Anatomy of Betrayal
Terry Hughes: a brief introduction
My friend, Terry Hughes, retired professor of Quaternary Studies at the University of Maine, is a specialist in Earth Sciences and Climate Change. Dr. Hughes (he never asserts the title) is one of the few “establishment” people who came to my aid and comfort when I was prosecuted long ago as a “clinic bomber.” He is a Roman Catholic and he is a man of God. Near death by cancer, he continues to write and advocate among friends and foes for the restoration of the protection for the womb children and for the restoration of the authority of the Law of God (and, he would say, “the Church”) in the land. As a “Protestant,” I prefer the Law of God to “the Church.” But if I had to choose between a Godless, Lawless, Communist (or other form of tyranny) and “the Church,” I would rather have the latter.
He often states succinctly the two worldviews which await our choice; one is that given by the Church; the other, that of the modernist/atheist. He prefers, to use his own expression, “Genesis to Darwin in providing an explanation for human origins and destiny. Genesis: We were created in the image and likeness of God for the purpose of spending eternity with Him after being obedient to Him here on Earth. Darwin: We came from worms and our only destiny is to be eaten by worms. We owe obedience to nobody and nothing. There is no ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in the struggle to become worm food.”
That really is the issue for the solitary citizen to decide per his own soul and mental heath. But there are also more general ramifications in consideration of the fact that Genesis (along with the rest of the revelation) establishes and commends the Law from the Creator so that a society can live with true moral discernment and provide justice for its citizens.
Anatomy of Betrayal
(Professor) Terence J. Hughes, Ph.D.
University of Maine
334 Main Street
Orono, ME 04473
23 May 2006
The shield of Ulster displays a Red Hand in the middle of a White Cross. In the Book of Invasions, the Milesians invaded Ireland a thousand years before Christ. As the lead ship approached the coast of Ulster, the Milesian King told his men, “The first to touch this shore gets the land.” One soldier immediately chopped off his hand and cast it ashore. The Hughes’ claim the Red Hand (Some Ulster Surnames, by Padraig Mac Giolla Domhnaigh, 1923. Clodhanna Teo., 6 Sraid Fhearchair, Baile Atha Cliath).
My great grandfather emigrated from Ulster in 1848 at the height of the Irish Potato Famine, and homesteaded in Iowa. His oldest son entered Dakota Territory around 1880 and became a rancher in the Bad River Valley south of Fort Pierre, the oldest White settlement, and then became a Circuit Court Judge in Pierre, the state capital across the Missouri River from Fort Pierre. My father became a County Judge in Fort Pierre. I was born in 1938 and raised on the Hughes cattle ranch.
The ice sheet that covered most of North America 14,000 years ago ended at the Missouri River. I got a B.S. degree in metallurgy from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in 1960, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Northwestern University in 1962 and 1968. Glacier ice is the material I have studied since then, first at The Ohio State University, where I met my wife Beverly, an Ohio farm girl, and since 1974 at the University of Maine. When I became active in Operation Rescue in 1988, and later with Father Norman Weslin’s Lambs of Christ, I took the prison name, Iceman.
Orono, home of the University of Maine, is a small town just north of Bangor. It has two Catholic parishes, St. Mary of the Assumption serving town people and Our Lady of Wisdom Newman Center serving University people. St. Mary’s is the jewel of Orono. Located in the center of town, it has twin steeples and is built of field stones. Next to it is the largest two-story building in town, also built of field stones, that still operated as Orono’s Catholic school when Bev and I arrived. I joined the Knights of Columbus and Bev began teaching the Faith to Catholic children.
St. Mary’s is the most Eucharistic church I have seen, and I’ve seen many, from St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome to the most humble shelters in New Guinea and Africa. The High Altar had been ripped out and replaced by a plain table. High above where the High Altar had been was a stained glass window of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It was framed in ripe grapes still on the vine and behind Our Lord were bundled sheaves of wheat. Lower and to the right, a window displayed Melchizedek giving gifts of Bread and Wine to Abraham (“You are a priest forever, according to the Order of Melchizadek.”). To the left and at the same height, an angel stops Abraham from sacrificing his son, Isaac, and points to a ram caught in a bush. It is God the Father who is to sacrifice His Son. People in the oak pews had their gaze drawn Heavenward, to the original High Altar on a broad deck three steps above the congregation, to these magnificent stained glass windows depicting Salvation History from Abraham to Christ, and to New Testament scenes on the wall below the windows, but painted over in the aftermath of Vatican II.
Eight stained glass windows on the two sidewalls presented Mary’s role in Salvation History. These depictions were paired, two scenes for each window. In the first window, Mary as a child in the temple making her vow of perpetual virginity is paired with the Angel Gabriel telling Mary she is to be the Mother of God. This explains why Mary asked the angel how she could bear a child, not “knowing man” and because of her pledge, not in the Bible but in Tradition and accepted by God, to never know man.
The next window pairs Mary giving birth to Jesus in Bethlehem with the Holy Family fleeing to Egypt as Herod massacres the Holy Innocents hoping to kill Our Lord. The Baby Jesus looks up fearfully at His mother, as Joseph leads their donkey.
