‘Bulletin’ Hates Blacks, Quakers, Realtors

In case you haven’t been paying attention — and, really, I hope you haven’t — about 15 Catholics in the city are in an uproar over the Tony Auth cartoon at right. The ‘toon ran as a commentary on the Supreme Court’s upholding of the partial-birth abortion ban.

Apparently, this cartoon is very offensive, because it says the five Catholic judges on the bench rule based on their Catholic morals. I thought this is what pro-life Catholics wanted judges to do, but apparently they don’t. Apparently Catholics are happier that the judges voted to uphold sound constitutional law than to uphold anti-abortion beliefs. Who knew?

Leading the charge against the Inquirer and its infidel cartoon is none other than The Evening Bulletin, which has run approximately 48 articles and letters about it in the past weeks. But none really did its job better than today’s column by James G. Wiles, which not only takes on Auth’s cartoon but black people, Quakers and liberals as well!

This one deserves — nay, implores — a full mocking. Join me after the jump.

One serious question percolating last week among Philly journalists and movers-and-shakers was whether Brian Tierney got blind-sided by his own employees.

Holy shit! Did Tierney get jumped? Did somebody attack him? And it might be employees who did it? Possibly with a pig? How did I not know this? You’d think I’d have heard some talk of it, working with journalists and all, but, hey, who knows.

Did Tierney know about that cartoon? The question du jour was whether Tony Auth’s explicitly anti-Catholic cartoon (reproduced nearby, with an earlier version of the same thing) had been presented to the Inquirer’s publisher?

Oh.

Or had the liberals on the Inky’s editorial board and in the newsroom seen an opportunity to stick a shiv into the Catholic Republican publisher’s back and joyfully done so?

See? I told you this deserves a full mocking. Apparently, the conspiracy — according to Wiles — is this:

1. Auth draws “explicitly anti-Catholic” cartoon.
2. Inquirer editorial board gets cartoon, places it on page.
3. Inquirer editorial board sends page without showing Brian Tierney because since Tierney is a Catholic, he wouldn’t have allowed the “anti-Catholic” cartoon to run.
4. Inquirer editorial board laughs and drinks blood — but not of Jesus! And no transubstantiation has taken place!

Man, for a newspaper that professes to be anti-political correctness, it sure does complain a lot about a cartoon.

We’ll know some day. I suggest Cardinal Rigali already does.

Ha ha, what? Did Cardinal Rigali call up Tierney? Is Brian Tierney so powerful he gets his confession heard by the Cardinal himself? I wonder if you get extra absolution when you confess to the Cardinal. Aw, but I bet he gives you extra Hail Marys to say or whatever. Although those never took that long. How do I get a personal audience with the Cardinal?

Sorry for all the questions, but, ah: How will we know some day?

Holy Mother Church has not, of course, been shaken one inch by the insult of a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist. So, let’s talk about something more important.

The hell? Er, sorry. The fuck? (Saying “fuck” isn’t a sin. Seriously, I learned it in grade school. We also learned “Go to Helen’s house!”) If this is so important, why did you lead the column with it? And if Holy Mother Church hasn’t been shaken by the cartoon, I know who has: James G. Wiles!

And that more important thing is the intentional destruction 40 years ago of many of Philadelphia’s ethnic Catholic neighborhoods by liberals.

Wow. I knew Penn bought all those houses in the Black Bottom and then built like a hotel or something on it, but I didn’t know liberals intentionally bulldozed Catholic neighborhoods. That’s pretty harsh. I wonder how my all-Catholic neighborhood growing up survived?

Most Philly Catholics know that, after William Penn’s demise, the City of Brotherly Love was not as welcoming to those who made the sign of the cross as it was to those who did not. They also know that, in the 1840s (the Know Nothing era, which Auth’s insulting cartoon faithfully reflects), there were anti-Catholic riots here.

Churches were burned, like Old St. Augustine’s in Old City, and a convent too. As the new rector of the Cathedral Basilica of Ss. Peter and St. Paul confirmed to me last month, the reason there are no ground level windows in the Cathedral is so a mob can’t pitch bombs or incendiaries into the Cathedral.

If you’re wondering the equation here, it’s this: Bombings of catholic churches = Cartoon with pope hats on Catholic Supreme Court justices. Man, Tony Auth is going to hell. I’m surprised Wiles didn’t predict that in his column.

Which, by the way, is happening to Christian churches along the “bloody edges” of Islam right now.

Damn! I was wondering when some fear-mongering about Islam was going to come in to this column. I’m kind of surprised it took this long. I can’t believe I used to work there! (To be fair, I was Arts & Culture editor and didn’t have to deal with any of this. I did run a review by a contributor of some Antonin Scalia book, but I got to run a funny photo of Scalia with it. Win-win!)

In a piece in the New Oxford Review last year, I remarked on Philly’s vanished Catholic neighborhoods. You can trace them with your eye, as Philadelphia Magazine did in the April issue. What was missed was the boarded-up or recycled Catholic church in the middle of whatever “Badlands” was visiting.

Wait, how did a magazine trace something with its eye? Is Phillymag sentient now? I found what I think is this article is about, but you gotta pay to read it. Sorry, Catholics: You’ve taken enough of my money. (Ba-ZING!)

Uh, also, wow, there are still a ton of parishes.

As someone who came here from upstate in 1983, after three years of practice elsewhere, I was struck by the anger of the older Catholic lawyers I met over the destruction of the neighborhoods in which they’d grown up. They didn’t say they were from North Philly, West Philly or Southeast. They’d say the name of their parish. And the parish wasn’t there anymore.

When talking with other Catholics about growing up, Catholics talked about what parish they went to. (Or, even, grade school.) This is, of course, what I do, but apparently I don’t exist anymore.

