COMMENTS AND OBSERVATIONS, a 2007 holiday series from lonely outpost San Jose, Ca. … storm clouds gather … a response to issues sent out by Catholica Australia.

A bit of advice to followers of Catholica Australia (CA): don't get behind on reading the material that comes from downunder; CA is charged with an Eveready battery, producing great grist for the dialogue mill. In observation #1 I limit myself to education, especially the Catholic School system.

"While storm clouds gather far across the sea let us pledge allegiance to a land that's free …."

The ten year old boy in me can still hear Kate Smith blasting out the pre-WW2 song that assured us God was on our side; my observations use the storm gathering theme, watching and studying the mobilization of religious forces, something like modern-day intellectual opposing crusades. On a Star Wars march since John the 23rd, the force of Vatican Two cuts its sensualized intellectual path through the deadwood theological forests of Old Europe; ultramontane forces of old, first remobilized by John Paul the 2nd, are again summoned by Benedict the 16th to purge Europe and the world of evil influences so deemed by isolated and insulated Vatican officials. The Vatican has feared loss of power in countries where freedom is prized. In contrast Jesus has willed his message to be "good news" heard freely by the whole world and the global village of today, where 51% of the world's people have a cell phone, has a communication system ready to hear and consider.

Electronic Catholica Australia with its openness to dialogue and sound positive adult information is fast becoming that beacon on a mountain top referred to in Matthew 5:15. Here in outpost San Jose as I watch the religious storm clouds gather I have strong confidence that God is on Catholica's side. (I do not believe in a God who micromanages the human race; I do trust in a positive Spirit built into human nature at creation — an idea I came by while reading about the Spirit hovering over chaos in the book of Genesis.) Catholica Australia is adult education at its best and greatly needed — continue to beam me in, CA.

Paul Cardinal Cullen 1803-1878

We need go back to the 1800's Irish Potato Famine and an ultramontane Cardinal named Paul Cullen to understand the present day Catholic School system in America; his heavy-handed separatist negativity dominates Ireland and finds its way into America by way of the immigrant Foreign Born Clergy (FBI); the Council of Baltimore, in a country blending all types and newly dedicated to religious freedom for all, mandates that every parish have a Catholic school, a continuance of separatist old Europe.

Charles R Morris in AMERICAN CATHOLIC (1997) describes Cullen: "… in the classic Medicean mould of a prince of the Roman Church — lean, ascetic, glacially cold and remote, every whisker turned to the nuances of curial politics, a diplomat and intriguer to his fingernails…". John Henry Newman lamented "poor Dr C, he makes no one his friend". At 18 Cullen leaves Ireland to live and study in Rome; he was said to be more Roman than Irish; working closely with Pius the 9th, he becomes at age 40 the Primate of Ireland as Archbishop of Dublin. In the midst of devastation and hunger Cullen opposes aid to the famished because it comes from Protestant Britain; remarkably unmoved by the national famine he sermonizes that the disaster is "simply the work of Providence … a calamity with which God wishes to purify ….the Irish people".

Wanting to civilize the people and break the ancient traditional Irish culture and pagan religious influence, Cullen purges the clergy from contact with the illiterate (**my people), creating a separatist elite clergy and a division between Catholics and Protestants that I experienced in my 1930's grade school training, in the clergy of my home parish, and in the priesthood to which I was ordained in 1954; the cardinal, while further impoverishing the poor, demanded pomp and ceremony, introducing across the nation spiritual practices such as novenas, rosary, benediction, stations of the cross, holy hour, processions and devotion to the Sacred heart and the Virgin Mary. An Irish people of squalor will be made to be a proper people with the English as a model; their God will be feared, while suffering and guilt will be their salvation. Jesus died for the peoples' sins! Human sexuality will be misunderstood and fear of sex is played upon; in Leon Uris' TRINITY the fearful Irish mother who confesses to enjoying sexual pleasure with her husband accepts as a penance that the child will become a priest. This is the heritage passed on to America through the Irish immigrant priests and heavily supported by the Catholic school system.