The next window pairs Jesus discovered in the Temple by his parents with a display of the Holy Family in which Jesus, about twelve years old, has a face and a tilt of the head that are identical to those of His mother, and having no resemblance to Joseph. This tells us that Our Lord’s humanity comes only from His mother.
Across the central aisle, the first window from the church entrance is Jesus in the workshop with Joseph. Jesus has fashioned a cross. This is paired with a scene of the death of Saint Joseph, with Jesus and Mary at his side.
Moving toward the altar, the next window pairs Jesus pointing to a stone jar that a steward is filling with water at the wedding feast in Cana, as Mary looks on, with a scene of Jesus with a shepherd’s staff standing next to His mother, both gazing into each other’s eyes, knowing the tranquility of their family life had ended at Cana and his tumultuous road to Calvary now lay ahead. “They have no wine.”
The next window shows Mary coming down from Calvary, grief stricken, while Saint John attempts to comfort her. The three crosses are silhouetted against a stormy sky on the summit behind them. This is paired with a scene of the death of Mary. Saint John and Saint Peter are at her bedside as a lone candle flickers in the dark.
The last window in front pairs Mary being escorted by angels upward to Heaven, with an expression of eager anticipation knowing she will soon see her Son, with Mary in serene humility being crowned Queen of Heaven by the Archangels Gabriel and Michael.
Fourteen Stations of the Cross between the windows complete this visual display of Salvation History. There was only one statue, Mary crushing the head of the Serpent in a side alcove. Bev and I brought a Sacred Heart statue of Jesus from Ohio to occupy the empty alcove on the opposite side. An ornate brass Tabernacle filled a small side altar.
To appreciate fully St. Mary of the Assumption Catholic Church and its school in Orono, it is instructive to read the book, Hard Times, Hard Men, by James Mundy (Harp Publications, Scarborough, ME, 1990). Subtitled, Maine and the Irish 1830-1860, it is an account of the hardships and anti-Catholic bigotry Irish immigrants experienced, especially those coming to Maine in the famine years. Taking the lowest paying and most dangerous jobs, they raised large families and built magnificent Catholic churches and schools from the meager surplus of their poverty. Their story and that of other Catholic immigrants, notably French Canadians, is told with less stark imagery by Vincent Lapomarda in his book, The Catholic Church in the Land of the Holy Cross: A History of the Diocese of Portland, Maine (Editions du Signe, Strasbourg, France, 2003), commissioned by Bishop Joseph Gerry to mark the 150th anniversary of the diocese.
Contrast this with the post Vatican II Our Lady of Wisdom Newman Center across College Avenue from the University of Maine in Orono. In no way does it resemble a place of worship from the outside. It is an angular jumble of rough painted lumber one floor high with few windows, and appears to be a post-collapse structure in 9/11 fashion. Inside, the butcher-block altar is at the bottom of a pit surrounded by concrete steps on two sides. Straight-back chairs occupy the steps, leaving scant room for standing and no room for kneeling. Behind the altar are high narrow windows closely spaced that give a view of trees and Stillwater Creek outside, a constant distraction as the seasons and weather change, and imposing the suggestion that Nature is God. To the left of the altar table is a barren wall on which banners having nothing to do with the Catholic Faith are usually hung. Stations of the Cross are tiny stamped metal images tacked to narrow slats between the narrow windows, and are unrecognizable from any distance. The Tabernacle is a plain cube on a post in a closet-sized room at the end of a dark narrow corridor out-of-sight in the far corner of the building. If a place of worship had been purposely designed to destroy any awareness of the Real Presence of Jesus Christ, this would be it.
I’ll return to these two churches later, as they are symbolic of what has happened to the Catholic Church in Maine since Vatican II, especially under our last two bishops.
Maine, once “Rock-ribbed Republican Maine,” is now a “blue” state under decades-long control of the Democrat Party at the state and local level, as is every state in the northeastern United States. Maine’s Catholics routinely vote for pro-abortion pro-sodomy Democrats to local, state, and national office. None of them could get elected or re-elected without the Catholic vote. Since the Catholic Church is officially pro-life and pro-family, how has this come about? From betrayal by our last two Catholic bishops, Joseph Gerry and Richard Malone. Think not? Read on.
Historically, the Democrat Party had been hospitable to Catholic immigrants, with native New England Yankees gravitating to the Republican Party. When the Supreme Court sanctioned killing the next generation of Americans by abortion in 1973, most Catholic Democrats declared themselves to be pro-life and opposed to abortion. This included a large swath of leadership in the Democrat Party, from mayors of big cities and state legislatures to the halls of Congress. They ranged from Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago to Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana to House Speaker John McCormack of Massachusetts. In addition, the major labor unions and many of the professions, especially the medical profession and medical journals, were run by pro-life Catholics, usually Irish Catholics. Catholic politicians just beginning their political careers, Governor Edmund Muskie in Maine and Senator Edward Kennedy in Massachusetts, defended life. One of the most eloquent letters defending the unborn and condemning abortion was written by Teddy Kennedy early in his Senate Career. I’ve seen it. The Democrat Party could have and should have been the pro-life party. What went wrong?
