Prime Bishop, the Most Rev. Dr. Anthony Mikovsky, accompanied by the Rev. Gregory Młudzik visited Poland from August 13th to the 23rd.
Prime Bishop Mikovsky and his party first visited Warsaw, attending Holy Mass at Good Shepherd Parish, accompanied by the Rt. Rev. Sylvester Bigaj, Bishop of the Canadian Diocese of the PNCC.
Following Holy Mass, the group attended by a contingent of Scouts laid a wreath and offered prayers at the tomb of PNCC Bishop and Martyr Joseph Padewski.
The Prime Bishop next visited the Polish Catholic Parish of St. Barbara in Bolesław (Krzykawa-Małobądz) on August 15th for their Dożynki (Harvest) Festival. The Prime Bishop also visited the birthplace of our first Bishop, and organizer of the Polish National Catholic Church, the Most Rev. Francziszek Hodur in Żarki as well as the Parish of Our Lady of Perpetual Help and monument to Bishop Hodur in Libiąż.
The Prime Bishop ended his visit at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish in Strzyżowice on September 20th where he took part in the Parish’s 50th Anniversary Holy Mass and celebration. Rev. Młudzik was baptized and raised in the parish at Strzyżowice.
The retired pastor of Our Lady of Perpetual Help is the Very Rev. Eugene Stelmach. Fr. Senior Stelmach served the parish for forty-nine years and was also Dean over five parishes in his Seniorate. Fr. Senior Stelmach was also active in ecumenical circles, serving as Vice-chair of the Silesian branch of the Polish Ecumenical Council. The Parish’s current pastor is Rev. Adam Stelmach, the son of Fr. Senior Stelmach.
The jubilee celebration was attended by representatives of the Churches in the Silesian branch of the Polish Ecumenical Council (PRE) including: the Protestant cathedral choir “Largo Cantabile” from Katowice, Bishops from the Evangelical Lutheran Church Dioceses of Katowice and Cieszyn, the honorary chairman of the Silesian branch of the PRE, the Rev. Jan Gross of Cieszyn, and representatives from the Mariavite parishes in Gniazdów and Sosnowiec. Faithful from the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Czech Republic from Czech-Cieszyn as well as guests from across Poland, the United States, and France were also in attendance.
Troy Davis has 1 days to live before he is executed by the State of Georgia. But 7 witnesses say Troy is innocent, and that another man committed the crime for which he will be killed. Evidence presented at Troy’s trial was considered shaky at the time. Since then, seven witnesses have recanted their testimony, many saying they were pressured by police into false testimony. There’s no physical evidence Troy committed the crime. And, according to Amnesty International, nine people have signed affidavits implicating another man. Georgia’s Board of Parole and Pardons had said there should be “no doubt” about a person’s guilt before he is executed. Today they decided that “doubt” doesn’t matter.
Background on the case from Wikipedia.
From the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty
E.D. Kain writing in Forbes with whom I totally agree: Troy Davis and the History of Injustice in America
The history of justice in America is pocked with such deep institutional injustices that time and again we make a mockery of the word. From slavery to the War on Drugs, the powerful have trampled time and again on the weak.
Law and order masquerade as justice, and our prisons fill to the brim with young men, mostly black and Hispanic, mostly poor. Meanwhile, inner cities lie like sunken ruins across the wealthiest nation in the history of civilization, stomped upon by drug warriors and poverty and violence.
And though we accept the limitations of our government and of the good judgment of our leaders, we nevertheless believe in the infallibility of this system we call justice, but which is not justice, to hand down the most final sort of judgment a man could ever know.
Troy Davis, convicted over two decades ago of killing an off-duty cop, though much doubt has been cast upon his guilt and the methods which police and prosecutors used to secure his conviction, will be executed by the state of Georgia tomorrow. The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles has denied him clemency, and there are no other avenues left to save him.
In the end, I am not concerned so much with whether or not Davis is guilty or innocent. I am concerned with the uncertainty of his guilt. “I’m not for blood. I’m for justice,” said the mother of the slain police officer. But we extract one or the other, not both. In a case where the blood may be that of an innocent, how can we call it justice?
If Davis is not guilty and we kill him nonetheless then we have simply stacked one murder on top of another. The life of Mark MacPhail will not be avenged. If Davis is guilty, surely serving out the remainder of his life in state prison should be enough. Justice does not require retribution.
