a surprise. He has always been far, far more conservative in the law and order/executive war power types of areas than most people in the blogosphere think. Dawn Johnsen though, now there was a profound loss.
Already beat him up for one.
I still don’t quite understand why our government decided it needed to weigh in on the sovereign immunity side of that argument, considering it’s only since the Reagan years that we treated the Vatican as sovereign with an ambassador and all.
There might be something else Victor Ashe-y going on, though….
It’s top secret because they don’t want the Vatican to figure out who among them is working for U.S. intelligence…what else could it be?
I saw this at the raw story earlier today:
“Pope begs forgiveness for church sex scandal”
and wondered about the timing..
Perhaps some busyness in the Vatican concerning this.
Now if you were to mix “some of the cables pertain to the Vatican’s position on the Church’s sex scandals” cables and US politicians; could the two ever meet in some embarrassing fashion?
Maybe the Vatican is providing information to the government? It does, after all, have coverage in a lot of places.
Like the Confessional!!
Secret info… no strings attached!
Eh? I always figured that whatever spy organization is run by the Vatican is in contact with the other big spy agencies. Why not? They’re all busy keeping their corporate masters’ money safe (and that goes for the Vatican, too, bc, to me, a non-Catholic, it just seems as if all the Catholic Church is about is money and power… and now, of course, raping kids – but that’s just another form of power. With all due respect to true believers).
If you have a Twitter account, tweet this story, folks. Maybe with greater awareness we can flush out the real gig at the root of this mess.
We’ve known about the Reagan/Bush era stories about young male prostitutes used in honeypot ops. Is this stuff related? Was it continuing?
Or are compromised priests good candidate for intel gathering?
So many options.
Maybe some Vatican Bank related issues…or embarrasing SCOTUS associations..
jus’ sayin’…
Does anyone have a link to the Katyal amicus brief? Also if the Vatican is a sovereign in these cases, does this mean that priests should be required to register as agents of a foreign government?
Here you go. And I will note that the odds are 100% that this was a Kagan effort and it is was only undersigned by Katyal because Kagan had just, within days prior, decided to do no work for her paycheck and made Katyal acting while she claws her way up to the Supreme Court.
Probably collaborating the data with respect to psych experimentation.
“Yes, Dr. X, we confirmed that sexually terrorizing/broiling the subjects produced results we were looking for.”
Thank you for the link.
Holy See v. John V. Doe
(holy shit!)
(V?)
(Poor Gary Cooper)
Well either Cooper or Exene Cervenka’s ex-husband and the bass player for X.
“Holy See v. John V. Doe
(holy shit!)
(V?)”
The appeal to the Supreme Court is from Oregon, where the appeals court decided that trial could go forward on Doe’s case on the issue of whether or not Bishops operate under Vatican Authority, and in terms of labor law, should a Bishop be considered an agent-employee of the Vatican. It is a nice lovely case. Gets really dishie because at the time of the abuse events in question, the Bishop in Oregon was Levanda, who has since become head of the Office for the Doctrine of the Faith, or the ole inquisition. That was Benedict’s previous job. Vatican claims Bishops are NOT employees, but more like independent franchise holders — Doe claims otherwise.
Oh wait a minute — the Oregon case is not in this question, this is the Kentucky case. Jeff Anderson has about five cases against the Vatican with slightly different facts in play all going on at the same time.
Theologians, particularly fairly liberal ones, have had great fun with this case, as about the only defense is to claim that the Vatican doesn’t control Bishops, and the Pope has no control over any Vatican Process. Benedict has even had to say, abet in fairly general language, that Vatican policy has always been that Bishops should report possible criminal priests to local civil authority (ha ha), even though there is hardly a case except in very recent years, of any Bishop ever calling the cops, even in murder cases. (The Germans are having lots of fun investigating this matter, as Merkle has appointed a Bundestag commission to investigate the application of Civil Law, and I sense strong opinion on most sides of German Politics for straightforward law making all institutions of any church subject to German Law — one way to wipe out the remains of Hitler’s Concordet with Rome. There also seems to be movement in the European Parliment to bring the issue to the European Human Rights Courts.)
Not at all surprised that State would suggest DOJ defend the Sovrreign Immunity issue as it seems to be doing. They use this argument all the time to defend Government Employees against Sexual offense accusations in various parts of the world.
What will be interesting is whether any of the five Catholic Justices will recuse themselves when they hear the case.
Why not just say church and state? Isn’t that how they say a sect that sacrifices animals is out of range and so not subject to animal cruelty laws? Protected religion, whatever? Pulling out of my airhead.
Besides, I’m so charmed by the name of the case. It’s like Pope vs. Jesus, let’s go to court. You can’t make this stuff up.
Since the Vatican controls who gets to become a bishop (and even more archbishops), I’d say that claiming they’re not employees is kind of ingenuous.
(Can bishops change locations without the Vatican’s permission? If not, then they’re employees.)
Ingenuous, perhaps, but I’d say disingenuous.
Bob in AZ
You are, of course, correct. I plead brain rot.
Yeah, for a while there I was gonna go with the Bishop thing, but I decided to open a Dairy Queen instead. Better deal on the co-op ads.
6 Catholic justices. Don’t forget Obama added to the pack w/Soto.
I’m sorry I don’t have time to read carefully here, but here’s something about Red Mass from October.
http://legaltimes.typepad.com/blt/2009/10/red-mass-in-dc-draws-six-justices-vice-president.html
Also, Jeff Kaye mentioned Banco Ambrosiano-I had no idea that was the Vatican Bank. The first I heard of it was in this article:
The War They Wanted, The Lies They Needed; Craig Unger; July 2006
Bush and the Cheney-gang, CIA, SISMI, Propaganda Due, Burlusconi, Reagan…this article made a lot of connections for me.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/07/yellowcake200607
Interesting link to the VF article. But note, Banco Ambrosiano and the Vatican Bank were not the same thing. The Vatican Bank owned a huge share of the B.A., but while B.A. collapsed after the suicide?/murder? of its chairman, Roberto Calvi, the Vatican Bank (Istituto per le Opere di Religione) continued to operate. Much of the dirty money which couldn’t be accounted for in B.A. ended up at Vatican Bank.
Calvi was a member of P2, the fascistic Masonic Lodge that had penetrated the highest layers of Italian politics. B.A. laundered money through Vatican Bank for right-wing causes, also to fund Gladio operations. American Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, who was director of the U.S. branch of the Vatican Bank was supposed to be indicted for his role in the B.A. bankruptcy (over $1.3 billion missing, in 1982 dollars), but the Italian courts ruled he had diplomatic immunity!
Vatican Bank has been connected to laundering money for the Nazis, the fascist Croatians after WWII, the Mafia, the CIA, etc. They are under investigation even now in Italy for yet another money laundering scandal.
The Vatican is so steeped in rot, it makes the canals of Venice look like a water treatment center.
Wait a sec! Does this have anything to do with that story a few years back about a Japanese businessman being caught at the Italian border with a bazillion bucks in a suitcase or something? Why, where’d this stuff come from? Damn, what was that story… ?
—
Like, the world was supposed to end… and then I never heard anything more. Also, I still don’t get it. Like “cleaning up” a toxic dump, it just means moving it someplace else. Wherever it is, it’s still a toxic dump. Who wants it? If the point is to make it disappear, why not a shredder? I don’t get it.
The outcome, as reported here, raises far more questions than it answered (almost none at all).
That article brought to mind another piece I had read some time ago about Japan, Moon , the Unification Church and money laundering .
It took a while to locate it, but it has a LOT of interesting background info that I found intriguing..
Mysterious Republican Money – Consortiumnews.comSep 7, 2004 … Mysterious Republican Money. By Robert Parry September 7, 2004 … But Hastert, an Illinois Republican, made news at the Republican National …
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/090704.html – Cached – Similar
re: Red Mass and SCOTUS
Here’s a most thought provoking piece about the origins of OPUS DEI(God’s Work)…a “society ” of uber conservative Catholics, of whom it is said ,that some of the SCOTUS justices are members of.
The Opus Dei Sets Out to Conquer the World [Voltaire]The Opus Dei Sets Out to Conquer the World | Catholic Extremists | It was during the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco in Spain that priest José …
http://www.voltairenet.org/article136480.html – Cached
I’ve been to Red Mass before (and I am a total heathen). All the big and important judges go; it is a great place to see and be seen and butter up those you need to.
Well, having been raised Catholic, I WILL give them this much-they REALLY know HOW to put on a theatrical production!
I was amazed the first time I went into a Protestant church-no glamour at all! s/
That is a fact!! Catholics are like the Rogers and Hammersteins crossed with the Busby Berkeleys of religious ceremony. Great pageantry (but so is the Rose Bowl parade).
