Monday, January 07, 2013

The Last Time American Catholics Refused to Bend To Progressive Doctrine - 1933


American Catholics supported Franco - rather, they would not support the Communists in Spain.

Catholics are told by editorial boards, news-readers, hack politicians, academics and activists to 'get on the right side of history' and abandoned their Church and consciences and embrace the reality that marriage must be redefined to include homosexual couples.  History does not have sides to it.  Armies may face one another in opposition and each may be considered a side. One faction, or side  will win and one will lose a battle and perhaps a war. But history does not take sides; only people take sides.

The 'right side of history' in early decades of the 20th Century depended on where you happened to stomp your feet - some goose-stepped and some fox-trotted.

In 1931,Spain's  King Alfonso was forced to abdicate the throne.  Thanks to Napoleon,the Industrial Revolution and the European imperial rush to colonize the un-claimed parts of the globe, Spain crashed from the  world power that dominated Europe from the 15th -19th Centuries, to the sad remnant armed with Mausers and Maxims against Col. Teddy Roosevelt;s Rough Riders, and Admiral Dewey's fleets.

Spain is a Catholic nation. Some abandoned their faith for the secular creeds of Marxism and anarchy.  Some found a balance with their faith and labor because Pope Leo XIII defended the right to organize trade unions. There were still folks who were loyal to the monarchy  and they were called Carlists. Some demanded that Spain follow Italy into fascism and the were called Falangists.

In 1932, the Soviet Comintern decided to make Spain International.

In 1933, a coalition of the Center-Left took the majority seats in Cortes:

The Comintern of Soviet Russia in 1932 made infiltration into Spain a priority, thus insuring a strong communist presence. Many workers, dissatisfied with the remorseless face of the liberal capitalism that had grown up under the late monarchy, began to turn in increasingly radical directions. Two separate extremist groups began to forge an alliance. One was the anarchists, those dedicated to the overthrow of any government; the other was the syndicalists, who wanted no government but only a series of disparate workers communes. The anarcho-syndicalists were especially strong in the ethnically separate Basque region and in the autonomous region of Catalonia, around Barcelona. It is important to note that the strength of the anarcho-syndicalists was not primarily among the farming peasantry, but rather took root with the working classes attached to industry in large cities. In the elections of 1933, a center-right coalition was voted in, but this was largely ineffective due to the destabilizing influences of the anarcho-syndicalists and the operations of the new communist party of Spain. New elections were to be held in 1936. These would be decisive in determining the course of Spanish history.
Election to the Cortes, or the parliamentary assembly of Spain, was an exceedingly complex process. It was anything but a direct popular election and many places, especially cities, were assigned a disproportionate number of representatives. This will be shown by the vote totals.
 Votes in the Spanish elections of 1933Right (Carlists, Catholic Action, Liberal Monarchists, Falange), 4,570,744 votes, 133 seats
Center 340,073 votes, 77 seats
Popular Front (Communists, Socialists, Catalan Separatists, Left Republicans), 4,346,559 votes, 263 seats
One can see that even though the center-right, which had governed since 1933, received over 500,000 more votes, the Popular Front had a majority of 26 seats over the old coalition. As a salient example of unrepresentative allotment, the center, which polled only 340,000 votes, received half the number of the seats that the right obtained with their 4.5 million votes. Ultimately, it was the socialistic Popular Front that formed a government. As each month passed, the regime acted in an increasingly despotic and radical manner, successively casting off ministers who were not liberal enough. Against this regime the military, the Carlist traditionalists and the political right rebelled. American Catholics went to great lengths to explain the facade of this "democratic" election process to the general public.
Progressive America was not accepting this - American Catholics found themselves on the 'wrong side of history.' American Catholics had become a political force.  George Babbitt was confronted by Studs Lonigan. American Catholics ran a coreligionist, NY Governor Al Smith for President in 1928 and lost. However, they formed something of a coalition with mainline Progressive Protestants, who demanded abortion and birth control; over the New Deal and elected FDR. Catholics remained very anti-Communist and somewhat isolationist and Progressives were delighted with Communism and were happily isolationist, until Spain got messy.