The Democrat Party became the official Party of Abortion at its 1976 National Convention, following its capture by the McGovern wing in 1972. Many things converged to bring this about; the lingering euphoria of the Civil Rights era, whose mantle had been hijacked by radical feminists after the contraceptive/abortifacient “pill” was marketed in 1968 and needed surgical abortions as a backup, fierce opposition to the Vietnam War by campus radicals whom pro-abortion George McGovern organized against Lyndon Johnson, the takeover of popular culture by the “make love, not war” Woodstock generation, and most of all, a failure of nerve by high-ranking Catholic Democrats and their bishops. The same was true for Catholics in leadership positions in organized labor, the professions, and most lethal of all, in Catholic colleges and universities, a rebellion which quickly spread to the major religious orders of priests and nuns, notably the Jesuits, many of whom had either participated in Civil Rights marches a decade earlier or cheered them on from ivy citadels. It was the post Vatican II era when a peaceful takeover of the Catholic Church from within beckoned seductively. This was mixed with pride and anger that John F. Kennedy had been elected President, and then was assassinated just as he seemed destined for re-election. Most of our middle-aged priests and bishops got their seminary formation in that seething cauldron.
One-by-one, Catholics in politics, the unions, the professions, and the universities slipped into the pro-abortion camp, first apologetically (“I have no right to impose my views on women.”) and then defiantly (“I have a choice!”). The slide was rapid. Two Catholic Democrat Governors of New York, first Hugh Carey and then Mario Cuomo, not only embraced the pro-abortion cause, they budgeted public money to pay the abortionists and vetoed any bills restricting abortions. All the while, they were often photographed with their Cardinal Archbishops, who also gave them Holy Communion at Mass, as if nothing was amiss. As they openly promoted and funded killing the next generation of Americans by abortion, they marched down Fifth Avenue in the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade in New York City surrounded by priests and bishops under the banners of the Catholic Knights of Columbus, keeping step with the bands of Catholic schools as Catholic schoolchildren who survived abortion beat their drums in celebration of Ireland’s patron saint.
Here in Maine, after his failed presidential campaign, Senator Muskie became pro-abortion Jimmy Carter’s pro-abortion Secretary of State. Initially pro-life Governor Joe Brennan appointed George Mitchell to finish Muskie’s Senate term, then ran for Congress and became pro-abortion. Running for his own Senate term, Mitchell wobbled on his earlier pro-life position and then became militantly pro-abortion after getting elected and made Senate Majority Leader by pro-abortion Democrats. John Baldacci from Bangor ran for Congress saying he was pro-life, and then amassed a 100 percent pro-abortion voting record after he was elected. This deception was repeated successfully by Democrat Congressman Mike Michaud, elected as “pro-life” in 2004 and running for re-election as pro-abortion in 2006. Pro-abortion Catholic Democrats took control of the Maine Legislature and governorship. In Congress, “pro-life” House Speaker John McCormack was succeeded by pro-abortion Speakers “Tip” O’Neill, also from Massachusetts, and Tom Foley from Washington, all Irish Catholics. When George Mitchell retired as Senate Majority Leader, he was replaced by another pro-abortion Catholic Democrat elected by saying, “I’m pro-life,” Tom Daschle of South Dakota. Murder is serious business. It leads to lying. Ask Cain (Genesis 4:9-10).
John Baldacci’s political campaigns were centered around fundraising spaghetti dinners, capitalizing on the family’s Italian restaurant in Bangor. After he was elected to Congress, he became pro-abortion and held a fundraising spaghetti dinner for the Mabel Wadsworth Abortion Auschwitz in downtown Bangor. It was in the dining hall of Bangor High School. When it was full of diners, I walked in and yelled, “Attention! Attention! The money you paid is going to pay for killing babies at Mabel Wadsworth!” Then I held aloft a big poster and said, “This is a baby after a suction abortion. Looks like a spaghetti dinner doesn’t it? Bon appetite!”
When Baldacci ran for Governor of Maine in 2002, Bishop Gerry approved his fundraising spaghetti dinners in the dining hall of St. John’s Church in Bangor. Some of us tried to get it cancelled. As pro-life spokesman in the Orono council of the Knights of Columbus, I made a motion to that effect and got no support whatever. Two weeks before the May 24th dinner, I walked up to the altar inside St. John’s just before the 4 pm Saturday Mass, faced the congregation, reminded them Sunday was Mother’s Day, recited Baldacci’s pro-abortion voting record, and told them about the dinner. It was scheduled for a Friday, the day Our Lord died for us, in May, the month dedicated to His mother, in a church named for the only disciple who was with Him on Calvary. Then I held up my big poster of the suction abortion and compared it to a spaghetti dinner. As I left the church, the priest, Gerard Gosselin, followed me and when we were outside told me, “Wait until the University of Maine hears about this. You’re finished!”
Three days later a cop shows up at my house in Orono and hands me a notice telling me if I ever set foot on St. John’s property, I’ll get a $2000 fine or a year in prison, or both. That’s what I got. Baldacci got his spaghetti dinner. It was signed by Nancy Long, the parish manager at St. John’s.