*G*
Christmas mass and the grand finale is Santa Claus coming up the aisle handing out candy to the kids and then going up to the manger to kneel. I have seen it.
Actually, that was the last mass I ever saw, I just could not believe it. I think my jaw is still on the floor of St. Martin’s.
The Episcopal Church is a good compromise. But if you really want the pageantry without the Pope, go to an Orthodox Church.
Bob in AZ
Your link doesn’t work for me, but an archive has it:
Thanks for that. I was having trouble, too, but figured I was just doing something wrong…I didn’t have time to try to figure it out. I’m glad you took the time.
I’m glad it helped somebody. I cannot believe how easily I get sucked into teh google, it’s like googleholism I guess. Beneficial googleholism in this case at least– thanks :-)
This is weird, I mean it kinda goes to support a church vs state separation and take it away as a defense. There is no intelligible employee/franchise analogy. Is there an analogous pope of McDonalds? Is the kid who serves me my cone like a priest, in relation? I think the better question is, can the Pope get away with murder? with pedophilia? with enabling pedophilia? The Pope is not the church, and pedophilia is not sanctioned by the church. Isn’t there something legal about the king’s two bodies, the natural one and the royal one? What is it– the office distinct from the person holding the office? So don’t touch the office of the Pope or the church that makes the office, but go after the guy who happens to be holding the office.
Immunity, I’m sick of it. Prosecutors get to frame a kid on fake murder charges, hey that’s tough.
Well, just catching up on my reading about the latest Vatican going’s on…
On Friday, the Pope redefined the Priesthood, not as a job, not as a franchise, but as a sacrament. The better to avoid a legal ruling by the Supremes, I would gather. He was marking the end of the “Year of the Priest” with a huge Mass in Rome, with 19 thousand Priests in attendence, and had a “few comments.”
A Sacrament is a mark of grace, if I remember my Catachism correctly. So can a mark of grace be sued? Nifty question.
(Just to note, Am not, and never have been Catholic. But due to moving all over the place due to WWII, mother thought I could do with a really good school, so sent me to a private Convent day school…highly educated nuns, brown uniforms, and all the rest. Found the religion fascinating, but wanted to discover what all the other religions said on the same topic — so beginning in the fifth grade, I started reading my self into all this stuff. More fascinating — Church History.
During the 1960’s, after college and involvement in the early Civil Rights Movement, I became Executive Director of the Minnesota Council on Religion and Race. To understand this — go back and read King’s letter from a Birmingham Jail, where he takes the white clergy (go real slow Martin) to task, and the upshot of that criticism was a new organization of Major Religious Leaders committed to support SCLC and “the movement.” In Minnesota we had 34 Denominations, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Orthodox in it — my board consisted of 34 Bishops, Denominal Presidents and the like, all seated around a huge table, with little me as their Director. (I knew Coretta, and through her Martin — Coretta was an Antiochian).
To do the job well, you had to know a hell of a lot about 34 Religions, if you wanted to move them to make common cause with Civil Rights — and all these guys had to confess to you the strange paricularities of their organization and all that needed to be considered in every sentence you wrote. In the 60’s, the Catholics were just in the midst of Vatican II, and all was up for consideration and debate. But I got to do things like take fairly high ranking Minnesota Priests to their first Black Baptist Service, with all the Gospel Music, Call and Response, Jazz and all the rest, and help them see the bits and pieces of it all that were 2,3, or 4 degrees away from an element in the Latin Mass they said every day…it wasn’t really a mish-mash. About half of the Priests who got involved in Civil Rights in a major way, left the Priesthood — most because they got out into Plural American Culture and found the Cloisters deadly. Anyhow since then, I’ve remained interested and kept reading. My own take on the whole sex abuse issue is that it became essentially epidemic in the European and American Catholic Churches in the 70’s and 80’s largely because many of the stronger potential leaders, the brightest bulbs on the block, are the ones who resigned after Vatican II, and went on to other lives. They were the guys who were informed, educated beyond the confines of the seminary, and had personal self confidence — and probably would have been leadership had they stayed. But they left, and the time-servers and the petty watchdogs inherited the scene and became today’s Bishops.
As to the Lincoln stuff…remember someone was always about to assassinate Lincoln. They had to sneak him into DC for his swearing in because of threats in Baltimore, and throughout his terms of office there were constant plans to kill him, some real, some not. No Secret Service in those days, you could just walk into the White House until elements of the Army were posted around the White House in the second year of the Civil War. And it was a Civil War, It tore the country apart, and not just north and south. Lincoln became a hate target of much of this — just look through the cartoons about him during his Presidency. As a result there were vast numbers of rumors about regarding assassination plots, and unless you can historically find evidence that the conspirator or conspirators acted in furtherance of a plot, it gets to be highly questionable.
We’ve seen something of the same thing with Obama — the rumors during the campaign, particularly in the Black Communities, that THEY were going to kill him — who was THEY? well no one knew exactly, the THEY had killed King and Malcolm. Every month or so the Secret Service or FBI bring charges or just investigate such rumors, some seem legitimate, others pretty far fetched, but I think for many of us, it is a constant worry. We may not be in the midst of a Civil War these days, but we all know there are plenty of nutballs out there, and they concern us.
The Historian has to learn to discount most rumors where you don’t have objective evidence.
Wasn’t it always a sacrament, holy orders? So, holy gobbledygook, that’s his business, but has nothing to do with whether the church can sanctify pedophilia or pedophiliacs to make a lawsuit go away. Because, I mean, really, isn’t that it? And where would he draw the line? Nuns can’t get parking tickets? Do priests vote? Do they renounce citizenship? Are they all illegal aliens outside the Vatican, or do they have a green card? I was confirmed, I was a Catholic once, confirmation is a sacrament, this means I won’t get a speeding ticket? Oh, tell me more.
Baptized people (sacrament!) don’t have to pay taxes?! I want my money back.
…oh wait… render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s …render unto the courts the slimy pedophiles and those who enabled them…
and render unto the Lord the things that are the Lord’s …and God will sit in judgment of the slimy pedophile’s and pedophile enabler’s souls.
Works!
I declare: I am a citizen of Nutopia, The Country of Peace, and my house is an embassy.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono tried that in a real immigration case, their own, when Nixon was trying to deport him. They won, but not on those grounds.
Yeah, holy orders are a sacrament in the Catholic Church.
Here’s what I think is the sly thing about the Pope’s reminder: If, in effect, God ordains the clergy, then they are not under the Pope’s control. Of course, this ignores the fact that the Pope can defrock a priest, but hey, who’s paying attention?
Bob in AZ
Who’s your mama?
John Wilkes Booth was present near Lincoln at his second inauguration, there’s a photo, certainly within gunshot range. He shot Lincoln on Good Friday.
I find everything in the story highly questionable, as in wow, red alert, let’s ask questions. I hope klynn’s Lincoln historian friend @101 will do so — I’m just a google monkey and I know my limitations. This is an old story, s/he probably knows of it already, or scholarship has already been done. Can I ask you if you had heard of it before, being in Minnesota and connected to so many churches?
This is fascinating. I agree with others here who say you’re a treasure. Tell us more.
you can’t make this stuff up!
:-)
Wow, interesting how high ranking government officails have their spies keeping tabs on pedophiles Dutroux Affair
Two words: Banco Ambrosiano, or alternatively, Vatican Bank.
The Vatican, looked at one way, is an asset of the CIA. The Vatican must be protected because of the role they play helping U.S. foreign policy in Catholic countries (think Poland, for instance), and because the Vatican demands it anyway. They each hold so many secrets on the other, neither could let the other fall or become vulnerable.
They don’t give a shit about abused altar boys and pedophile priests. They keep an eye of the Vatican just like they keep an eye on any of their allies. You don’t think they snoop on French diplomatic cable traffic, or Mexican, or German, etc.? When the pedophile scandal reached the steps of the Vatican, the administration reached for sovereign immunity. Americans are so cynical now they will seemingly tolerate anything: torture, assassination, invading countries on lies, bombing civilians, human experimentation without consent on prisoners, buggering little boys… it’s all okay, or at least tolerable when it’s for the glory of the United States, or the career of your favorite politician.
Actually, the court has limited Religion in several ways. You can’t claim that your faith requires you to ignore substance laws and consume holy mushrooms or to smoke pot, and they threw out a religion born in American Prisons that demanded its followers only consume steak (Prime). It also limited the degree to which churches could ignore zoning laws.