Death is tragic. The death of Mark MacPhail is a tragedy that will never be undone. Not by blood, not by prison bars, not by time, not by proof that Davis is guilty or proof that he is innocent. But if we have even a glimmer of doubt about his guilt, there will be no justice in his death…
I will not argue the death penalty here. There are times when it may be appropriate. However, a persons guilt or innocence cannot remain questionable. As long as questions persist, the course of least harm must be followed.
Poverty is on the increase, inequality — not based on personal effort — but systematically driven is on the increase. Those who have are fewer and fewer, those without are increasing, and those in the middle are on a downward spiral. What is the proper faith response? Where are the strong calls to justice and prophetic witness?
From the U.S. Census Bureau: Poverty
The data presented here are from the Current Population Survey (CPS), 2011 Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC), the source of official poverty estimates. The CPS ASEC is a sample survey of approximately 100,000 household nationwide. These data reflect conditions in calendar year 2010.
- The official poverty rate in 2010 was 15.1 percent — up from 14.3 percent in 2009. This was the third consecutive annual increase in the poverty rate. Since 2007, the poverty rate has increased by 2.6 percentage points, from 12.5 percent to 15.1 percent.
- In 2010, 46.2 million people were in poverty, up from 43.6 million in 2009—the fourth consecutive annual increase in the number of people in poverty.
- Between 2009 and 2010, the poverty rate increased for non-Hispanic Whites (from 9.4 percent to 9.9 percent), for Blacks (from 25.8 percent to 27.4 percent), and for Hispanics (from 25.3 percent to 26.6 percent). For Asians, the 2010 poverty rate (12.1 percent) was not statistically different from the 2009 poverty rate.
- The poverty rate in 2010 (15.1 percent) was the highest poverty rate since 1993 but was 7.3 percentage points lower than the poverty rate in 1959, the first year for which poverty estimates are available.
- The number of people in poverty in 2010 (46.2 million) is the largest number in the 52 years for which poverty estimates have been published.
- Between 2009 and 2010, the poverty rate increased for children under age 18 (from 20.7 percent to 22.0 percent) and people aged 18 to 64 (from 12.9 percent to 13.7 percent), but was not statistically different for people aged 65 and older (9.0 percent).
From the AP via Yahoo!: Behind the poverty numbers: real lives, real pain
At a food pantry in a Chicago suburb, a 38-year-old mother of two breaks into tears.
She and her husband have been out of work for nearly two years. Their house and car are gone. So is their foothold in the middle class and, at times, their self-esteem.
“It’s like there is no way out,” says Kris Fallon.She is trapped like so many others, destitute in the midst of America’s abundance. Last week, the Census Bureau released new figures showing that nearly one in six Americans lives in poverty — a record 46.2 million people. The poverty rate, pegged at 15.1 percent, is the highest of any major industrialized nation, and many experts believe it could get worse before it abates.
The numbers are daunting — but they also can seem abstract and numbing without names and faces.
Associated Press reporters around the country went looking for the people behind the numbers. They were not hard to find.
There’s Tim Cordova, laid off from his job as a manager at a McDonald’s in New Mexico, and now living with his wife at a homeless shelter after a stretch where they slept in their Ford Focus.
There’s Bill Ricker, a 74-year-old former repairman and pastor whose home is a dilapidated trailer in rural Maine. He scrapes by with a monthly $1,003 Social Security check. His ex-wife also is hard up; he lets her live in the other end of his trailer.
There’s Brandi Wells, a single mom in West Virginia, struggling to find a job and care for her 10-month-old son. “I didn’t realize that it could go so bad so fast,” she says.
Some were outraged by the statistics. Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund called the surging child poverty rate “a national disgrace.” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., cited evidence that poverty shortens life spans, calling it “a death sentence for tens and tens of thousands of our people.”
Overall, though, the figures seemed to be greeted with resignation, and political leaders in Washington pressed ahead with efforts to cut federal spending. The Pew Research Center said its recent polling shows that a majority of Americans — for the first time in 15 years of being surveyed on the question — oppose more government spending to help the poor.
“The news of rising poverty makes headlines one day. And the next it is forgotten,” said Los Angeles community activist and political commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson.
Such is life in the Illinois town of Pembroke, one of the poorest in the Midwest, where schools and stores have closed. Keith Bobo, a resident trying to launch revitalization programs, likened conditions to the Third World.
