Posted in category "Scandals"
Cardinal Angelo Scola, patriarch of Venice, celebrated a Mass to mark the 30th anniversary of the election of John Paul I, “the smiling Pope.” Cardinal Albino Luciani was elected Pope on August 26, 1978. Acclaimed for his refreshing candor, spontaneity and wit, he was described by Cardinal Basil Hume as “God’s candidate.” 
John Paul I was the first Pope to have a composite name, a gesture to honor his two predecessors – John XXIII and Paul VI.
The “smiling Pope” died on September 28, 1978, 33 days after his election to the papacy, allegedly of a heart attack.
Many people, myself included, believe he was murdered for changes he planned to implement in the Vatican.
Most conspiracy theorists believe John Paul I was the victim of a plot involving powerful men linked to the Mafia, the Vatican Bank, and P2, an illegal Masonic Lodge whose membership included senior Italian politicians. One of these men was Bishop Paul Marcinkus, then head of the Vatican Bank.
According to some investigators, John Paul I was murdered not only because he was planning to purge the Vatican Bank, but also because he was planning to demote or dismiss powerful figures in the Curia, the Vatican bureaucracy.
There were several other rumors that may also have contributed to his assassination: the belief he was planning to proceed with the ordination of women; and continue to push the reforms of Vatican II, particularly with the bureaucracy.
The late Cardinal Aloisio Lorscheider of Brazil, a strong supporter of John Paul I, decided to speak out 20 years later. He had to “record with sorrow” that the official version of John Paul I’ death was open to question. The cardinal noted that Cardinal Jean Villot, the then Secretary of State, had refused to allow a post mortem examination. 
“I have to say that a suspicion remains in our hearts,” Cardinal Lorscheider said.
Three well-known books about the death of Pope John Paul I include: In God’s Name by David Yallop; Murder in the Vatican by Lucien Gregoire; and A Thief in the Night: The Mysterious Death of Pope John Paul I by John Cornwell.
Silent screen actor Ramon Novarro (1899-1968) was one of early Hollywood’s leading actors. He got his big break in the 1923 movie Scaramouche, and went on to play the title role in 1925′s Ben Hur and later appear with Greta Gardo in Mata Hari. 
Novarro was gay. Even under pressure from MGM studio head, Louis B. Mayer, Novarro refused to contract a “lavendar marriage”–something most homosexual stars did to keep their contracts and stay out of gossip columns.
He was also a devout Roman Catholic all his life, and at one time considered becoming a priest.
Ramon Novarro was murdered by two brothers, Tom and Paul Ferguson, whom he paid to come to his Laurel Canyon home for sex. Tom was 17 and Paul was 22. Novarro had slept with Paul a number of times before. On this night he brought along his brother to help him rob Novarro. The two young men believed that a large sum of money was hidden in Novarro’s house.
Paul had sex with Novarro, and then the brothers beat and tortured him looking for the money. After they left the house, he suffocated in his own blood.
To avoid Novarro’s slipping into unconsciousness, the brothers dragged him into the bathroom, slapping him awake with cold water. Novarro staggered into the bedroom. Collapsing on his knees, he sobbed: “Hail Mary full of grace.”
Tom’s defense attorney, Richard Walton, placed the blame for the murder on Novarro. “Back in the days of Valentino, this man who set female hearts aflutter, was nothing but a queer. There’s no way of calculating how many felonies this man committed over the years, for all his piety.”
Paul Ferguson blamed his Catholic background: “When he kissed me, I reacted like a Catholic, what they call homosexual panic. Some old guy in the desert says, ‘Kill homosexuals.’ It’s inbred…I was too drunk to be civilized. Whatever my most primitive moral standings were, I reacted. It had nothing to do with Novarro, nothing to do with his being homosexual. It all had to do with how I saw myself. And the fact that my brother was there. And that he could see me in that homosexual act. It all had to do with my Catholic upbringing, with my five thousand years of Moses. And that’s the only reason why this whole thing happened. Because that’s what society teaches you…I think after I hit Mr. Novarro…I turned around and sat down on the sofa. I got up and went to find (Novarro) in the bedroom. ‘This guy’s dead’…We didn’t go there to rob him.”
Novarro was interred in Calvary Cemetery in Los Angeles. His killers were released from prison after a few years.
Author John Rechy describes the murder in his blog, Speaking Out. The events he describes are drawn from the book, Beyond Paradise: The Life of Ramon Novarro. 
Is Catholic art getting too excremental?
In recent years we’ve been treated to “Senation,” a Virgin Mary pelted with elephant dung; and ”Piss Christ”- a crucifix immersed in the artist’s urine.