About a dozen of us were outside the church on the day of the dinner with our big posters of aborted babies. After that I began a prayer vigil with my posters of aborted babies on the public sidewalk in front of the church during the 9 am and 11 am Sunday Masses. In time a few others joined me and it lasted for two-and-one-half years. Father Gosselin filed a complaint for protection against harassment against me, but District Court Judge Ronald Russell dismissed it. I was outside with my display when Auxiliary Bishop Michael Cote came to St. John’s for First Communion and Confirmation. He and Father Gosselin came out to greet people after Mass and I called out to him to stand with me and the dead babies, reminding him that Confirmation was supposed to put some steel in our spines. When he and Father Gosselin ran back into the church, I called out, “Sanctuary! Sanctuary!” Father Gosselin left the priesthood a few weeks later.
He was replaced by Father Richard McLaughlin, who began by leading a circle of parishioners in prayer outside the church after Mass, asking God to remove me and my posters not ten feet away. Father McLaughlin filed protection against harassment papers in District Court but that didn’t work. During his installation Mass as new pastor, six Knights of Columbus in full plumage and with drawn swords charged out of the church and formed a human wall separating me and my display from people leaving after Mass. My son Mac was there with a camera taking pictures. The head Knight tried to grab Mac, but missed, and then threatened him with arrest and a lawsuit. Mac was eleven years old.
Three or four others joined me fairly regularly after that. Ernie Gallant from Old Town was with me on Sunday, 18 May 2003, when Bishop Gerry came to St. John’s for First Communion and Confirmation. We set up out display across the street because ten or so parishioners were in front of the church to block our posters with big plywood sheets if we crossed to their side. A Bangor cop, Michael Brennan, pulled up and told us we couldn’t stay where we were, we either had to leave or cross the street. We pleaded with him to let us stay where we were to avoid confrontation with them, but he wouldn’t allow it. So I crossed the street with my two posters, one reading BALDACCI’S SPAGHETTI DINNER and the other of a baby aborted at ten weeks. What could happen with a cop right there? As soon as I stepped onto the grassy esplanade on their side, about six of them closed around me, the parish manager yelled out, “You assaulted me!”, two others yelled, “I saw it, “ and Brennan arrested me. It was all planned. Nancy Long filed protection against harassment papers against me, claiming I pushed her, but Judge Russell dismissed the complaint at a District Court hearing on 3 June 2003.
Then Chris Almy, the pro-abortion Democrat District Attorney, had me prosecuted for assault and got a feminist judge, Jessie Gunther, to hear the same perjured testimony from Nancy Long, the parish manager, and her two “witnesses,” one a member of the parish council and the other a Professor in the History Department at the University of Maine (his testimony was a knowing falsification of history). This time conviction required proof of “assault” beyond reasonable doubt, not just a preponderance of evidence as at the civil hearing. It also required proof of willful intent to assault Long. Gallant, Brennan, and I all testified that Ernie and I pleaded to remain on our side of the street to avoid a confrontation. Nobody testified otherwise. There was no intent. Gunther found me “guilty of assault” anyway and fined me $100. I appealed to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, but it rejected my appeal when I refused to provide the Justices with a transcript of testimony I knew was perjured. It was Almy’s duty to request a transcript of that testimony, and the Court had the electronic trial record anyway. It didn’t need to make me supply it with illegal perjured testimony. I wrote them saying, “Now I know what Maine fishermen mean when they say a fish rots from the head down.”
Our prayer vigil at St. John’s had gone on every Sunday for two-and-one-half years when Bishop Gerry retired and was replaced by Richard Malone as Bishop of Portland in the middle of the 2004 election season. Gerald Thibodeau, President of the Pro-Life Education Association (PLEA), invited Malone to give the keynote address at the annual awards luncheon in Augusta in September. Malone accepted. Earlier, he had told reporters he would continue to give Holy Communion to pro-abortion Catholic politicians, even though Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, now Pope Benedict XVI, had told American bishops at their June meeting in Colorado that this should not be allowed. After Malone’s talk, I asked if he would take questions. He would, so I asked him about that. He said he had to give Communion to these creeps because they may have made a good confession to some priest earlier. I said absolution would require a public refutation of their pro-abortion activities, and I asked if he had met with Governor Baldacci to inform Baldacci’s conscience. He said, “None of your business.” Then I said, “So you haven’t.”
Jean Barry from Bangor told Malone she was at Baldacci’s spaghetti dinner at St. John’s in 2002, and during questions after his talk she asked why he always voted pro-abortion when he was in Congress. Baldacci told her, “I have a choice.” Even with that, Catholics elected him governor, so his defiance was a scandal in the Church. Then Ernie Gallant told Malone about our two-and-one-half year prayer vigil in front of St. John’s after Baldacci’s spaghetti dinner, and said we would end it if Malone promised us Catholic churches and other facilities would no longer be used to advance the careers of pro-abortion Catholic politicians. Malone told us all he would put an immediate stop to that, and so inform every priest in the diocese in writing. We would get a copy of his order. Then Malone repeated his pledge directly to Ernie when he met Ernie in the doorway as he was leaving. On Malone’s word, we stopped the prayer vigil with our big posters, but Malone never sent a written order to his priests.