“A lot of the people here just feel like they are on an island, like no one even knows that they exist,” he said…
From Robert Reich writing in the Christian Science Monitor: What you won’t hear about during the 2012 election: Why progressive ideas like wage increases and medicare won’t be mentioned during presidential debates
We’re on the cusp of the 2012 election. What will it be about? It seems reasonably certain President Obama will be confronted by a putative Republican candidate who:
Believes corporations are people, wants to cut the top corporate rate to 25% (from the current 35%) and no longer require they pay tax on foreign income, who will eliminate capital gains and dividend taxes on anyone earning less than $250,000 a year, raise the retirement age for Social Security and turn Medicaid into block grants to states, seek a balanced-budged amendment to the Constitution, require any regulatory agency issuing a new regulation repeal another regulation of equal cost (regardless of the benefits), and seek repeal of Obama’s healthcare plan.
Or one who:
Believes the Federal Reserve is treasonous when it expands the money supply, doubts human beings evolved from more primitive forms of life, seeks to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and shift most public services to the states, thinks Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, while governor took a meat axe to public education and presided over an economy that generated large numbers of near-minimum-wage jobs, and who will shut down most federal regulatory agencies, cut corporate taxes, and seek repeal of Obama’s healthcare plan.
Whether it’s Romney or Perry, he’s sure to attack everything Obama has done or proposed. And Obama, for his part, will have to defend his positions and look for ways to counterpunch.
Hence, the parameters of public debate for the next fourteen months.
Within these narrow confines progressive ideas won’t get an airing. Even though poverty and unemployment will almost surely stay sky-high, wages will stagnate or continue to fall, inequality will widen, and deficit hawks will create an indelible (and false) impression that the nation can’t afford to do much about any of it – proposals to reverse these trends are unlikely to be heard.
Neither party’s presidential candidate will propose to tame CEO pay, create more tax brackets at the top and raise the highest marginal rates back to their levels in the 1950s and 1960s (that is, 70 to 90 percent), and match the capital-gains rate with ordinary income.
You won’t hear a call to strengthen labor unions and increase the bargaining power of ordinary workers.
Don’t expect an argument for resurrecting the Glass-Steagall Act, thereby separating commercial from investment banking and stopping Wall Street’s most lucrative and dangerous practices.
You won’t hear there’s no reason to cut Medicare and Medicaid – that a better means of taming health-care costs is to use these programs’ bargaining clout with drug companies and hospitals to obtain better deals and to shift from fee-for-services to fee for healthy outcomes.
Nor will you hear why we must move toward Medicare for all.
Nor why the best approach to assuring Social Security’s long-term solvency is to lift the ceiling on income subject to Social Security payroll taxes.
Don’t expect any reference to the absurdity of spending more on the military than do all other countries put together, and the waste and futility of an unending and undeclared war against Islamic extremism – especially when we have so much to do at home.
Nor are you likely to hear proposals for ending the corruption of our democracy by big money.
Although proposals like these are more important and relevant than ever, they won’t be part of the upcoming presidential election.
But they should be part of the public debate nonetheless.
That’s why I urge you to speak out about them – at town halls, candidate forums, and public events. Continue to mobilize and organize around them. Talk with your local media about them. Use social media to get the truth out…
John Gray’s essay from the BBC: A Point of View: The revolution of capitalism
Karl Marx may have been wrong about communism but he was right about much of capitalism, John Gray writes.
As a side-effect of the financial crisis, more and more people are starting to think Karl Marx was right. The great 19th Century German philosopher, economist and revolutionary believed that capitalism was radically unstable.
It had a built-in tendency to produce ever larger booms and busts, and over the longer term it was bound to destroy itself.
Marx welcomed capitalism’s self-destruction. He was confident that a popular revolution would occur and bring a communist system into being that would be more productive and far more humane.
Marx was wrong about communism. Where he was prophetically right was in his grasp of the revolution of capitalism. It’s not just capitalism’s endemic instability that he understood, though in this regard he was far more perceptive than most economists in his day and ours.
More profoundly, Marx understood how capitalism destroys its own social base – the middle-class way of life. The Marxist terminology of bourgeois and proletarian has an archaic ring.
