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Month: March 2023

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A Canticle for Bank Failures

March 24, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Do human flaws make corrupt finance and its fallout inevitable?

This being the holy season of Lent, I’m doing some Catholic reading. But since I’m lazy, I’m avoiding heavy thinkers like Aquinas and Augustine, and focusing on Catholic novelists. (Maybe someday, I can claim to be one.) Of course, there are still some heavy thoughts to be found in fiction, especially in the case of A Canticle for Leibowitz, a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel that suggests mankind may be irredeemable, despite Christ’s best efforts at Calvary. Mankind’s redeemability is a question worth pondering, given the trajectory of society today. And as I watch my 401(k) dissolve by a few more percentage points each day, while reports of bank failures suggest worse times to come, I wonder if we couldn’t ask that question about the custodians of our financial system. Are our banks run by irredeemable scoundrels, so addicted to risk-taking and loose stewardship that neither regulations, nor market forces, nor memories of catastrophes past, nor simple human decency can persuade them to operate on a sound basis? First, the book.

Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel, 1961

A Canticle for Leibowitz is what’s known as a “fix-up” novel, meaning that portions had been published as short works of fiction and the author later fit them into a larger, cohesive story. Leibowitz was published in October 1959 by J. B. Lippincott & Co. and won author Walter M. Miller Jr. the Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 1961. Though it got mixed reviews at the time of its release, Leibowitz has come to be regarded as one of the great science fiction novels of the 20th century.

Leibowitz tells the story of Earth, starting six hundred years after a devastating nuclear war reduced the landscape to radioactive rubble. Part One, entitled Fiat Homo, meaning “let there be man,” introduces us to this world through the eyes of a community of Catholic monks whose monastery survived the war. Suggesting a parallel to monastic life just after the Fall of Rome, the monks are trying to preserve scraps of writings, which they call Memorabilia, for posterity. Much of what they hold sacred, such as engineering schematics, they do not understand. But the monks hope that when mankind recovers its learning, scholars will be able to unlock the knowledge of the past. The world of Fiat Homo is primitive, savage and tribal.

Part two, Fiat Lux (meaning “let there be light”) jumps 500 years or so into the future to show us a world entering its renaissance, with rudimentary technology, such as electric arc lamps, being developed. Warlords have formed nation-states, and the church serves as a moral authority, though enlightened minds and ambitious monarchs are chomping at the bit, agitating to be free from the old superstitions.

Part three, Fiat Voluntas Tua (meaning “Thy will be done”) shows us the monastery 600 years hence, during the new nuclear age. In fact, the world is on the brink of nuclear war. “How can this be?” the sane mind demands. Didn’t mankind learn anything from bombing itself back to the Stone Age once already? Hasn’t the miserable 18-century climb out of the muck impressed upon world leaders the need to preserve peace? Must we repeat the cycle, dooming our posterity to needless centuries of misery, if some shred of humanity is even able to survive this time? Are pride, vanity, greed, cowardice, and ambition so ingrained in the human psyche that we are incapable of prudently managing the power of the atom so we don’t destroy ourselves? I won’t give the ending away, but…y’know.

A run on the 19th Ward Bank at 242 East 86th Street, New York City, 1911.

Which brings me to the current state of our financial sector. Wasn’t the housing crisis enough? Wasn’t the needless destruction of trillions of dollars of accumulated wealth enough? Wasn’t giving Obama the excuse to raid the national treasury on the false promise of “shovel ready jobs” enough? Wasn’t the imposition of more onerous regulations enough? Wasn’t the needless suffering of hundreds of millions of Americans enough to convince these cretins to adopt prudent fiscal policies? I won’t give the ending away, but…y’know.

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“The Wedding Routine is real, raw and heartwarmingly funny. In the “song and dance” of life, this lovely story teaches how to lead with your heart. It showcases how helping people not only benefits those receiving, but is therapeutic for those who give.”

— Laura Orrico, TV and Film Actress and President of Laura Orrico Public Relations, LLC

Sins of the Fathers: Did Theodore McCarrick Groom Robert Chambers?