Hollywood cast Catholic Spain as the villain - universal and historical. Claude Raines, Basil Rathbone, the Inquisition tortured Errol Flynn, John Garfield and Tyrone Power in movies about pirates, gun runners and rebels with one cause.
Bernard F. Dick is of the opinion that Hollywood's preoccupation with portraying opposition to the fascist forces emerged long before September 1939: "Hollywood began its war on fascism before fascism began its war on democracy." He asserts that the film industry was conscious of political turbulence in Europe since the early 1930s, but veiled "their fascist aggression in allusion and metaphor until...history intervened." He goes on to support this claim with a discussion of the various attempts to produce meaningful films about the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that was never mentioned by name in any of the movies until 1940, and then only to say that it was over. According to Dick's examination of Hollywood wartime production, the OWI wielded enough influence to prevent the expression of firm political convictions in early war films, and the filmmakers were left to follow its advice.


 The Republic's Popular Front was dominated by Soviet trained commissars and immediately churches and monasteries were confiscated by the Republic, because the Church needed to pay its 'fair share' and immediately bishops, priests and nuns were executed.  Peasants and workers who objected to this savagery were executed.


The trouble in Spain forced American Catholics to break ranks.  General Franco led a rebellion against the Communist dominated Republic. Donald Prudlo's fine article for Catholic Culture details the powerful unity of American Catholics in opposition to the Popular Front and the support it maintained for Franco's government. The American Catholic Church remained fiercely and uncompromisingly anti-communist, even among its academics and politicians, unlike today.

Prudlo noted:

In their battle to justify Franco to the American public, Catholic journalists faced an extremely difficult battle. One of the most basic obstacles encountered was the persistent "Black Legend" regarding Spanish history, a view that had taken root in Reformation England and spread from there to all of the English-speaking countries of the west. This legend excoriated Spain as a backwards, religiously dominated gothic land of torture and inquisition. Hilaire Belloc was credited by Catholics as the first historian to plow through the patina of prejudice and hatred to offer a balanced English-language account of Spanish history.20 McGuire was concerned with showing that all of the news correspondents in Spain were infected with this, and as a result were not being impartial. These correspondents presented Franco as standing for the forces of Church, inquisition, privilege and repression, against idealistic socialists, communists, and anarchists trying to shed some light on backward Spain.21 The editors of The Sign were constantly warning American Catholics not to trust major media outlets, but rather to get their news from the National Catholic Welfare Council News Service, as mediated through the 300 or so Catholic periodicals in the country.22 America attempted to reshape the terms used to describe the conflict. The editors railed against the tyranny of calling the Rightists "rebels" and the communists "loyalists." The rebels, "not the government forces, are fighting the battle of world democracy," the writers stated.23 Catholic journalists refused to let Protestant and popular news outlets cast the struggle in terms of democracy vs. totalitarianism.
Today, the struggle is much less tangible and much more hostile; gay marriage is much more than a ceremony and license.  Gay Marriage and abortion are secular doctrines that Catholics, if they are to be considered American citizens, must not merely accept but heartily acclaim.

Catholic support for Franco was very unpopular, but the Church and Catholics did not cave.  Donald Prudlo's article concludes:

In the end the unpopular position of the Catholic Church in the war resulted in very few negative repercussions. Perhaps if World War II had not followed hard on the heels of the Spanish conflict there would have been more time for a backlash, but as it was the Church was prepared for war. Had Catholics remained in the camp of the old liberal isolationists one can only imagine what a shock the coming of the next war would have brought. As it was, the Church entered the forties and fifties as a unified group with a common identity ready to face the challenges of those decades. It is ironic that the terrible bloodletting of Spain helped to bring forth a strong and tightly knit American Catholic presence. Sometimes great good can come from the most unexpected of directions.
Wonder how we will do?




Sunday, January 06, 2013

American Education: Graphic Novels - Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Hello, Dr. Bucky!