These cases go much deeper into Church-State relations. Ultimately it is about whether Canon Law that conflicts with US State and Federal Law has any legal merit. Since all the investigations started back in the late 80’s and particularly after 2001, we have all sorts of sworn testimony from Police Administration, that if cops found Father X rapeing a kid, a woman, another man, the proper proceedure was to put him in the squad car and turn him over to the Bishop. Civil law enforcement (not the actual law) ignored the rights of the victim to a hearing, trial, punishment of the offender, but instead allowed Bishops to hide the offender, send him to another parish, to a psychologist, whatever — practice actually recognized Canon Law in all too many jurisdictions, by treating the priest-offender different from the way cops would treat other rapists. At issue in these cases is whether the Vatican can be held responsible for administration of such Canon Law that offers absolutely no protection of the victims of the offender, or in fact any protection to anyone not a priest or in the hierarchy. The case is much more about 14th Amendment matters regarding equal protection — and the actual parties to the suit will be much more focused on this than on Sovereign Immunity.
Thanks, this is interesting.
I still say, though, that when you get to Pope vs. Jesus, and you’re the Pope– you have lost. Pope vs. Jeff Anderson, maybe you’ve got a prayer. Pope vs. John V. Doe, done. Unless all you ever had to defend was your money, in which case the exposure is lovely.
That sure may be the practice or what occurred in some jurisdictions, and I am certain it probably was; but that is not anything I saw here particularly. Here the problem was far more one of intense heavy handed pressure from the church on victims and their families to keep quiet and not report to the authorities and the church hiding and moving its offending clergy. When advised and in possession of a sufficiently provable case, there was never any problem with the cops and/or prosecutors pursuing it. Like I said though, I doubt that is the case everywhere.
As to focus much more on the 14th as opposed to immunity; I think that will change markedly with the wedging in of the US government. When you have the defendant and the government fight you on a cognizable front, you darn well better pay attention to it. Ah, which you address @29. You are right, Anderson’s story would make a great book or flick. I also have serious problems with treating the Vatican as a state. On a lot of fronts.
“That sure may be the practice or what occurred in some jurisdictions, and I am certain it probably was; but that is not anything I saw here particularly. Here the problem was far more one of intense heavy handed pressure from the church on victims and their families to keep quiet and not report to the authorities and the church hiding and moving its offending clergy. When advised and in possession of a sufficiently provable case, there was never any problem with the cops and/or prosecutors pursuing it. Like I said though, I doubt that is the case everywhere.”
In most states, prosecutors could not deal with the cases due to very short statute of limitations law. This has been expanded in many states in recent years due to public pressure (NY, Ohio and Wisconsin just defeated this year’s efforts). When you add up the fact that many kids don’t comprehend the damage done to them until they are adults, plus the limitations on criminal and civil proceedings, the ability to get standing in court was very difficult. But Prosecutors until the last decade or so hated these cases, and let them slide till they were precluded by statute. You need to read the Grand Jury reports from Philadelphia and Long Island to see how the combination of Church Influence in the political process worked to keep Prosecutors away from these cases. (You can find the grand jury reports at http://www.bishop-accountability.org).
There is also an interesting pattern and practice in the Church/Bishop’s responses to these cases. Early on they were able to argue against bringing the cases based on Church/State separation, religious freedom grounds. Then that argument began to fail in the 1970’s. and the pattern became “Send the abusing Priest to a Shrink, and claim you relied on the medical advice of the Professionals.” At that time you had a number of Catholic Treatment Centers spring up — some not worth much, others much more professional. New Mexico had one of the horror stories, the treatment center run by the Servants of the Paraclete, which regularly placed priests in “treatment” in parish churches while under care…the better to fu** more kids. Arizona got some spill over from that — but Arizona also got hit with another theory, namely that offenders from California could be “cured” by putting them out in poor communities in the desert, on Indian Reservations, or in Mexican neighborhoods. So at least a good many of your offenders were imported from elsewhere. Not all that many aggressive Plaintiff’s attorneys out there in the desert, etc., so lots of cases that might have been brought never saw daylight.
But no question that Church Strategy was to shut up potential Plaintiffs with fear of hellfire, secrecy agreements frequently tied to relatively small financial settlements, or agreements to provide therapy for victims that frequently were not fully honored once the statute of limitations was past. Anderson’s latest tactic around the statute in Wisconsin is interesting in that he got a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling that Fraud makes the statute of limitations invalid, so he is now going back and picking up old cases where the Church brought extreme pressure, and getting it ruled a form of fraud, and then taking the factual cases forward. He may be able to finally get the Wisconsin Deaf Boys cases into court on the Fraud ruling — they have never had a hearing, even though when the cases could have been brought the Prosecutor declined them, and they were ignored when they picketed the Milwaukee Cathedral.
sounds like diplomatic immunity — is that separate from sovereign immunity or just a face of it?
I don’t get it, what does the 14th amendment have to do with protecting the Vatican as a pedophile enabling organization? Aren’t kids persons, or is the church claiming it’s a person too (and why would that make them win?).
“I don’t get it, what does the 14th amendment have to do with protecting the Vatican as a pedophile enabling organization? Aren’t kids persons, or is the church claiming it’s a person too (and why would that make them win?).”
The case going to the Supreme Court at this time deals narrowly with the question of whether the Plaintiff can include the Vatican in the class of defendants — only the trial court will deal with the details of the abuse claims. The Court has to decide whether the Vatican (Holy See) is in fact in an employer relationship with Bishops (and by extension, the heads of religious orders), and whether aspects of Canon Law that governs the relationship between Pope, Bishops and Priests, or Heads of Pontifical Institutes — another way of saying religious orders), reflects a supervisory relationship akin to the relationships in US Labor Law.
The lawyers of Plaintiffs have many Vatican documents communicating their orders as to how offenders are to be dealt with under Canon Law. The very fact of any investigation or trial must be kept totally secret, the victim of abuse or rape is not a party to the process, and cannot even know it is ongoing. Information about acts of abuse (we might call them rape claims) are written up by Canon Lawyers who interview victims, making them sign documents indicating if they speak to anyone about the interview, they will be excommunicated, and sent directly to Hell. (Church claims it has that Power.) No public announcement is made of any verdict, no note is made of any punishment. Obviously the victim is not even considered as a person deserving of restitution in such a process. (For the full story of the secret agreements with the victims, follow the case of Cardinal Brady in Ireland who is under fire for having some years back been the Canon Lawyer who enforced such agreements. Think Canon Lawyer who is threatening an 11 year old raped girl with Hellfire.)
14th Amendment comes in here because of the guarantee of Equal Protection and Treatment, which you add on to the articles in the constitution which guarantee public trials. What the Holy See is trying to argue is that it, and its Bishops and Priests are subject to Canon Law, not US Civil and Criminal Codes (or British, German, Dutch, Danish, French or any other sort of law). Sovereign Immunity for agents of the Holy See is essentially the base of this argument. But it is also making the argument that Bishops are not “employees” with defined supervisory responsibilities, in some cases defined by US Federal and State Laws. Many states now have laws that designate who must report to officials knowledge of Child Abuse or Elder Abuse. This includes in some cases, Clergy, but mostly it includes teachers, school administrators, medical personel, psychologists, social workers, etc. In virtually all cases until recently, and just in the US as a result of norms voted on by the US Bishops in 2002 and revised in 2005 after Vatican Review, no abuse cases were ever reported to proper child protection authorities by any Catholic Official covered by reporting requirements. They still don’t report many cases, but if they are at all public, the Bishops now understand rape is a crime, must be reported, and call the cops fairly frequently. Two Billion in Civil Damages finally got that notion through their wooden noggins. But the new rules for the US, sometimes called the Dallas Rules, only apply to the US. In Europe they are now talking about taking the issue to the European Human Rights Court so as to see if they can extend rules like the US now has to the whole EU. This is a result of the messes uncovered in Ireland, Holland, Germany, etc, in recent months.
I hope that the court rules that the bishops are employees … and that it spreads to the rest of the world. We need that kind of accountability available. (I also hope that the Vatican gets its head handed back to it, with its total secrecy idea. Or that some bigwigs find themselves in positions where they have to talk or be excommunicated.)
The path of least resistance for the court is to find immunity like the Obama Administration has cravenly asked for. If they do, they will never reach the question of employee relationship. Considering there are a supermajority of Catholics on the Supreme Court (hey Obama, thanks a lot for adding that sixth Catholic) I would not be overly worried about how they rule on the employee issue.
I should add, you have to get beyond the sovereign immunity argument, (now one issue before the Supreme Court) and the Bishop as agent/employee of the Vatican, before you can get to trial of the facts — did the Bishops all do almost exactly the same thing when confronted by a rapist priest simply because of chance, or because they were following Canon Law, and orders from the Vatican as to how to administer it? If so, then the Vatican could be held “responsible” in civil cases for the damages. It would also mean that in preparing such cases, Plaintiff’s Attorneys would be able to conduct discovery depositions, and Jeff Anderson dreams daily of deposing the Pope.