Uh, also, wow, there are still a ton of parishes.

Most Catholics who today live in Delaware, Montgomery, Bucks or Chester counties today know an older person who emits that anger.

I had no idea Catholics were so angry. Perhaps Jesus’ message of tolerance and peace somehow brings out some sort of backlash.

What these folks are angry about is the intentional destruction of their parishes by a combined assault of the civil rights movement (funded mostly by such WASP organizations as the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation) and the Quakers.

Ha ha ha, what? Damn you civil rights movement? With your equal rights for all strategy and your non-violent means to achieve goals! And those damn Quakers! How dare you be quiet and sit still!

I thought the Protestants and the Catholics were cool again. I really thought they put aside their differences to fight against research on clumps of cells headed for a dumpster and gays in committed relationships.

This effort represented what others have named the Liberal Project.

The Liberal Project, as it began in the 1950s, was a sustained campaign to de-construct the Judeo-Christian consensus on morals, ethics and social values which then prevailed here. The results of the success of the Liberal Project we see all around us today.

Yes, that civil rights movement, really edoring away at the Judeo-Christian consensus on morals, ethics and social values. Didn’t the Catholic Church support the civil rights movement?

Also, I’d like to thank the Liberal Project for allowing culture to devolve — I guess — to the point where gays can get married in some places and where I can get a job doing stupid shit like this.

On the law side, the Liberal Project took the form of “public interest” litigation to knock down state laws regulating morals and to erect a civil right to privacy in the Constitution. In Philadelphia, where there was an entrenched Republican political machine sustained by the votes of Catholic ethnic neighborhoods, the Liberal Project embraced the deliberate destruction of those neighborhoods.

You see, Mr. Wiles believes that we shouldn’t have a right to privacy. If you want to have premarital sex, you can be arrested for it! Ditto sodomy, masturbation! Hell, why isn’t there a law against skipping church?! Look how far we have fallen.

And, here we go, the best line in the column:

In the 1950s, the reform Democratic mayors of Philadelphia, Joe Clark and Richardson Dilworth, confronted the problem that most Philadelphians, although sickened by the Republic Party’s corruption, weren’t Democrats. The solution was to ethnically cleanse the Republicans by encouraging the black migration which had already transformed New York and Chicago.

Ethically cleanse! Ha ha, get it! Because, like the Holocaust, Catholics in 1950s Philadelphia were murdered in ovens!

How was this done? By “block-busting” Catholic neighborhoods - an effort often funded by the Quakers. Taking advantage of the racist refusal of many Catholic ethnic groups to live with blacks, the Quakers would finance the purchase of a home in a Catholic section by a black family. Realtors, hungry for commissions, would do the rest.

You crazy black people, moving into an area where racists live. When will you ever learn?

Boy, this is a pretty lame ethnic cleansing. I thought Catholics were murdered in droves, when instead they moved out of the city voluntarily because they were horrible racists. Bastard Quakers and realtors! How dare they attempt to integrate society for the betterment of all.

I really love the sentence, “Realtors, hungry for commissions, would do the rest.” As far as I can tell, “the rest” means “sell a house to a family with adequate financing instead of denying people a home because they are black.” What a strategy!

The result would be the disintegration of the parish and a neighborhood.

And, as we have today, a permanent Democratic majority in Philadelphia.

When I first heard this - especially since I’m not from here, I was skeptical. After all, Jewish neighborhoods like Wharton, South Street and Strawberry Mansion emptied out too. Did the Democrats and the Quakers also target the Jewish neighborhoods? Why did the Italians in South Philly and the Poles in Bridesburg stay? Ditto the Jews in West Mount Airy or the Northeast?

Phew. Okay, he was just sort of hilariously explaining the “Liberal Project,” a fake conspiracy on the level of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

But the visual evidence that there had been a mass exitus from vast areas of Philadelphia was compelling. A writer in Esquire magazine remarked in a profile of our then police commissioner, John Timoney: Philly is a city of one million built for two million. The other million, mostly Catholic working class, left.

Boy, that is compelling evidence.

.So I read on. The evidence is summarized in two books by E. Michael Jones, a native of Southwest Philadelphia, now based in South Bend, Indiana. He operates the Web site culturewars.com. Jones’ relevant books are Cardinal Krol and the Cultural Revolution (1995) and The Slaughter of Cities (2004).

Oh.

To summarize, Wiles’ evidence:

1. In an Esquire article, a writer said the Catholic working class left Philadelphia.
2. In two self-published books, some guy who runs a website called culturewars.com said this theory was true.

Jones is routinely denounced as a racist and an anti-Semite. And yet, Jones addressed the National Press Club on March 20, 2007; so I don’t think so. His speech is available on his website.
But I don’t think the boys at the NPC would have lent him their podium if they thought he was a bigot.

To summarize, Wiles’ evidence for Jones not being racist:

1. He gave a speech to the National Press Club.

This is the same National Press Club which invited David Duke to speak.

And, finally:

To me, Jones sometimes sounds like William Donahue of the Catholic League or Ann Coulter, without the charm.

Ha ha ha hahahahahahahahahahahahahah!

Who knew this writer would spend all these words, only to tell the greatest joke ever at the very end.

I scanned through Wiles’ column again and decided to see what he feels is to blame for Catholics moving out of the city. He has denounced:

• The Civil Rights Movement
• Black people
• Realtors
• Liberals
• Quakers
• Democrats
• Joe Clark and Richardson Dilworth
• Protestants
• The Ford Foundation
• The Rockefeller Foundation

Good show, Jimmy Wiles.

Philadelphia: The Desolate City [The Bulletin]