City Safari: His Adopted Son Bears His Devine Secret

By Thom Nickels• Wed, Sep 18, 2019

Over a period of several months I conducted many interviews with Lori Garcia, the wife of Tommy Garcia who was the adopted son of Father and Mother Divine.

One of the topics that most interested me was how Tommy Garcia, a boy born in Los Angeles, wound up in Woodmont with Mother and Father Divine. This complicated story will probably be told at greater length when Tommy Garcia publishes his own book about that period. Still, Lori Garcia was forthcoming when speaking about how an anonymous little boy from Los Angeles wound up in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania.

The adoption story has its roots in Jim Jones’ (of Jonestown infamy) association with Mother and Father Divine. For years Jones had tried to infiltrate the Peace Mission movement.

“The final visit between Jim Jones and Mother and Father Divine,” Lori said, “was the firecracker that set things in motion. It was at that time that Father Divine told Mother Divine, ‘I need a brown little boy who can be groomed, who has not been tainted by the movement, who is intelligent, and that I can groom to be your assistant.’ The obsessive lurking around of Jim Jones had put something unpleasant in the air, a tone that more or less seemed to say: “Look, Father Divine, you are a sick old man, and once you’re gone I’m going to come here and take over the Peace Mission movement.” An adopted son who could be trained to be Father Divine’s successor as well as an aid to Mother Divine was an investment in perpetuity. Soon a universal call went out to everyone in the movement at every location around the world to keep an eye out for such a boy.

‘Everyone wanted to be the one who delivered the child to Father Divine,” Lori said. In Los Angeles, meanwhile, a woman named Georgia Julia Costa, the 13th of 14 children born to Greek-Albanian parents in New Hampshire, met the very handsome and athletic Tomas Garcia, a semi professional soccer player who played for the Mainland Mexico team and who came to the United States on a work visa in 1949. The two met in Los Angeles in 1952, and little Tommy Garcia was born in 1954.

“Georgia fell in love with Tomas,” Lori said. “Tomas was very handsome and very well built. Both were very young. Georgia, a photographer, was 22. They spent a lot of nights dancing at the Hollywood Palladium. After Tommy was born, his sister Susan was born in August of 1958. “

Life for the little brown boy from the time of his birth to March of 1962 was a combination of harmony and falling victim to his father’s demons. Tommy was constantly complaining of severe headaches to his mother as the relationship between Georgia and Tomas began to go downhill. The headaches continued. Tommy was even been sent home from school because of them and his mother, at her wits end, took him to Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles to find out what the problem was. The source of the headaches could not be traced to a medical condition but rather to trauma, such as a blow to the head. This was in fact what was happening although Tommy refrained from telling his mother beforehand that his father had kicked him in the head.

At the same time that this was happening, Georgia found herself in Los Angeles’ Self Realization Fellowship’s Lake Shrine gardens, camera in hand and looking for the perfect photo. Here she was in this Paramahansa Yogananda-inspired garden where, according to Lori, she had her first interaction with a woman from the Peace Mission movement.

“I believe that when a person meets a new friend, it’s sometimes easier to speak with that new friend about what’s going on in your life than telling an old friend,” Lori offered.

That’s what Georgia Garcia did. Georgia showed the woman, whose name was Louise, a photograph of her son, Tommy, and Louise must have thought of the call for a brown little boy that had been made by Mother and Father Divine back in Woodmont. What transpired between Georgia and Louise from that moment on was something that Lori Garcia could not tell me, although it can be assumed Louise sent the photo to Mother and Father Divine. This set the wheels of progress in motion. Years later, Tommy Garcia would reveal to Lori how he spotted the photo of himself at Woodmont. Father Divine had two special secretaries entrusted with a sort of high security clearance, Miss Saint Mary Bloom, his black right hand assistant and Miss Dorothy Darling, his white right hand assistant. Miss Saint Mary Bloom was also the treasurer of the movement’s Palace Mission and president and treasurer of the Circle Mission. Miss Saint Mary Bloom had a private office on the second floor of Woodmont with a sofa that Lori recalls being “over six feet long and a large safe that contained important papers and lots of cash.”

One day when Tommy was sent to the Bloom office he spotted the picture of himself in the safe.