Now it’s “Zuerst dei Fuesse” (Feet First). A green frog is nailed to a cross holding a beer mug in one outstretched hand and an egg in the other. The frog wears a green loincloth and is pinned to the cross in the manner of Jesus Christ. Its green tongue hangs out of its mouth. 
The 4′ wood sculpture was made by the late German artist Martin Kippenberger.
Franz Pahl, an official from the Trentino-Alto Adige region in northern Italy, said the pope had written to him to complain about the frog, which was installed in May at Museion, the modern art museum in Bolzano.
In a letter dated August 7, 2008, Pope Benedict said that the sculpture “injured the religious feeling of many people who see the Cross the symbol of the love of God and of our salvation, which deserves recognition and religious devotion.”
The board of the Museion museum decided by a majority vote that the frog was a work of art and would stay in place for the remainder of the exhibit.
Museum officials said the artist, who died in 1997, considered the sculpture to be a self-portrait illustrating human angst. “Fred the Frog” was Kippenberger’s alter-ego.
An art critic exclaimed: “In this work Kippenberger represents a society that appears perfect but is actually hypocritical…the frog on the cross represents men reduced to animals, that drink to the point of demeaning themselves, that cannot free themselves from the cross of alcohol lived as a plague. And Kippenberger condemns a society that, one the one hand claims to be Christian and on the other, right under and before Christ that it reckons to venerate, can only express its worst side.”
“A crucifixion is always an invitation to reflect on suffering,” said another critic. “In any event of contemporary art you will find more or less strong works on religion. It is part of people’s life, it is normal for it to become an ingredient of art. Society is getting used to being hypersensitive about certain themes but nobody can feel offended by a work of art.”
Well, Pope Benedict, who is German himself, obviously doesn’t agree.
The bishop of Limburg, Germany, Franz Peter Tebartz van Elst, has removed a priest from office for “blessing” the partnership of two gay men. Their marriage took place on Friday, August 15th. 
Fr. Peter Kollas, a dean of priests in the city of Wetzlar, participated in the blessing of the two men during a civil wedding ceremony witnessed by a Protestant minister and 150 guests.
The bishop, appointed to the Diocese of Limburg by Pope Benedict XVI in 2007, said Catholics “have a duty to protest the legal recognition of homosexual partnerships.”
In a statement appearing on the diocese’s website, Bishop Tebartz van Elst said he had removed Fr. Kollas as dean of priests to avoid further “damage” to the Church’s reputation.
The bishop met with Fr. Kollas, who said hat he would promise to “omit” such blessings in the future and said that he had never done them before.
A new dean of priests will be chosen who has the “confidence of the bishop.”
The statement from the bishop’s office came after protests over the event, not only from Catholics, but also area Protestants.
Fr. Kollas must have been disciplined within days of the event. The bishop’s reaction was much swifter than what we usually see for other transgressions–like pedophilia accusations or financial improprieties.
Obviously, gay men and lesbians in love are a much greater threat to the church–and merit a much harsher response-than serial child abusers and priests who help themselves to the parish bank accounts.
I am grateful to Fr. Kollas the sacrifice he made to bless a loving relationship.
“As a director, my goal is to be completely open. Just look at how I portray sex in my films. They’re considered shocking and obscene because I like to carefully examine human sexuality. It has to be realistic.”
Paul Verhoeven’s biography of Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth: A Realistic Portrait, will be published next month by J. M. Meulenhoff, an Amsterdam publishing house. It will be translated into English in 2009. 
Verhoeven, 69, is best known as the director of a number of blockbuster films, including Basic Instinct, Robo Cop, and Total Recall.
Over the years, Vehoeven, who is Catholic and holds a doctorate in mathematics and physics from the University of Leiden, was a regular attendee of the Jesus Seminar, which was co-founded by the late religious scholar Robert W. Funk. The Jesus Seminar is a group of scholars and authors that seeks to establish historical facts about Jesus, and examines miracles and statements attributed to him.
Verhoeven’s new book makes the suggestion that Jesus may have been the son of Mary and a Roman soldier who raped her during a Jewish uprising against Roman rule in 4 B.C. The book also makes the claim that Judas Iscariot was not responsible for Jesus’ betrayal.
William Porter, a professor of religious studies at the University of Dayton, in Ohio, said the Jesus Seminar was known for making provacative claims, but “they are real scholars–you have to deal with them.”
However, he said Verhoeven’s ideas sounded “pretty out there.”