But when he argued that capitalism would plunge the middle classes into something like the precarious existence of the hard-pressed workers of his time, Marx anticipated a change in the way we live that we’re only now struggling to cope with…
“For the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for a denarius a day, he sent them into his vineyard. And going out about the third hour he saw others standing idle in the market place; and to them he said, `You go into the vineyard too, and whatever is right I will give you.’ So they went. Going out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour, he did the same. And about the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing; and he said to them, `Why do you stand here idle all day?’ They said to him, `Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, `You go into the vineyard too.’ And when evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his steward, `Call the laborers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last, up to the first.’ And when those hired about the eleventh hour came, each of them received a denarius. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received a denarius.
[11] And on receiving it they grumbled at the householder, saying, `These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ But he replied to one of them, `Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what belongs to you, and go; I choose to give to this last as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?’ So the last will be first, and the first last.”
So she set out from the place where she was, with her two daughters-in-law, and they went on the way to return to the land of Judah. But Na’omi said to her two daughters-in-law, “Go, return each of you to her mother’s house. May the LORD deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead and with me. The LORD grant that you may find a home, each of you in the house of her husband!” Then she kissed them, and they lifted up their voices and wept. And they said to her, “No, we will return with you to your people.” But Na’omi said, “Turn back, my daughters, why will you go with me? Have I yet sons in my womb that they may become your husbands? Turn back, my daughters, go your way, for I am too old to have a husband. If I should say I have hope, even if I should have a husband this night and should bear sons, would you therefore wait till they were grown? Would you therefore refrain from marrying? No, my daughters, for it is exceedingly bitter to me for your sake that the hand of the LORD has gone forth against me.” Then they lifted up their voices and wept again; and Orpah kissed her mother-in-law, but Ruth clung to her. And she said, “See, your sister-in-law has gone back to her people and to her gods; return after your sister-in-law.” But Ruth said, “Entreat me not to leave you or to return from following you; for where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God; where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the LORD do so to me and more also if even death parts me from you.” And when Na’omi saw that she was determined to go with her, she said no more. — Ruth 1:7-18
On the third day Esther put on her royal robes and stood in the inner court of the king’s palace, opposite the king’s hall. The king was sitting on his royal throne inside the palace opposite the entrance to the palace; and when the king saw Queen Esther standing in the court, she found favor in his sight and he held out to Esther the golden scepter that was in his hand. — Esther 5:1-2
From the NY Times: ‘Father of Pop Art’ Richard Hamilton Dies at 89
LONDON (Reuters) – British artist Richard Hamilton, regarded by many as the father of pop art, died on Tuesday. He was 89.
“This is a very sad day for all of us and our thoughts are with Richard’s family, particularly his wife Rita and his son Rod,” art dealer and gallery owner Larry Gagosian said.
A statement from the gallery called Hamilton the “father of pop art” and a “pioneering artist of unparalleled skill, invention and lasting authority.
“His influence on subsequent generations of artists continues to be immeasurable.”
Nicholas Serota, director of London’s Tate gallery, added: “Greatly admired by his peers, including (Andy) Warhol and (Joseph) Beuys, Hamilton produced a series of exquisite paintings, drawings, prints and multiples dealing with themes of glamour, consumption, commodity and popular culture.”
Despite his age, Hamilton had been working until just a few days ago on a major museum retrospective of his work scheduled to travel to Los Angeles, Philadelphia, London and Madrid in 2013/14.
Gagosian did not say how Hamilton died or where, although he was in Britain.
Hamilton’s best known work was his 1956 collage “Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?,” considered by some historians to mark the birth of the pop art movement.
Hamilton is also credited with coining the phrase “pop art” itself, in a note to some architects who were considering putting on an exhibition with him along similar lines to the 1956 “This Is Tomorrow” show.
In words dating from 1957 that are seen as prescient of the likes of Warhol and, more recently, Damien Hirst, he wrote:
“Pop art is popular (designed for a mass audience), transient (short term solution), expendable (easily forgotten), low cost, mass produced, young (aimed at youth), witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, big business.”
Hamilton is often associated with the swinging 60s, including for his painting of Mick Jagger and art dealer Robert Fraser in handcuffs following a drugs raid.
He also designed the sleeve of the Beatles’ “White Album,” consisting of a plain white sleeve with the band’s name embossed on it.
Hamilton is remembered for his modesty and sense of humor as well as his artistic talent.
Asked about people’s perception of “Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?,” he said in a recent newspaper interview: “I’m rather bored with it but it’s a nice little earner!”