The 2006 election year for the Democrat Party in Maine began officially in February with a spaghetti fundraising dinner at the Catholic church in Westbrook. Dr. George Rodrigues, a parishioner at the church, and others tried to get it cancelled, but Malone was out-of-state and his spokesman in the Chancery, Marc Mutty, approved the dinner, saying it was non-political because it would buy heating oil for Baldacci’s “Keep ME Warm” campaign. About a dozen Catholics picketed the dinner outside the church, as we had done at St. John’s in Bangor in 2002. The next day, at a Sunday White Mass for health-care professionals (which included abortionists) at Saints Peter and Paul Basilica in Lewiston, Bishop Malone announced during his sermon from the pulpit, that Catholic churches and other Catholic facilities would now be open for fundraising dinners by pro-abortion Democrat politicians because things like heating oil were more important than the lives of unborn babies. Malone stated the same thing in writing to those of us who had sent him letters that exposed the extreme pro-abortion voting records of the two Democrats, Tim Driscoll and Bob Duplessie, in the State Legislature who sponsored the dinner and were running for re-election. One writing Malone was former State Senator, Carolyn Gilman. We all got the same letter, in which Malone wrote, “I am one hundred percent (100%) pro-life. Anyone who knows me will testify to this fact…That being said, there are times when for the common good of humanity, I will work with people who are pro-choice on issues on which we can agree. I see keeping the poor warm during these brutally cold days a pro-life action.” It was the mildest winter in my 32 years in Maine, and Malone could have asked for a special heating-oil collection at Mass. He didn’t have to dirty himself with pro-abortion Democrat politicians.
This was a “bug” letter. When I was at the Institute of Polar Studies at The Ohio State University, Associate Director John Splettstoesser told me that he and his bride spent their honeymoon night in a bed infested with bedbugs. It was a big-name national motel, so he wrote the corporate president a letter describing their wedding night with the bedbugs. Eventually he got a letter from the president saying the corporation was dedicated to maintaining the highest standards of cleanliness and sanitation at its motels, this matter would be investigated and corrected immediately, and we look forward to your continued patronage. Lodged in the envelope was an inter-office memo upon which was scrawled, “Send him the bug letter.”
Here I must digress to the best-selling book, Goodbye! Good Men, by Michael Rose (Aquinas Publishing Ltd., Cincinnati, 2002). Bishop Malone got his priestly formation at St. John’s Seminary in the Archdiocese of Boston, the epicenter of the sexual abuse scandal involving homosexual predator priests sodomizing altar boys and being rotated to new parishes and fresh ani as soon as complaints reached the Chancery office. St. John’s Seminary is exposed on pages 101 to 111. Rose records the glee of two homosexual seminarians re-living their ears-at-the-door snooping on two seminarians engaged in sodomy, moaning on a squeaky bed. No young man at St. John’s progressed to ordination unless he was an active homosexual, approved of homosexual activity, or pretended it didn’t exist. Malone was not only ordained, he made bishop.
Under the previous bishop, Joseph Gerry, the Diocese of Portland was the international home for the Saint Sebastian’s Angels website, where homosexual priests and even one bishop exchanged e-mails that included naked priests in lewd poses and wallowed in self-pity, often denigrating Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, calling him “The Rat.” When the website was exposed by Roman Catholic Faithful, it was altered to open with a priestly penis ejaculating above the words, F–K YOU A—–E! (Fill in the blanks.) One of Malone’s first acts as Bishop of Portland was to declare the Diocese “neutral” on a State Referendum to deny preferred status to homosexual sodomy.
Bishop Gerry was a Benedictine priest. So was Father Paul Marx, founder of Human Life International, the world’s largest and most active pro-life organization. Father Marx was invited by pro-lifers in Maine in 1983 to give a talk. Bishop Gerry offered neither hospitality, lodging, nor a forum for Father Marx. He spoke at the Italian American Cultural Center in Portland, not far from Bishop Gerry’s Cathedral Rectory, a large mansion with many bedrooms. However, not many years later, Bishop Gerry invited fellow Benedictine, Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee to deliver a justice-and-peace lecture at Notre Dame Church in Waterville. It had the fashionable Pizza Hut design. Ron Stauble, my son Shane, and I entered by a side door and displayed big posters of aborted babies from Human Life International just below Weakland’s podium while he delivered his address. Shortly before his retirement as bishop, Gerry invited Weakland to Maine again to lead a retreat of Maine’s Catholic priests. Then the story broke that Weakland had stolen $450,000 from his Milwaukee Archdiocese to pay hush-money to his homosexual lover. Weakland then began a systematic “wreckovation” of his cathedral, which he completed just before he was forced into retirement.
This was the state of the Catholic Church in Maine when Malone succeeded Gerry as Bishop of Portland. How could it get worse? Malone found a way. Dr. George Rodrigues began an investigation of when and how Malone engineered a reversal of the pledge he made at the 2004 PLEA luncheon to stop letting Catholic churches and other facilities host fundraising dinners for pro-abortion Catholic politicians. Rodrigues was a member of the Westbrook parish that hosted the fundraising dinner for State Legislators Pat Driscoll and Bob Duplessie, despite their one-hundred-percent pro-abortion voting records that included opposition to bills requiring parental notification before an underage girl cold be aborted, and informed consent before any woman could be aborted. “Keep ‘em ignorant and aborted like the hillbilly keeps ‘em barefoot and pregnant,” was their attitude. Rodrigues’ report was published in the May 2006 PLEA newsletter, sent to every priest and news outlet in Maine.