You know, I knew Jeff Anderson back when he nearly got kicked out of college for poor grades because he was so involved in protesting the Vietnam War — eventually he managed to get into Hamline University Law School (not exactly Minnesota’s leading Law Shop) and he finished in a night school program, largely because he was totally focused on the poor folk who came to the free legal clinic. After he passed the bar, the only job he could get was part time in the public defender’s office. But one of his druggie cases told him all about being abused by a priest for years, and while Jeff got him a plea bargain that involved two years in St. Cloud Pen., he took the priest case, financed it himself out of his nothing income, and after several years won a huge settlement that put him on the map doing something everyone else was afraid to do — sue the Catholic Church. He is now quite a wealthy man, owns his own law firm with a number of associates, his office is an old 1930’s era art deco Bank, which he has fixed up with stained glass, votive lights, statutes, old confessionals, and recently an assortment of Buddhas. Since he has either tried himself, or been of counsel in over 700 cases, Rome really knows about him, and they are frightened. (Attorney Friends suggest that in the recent California Settlements, San Diego and LA, he probably earned about 20 million as his share in each settlement, given the number of clients he represented.)
Moral of the story — beware of the rough hippy looking kid at the bottom of the law school class. It would make a damn fine Hollywood Style movie.
Yes! Hippies!! (My tribe)
I love this guy already. I wish he’d go into mortgage law.
Another really cool story, Sara!
Damnitall. We could have used the argument that the Catholic Bishops are agents of a foreign power during the health care reform debate.
“Damnitall. We could have used the argument that the Catholic Bishops are agents of a foreign power during the health care reform debate.”
Well, I have problems with the notion that the Vatican is a State. It was made such by the Lateran Treaty of 1929 between Mussolini and Pius XI, and as this is just a bi-lateral treaty, the US has no obligation to recognize the old Fascist Treaty. The UN doesn’t precisely recognize it — the Vatican has speaking rights at the UN General Assembly, rights to appointments to commissions, but no voting rights. There is an important movement internationally to reduce the UN status of the Vatican to that of an NGO (as other religions are represented), and I assume if there ever is a review of the UN Charter, that might be an issue. It should be talked about.
But I am against too much emphasis on the “foreign agent” argument, largely because in the past so much anti-Catholic bigotry was based on that construct. Far better, in my mind, to just argue the obvious, that women have zilch influence in Catholic Decision Making Circles, and that old crusty homophobic (closet queen)celebates (who don’t know how to call the cops on a child rapist), cannot speak for the lived health or other social concerns of contemporary women. We owe this argument to the nuns who stood up and took a contrary position to the Bishops on the Health Care bill — and we should not let that bit of courage fall into history’s dustbin. In fact, on other issues that come along, there ought to be a positive effort to ask the nuns just what they think on issues, perhaps before the Bishops get a crack at the matter. They probably don’t all agree with each other, but particularly on health and welfare matters they have a huge vault of lived experience.
“I love this guy already. I wish he’d go into mortgage law.”
He says his next interest is in finding children who have been forced or coerced into making child porn, and bringing civil suits on their behalf against those who make billions either selling the porn, or making the films. It is a mafia business in part, but Jeff is convinced that some very high powered religious types are investors in the business. It is something of an outgrowth of what he has learned dealing with child abusers under cover of clergy. He can really work up a sweat talking about the failure of the criminal system to deal with this industry by going after those who make the big bucks, as opposed to the little guy who buys a peek or two. Criminal Rico laws are just made for this sort of thing, but haven’t been used at all, for all the venting of the politicians. So he will just find the right plaintiffs, and see if he can sue the hell out of the industry in civil courts.
But this week he is all concerned about a Benedictine Monk who abused kids at St. John’s Abby in Collegeville, who was the subject of a huge settlement he got about ten years ago, part of which was that the Abby would keep the monk away from kids, and under tight supervision inside the Abby. Well he disappeared some years back, showed up down in the Virgin Islands, but when found, disappeared again, but now was found in Rome, living in the Vatican, and giving tours to schoolchildren of the Vatican treasures. So he has to sue the Benedictines again for violation of the terms of the settlement, and perhaps he can go after the Vatican for designing a job that involves close unsupervised association with children. This monk was something like a 30 child victim abuser.
omg! This is by St. Joseph MN? Did you ever hear a story about Lincoln’s assassination and Father Chiniquy?
Fifty Years in the Church of Rome by Father Chiniquy (defended by lawyer Lincoln in the 1850s, and excommunicated) — go to Chapter 61, or specifically search St. Joseph — Father Chiniquy contended that the Vatican was behind Lincoln’s assassination, and more…
The guy hated the Catholic church. If you’re into Catholic skullduggery, it’s pretty fascinating. I read it a few years ago, my aunt got me started, she grew up in St. Cloud. You may know more.
The approach could have been a squeeze play, Sara. That’s what I was thinking.
If we could have organized enough folks to take the tack that the Church is a foreign agent interfering in domestic policy, there would have been a reciprocal pushback that the Church is a religious organization.
Presto, there’s a bunch of people on record and the Church cannot touch sovereign immunity.
And the question of religious interference then becomes a more prominent topic of discussion, because ALL the Christian fundamentalist churches would have come out to defend their accessory/accomplice organization, declaring it a legitimate religion. The Protestant religious groups have been hauling a lot of water for the Catholic Church over the last 10+ years, based on the crappy emails I get daily from Protestant groups.
Hauling Holy water:
Unlike his family, which is part of the Christian Reformed Church, Erik Prince is a Catholic. He most likely became Catholic when he married his first wife, who died of cancer shortly after they were married. Interestingly enough, most of the leadership at Blackwater is also Catholic, albeit a conservative wing of the church that is quite reactionary. Erik Prince is personally connected to conservative Catholic groups like Catholic Answer, Crisis magazine, and a Grand Rapids-based group, the Acton Institute. But Prince has not abandoned his Protestant/Evangelical roots and is a close friend of Watergate criminal turned believer Chuck Colson. They have shared the podium on several occasions, even once at Calvin College. According to Scahill, Prince is aligning himself with a new Catholic/Evangelical alliance called “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.” The ECT manifesto states:
“The century now drawing to a close has been the greatest century of missionary expansion in Christian history. We pray and we believe that this expansion has prepared the way for yet greater missionary endeavor in the first century of the Third Millennium. The two communities in world Christianity that are most evangelistically assertive and most rapidly growing are Evangelicals and Catholics.”
From Blackwater to Xe, the Templar CrusadeJan 10, 2010 … From Blackwater to Xe, the Templar Crusade. Mercenary soldiers and security personnel for the US government. by Michael Carmichael …
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16878 – Cached – Similar
Yeah. EW and I both know this only too well, living in the state which is home to the confluence of the Catholics and Calvinist-Dutch Reformed, persuaded by Dominionism.
Ave Maria School of Law
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Ave Maria School of Law, founded in 1999, is a fully ABA accredited Roman Catholic law school, located in Naples, Florida.
Ave Maria espouses a natural law philosophy and teaches law within the context of the Catholic intellectual tradition.
Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino’s Pizza and former owner of the Detroit Tigers.Ave Maria was founded in 1999. 1998, several professors left University of Detroit Mercy School of Law after a dispute regarding the invitation of a pro-choice Michigan Supreme Court justice to give the oath at the end of the school’s Red Mass, providing a core faculty. The school currently has thirty-four professors including Robert Bork (former United States Supreme Court nominee .)
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia assisted Ave Maria’s leadership in developing the school’s curriculum, and in 1999 Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas delivered the school’s first annual Ave Maria Lecture.
The school moved from Ann Arbor, Michigan to Naples, Florida, opening in the new location in August 2009.
NOTE: Naples, Florida is near Venice,Florida. Is this area the new Little Italy?
“Ave Maria School of Law
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Ave Maria School of Law, founded in 1999, is a fully ABA accredited Roman Catholic law school, located in Naples, Florida.
Ave Maria espouses a natural law philosophy and teaches law within the context of the Catholic intellectual tradition.”