James Bucky Carter, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, wrote a book that guides teachers in pairing graphic novels with traditional texts."I think we live in an age where we should not study text in isolation," he said. "Every text should be put in relation to something else," such as graphic novels as supplements to traditional literature. Chicago Tribune

In the photo above is Dr. James Bucky Carter, an asstistant professor of English education at University of Texas of El Paso. The above photo is from the professor's website.  The Chicago Tribune wrote a glowing piece on the application for Professor Bucky's methodolgies employed at Alan B. Shepard High School, in the south west Chicago suburbs.

Dr. Bucky advocates the use of graphic novels (comic books in the classroom) not only to aid in the development of slow readers, but in Honors English and Advanced Placement courses as well.


Professor Bucky has much going for him, an advanced degree in English education. a tenured track position with University of Texas Farm System, a sure fire path to full class loads completely free of academic rigor, a culture dumb-ed down to the point that newspapers must be offered in digest form ( RedEye), literature must wait for the movie ( Anna Karenina Redux)  and history in the care of Oliver Stone is even considered. . .for anything of substantive historical perspective.


Reading is a rigorous activity.  Reading and writing require hard work. More so, misreading and misunderstanding have contributed to miseries historical and sundry - Guttenberg developed the printing press to free Western Man from the clutches of clerics who printed books by hand.  As a result the Northern ( read Dutch/English) Humanists like Disiderius Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, both were trained by the manuscript illustrating monks with books printed on Gutenberg's moveable type.  Though both the clerical abuses of the Medici and Borgia Popes, neither ditched the Faith.


Their contemporary, the activist Augustinian priest Martin Luther, used the graphic novels of the day, Broadsheets, to make propaganda weapon that would reach its zenith in 1920's Bavaria.

Martin Luther's graphic novels  ( like Lucas Cranach's "Kissing the Pope's feet" and the Monk Calf)
sparked decades of religious slaughter. Lucas Cranach, the Stan Lee of the 16th Century, illustrated Martin Luther's tracts aimed at particular demographics, ignorant and illiterate peasants and ignorant and reading-challenged German nobility nurturing particular beefs with ecclesiastical princes.

Illustrations help texts make clear authorial intent.  William Makepeace Thackeray illustrated all of his works and Charles Dickens hired out illustrators Hablot K. Browne to help readers of Pickwick Papers understand what lies within his words.


Babies learn to love books via picture books and all good elementary developmental texts are illustrated to some extent.


Our public  secondary schools are a disaster.  Teacher training is enthralled to Colleges of Education and mastery of academic disciplines remain subject to the limitations set by those colleges. Teachers who don't know their subjects, but are certified to teach are placed in classrooms thick with challenging and willful youngsters.  Shortly, the cry of "No one cares about learning" is heard crawling its way from under the tightly closed doors of the novice's classroom.  It is easier to become a teacher than it is to become an electrician, carpenter, pipe-fitter, or stationary engineer.  The certification process of the trades is much more rigorous and exacting.  The apprenticeship programs for the skilled trades are much more carefully monitored than any Student Teacher program.


Advanced degrees in the subject ( biology/English/history & etc.) to mastered are discouraged in favor of a M.Eds. and Ed.Ds worth exactly the papers they are printed up . . .without illustration. A public  school head could never expect let alone request a driver's ed instructor with more than  few free periods in his day to take over a history class, " Hey, sorry Doc, not my rice bowl.".


I have yet to meet a skilled tradesman unable to engage in cross-disciplinary work ( cut pipe, build a frame, wire, or weld) and do so with professionalism.  There are no graphic novels in plumbing.


Teachers wholly unfamiliar with Beowulf and its place in the canon of English literature well ahead of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, don't ken kennings, or their thorn from their ash, much less wynn over the students to beauty and fun of Old English, will necessarily embrace a good comic book over Seamus Heaney's translation.


Goodbye Mr. Chips and Hello Dr. Bucky.


Friday, January 04, 2013

White House Posts Petition to List Catholic Church a 'Hate Group'



The First Gay President allowed his website to post this:
The White House Emblem
The White House Emblem

WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO:

Officially recognize the Roman Catholic Church as a hate group.