Rodrigues discovered that on 15 November 2005, Governor Baldacci and other Democrats met with Church representatives and engineered Diocesan collaboration for distributing heating oil Baldacci had secured from anti-American anti-Catholic Venezuelan strong man Hugo Chavez, after Baldacci paid a courtesy call on Fidel Castro in Cuba. The Castro regime is near the top of the list of human-rights violators every year. As Malone’s part in this Faustian bargain, his Chancery sent out “requests” to every parish to host trademark Baldacci fundraising spaghetti dinners sponsored by pro-abortion Democrats like Driscoll and Duplessie. The priest at Rodrigues’ church in Westbrook got one of these “requests” and dared not refuse it. That got the spaghetti dinner moved from the Westbrook High School into St. Hyacinth’s Catholic Church, the very thing Malone promised us at the PLEA luncheon only a year earlier would never happen again.
After the pro-abortion spaghetti dinner at St. Hyacinth’s, Bishop Malone assured us in his 1 March 2006 “bug” letter this would only be allowed “for the common good of humanity.” Tell that to those suffering religious and political persecution under Chavez and Castro—and to the 47 million aborted babies in America.
To plunge the knife deeper into our backs, school children, all survivors of America’s Abortion Holocaust (47 million murdered since 1973), were sent home with thousands of invitations to the spaghetti dinner, stating “Rep. Tim Driscoll invites you” to a spaghetti dinner at “St. Hyacinth’s Church.” All the while, Malone’s mouthpiece Marc Mutty was telling us the dinner was allowed because it was non-political, when Mutty was at the center of the scheme to ram these pro-abortion fundraisers into Catholic churches. The Democrat website ground out report after report attacking Republicans for wanting to keep “the poor” cold, quoting Bishop Malone that heating oil trumps abortion, and proclaiming Jesus Christ cares more about helping “the poor” than about “sex.”
That was the first shoe to drop. The next shoe dropped in a Diocesan announcement by Monsignor Paul Stefanko on the “Weekend of April 1-2, 2006,” under the heading, “Welcome Catholic Charities.” The Cathedral Residence, the very mansion that had no room for Father Paul Marx, was to be the new administrative home for Catholic Charities in Maine. Cathedral Residence was built in 1869, and had become a heavy financial drain on the diocese, costing some $180,000 to maintain every year. In addition, it was determined that major repairs and renovations were needed. Once a vibrant center for diocesan activities in the flush years of vocations to the Catholic priesthood, now in the lean years it had become increasingly vacant. But now the maintenance bill could be charged to Catholic Charities, which gets over 85 percent of its money from the heavy hand of state and local governments reaching into the pockets of Maine’s taxpayers. These governments for many years have been under the control of the pro-abortion pro-sodomy Democrat Party in Maine, and the paid staff administrating Catholic Charities are card-carrying Democrats. This solution was negotiated precisely at the time when Marc Mutty was negotiating to get pro-abortion Democrat fundraising dinners back into Catholic churches. Stick it to the taxpayers. Isn’t that the Democrat “solution” to every “problem”? Monsignor Stefanko called this a “win-win situation.”
It’s a lose-lose disaster for the Catholic Church and for Maine’s taxpayers. In addition to Catholic Charities, Cathedral Residence now also houses offices for Cathedral Parish and is the residence for the Cathedral Rector. Bishop Malone has invited the pro-abortion pro-sodomy Democrat Party right into the administrative, financial, and spiritual heart of the Church, from which the Party of Abortion and Sodomy can dictate to the Church just which activities are “charitable” and can ban any activities that bring the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ to people in need whose condition screams for s a spiritual, not a political, solution. Any departure from this violates Separation of Church and State, but giving the Democrat-controlled State such total dictatorial power over the Church is allowed, even mandatory.
To understand how this perversion of Christian charity came about, the nine-page investigative report by Brian Anderson, “How Catholic Charities Lost its Soul,” in the Winter 2000 edition of City Journal is most instructive. Charitable activities by the Catholic Church in America began with the Irish Potato Famine, which began a flood of destitute Irish immigrants that included my great grandfather. Initially poor materially but rich spiritually, charitable work began by focusing on reversing self-destructive behavior such as alcoholism, crime, and neglect, by changing the values and beliefs of those mired in these vices. Personal responsibility and the saving grace of Jesus Christ was stressed, and it transformed lives. This approach continued into the 1960s, when the Church was operating benevolent societies, hospitals, orphanages, reformatories, schools, and other institutions that needed a large physical infrastructure while also acting as centers of charitable activity.
The cost was too great. The Catholic Church, seduced by the Democrat “solution” to every problem, turned to government. It got a quarter of its money from taxpayers at the end of the 1960s, over half by the late 1970s, and closed on two-thirds by the mid 1980s. At the same time, Catholic Charities had adopted the social/political agenda of Saul Alinsky. His 1947 book, Reveille for Radicals, depicted faith-based charity in Marxian terms, as an “opiate of the people” that kept “the poor” at the bottom of the economic ladder and allowed rich capitalists to retain control over society. To break those chains, “the poor” had to organize and thereby acquire power that allowed them to make the demands and chart the course of the nation.