March 23, 2023 / / 0 Comments

The plausible connection between a predator priest and a convicted killer

I remember the Preppy Murder case quite clearly. It happened at the end of August, 1986. I was a 26-year-old aspiring actor/singer, working in Manhattan five days a week at a Murray Hill restaurant, The Back Porch. The Mets were tearing up the league, and one of their star pitchers, Ron Darling, who lived in the neighborhood, occasionally dropped in for a meal. Then on August 27, the news came that a pretty uptown girl, 18-year-old Jennifer Levin, had been strangled in Central Park. Her alleged killer was 20-year-old Robert Chambers, an Upper Eastside teen with movie star looks and the cold, dead eyes of a psychopath.

Chambers claimed he had accidentally killed Levin during “rough sex,” but forensic evidence indicated a vicious beating and strangulation. The press painted Chambers as a bad seed, a privileged youth from a broken home, who gravitated towards drugs and supported his habit with burglary. Chambers came across as a soulless psycho who threw Levin’s life—as well as his own—away like so much trash. I remember seeing him on TV in an infamous video clip after he’d been released on bail. He was partying with friends. Looking stoned, he grabbed a small doll and twisted the head, while diabolically groaning Levin’s name. When the doll’s head came off in his hands, he muttered, “I think I killed her.” I was thoroughly repulsed; to me, Chambers was the epitome of the spoiled brat of the Silk-Stocking class.

I was tangentially familiar with his ilk. I had attended high school on the Upper East Side, at Regis, an elite Jesuit institution with a difference. It had been founded as an all-scholarship Catholic school for the academically talented sons of working class and immigrant families. My classmates and I commuted to the Upper East Side daily, most of us knowing we didn’t belong there. The Preppy Murder Case, as it was called, reinforced my notion that Robert Chambers and I came from different worlds. However, a recent video investigation from Church Militant reveals there were several points of intersection: Irish heritage, the Catholic church, and the lurking presence of pedophile, predator priests. Please watch the video below. (Here’s a link if the video doesn’t appear.)

I want to be clear that I have never been assaulted or molested by a priest. But I have plenty of friends and acquaintances who were. While at Regis, I was aware of one priest who groomed boys for sexual violation, and punished boys who rebuffed his advances. He just happened to be in charge of admissions, which enabled him to corrupt the selection process to meet his grooming goals. I have since learned of one more priest, who was credibly accused of sexual assault and was later laicized. The Jesuits knew the second priest was a problem before posting him at Regis, because he had been credibly accused of sexual impropriety with male students at McQuaid high school in Rochester, NY. But instead of drumming that predator out of the Society of Jesus, Jesuit mucky-mucks from the provincial hierarchy, those in the know, attended the ceremony at Regis when this predator priest took his final vows.

My life has not been directly affected by priestly misconduct, except perhaps that I didn’t get the guidance I needed in my formative years, because too many of my would-be mentors were distracted by their pursuit of sexual gratification from my peers. My reason for writing this post is compassion for my wounded friends and my still-simmering anger at a corrupt institution that not only turned a blind eye towards sexual predation, but knowingly promoted the worst of the worst to positions where they could do lasting harm to innocent young people.

Christine Niles reporting for Church Militant makes a compelling case that Theodore McCarrick’s abuse of a youthful Robert Chambers inflicted psychological pain that erupted, resulting in the death of Jennifer Levin in 1986.

I encourage you to watch the Church Militant video in its entirety. The circumstantial evidence forms a compelling case that Theodore McCarrick, while a priest and bishop of the Archdiocese of New York, abused Robert Chambers, setting him on a path of self-destruction that ruined his life and ended the life of Jennifer Levin. The sins of the father were visited upon the son. The Bible says this phenomenon can last for three or four generations. Various organs of the Catholic Church have acted corruptly to ensure that intense pain would pass down for generations. It needs to end.

Disclaimer: This column may contain affiliate links which help to support the website. When you click on a link and make a purchase, the website receives a small commission at no additional charge to you. Thank you for your support.

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