**my people: pardon this writer as I insert here that my American fore parents are Potato Famine Irish and my heart bleeds with their being abused by clerical power; I have written about alcohol as the male drug of choice to survive within the oppressive roman system. I write with tears and anger as I feel their fear and pain. I spent 26 years in institutional priesthood, as well as the past 28, teaching a God of love and a Jesus of compassion. Jesus was missing in the clericalism of Cullen's Ireland and the subsequent Catholic School system. Vatican Two was the death warrant of Cullen's religion.

In 1955 in my first parish after ordination I silently opposed the Irish-born pastor's wanting to disband our 200-member coed teen club and form rather a girl's sodality; over half of the youth were public school youngsters, to whom the pastor referred with scorn as "McMahon's kids". (At a funeral 40 years later a woman introduced herself to me as one of those public school kids, making my day as she said "Father, I graduated from San Leandro High; you respected us and treated us like persons and we knew you loved us".) Although I taught daily for 20 years in Catholic schools I fought valiantly for the public school kids; in 1960 the California Parent Teachers Association awarded me a medal for my dedicated service to Public School students. My son Steve is a Public High School math teacher. I regret today the apartheid separation that Paul Cullen first introduced to Ireland. The Canadian Educational System successfully includes denominational education.

Education of the young in the American Catholic School System was mandated by the Council of Baltimore (1884). Each parish was to have a catholic school within two years of the Council; an underlying fear of Protestant intellectualism, the immigrant want to be equal with the long-standing Colonial descendants, and a giant push from a Rome fearful of new religious freedoms shoved the obligation of the Catholic system on adult American Catholics who themselves were mostly of the illiterate common worker class. The impossible dream struggled, myself attending 1930's Catholic grade school as my widowed mother paid $1 a month for each of her four kids.

Holy Names High School, Oaklands www.hnhsoakland.org

Oakland's Holy Names High School survives today with a student body of Afro-American girls, in 2007 a rare beacon of hope in a city with a devastating crime and homicide rate; the Diocese has never financially helped this inner-city school. In poverty days the Catholic school system thrived, while Catholic minorities shouldered financial burdens and the teaching staff were dedicated under-paid vowed religious women. In wealth the system became an apartheid haven of those who wanted to be above the ordinary and who wanted law and order in over-crowded classrooms; in the 2007 Bay Area the Catholic High School has become a havens for star athletes, De La Salle's nationally known football team a prime example.

After a period of 100 years and the American sexual and freedom revolutions of the 1960's the fire of ambition to get ahead by being in the Catholic system was quelled by the awareness that a good solid education could be obtained in all systems, plus the fact that there was no more cheap labor, religious sisters in the classroom. Our two sons, fourth generation grandchildren of illiterate Potato Famine Irish, never went to a Catholic school; both possess degrees from Cal Berkeley. The Catholic School system of the past 100 years offered much to a developing America espcially during the Great Depression; now as Catholics stand tall among fellow Americans the need for a special school for their children has faded. Here in Silicon Valley a sixteen grade Catholic School struggles for survival; when I was associate pastor in 1967 the want to build a Catholic school was laid aside as fifty families would be favored out of some 2000 who attended Sunday Mass. Venerable and now deceased Father Tom Murray, himself a product of Oakland Public schools (Ace was all city football), soon after Vatican Two abandoned the idea of a parish school, fostering the community concept of parish; years later Bishop Pierre DuMaine — like most bishops never a parish priest — got a double school built, one that struggles and I would guess is filled with children of recent Asian immigrant families, money that fled Hong Kong when China took over. Houses in Almaden Valley are worth at least a million.

A house built on sand will not survive…. The sands of fear and guilt are the foundations of a Paul Cullen type church and school system; the waves of liberty and equality will wash away the underpinnings of this dysfunctional ultramontane system. Even though it does not perfectly match up I end and quote here from a post I recently received addressing the issue of future institutions in free countries: "A monarchy itself, the Vatican has an affinity towards dictatorial forms of government and a distrust that a people accustomed to participatory government would demand the same thing from their hierarchy or a nation with access to education and open information". The Catholic School network has failed Jesus' encouragement to teach all nations.

Tom McMahon, Brian's "old man from the sea", 28/12/07

Tom McMahon, a former priest now married, lives a very fulfilled life in San Jose and continues to contribute voraciously to several Catholic discussion lists in the States. He has been an enthusiastic supporter and encourager of the Catholica Australia initiative from the very beginning.

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©2007 Tom McMahon

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