Ave Maria is perhaps an interesting matter to follow. The school got much of its foundation support not from Opus Dei, but from the Legion of Christ, which Benedict has just totally taken over given the investigation that revealed the complete rot of its founder and leadership. I won’t recite here all the findings, if you are interested google the recent publications of Jason Berry particularly in the National Catholic Reporter — Lots and lots of money and sex (of all sorts) are part of the story. (Founder had perhaps six common law wives, children by them, and was paying off many Cardinals in the Vatican to look the other way. He also raped his Seminarians on a regular basis over the years. He was protected by Pope John Paul II, and his Polish Secretary (now a Polish Bishop & Cardinal), and there is much else including illegal drugs, and millions that cannot be accounted for. (six wives does take a mite of cash). The Legionaires spent fifteen years or so spreading the nasty against any critics (including Jason Berry who wrote the book and film on them), and now they have to be reorganized. The Legion has already closed some of its US Schools — Ave Maria may be able to find other support, but it is one of the Legion’s many projects.) The Legion is essentially a Mexican/Spanish Religious Order. One of the largest donors is the Mexican Cable/Cell Phone Billionaire the Sultzberger family of the New York Times got to invest in the Times last year. (The Times’s White Knight.) Anyhow, read Jason Berry’s latest for all the horrid details.
Wasn’t Jason Berry a Times Picayune reporter who exposed Father Gilbert Gauthier?
I was living in NOLA when that hit the media-back in the early ’80’s ,IIRC.
RE: Sulzberger White Knight,that is Carlos Slim,right? Incidentally, his actual given name was Salim or something similar to that.His heritage is not Mexican,but Middle Eastern extraction…(from bits of my rapidly fading memory… .)
If I am in error, please correct me.
“Wasn’t Jason Berry a Times Picayune reporter who exposed Father Gilbert Gauthier?”
I don’t think he ever worked for the Times Picayune — he did the Father Gauthe articles for the “Times of Arcadia” and they were all reprinted in the National Catholic Reporter. He then expanded the various series into a book, “Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and Sexual Abuse of Children” published in 1992. It has since been reprinted and expanded by U of Illinois Press. He did another book on the Legionnaires in the 1990’s, and then a film for TV based on that material. He is without question the lead journalist in this field since the 1980’s, but his form is not so much daily reporting — his preference is the long investigative series and books demanding several years of research. He also writes about Jazz and Cajan Food.
Not a chance.
The vatican is not a state it is a virus.
I’ve been working on the google, all the livelong day… sorry
re @27, 36 and 37, re Vatican as state
See, that Father Chiniquy thing (me @33) really is interesting because part of his evidence is that Pope Piux IX was on the side of the Confederacy. I don’t think any other “state” recognized the Confederacy, and the Pope didn’t exactly, and yet he did — he wrote Jefferson Davis an extraordinary letter of support. Wikipedia footnote 57 says the Pope’s letter was dated November 1863, passed by hand from the Pope to a Confederate emissary. Published in newspapers in America.
That’s Catholic Knight’s take on it, but the Confederate letter linked to by footnote 57 says it wasn’t the recognition the South hoped it would be.
Davis’s wife Varina included the text in the memoir she wrote of her husband after his death. Wikipedia says Varina donated the letter and the Pope’s handmade crown of thorns to the Confederate Memorial Hall collection, and there are color photographs of the crown on the web, so I’m guessing the letter and crown still exist, though I wonder too because the hall is in New Orleans (Katrina?) and the hall’s website makes no mention of them.
and scrolling down on Catholic Knight’s page (I’m not reading them all) I see a comment from “ghost”:
my bold (is it ghost or the Vatican that calls the letter writer the Vatican’s Secretary of State?)
back to wikipedia, at top, Confederate States of America motto: Deo Vindice (“With God Our Vindicator”)
! I never heard the civil war called that before:
Anyway, re Vatican as state, civil war events are of possible interest.
heh
lemons
>”Anyway, re Vatican as state, civil war events are of possible interest.”
It is all so complicated. Between 1860 and 1865 the Vatican’s primary concern was the loss of the Papal States. Our Civil War falls within the same period as the Italian wars of Unification under Garbaldi. The Vatican’s claim to temporal state power was based on the central Italian Papal States, When the wars of unification were over, treaties made and all, nothing was left of Papal Temporal Powers other than the Vatican acreage. The Pope was essentially a prisoner in the Vatican, and until the Lateran Treaty of 1929 that was essentially the status. The Pope and Curia didn’t really recognize the legitimacy of Italy with Rome as Civil Capitol, and the Italian Governments pretty much ignored demands from the Church. In the wake of the loss of Papal States, the Pope declared himself infallable (Vatican I, 1870), and it would not be till the mid 1880’s that the Church got around to formally disapproving of slavery, about the time Catholic Brazil and Cuba abolished Slavery. All this mish-mash correspondance with the Confederacy is crazy effort to get CSA American Support for return of Papal States or some such Temporal Arrangement, or some sort of diplomatic recognition. At the time of the Civil War the centers of American Catholicism were Baltimore, Charleston SC, and New Orleans. The weight of Irish, Polish, and Italian migration to the North, Midwest, and Northeast had not yet made itself felt politically, and was not yet comprehended by the Vatican. North was Yankee Protestant, and mid South and New Orleans, the center of American Catholicism. All that changed after the Civil War with Industrialization, massive Catholic migration, and the rise of the Urban Northern Catholic Political Organizations and voting blocks.
The St. Cloud Catholics (the Benedictine Schools) were just little bitty places during the Civil War — founded in 1857, and they represented a wave of German, Austrian and eventually Irish migrants that were brought in by one Bishop Ireland as planned immigrations. Post Civil War, Bishop Ireland and his best friend, James J. Hill of Great Northern Railroad Fame, worked together to make certain Minnesota and the Dakotas were not strictly Scandinavian Lutheran Lands. Hill had vast Federal landgrants on either side of his railroad route all the way from the Twim Cities to the West Coast, (Ten Square Miles checkerboarded all the way across). Hill founded the commercial towns on his landgrants, Ireland recruited the immigrants from European Catholic Countries, and Hill sold them land cheap. Hill made money on it because the settlers needed to be supplied by a freight railroad, and needed it to get grain production out. The alternative ten square mile parts were public lands available for Scandinavian homesteaders, and they didn’t get the commercial centers. The Benedictine Schools were essentially on the railhead, last major town before the Twin Cities, and Bishop Ireland planned it that way, as he set up St. Johns and the other schools to compete with the Secular U of Minnesota which was founded the same year (1857) in the Twin Cities.
Two good sources on all this — James J. Shannon’s history of Ireland and Hill’s relationship. It was his PhD Dissertation, but later published as a book. Shannon was a Bishop in Mpls/St.Paul appointed by John XXIII in 1964 during Vatican II. He was a College President at St. Thomas in St. Paul. Resigned as a Bishop, Priest and Catholic in 1969 as he could not preach the Birth Control Theology. Became President of St. John’s Great Books Program in Santa Fe, then returned to Minnesota to head two large Foundations. Died a few years ago. This is the best history of Catholic Minnesota, as he had unlimited access to Ireland’s Archives. Another source I would recommend is Abigail McCarthy’s book, Public Faces, Private Spaces. She was Senator Gene McCarthy’s wife, and both of them had long term deep ties to Collegeville. (The McCarthy Family was one among thousands of Bishop Ireland’s migrant post-famine Irish Catholic Farmer Families who settled on James J. Hill’s lands.) I would tend to discount the stories about predicting Lincoln’s death without good evidence — the religious suspicions between Catholic and Lutheran were hot and heavy during that period, and the Scandinavian Lutherans were solidly pro Lincoln and pro-Union. They were always starting nasty rumors about each other. At the beginning of the Civil War, the Lutherans would not allow any Catholics to join the Minnesota First Militia for instance. (Later they let Catholics get drafted.) But it was the Minnesota First that saved the day (and the Union) at Gettysburg, and it was pretty much a strictly Protestant militia.
Ah, Garibaldi.
Garibaldi: The first global action hero
Revolutionary, sex symbol, global celebrity – as romantic heroes go, Guiseppe Garibaldi really took the biscuit. Paul Vallely celebrates his bicentenary
LINK.
good link! Thanks
Way interesting, thanks! I know a lot of this is over my head, but I do have some bits of information from my delving into the St. Joseph and Fr. Chiniquy clues a few years ago. I came at it from the Lincoln anecdote I quoted in @33:
A small Albany newspaper, the Stearns-Morrison Enterprise, had serialized Kulzer’s autobiography beginning in May 1976, and my Minnesota aunt had seen it and sent it to my mom with the Lincoln paragraph above highlighted — they were once related, briefly, to Kulzer by marriage, and my aunt remembered grandma seeing him on a street in St. Cloud and pointing him out to the girls as a distant relative. The binder with the newspaper xeroxes came to me years later to figure out what it was all about, and I started googling and found the Chiniquy book on line. It may be that Chiniquy is THE source of this story now, and he certainly had an anti Catholic church axe to grind. My remembrance is that Lincoln had defended him on libel charges against [a bishop?] in the 1850s, and Chiniquy was excommunicated and became a kind of rock star lecturer against the church. wikipedia has it a bit different, which is interesting because it kinda comes full circle to the original question of whether priests are employees:
Yet from his book (start on p. 730) he did quite a bit to substantiate the truth about St. Joseph. He had heard the story from one of the principals years after the fact and sent someone ato St. Joseph to verify it, take notarized statements. As I recall, it all originated when Rev. Conwell and Mr. Bennett, two visitors to a Catholic boarding house in St. Joseph on the afternoon of April 14, 1865, were asked by the proprietor, Mr. Linneman, if it was true that Lincoln and Seward had been assassinated. Well of course no one had heard anything about it; it hadn’t happened yet, and St. Joseph had no news source, no train, no telegraph — that would be why the proprietor was asking the visitors for news. I think people learned it that Sunday at church (by that time the news had come via St. Cloud) and that’s when they realized the anomaly. So the story.