The Democrat Party became the vehicle for this takeover, and the whole tradition-and-family base of the Party was sacrificed for this new radicalism. By its very nature, it saw religion as the enemy, which in America meant Christianity and in the American Catholic Church meant Rome. Thus did Notre Dame President Theodore Hesburgh bring the presidents of Jesuit colleges and universities together at Land o’ Lakes to draft a Declaration of Independence from Catholic bishops and therefore from the Catholic Church. Catholic Charities issued a similar manifesto in 1972 that announced its new Marxist political agenda. Political activism held the solution to every social problem. This was an embrace of Social Darwinism that replaced the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ with the social gospel of liberation theology. Salvation existed here on Earth and only here. We can make it happen without God. Forget some faraway and probably nonexistent Heaven. The Supreme Court “legalized” abortion in 1973. The Jesuits enthusiastically embraced sodomy. The Descent into Hell had begun.
With no apology to Grantland Rice, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse today are Kennedy, Leahy, Biden, and Durbin, all Irish Catholics on the Senate Judiciary Committee and all insanely pro-abortion. C-Span and Fox News televised their hateful badgering and defamation of fellow Catholics, Judges Roberts and Alito, whom President Bush had nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court. Why did they hound these men? Because they suspected that, given the chance, Roberts and Alito might overturn Roe v. Wade that 33 years earlier launched killing the next generation of Americans by abortion! Then these creeps go to Mass and get Holy Communion from their bishops, with everyone in Church watching and thinking, “Hey, it must be okay for me to be pro-abortion too, and vote that way.”
Today, every “blue” state is controlled by the pro-abortion pro-sodomy Democrat Party, which also controls the Catholic Church by providing multi-billions of taxpayer dollars to Catholic Charities every year, which in turn has become a politicized organization with the primary mission of blackmailing Catholic bishops into giving only occasional lip service to moral teachings of the Church but working full-time on wooing the evaporating pool of church-going Catholics into the voting booths to pull the “Democrat” lever that keeps tax dollars rolling into Church coffers. Traditional charitable activity had become a smokescreen to hide the true political agenda that advances the Culture of Death. Catholic Charities is not Catholic and not Charity. Nationally, it has a $2.3 billion annual budget that supports 46,000 paid employees whom we can be sure are mostly Democrat Party operatives. Its goal now is to push welfare-state “solutions” that don’t work and oppose faith-based initiatives that do work and cost much less. But Catholic Charities doesn’t want solutions that work. It wants government money and the Democrat Party needs Catholic Charities to keep its hook in the Catholic Church.
Catholic bishops have become stuck to the same Tar Baby of vices that had gripped members of their flock whom they once sought to free with the saving grace of Jesus Christ. Catholic Charities sucking the government teat got bishops stuck and the pro-abortion pro-sodomy Democrat Party wants to make sure they stay stuck. Once bishops embrace abortion it’s a small step to wallow in sodomy. Both prevent babies from being born. Diocese are now being forced into bankruptcy to pay the judgments awarded men sodomized as boys by homosexual Catholic priests, leaving bishops with no moral authority anyone respects because bishops have so recklessly squandered the Church’s birthright for the pottage of abortion and sodomy. The pro-abortion pro-sodomy Democrat Party wants to keep bishops in thralldom and morally bankrupt.
Bishop Malone has become a kind of Typhoid Mary as he makes the circuit of dwindling Catholic churches to administer First Communion and Confirmation to dwindling numbers of children, all abortion survivors and all ignorant of the basic Truths of the Catholic Faith. Everywhere he goes, churches close and rectories are abandoned. What faithful young man considering the Catholic priesthood would want to be under Bishop Malone, knowing Malone may force him to host fundraising spaghetti dinners for pro-abortion pro-sodomy Catholic Democrat politicians, as Malone did to the priest at St. Hyacinth’s Church in Westbrook?
At St. Mary’s in Bangor on 6 May 2006, Malone didn’t even bother to ask the children to whom he administered Confirmation and Holy Communion when these sacraments were instituted and by Whom. He only made a pitiful plea that they continue to attend Mass and not see these sacraments as divorce papers served on the Catholic Church. At St. John’s a day later, he told the children in front of their parents, “Some people think I’m pro-abortion, but actually I’m not.” At both churches I was outside with a five-foot-high sign saying WOULD BISHOP MALONE ALLOW SPAGHETTI DINNERS IF DEMOCRATS WERE KILLING PRIESTS? Next to that sign was one saying DEMOCRAT SPAGHETTI DINNER above a before-and-after poster of a baby murdered by suction abortion at ten weeks of life. Another one showed a pile of naked dead Jews below the words HITLER’S HOLOCAUST, and below them was baby Malachi, named after the last of the Jewish prophets, ripped to pieces by an abortionist, with the words DEMOCRAT’S HOLOCAUST printed above him.
As Malone was telling the abortion survivors he wasn’t pro-abortion, two goons shipped up from Boston were salivating in the back of St. John’s Church. After most people had left and I was thinking about packing up my display, they came outside to confront me. One began spitting on me and my display while the other tried to goad me into a fight and hurled threats. “If you were in Boston, I’d know how to take care of you. I’d burn your signs and car, and you’d be at the bottom of the Charles River.” The other one said, ”I’m going to piss on this Holocaust sign,” and unzipped his pants. I took out my camera and said, “Go ahead, I’ll take a picture and send it to Bishop Malone.” He zipped up his pants and told the other punk, “I don’t have any more spit to spit.” Then they headed for the parking lot. As this was taking place, an expensive sedan pulled up directly across the street, and a middle-aged professional-looking man behind the wheel rolled down his window and watched. He was their “respectable witness” in case they goaded me into action, so he could testify to my “assault” and Judge Gunther could sentence me to prison this time because she had already given me a criminal “assault” record in front of St. John’s Church, on testimony she had to know was perjured. When the goons drove out of the parking lot, one stopped the car so the other one could spit on me again. Then they drove off and the “respectable witness” in the sedan followed them.