John Dominic Crossan, a Jesus Seminar founder, agreed. He said that while Verhoeven was a member in good standing, there was little evidence for the view Jesus was illegitimate.
Crossan said the claim was first reported in a polemic written in the 2nd century against the Book of Matthew, intended for a Jewish audience.
“It’s an obvious first retort to claims that Mary was a virgin,” Crossan said. “If you wanted to do a hatchet job on Jesus’ reputation, this would be the way.”
On July 27, 2008, a man walked into the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville and opened fire with a 12-gauge shotgun. He killed two people and seriously wounded seven others. Around 200 people were packed in the church for a children’s rehearsal of “Annie.”
The man, David Jim Adkisson, 58, was motivated by a hatred of “the liberal movement,” and he planned to shoot until police shot him, said Knoxville Police Chief Sterling P. Owen IV. 
The police found a four-page letter Adkisson wrote, in which he stated his hatred of “liberals in general, as well as gays.” He targeted the church “because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country’s hands in the war on terror and they have ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets.”
Adkisson said that “he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement” so he would “target those that had voted them into office.” Police Chief Owen said Adkisson specifically targeted the church for its beliefs and its political advocacy, including gay rights.
Inside his house, officers found Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder by radio talk show host Michael Savage; Let Freedom Ring by political pundit Sean Hannity; and The O’Reilly Factor by television talk show host Bill O’Reilly.
All three of these books didn’t prompt a madman to kill people. But in all three of them a madman who hates liberals and gays found words that resonated, sentiments to take comfort in, and nothing to make him think twice before going out to engage in domestic terrorism – violence and murder against fellow Americans holding different political beliefs. The same kind of behavior these three men condemn when perpetrated by Islamic terrorist groups.
I went to see if Bill O’Reilly (Roman Catholic) or Sean Hannity (Roman Catholic) said anything about the incident, had any expression of compassion or grief for the Knoxville victims and their families, or any condemnation of the shootings at all. No quotes turned up on Google or on their websites.
Michael Savage has no search function on his site and no mention of the story either. But his site did feature a link to a Daily Mail story about how an “Islamic ban on ‘suggestive’ cucumbers’ cost al-Qaida public support in Iraq.” 
Huh? Well, I guess he has his priorities.
I was disappointed in all three of these entertainers/commentators that they couldn’t spare one word for the dead in Knoxville and the assault on freedom in Tennessee. One man in particular, an usher, shielded others with his body and took the brunt of the first shotgun blast. This is ususally the type of person these talk show hosts love to laud – an American who died for others.
I hope O’Reilly and Hannity have enough left from a Catholic upbringing to be a little shaken up that this nut looked to them for inspiration. They should continue to disagree furiously and passionately with liberals and others they feel are mucking up America, but they need to stop de-humanizing people they don’t like or disagree with. That gives murderers a license to kill.
PZ Myers is a biology professor at the University of Minnesota Morris and author of the blog, Pharyngula. The blog is eclectic, and Myers writes about science, education and religion. Raised a Lutheran, Myers is now an atheist. 
But he cares deeply and passionately about Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, to have pulled his latest stunt. He made good on his protest pledge to desecrate a Communion host. “I pierced it (the Host) with a rusty nail (I hope Jesus’s tetanus shots are up to date). And then I simply threw it in the trash.”
Saying he did not want to “single out just the cracker,” Myers also tore pages from the Koran along with a few pages from Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and nailed them to the Host. He then said, “They are just paper. Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet.”
Myers was given consecrated Hosts by an unknown person in response to his appeal:
“Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There’s no way I can personally get them – my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I’m sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, glady, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web. I shall do so joyfully and with laughter in my heart. If you can smuggle some out from under the armed guards and grim nuns hovering over your local communion ceremony, just write to me and I’ll send you my home address.”
What he did–the desecration of a Host–is an offensive and deliberately provocative gesture of contempt to people for which the Eucharist means something and is sacred. It was a violent act. I would certainly say it was a hateful act, but not necessarily a hate crime.
The University has received calls for his firing, and Myers has received hundreds of emails protesting his action. Myers sighed, “There are days when it is agony to read the news, because people are so goddamned stupid. Petty and stupid. Hateful and stupid. Just plain stupid. And nothing makes them stupider than religion.”
He summed himself up very well.
There aren’t many instances when I’m in accord with conservative Catholic bloggers Jimmy Atkin and Mark Shea, but we all agree today.
Sally Kern is a state legislator from Oklahoma. She is also the wife of a Baptist minister. 