What’s totally interesting all these years later is the Kulzer autobiography that showed up more than 100 years later in the Albany paper, which Chiniquy would have known nothing about. Kulzer was a German who had immigrated (1840s?) and found his way to the Albany area. He had married in Germany a woman who worked as a servant/cook but they didn’t have any prospects there and so to America they went. They had nothing and made their life from scratch, and I mean handmade. Amazingly hard workers, to read his autobiography you’d think he’d cut down every tree in Minnesota by the time he was done. Anyway, if he wrote the Lincoln story in his autobiography… that would be kind of something; he didn’t have Chiniquy’s axe to grind against Catholics, and he actually lived in the area at the time. When I was googling I had found his autobiography in a Washington state university library, and I sent away for a copy. Lo and behold, it’s the same story but not in the same words, and the Lincoln story isn’t in it. Apparently there are at least three versions. Kulzer wrote in German, his daughter Mary translated it into English, and (iirc) his granddaughter Romona rewrote it to fill in details and grace up the language, all over the space of many years. Mary’s plain version is the Washington state one, so it would seem the one in the Albany newspaper is Romona’s rewrite and that she put in the Lincoln story, though weird that she should get the day of the week wrong, and you wonder where she learned it, or if she restored something Mary had taken out. George’s original German manuscript might be in an Albany church– ? I’ve always been dying to know more, if the story is in the original. But what IS in both versions that I have are mentions of some of the same people who are in Chiniquy’s story. Father Bruno and the Catholic boarding house keeper Linneman and his family were well known to Kulzer.
Kulzer’s brother served in the Union army and died at Andersonville as a prisoner of war, iirc… Kulzer’s wife died sourly, and did he then marry a Jewish lady? Did his neighbors not accept her? Not sure what I’m remembering, but hell to that, off they went to Washington to start over and do it all again (1880s-90s?) (my snark :-). I find it pretty amazing, he retired to Santa Monica and died there in 1912. Lincoln wanted to go to California after his presidency–George actually made it.
So that’s Kulzer, but if you go read Chiniquy — what a story! And a lot of it checks out, from what I can see. The plot to assassinate Lincoln was hatched in a DC boarding house run by an extremely Catholic woman, Mary Surratt, whose guests were often Catholics (including priests I think, hence the possible connection to Linneman’s Catholic boarding house in St. Joseph, which put up priests from St. John’s abbey). She and other co-conspirators were tried by a military commission and hung. Her son John escaped to Canada and was harbored by… a priest one or two degrees away from the Bishop of Montreal, and then he flees to… the Vatican, where he’s a zoave under an assumed name, which is a kind of soldier in the Pope’s service (picture of John in zouave costume on wikipedia). Nice pantaloons. He moves on and eventually gets caught and extradited back to America, where he’s tried in a civilian court (because trying civilians in military commmissions had then been found unconstitutional, Ex Parte Milligan, hello!) and the jury hangs 8 innocent – 4 guilty. Is it Chiniquy who says the jury had Catholic moles on it that got him off? How could that have been arranged? Whatever, there really are a lot of Catholic connections to Lincoln’s assassination, and the big thing that’s there for anyone to see is that Lincoln was killed on Good Friday, which could say something as well about how everyone had their “premonition” on the same day.
It would be great if people had access to those newspapers of the time, because Rev. Conwell, when he realized the St. Joseph anomaly, within days of the assassination wrote a letter to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and then wrote a followup one a week later. He says that letter was printed. Is it there? Well that’s something Chiniquy couldn’t have rigged. It would also be way interesting to see those other two newspapers in New Hampshire and New York that reportedly printed the assassination story before it happened. (Really? Can I see?) Plus, what ever happened to the physical notarized statements Chiniquy said he had and reproduced in his book? Do they still exist?
As for the Pope and the Confederacy, it sounds like they were both desperate to lean on each other and conjure divine legitimacy.
btw, my MN aunt is 93 and still pretty sharp though very frail — she’s the last sister left, and she’s a treasure. I hate to think of all that’s going to be lost. She could probably go toe to toe with you on Catholic history, that’s one of her (“grrr!”) subjects.
(Plus, can I just say what a perfect name St. Cloud is?)
Thinking again, how can this be true?
My aunt was born in 1917. George Kulzer died in Santa Monica in 1912. Maybe there were Kulzers left in St. Cloud, they didn’t all move to Washington, and Grandma saw a descendant? Gotta find the Kulzer binder, it has my aunt’s letter (with that detail?) in it.
I moved since then… boxes boxes ? ?
Just as prostitution is the worlds oldest profession, religion is the worlds oldest scam.
Their Will Be Done | Mother JonesTheir Will Be Done. — . From the Archives …. Fr. Malachi Martin was the most spied upon American by the CIA for the Vatican tryants. …
motherjones.com/politics/1983/07/their-will-be-done – Cached – Similar
This MOJO article is a superb primer on the origins of the OSS/CIA and Vatican “alliance “.
Lets not forget the Blackwater connection via Joseph Schmitz.
One bright spot, the Pope begs forgiveness and Blackwater declares itself up for sale-ALL in the same week.
Which does make one wonder, doesn’t it?
Tempted to go and buy up stock in hair shirt and self-flagellation manufacturers, I sense an impending up-tick in sales.
I’d put my money on prison for profit business.
Clarence Thomas’ Revenge | EmptywheelMar 7, 2010 … Rosalind linked to this LAT article describing Clarence Thomas’ pro-abuse … and Thomas are reported to be affiliated with Opus Dei-the …
emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/03/07/clarence-thomas-revenge
NOTE: There is some really intriguing commentary on this not long ago thread. Worth a look,imho.
BTW, that Voltairenet link has some VERY interesting info regarding past and present popes.
“Their Will Be Done | Mother JonesTheir Will Be Done. — . From the Archives …. Fr. Malachi Martin was the most spied upon American by the CIA for the Vatican tryants. …
motherjones.com/politics/1983/07/their-will-be-done – Cached – Similar
This MOJO article is a superb primer on the origins of the OSS/CIA and Vatican “alliance “.”
Relationships between the US Government and the Vatican actually began in 1938 — and it is a fascinating story.
That fall, Cardinal Pacelli, (soon to be Pius XII) sailed to the US for a visit during the fall. His caretaker and host was then the auxilary bishop of Boston, Francis Spellman. Spellman met the ship in NY Harbor with several armored trucks in tow, as the Cardinal had brought the liquid assets of the Vatican (Cash, Securities, Gold) in a second guarded stateroom next to his own, with the intent of having Spellman take good care of them during the coming war. Sadly the movement of the strong boxes was interrupted by the US Customs agents on the NY docks, (Customs in those days was in Treasury), and the agents took custody of the loot as one just didn’t enter the US quite that way with several trucks worth of loot and not properly declare it. Moreover, ownership of Gold was illegal. Customs reported details to the boss, Henry Morgenthau, and old Henry told FDR all about it.
Now one of FDR’s good ole buddies was Cardinal Mundeline of Chicago — such a good old bud, that he was a member of the Cuff Links Club, the boys who were the inner circle around FDR when he ran for VP in 1920, and who were always welcome at the poker table in the White House. So FDR made a point of asking Mundeline about who in the hell Spellman was (little bitty Auxilary Boston Bishop), and why the millions would go to his custody? Now one must understand there are all sorts of riffs in the Catholic Hierarchy and all, and politicians if they are any good know how to play them, and FDR loved to play. He got the low down from the Cardinal, and then just held on to the strong boxes during Pacelli’s visit. Finally, just after the 1938 election day, he invited Pacelli to Hyde Park for lunch, asking him to bring Spellman along, but adding Henry Morgenthau, Joe Kennedy, and Myron Taylor to the guest list.