In his annual Christmas address to the College of Cardinals, Pope Benedict XVI, the global leader of the Roman Catholic Church, demeaned and belittled homosexual people around the world. Using hateful language and discriminatory remarks, the Pope painted a portrait in which gay people are second-class global citizens. Pope Benedict said that gay people starting families are threatening to society, and that gay parents objectify and take away the dignity of children. The Pope also implied that gay families are sub-human, as they are not dignified in the eyes of God.
Upon these remarks, the Roman Catholic Church fits the definition of a hate group as defined by both the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League.

 "I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history." Francis Cardinal George, OMI Archbishop of Chicago

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/officially-recognize-roman-catholic-church-hate-group/CZB81hWK

Your Illinois Gay Marriage Barometer - Make Some Calls




HB5655vote1

IL Sen.Heather Steans, the trust-fund baby who became an Illinois State Senator, did not have the votes yesterday.

Gay Marriage or the Religious Freedom and Marriage Fairness Act, the Selma is Stonewall Procrustean rack, touted as the THE most important piece of legislation to come down the pike since the movie Lincoln *premiered last month, had been attached to a Car Rental Bill and then in 24 hours when 5655 stubbed it's toe in Committee stapled to Nursing Home legislation.

Whatever!

5655 moves to the Lame Duck, Part Deux, I guess, or awaits the new Senators (Y) to replace the Vanishing Senators (Y) in your neighborhood.  Some House Reps will become State Senators.


The always laughable Eric Zorn does another bit of Stretch Armstrong cover with an absolutly hilarious attempt to link ILHB 5655 to the 13th Amendment (link Lincoln above) and opines the necessity to 5655 villains to adopt pseudonyms for an expected film based upon Illinois Gay Marriage Agonistes - How about Illinois Senator Selma Stonewall as cover for Sen. Heather (Trust Fund)Steans?

Thursday, January 03, 2013

Marriage Versus Money & Power - Gay Marriage Wins!

The Couple Next Door-- Illinois 2013 - at least there's no damn tricycles, Barbie Dream Houses and chalk art all over their sidewalks.

Illinois Gay Marriage will happen; Pop Culture over Tradition? - it's time, I guess.  It was time for civil unions, but that was so long ago that former Gov.  Pat ( Two Bits') Quinn still seemed like he could send a fax without a stamp on it.  That long ago.

When forces of Gay Marriage have a heavy-weight moral theologian with three names and bow-tie, Traditional Marriage,  backed a leader named Francis Cardinal George and a mitre, has got nothing,  so says what passes for editorial, political and activist thought in this burg.

Lt. Governor Sheila Simon and political-powerhouse Deb Mell trotted out no-less a Lincoln stand-in than Jesse Tyler Ferguson - star of  ABC's TV Sitcom Modern Family! AND 250 clergy persons in full communion with Jesse Tyler Ferguson,  Fred Eychaner, former Gov. Pat Quinn, Chicago's Blink-of an-Eye' Mayor Dave Orr, Eric Zorn, Bruce Dold and the cast of The Book of Mormon . . .  and the Illinois Legislature.!

Overwhelming! Dennis Byrne made a great case for common sense in the Tribune today, but any objection to re-defining marriage meets the catcalls of the bigots, who call everyone who merely disagrees a bigot.

 Now, what do we Catholics and traditionalists have in our corner?





Much of the opposition stems from religious concerns, such as those cited by Cardinal Francis George, who has urged a "no" vote. We fully understand and respect the cardinal's view that same-sex marriage violates natural law. But nothing in this bill affects the church's authority to define what is right for Catholics. It recognizes the difference between religious rites and civil institutions.
The Catholic church, after all, bars remarriage by divorcees, but Illinois grants marriage licenses to them. Allowing same-sex marriage does not limit the freedom of religious believers to reject it; it merely allows those who differ to practice what they believe. Bruce Dold and The Chicago Tribune Editorial Board!
We all know how The Illinois Religious Freedom and Civil Unions Act affected Catholic Charities and that 'could not wait' legislation was deemd as sweet as bear meat, as well.

Gay Marriage will happen in this sad State,  because money trumps everything and power is the goal.