POP-UP NUMBER 5: SAINT FASCIST
(Did You Sleep With the Models?)
George De Stefano’s review is as timely today as it was in 1985, the main difference being names and dates. The same issues, espoused by the continued alliance of right-wing religion and ultra-conservative politics, haunt this country even more dangerously now than then. Many of those issues — abortion, gay rights, separation of church and state, American support of foreign dictators and warmongers — led to the Trump disaster and could do so again.
Francis Cardinal Spellman, as Roman Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of New York, was a vicious closeted homosexual whose secret was protected by the Vatican, by the White House and the FBI, and of course by the New York Times and virtually all other media. For instance, you’ll read below that “by the time The American Pope was published…the four pages of gay-related material had been reduced to a mere paragraph…Editors at Times Books got skittish…” Times Books is owned by the New York Times, as corrupt in its way as Fox News, Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, or The National Review.
Although Spellman died almost sixty years ago, his evil influence lives on throughout the Roman Catholic hierarchy but most especially in his successors to the New York archbishopric, all of whom were elevated from archbishop to cardinal: Terence Cooke (1968-1983); John O’Connor (1984-2000); Edward Egan (2000-2009); Timothy Dolan (20009-present).
Although the statement that “history repeats itself” has become a tired cliché, it still sometimes speaks truth. De Stefano points out that Spellman was a vociferous supporter of this country’s calamitous war against Vietnam. But “once anti-war sentiment within and without the Church shattered Spellman’s omnipotence, the stage was set for the final, decisive challenge to his power.”
Will the widespread recent protests against Israeli genocide in Gaza have a similar effect?