They discussed the contents of the strong boxes, with Pacelli claiming he only brought it so as to invest it in US economy — and FDR said that would be fine, but it would have to be “supervised.” He made Joe Kennedy, then Ambassador to London, and former head of the Securities and Exchange Committee the chair of the investment committee — put Henry Morgenthau on the committee, allowed that Spellman would be part of it, and made Myron Taylor the “Personal Representative of the President to the Vatican” the person Pacelli would discuss investments with in Rome. Now Myron Taylor was the former President of US Steel, and he was very much a Mundelain man, Taylor was also the representative of “Big Steel” who had broken from the rest of the Steel Executives, and recognized the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, which became the labor union, United Steelworkers. So from late 1938 until after WWII, this little group actually controlled a good deal of the Vatican’s liquid wealth. Ole Joe Kennedy managed to invest the funds so that at war’s end the value was four times what had been brought over in 1938 — but it also meant that from that point on FDR and Morgenthau really controlled the Vatican Treasury, and had much needed leverage to keep Pius from trying to cut deals with Hitler. FDR made Spellman the chief Chaplain to the US Armed Forces which forced him to be at least in public, something of a red-white and blue American Patriot, and less a servant of the Vatican. They also got another pound of flesh because they showed Pacelli J. Edgar Hoover’s reports on how Father Coughlin was getting financial support from German Nazi Sources, and they got the future pope to agree to silence Coughlin. He did till after the 1940 election, but then Coughlin went back on the Radio, and Hoover had to threaten him with Jail as an enemy agent, and he was finally silenced for good just after Pearl Harbor.
Myron Taylor would spend most of WWII locked up in the Vatican as a diplomat under the Pope’s protection — and he was the real intelligence operative there, reporting directly to FDR, not through State. OSS only was able to put agents in Rome after Rome was liberated in June, 1944. I suppose I should note that Taylor was High Church Episcopalian. After Liberation, OSS sent in Bill Casey as Rome “Station Chief” and many of his projects were counter to things FDR wanted done.
Sara, I strongly suspect that you are a national treasure!
Certainly a treasure trove of knowledge.
Thank you for your wonderful,informative posts…
(BTW, I keep remembering a Jason Berry that wrote a music and entertainment column for the Times Picayune. Perhaps not,but I’m going back over a quarter century ,here.)
This guy?
Sure looks like the Jason Berry I remember..but ofcourse, much more mature.
Appreciate the effort,bmaz.
I didn’t know who Father Coughlin was, so… I wikied. This sounds familiar:
Hutarees?
and this kinda makes me sick
Gees, where was the ACLU?
“Coughlin reasoned that although the government had assumed the right to regulate any on-air broadcasts, the First Amendment still guaranteed and protected freedom of the written press. He could still print his editorials without censorship in his own newspaper, Social Justice. However, the Roosevelt Administration stepped in again, this time revoking his mailing privileges[23] and making it impossible for Coughlin to deliver the papers to his readers. He had the right to publish whatever he wanted, but not the right to use the United States Post Office Department to deliver it.
Gees, where was the ACLU?”
Problem was, a guy in Germany named Joseph Goebbels was sending Coughlin money for his propaganda efforts, which included massive doses of anti-Semitism, and Coughlin was passing the stuff off as Church Teachings. FDR was hardly one of our sterling Civil Libertarians — ER, somewhat a different story. The various restrictions FDR “invented” ultimately became the FCC’s “Fairness Doctrine” that lived from Post War through the Reagan years as regulation of Radio. The ACLU was not at all interested in the 1930’s and 40’s in the cause of Fascism, and any “defense” of it or it’s free speech rights. They took the same position, post WWII, with regard to Stalinism and the US Communist Party. Purged all suspect Communists from ACLU Chapters and Boards. Took no cases during the 50’s and the McCarthy Era regarding real or suspect Communists and their rights. Morris Ernst, who headed ACLU in those days, was a confidential source for J. Edgar Hoover for years.
This the same ACLU that defended the right of the Nazis to march in Skokie and also Rush Limbaugh’s right to… what, medical/medication privacy? (yep) Glad they grew some ethics. Part of the Coughlin story was that once his audience associated him with Nazi sympathies, they turned him off. Destroying the Constitution was no defense of it.
“This the same ACLU that defended the right of the Nazis to march in Skokie and also Rush Limbaugh’s right to… what, medical/medication privacy? (yep) Glad they grew some ethics. Part of the Coughlin story was that once his audience associated him with Nazi sympathies, they turned him off. Destroying the Constitution was no defense of it.”
Organizations are not static, they change to various degrees over time. To judge the ACLU of the 30’s, or the 50’s, you have to read your way into where they are coming from, meaning you have to figure out those times. ACLU no different from any other organization of its nature. ACLU for instance, did not take up the cases of the Japanese who were rounded up and put in, essentially, concentration camps during World War II, based only on their national ancestory. To understand why the ACLU stayed silent, you have to figure who were influentials, who were decision makers in its ranks in the early 40’s, and comprehend how they saw their decisions.
Between the 30’s and the 50’s the most identifiable voice of the ACLU was Morris Ernst. He thought J. Edgar Hoover was a really great guy, and he was extremely close to him, sharing letters that came into ACLU with him, talking with him about cases, and in the late 50’s, even involved with being the go-between clearing people accused of Communist Links by persuading Hoover to review files and all. But he also persuaded Hoover at times to “blacklist” some people too. Ernst was on perhaps every center left National liberal board in the US at one time or another, and he reported on other board members directly to Hoover. Many people who knew Ernst, knew exactly what he was doing, and approved of it. It was quite a different time, and you have to do the general history in order to comprehend what motivated folk in specific time periods.
In the 30’s, the cause of anti-Fascism was essentially a left wing cause, that changed considerably in late August, 1939 with the Hitler Stalin Pact, when the Communists and those they influenced became middling pro-Fascist, or at least pro Hitler-Stalin Pact. The CP lost about a third of its membership in the months after the Pact (some couldn’t swallow the change of line), but in the meantime the CP got all involved with the American First Movement and other “peace” movements. All changed again in June, 1941 with invasion by Germany of the USSR. Suddenly, we should be already at war, and mounting the second front.
The ACLU’s position at least in the late 30’s was “A Plague on Both Your Houses.” That is when they engaged in thoroughgoing political cleansing of all their Chapters and Boards.
that nifty word again, not
If you like First Amendment Freedom of Speech, they you support people and organizations that protect it for everyone, not just you. If it is not protected for those you hate, it will not be protected for you against those who hate you. That is just how it works. Frankly, I am thrilled that the ACLU took those cases; they should, it is what it is all about.
Right, jump back a couple of steps, I was sick that the ACLU said nothing when Roosevelt pretzeled the Constitution and maybe facts just to silence one Father Coughlin. Sara’s been great, she can give a lot of context that shows it took a long time, decades, for the ACLU to finally get around to your–and my–point of view. Took them a while.
Should have been there for that I agree. The ACLU does not always get it right, but I support them when they do even if it is speech I hate. The quote from President Andrew Shephard in The American President is the best I have ever seen on this:
see in my mind I’m fishing for a John Stuart Mill quote (I just tried to see if I’d posted it on Daily Kos but it seems I’m always trying to remember it), but yours is rousing stuff, now I want to see the movie. Thanks bmaz.
Ah ha! (2008!!)
On collision! Vivify! (injecting exclamations)
Yeah, but the problem seems to be that the citizenship thing isn’t working out all that well. Too many citizens are not doing their jobs and at least two of the three branches of government are paying little if any attention to the Constitution. And what attention gets paid seems often to be how to circumvent it. Ben Franklin was right to worry if we could keep The Republic.
Bob in AZ
Like the SPLC was a confidential source to the FBI re Oklahoma City bombing?
That didn’t turn out too well, and since the informers and their managers are hidden by the cloak of secrecy (above transcript discussing FOIA results, here’s one with the SPLC, see p. 2 of the PDF), we all fumble around with only the visible dots and connect them as best we funkily can. Doesn’t do anything for safety or justice or reason or the Constitution.
I want to second the recommendation to read this diary at the Seminal:
Judges to Congress: Don’t Legislate Indefinite Detention.
Why is Lindsay Graham such a tool? or fool?
Bob in AZ
Well, he is from South Carolina…..
Ah! That explains everything.
Oh, and about that Democratic Senatorial candidate, Doesn’t this fall into the DSCC and Tim Kaine’s lap? I suppose they just assumed that their guy would win, and didn’t even bother to check up on the other candidates in the race, but isn’t it their job to know about such people?
Bob in AZ
However corrupt the institutions have become, there is a strong, bright line of individuals throughout history who stand courageously against cruelty and suffering because, somehow, they have managed to stay true to the teachings of their founders.