The next week Bishop Malone was at St. Ann’s Church on Indian Island, a Penobscot Indian village in the Penobscot River. Ron Stauble and I were there with the same signs and posters to greet him when he came out, darted into his chauffeured limousine and sped back to his Portland Chancery, where he raised the drawbridge and had more alligators poured into the moat. “The wicked flee though none pursue them” (Proverbs 28:1).
The week after that, all priests in the diocese went to Bar Harbor on retreat. I don’t know if ex-Archbishop Rembert Weakland was brought in to provide spiritual guidance. I was at the Newman Center in Orono the next Sunday for Mass, after which Father Wilfred Labbe made a series of announcements. He said St. Ann’s Church on Indian Island and St. Ann’s Church in Bradley across the Penobscot River would no longer have a resident priest. St. Teresa’s Church in Brewer, across the Penobscot from Bangor, would no longer have a resident priest. St. Teresa’s had hosted one of Baldacci’s fundraising spaghetti dinners. St. Mary of the Assumption would be merged with the Newman Center and one would be closed. Bishop Malone had assigned a 5:30 pm Saturday Mass to St. Mary’s a year earlier, so the elderly people who had been attending a 4 pm Mass there were no longer going. Many were on assisted living, and 5:30 was suppertime and it was pitch-black by then in winter. Collections, which had been even with those at the Newman Center had dropped by half, while Newman collections were up. This would give Bishop Malone the excuse he needed to close St. Mary’s and deprive Orono Catholics of seeing those beautiful Eucharistic stained glass windows and their depiction of Mary’s role in salvation history, and force them to attend Mass at a Newman Center designed to destroy belief in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist.
For bringing down my bishop, my goal now is to hang an aborted baby around the neck of the Democrat Party like a millstone and sink it “in the depths of the sea” (Mark 9:42). For over a month, I have been outside the Newman Center with my display of aborted babies and my big sign asking, WOULD BISHOP MALONE ALLOW SPAGHETTI DINNERS IF DEMOCRATS WERE KILLING PRIESTS? The week before Father Labbe announced the closings was graduation week at the University of Maine, and Catholic parents who had come to see their children graduate were at Mass on Sunday, 14 May 2006. One couple came up to me after Mass and asked about my sign and posters. I told them the whole sad story said, “With Bishops like Malone, Maine will never outlaw abortion like they did in South Dakota.” The man said they were from South Dakota and he taught at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. I said, “I graduated from there in 1960, and I grew up on the Hughes cattle ranch in the Bad River Valley south of Fort Pierre!” South Dakota, with half of Maine’s population, has two Catholic diocese, one in Sioux Falls and one in Rapid City. They both have plenty of vocations. Both bishops urged voters to vote against pro-abortion politicians in the 2002 election, and pro-abortion Democrat Senate Leader Tom Daschle was defeated and replaced by a pro-life Republican.
In 1966 and 1967 I left Northwestern University to spend a year traveling around the world. I found myself in Samarkand one Sunday and went to the Russian Orthodox Church to attend Mass. Samarkand was in the Moslem part of the old Soviet Union, and the few Russians attending Mass were old peasant women. At one point in the Mass, they all formed a line to kiss a large crucifix held by the priest. I got in line and, as I bent down to kiss the crucifix, the priest touched the top of my head and each shoulder with a small wooden cross he held in his other hand. He didn’t do that to anyone else. At that instant, a current ran through me that I couldn’t have endured if it had lasted more than a moment. When I went back to where I had been standing, I thought I was walking on air. After Mass, Russian children had gathered outside to taunt the women as they came out. A man dressed like a monk who had assisted the priest drove them away.
I’ve thought about that ever since and finally decided I got that blessing because I was someone obviously from cowboy country in America who believed as they did, and had come to join them in worship. They were a dwindling community of old women living under atheistic Communism in a Moslem part of Mother Russia, and their grandchildren mocked their faith. Perhaps I was a sign of hope for them. They were not alone. Now Communism is a fading bad memory, gone with the wind in a fortnight, and the Russian Orthodox Church has survived. The last Communist ruler, Mikhail Gorbachev, is now an Orthodox Christian. Forty years after 1966, Americans from cowboy country, South Dakota where I was born and raised, came to Maine to worship at my dilapidated-looking Newman Center, Our Lady of Wisdom. They reminded me that in my part of America the people instructed their Legislature and Governor to stop the killing, and a bill was signed into law outlawing abortion. If it can happen in South Dakota, perhaps it can happen in Maine. And if it can happen in Maine, it can happen in America. Maybe the upraised Red Hand on the White Cross is saying, “Stop! Stop this bloody killing in the Land of the Holy Cross!”
Viva Cristo Rey!
Terry Hughes
The Camden County Jail . . . A Toast to the Criminally Insane
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