Kern first gained national notoriety back in March when her anti-homosexual rant to a group of 50 Republican constituents ended up on YouTube. Here are some highlights:
“Studies show, no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted for more than, you know, a few decades…”
“I honestly think it’s the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam…”
“They are going after our young children, as young as two years of age, to try to teach them that the homosexual lifestyle is an acceptable lifestyle…”
“One of my colleagues said, ‘We don’t have a gay problem in our community’…well, you know, that is so dumb. If you have cancer in your little toe, do you just say that I’m going to forget about it since the rest of you is fine? It spreads! This stuff is deadly and it is spreading. It will destroy our young people and it will destroy this nation.”
“The homosexual agenda is destroying this nation…. Not everybody’s lifestyle is equal, just like not everybody’s religion is equal and according to God’s word, it is not the right lifestyle.”
That was Goof #1, which took weeks to die down. Now, Sally’s back in the news again.
Last Wednesday, Kern was stopped by the Oklahoma Highway Patrol trying to enter the state capitol building with a loaded handgun in her bag. She said she forgot to take the .380 caliber semi-automatic out of her purse after she stopped to talk to a colleague. “It was an honest mistake from being out of my routine, you know,” she said.
Huh?
She tells one whopper after another and doesn’t bat an eyelash!
Really, what kind of lady doesn’t check her purse before leaving the house. Yep, house keys, car keys, sunglasses, cell phone, makeup bag, breath mints, loaded semi-automatic….uh, make sure the safety’s on…ok, I’m off! 
On April 23, 2008 the Vatican approved the beatification of John Henry Newman, of one of the most significant Anglican converts to Catholicism. But, before he can be canonized, a few things need to occur: namely, a second miracle, and removing his body from a grave he shares with his beloved–a fellow priest, Ambrose St John.
In an interview with L’Osservatore Romano shortly before Newman’s beatification, Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins, Prefect of the Congregation of the Causes of Saints, said Cardinal Newman was “a man of thought, an emblematic figure of a conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism.” The Cardinal added, “Personally, I hope that such a beatification may occur truly within a short time because it could be very important at this moment for the path of ecumenism.” 
If so, Newman’s beatification is certainly ironic.
The Anglican Communion is tearing itself up over homosexual clergy and solemnizing the relationships of its gay communicants. Several Anglican bishops from North America have already or are in the process of seeking reception into the Catholic Church.
It’s most famous convert–John Henry Newman–was most certainly a gay man. Converting in 1845 at the age of 44, he chose to live a celibate life as an Anglican priest. However, his strong and intimate emotional attachments were with men–Richard Hurrell Froude and then, Ambrose St John. When St John died, Newman clung to the body all night.
It was Cardinal Newman’s dying wish that he be buried with his closest friend in the grounds of the house they shared as priests. The cardinal repeated on three occasions his desire to be buried with his friend, including shortly before his death in 1890.
“I wish,with all my heart, to be buried in Fr Ambrose St John’s grave – and I give this as my last, my imperative will,” he wrote, later adding: “This I confirm and insist on.”
Newman wrote after the death of St John in 1875: “I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband’s or a wife’s, but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or anyone’s sorrow greater, than mine.”
Ambrose had also become a Roman Catholic around the same time as John Newman, and the two men have a joint memorial stone, inscribed with the words Newman had chosen:
“Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem”, which translates as “Out of shadows and phantasms into the truth”.
But now, nearly 120 years after his death, Newman is to be reinterred in a sarcophagus in preparation for his becoming a saint, leaving the remains of his friend behind.
The decision to separate the remains of John Henry Newman and Ambrose St John has led some people to question whether the Church is embarrassed about their relationship and doesn’t want to raise attention to it at the time of Newman’s beatification. 
These priests are so handsome and seductive I’m thinking about becoming….a gay man!
The publication of Mormons Exposed had me wondering if Catholics had anything similar…and we do! Calendario Romano publishes an annual calendar of hunky seminarians and priests at the Vatican. The calendar also includes some helpful notes of places to see and things to do while you’re there….My advice: Guys, buy the calendar AFTER church so you’re still in a state of grace for Communion. 
I may order a copy for my sister. Fr. March may be enough to get her back to church again. Fr. October, who is also the Cover priest, certainly would have been labeled “Father-What-A-Waste” when I was growing up. 
Lesbians, as usual, have some catching up to do. The publisher would probably have to go through six thousand reprints if they printed a calendar of twelve handsome sisters looking soulfully in our eyes with all kind of promises in theirs….
Just in time for World Youth Day, the casting for Calendario Romano 2009 is about to begin. Want to get boys and girls back to the Church? Hunky seminarians may be the answer. Boring homilies about following rules are not.