Witness Against Torture: Peace Activists Face Trial
“The latest chapter in this dramatic yet underreported tradition of radical Catholic social justice activism [including Dorothy Day and the Berrigan Brothers] involves a group of twenty-seven peace advocates who are now facing trial for protesting the Obama Administration’s abysmal failure to close the high-security prison at Guantánamo Bay, grant detained suspects their right to habeas corpus, and prosecute the Bush Administration architects of torture.
. . .
“Next week, on June 14, these twenty-seven peace activists will face trial for condemning the Obama administration’s continuation of Bush policies.”
LINK.
I don’t understand how they can remain within those religious institutions, but I’m sure glad they’re there.
Good article, but frustrating… what court? what charges?
Press conference Monday June 14
From the article you linked, it says:
“The press conference will be held Monday, June 14th at 8:30 am, across from the Federal District Courthouse
(333 Constitution Avenue, NW).”
So, I would assume that’s the place and they are to appear in court shortly after the press conference. I’m sure it will be fascinating to hear all the charges read aloud. I don’t know what charges are standard these days, but back in my days the most popular one seemed to be “unlawful assembly”, which always seemed puny to the point of utter insignificance when compared to what we were assembling against.
fatster, see @71 — this could be good … :-)
Oh, I DO hope so, thatvisionthing. Great of you to find this info. Many thnx.
I like the judge already: JUDGE RUSSELL F. CANAN, “Top Dog,” Guitar in Deaf Dogs and the Indictments, “the world’s only almost-all-judge band” – link
omg I have lived to see a judge who was a DEFENSE attorney… I must have dreamed him:
…firm of Milliken, Van Susteren & Canan… (was in practice with Greta van Susteren!)
…served as a law clerk to the late John D. Fauntleroy (Fauntleroy! Zounds!)
link
State Department assessing damage from cables leak
LINK.
Fatster, in your ruminations on this subject, do you happen to know the time range of these alleged documents? Years involved?
I seem to recall Mel Sembler being an ambassador to Rome not so long ago….
Follow the link EW provided above, Gitcheegumee. They are trying to figure out dates pertaining to the documents. Also, check out the quote from Assange in the article I linked @ 59. As for Sembler, give me a few minutes–to both get to my files and to get my bp under control (he does that to me).
Thanks ,fatster. I read your link @#59, but not the EW one in the thread yet.
BTW, once again, referring to that thread from March,2010, “Clarence Thomas’ Revenge”,it has several entries about Sembler and the juvenile bootcamps, Straight,Inc. that he ran.Based upon “The Seed”,apparently.
Lots of interesting background there dealing with juvenile abuse.
Here is some info. Do you want more?
The Semblers go to Rome (scroll down and to the left)
Some curious activities while in Rome.
The Semblers find a home in Rome.
“Ambassador de Sade”.
And just a tad more that might be of interest
WHOA, fatster, you are a cornucopia of knowledge. Thank you for my summer reading list!
So much slime and so little time-greatly appreciated.
Incidentally, I was reading on Wiki that the Vatican can issue passports,as do the SMOM.
Here’s a pretty interesting bit of info:
Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM)Dec 26, 2008 … the Red Cross, and the UN issue passports), and it’s a member of a … SMOM is the remnant of the Order of Malta which had territories …
http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/smom.html – Cached – Similar
Vatican City – Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaThe two entities even have distinct passports: the Holy See, not being a country, only issues diplomatic and service passports; the state of Vatican City …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_City – Cached – Similar
Show more results from en.wikipedia.org
Is it possible to get a Vatican passport?The Vatican issues its own passports to certain Vatican officials born in foreign countries who need to be permanently based at the Vatican or in other …
http://www.wikilaw3k.org/…/Is-it-possible-to-get-a-Vatican-passport-311719.htm – Cached
I made a mistake about article @38. After reading that Unger article, some investigation brought me to this article about Banco Ambrosiano and Propaganda 2.
New Hope for Clues In Italian Scandals; EJ Dionne; NYT; 3/24/85
http://www.nytimes.com/1985/03/25/business/new-hope-for-clues-in-italian-scandals.html?scp=1&sq=%22new%20hope%20for%20clues%22&st=cse
I’m very sorry about the confusion. I should know better than to try to do things in a hurry…and I still don’t have time to read this interesting thread…rats! :-/
Thanks for the post bmaz.
Great comments. This doc release could be a godsend on so many levels. (No pun intended.)
Nope, not me; this is Marcy’s.
Yep.
I meant to type thanks to Marcy and thanks to you for your comment @ 16. I am WAY too tired this weekend!
Many thanks to Sara and others for some insightful comments. Some of which I want to run by a friend of mine who is a world famous Lincoln historian and want to learn his take on the “Lincoln news” concerns noted. That is quite interesting information and would be quite relevant today on a number of levels.
Please get back to us! It’s all hearsay to me.
I bookmarked this page. So much heavy Sara info!
Yes, given the nature of Congress at this juncture, and the preferences of recent Republican Administrations, it was neigh impossible for a look to be taken at any militia group, religious or otherwise. (Look at how the Homeland Security Report was attacked about a year ago.)
The FBI has always used cut-out’s. How in the hell do you think we dealt with the Klan back when they were bombing churches and all in the 60’s? The FBI paid informants to get inside the Klan, and report. They also paid informants to get inside the New Left in the 60’s, inside the anti-war movement of the 60’s, they had an insider in King’s headquarters at SCLC for years (the accountant’s assistant who set the bugs), and some of the better old left jokes are about CP Cells and Branches that were nearly entirely made up of FBI informants, trying to convince other informants to plan the overthrow of the Government, and then reporting on each other.
Not so old, that seems to be national policy these days. And it’s bad and dangerous and grows monsters like cancer. It’s Dick Cheney’s MO.
RE: the broiling one in Germany
I see no one here has got this reference, yet. Ever heard of the German band Rammstein, whose video Rosenrot was banned from MTV? Go to Youtube and lookup Rammstein Rosenrot and watch the video, so you understand this very relevant reference. A link is included below. It came out in 2005 and is directly related to child abuse in Germany. It is a purposely symbolic video, and its title refers to blood and Sub-rosa, among other related topics that will become obvious. The girl doubles as a symbol for religion and the obvious details of the video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhi4EMTLZ1A
You do not need to understand German to get it.
Bringing light into the darkness….
I googled — never heard of this band (not surprising)
She made him do it? The child is the devil, it’s always been that way? :-(
In this video, the girl is a symbol for spiritual desires, which can mean wisdom or religion. The literal story line refers to the evils perpetrated by the religious hierarchy (men), which includes sexual exploitation among many other evils. Notice the timeline puts this in previous centuries, when the church often “broiled” those it disproved of.
Seven
Hey Seven, I’m not getting it. Sorry, I’m not going to follow the link to the book right now. But this is a thread about church pedophilia and whether the Pope can shield his pedophile priests and his own pedophile enabling and obstruction of justice. The video you linked to was about a priest being tempted by a beautiful young girl-woman, and apparently she gets him to murder her parents too? She comes on to him, and it’s all consensual. Not even the same thing as pedophilia. So just what are you saying is the church’s worst nightmare coming true? Are we even on the same page? Sorry, it’s been a really long thread and now I’ve hit the Wall of Huh? But I appreciate your expertise.
Good description ‘VisionThing.
Another important detail here is that Rammstein’s albums normally have 11 songs and certain songs and videos are purposely symbolic. For example, the rose and sub-rosa symbolize secrecy and symbolism. In ancient wisdom, mountains and pyramids symbolize great bodies of knowledge and their peaks (mountaintops, capstones) symbolize wisdom, hence pinnacle or acme knowledge. A mountain and a pyramid also both model the hierarchical relationship between knowledge (mountain, pyramid) and the associated wisdom (mountaintop,capstone).
Climbing to the top of a mountain has always symbolized attaining wisdom by mastering a great body of knowledge. Stones also symbolize wisdom (as the essence of the mountain), but rocks refer to religion and especially stories about Peter. So this song talks about the boy seeking wisdom (under the flower, aka sub-rosa) through symbolism, but finding religion instead, which causes him to crash back down to the earth, where he joins “the dead.”
If you want to understand how to read the symbology of ancient texts and modern esoterica, then feel free to download a preview of my upcoming book on the topic. Please excuse the ads, its a free download site. Otherwise, I am freely offering proof of why the Vatican fears Freemasonry and related symbolic endeavors and killed off and oppressed so many over the centuries to hide and bury the truth about ancient symbology. No, I am not a Freemason, but I know the symbology far better than anyone else, anywhere. This is the Vatican’s worst nightmare, unfolding in the midst of the child-rape scandal.
http://www.mediafire.com/?djg5amy4mmy
Peace and Wisdom,
Seven