“Somehow that picture was sent to Woodmont. I don’t know if it was sent to the attention of Mother Divine or Father Divine, I don’t know that answer,” Lori told me,” but I do know that upon receipt of that photo Father Divine said, ‘Bring me that child!’”

Mother and Father Divine obviously liked what they saw and further negotiations ensued. Eventually it was agreed that the four of them, Louise, Tommy, Tommy’s sister, Suzie and Georgia, would drive to Philadelphia from Los Angeles. With Louise in the passenger seat and Tommy and Susan in the back seat, the group headed east.

Immediately after Tommy’s personal introduction to Mother and Father Divine, he was taken to the King of Prussia Mall where he was outfitted in a new wardrobe. But his new life as the prince of Woodmont would not last long because almost immediately after his arrival he was molested by a male Peace Mission member.

Tommy’s mother, Georgia, who was promised the position of Mission photographer, was sent to live in another property. In 1962, there were hundreds, even thousands of buildings owned by the Peace Mission—in Philadelphia, New Jersey, New York City, Harlem and even upstate New York. These buildings were places where people—workers—were needed. In exchange for room and board Peace Mission members participated in worker duties. Lori Garcia says she’s certain that Georgia fell right into step because she remained with the movement for the rest of her life under a new name, Miss Harmony Faith Love. “In most cases new names were given by Father Divine but in some cases people chose their own names and Father gave his okay. Georgia worked at the Key Flower Dining Room at the Divine Tracy Hotel and died in 2001. She never left Philadelphia,” Lori said.

Father Divine would die three years after Tommy Garcia arrived at Woodmont. “I am certain that Father Divine expected to have far more time with Tommy than he had,” Lori recalls. “But certainly the three years he had with Tommy were intense and very special.” The two shared many confidences, including the revelatory fact that Father Divine was not really God, as his followers believed. Lori, who says that she believes in God although she’s not sure what house of worship she belongs in, said: “Tommy not only knew that Father Divine was not God, but in one of their first meetings Father Divine said to Tommy, ‘I am not God.’

God or no God, the plan to find a little brown boy was well executed. “When Tommy was delivered to Father Divine, it was up to Father Divine to decide whether Tommy stays or goes. One of the first things Father Divine asked Tommy was would he agree to stay there with him,” Lori recalls. “Tommy looked around Father Divine’s office where there were 13 or 14 secretaries with their steno pads writing down every word that is uttered. Tommy notices that some people are smiling, some are frowning and some have no expression whatsoever. The first thing this eight and a half year old child says is, ‘What about my sister and my mom?’”

 Lecturing on Father and Mother Divine

This sentiment demonstrated to Father Divine that this was not your average selfish kid. At this point Father Divine stated that they would be well taken care of although Suzie would not live at Woodmont. Tommy agreed and spent the next three years with Father Divine. At banquets he was seated between Father and Mother Divine. In addition to his Woodmont training, the boy was taken around to all the Peace Mission locations where he was introduced as Master Tommy.

Enrolled in a local school, the boy was taught how to be compassionate and a caring person and to take care of your fellow men and women and especially to take care of the elderly. As for the so-called ‘God Secret,’ Father Divine instructed the boy to “tell no one.”

“Tommy has kept that secret. From the time he was eight years old this secret has been kept because Father asked Tommy to keep it,” Lori adds.

The Zen Of Philadelphia’s New Fashion District

City Safari: The Zen Of Philadelphia’s New Fashion District

By Thom Nickels• Wed, Sep 25, 2019

Philadelphia’s original Gallery Mall opened in 1977. It was an interesting user-friendly place with a long gushing Zen Japanese style canal near long rows of slab benches. Patrons could sit and listen to rippling water sounds while watching passers-by and munching on snacks.

I remember having long conversations in the old Gallery with a medium friend of mine who often told me that the spot helped him to center himself. Across the way was a B. Dalton’s bookstore, not the best bookstore in the world but in the Gallery, it seemed more than adequate. I mention B. Dalton’s because I had a book signing there in 1988 when the Gallery seemed to be going downhill. I sat at a book-signing table in front of the bookstore, although I was practically in the mall hallway, surrounded as I was with signs advertising the book that I was promoting (The Cliffs of Aries). It was around lunchtime, not the best time for a signing, nevertheless I wound up speaking with many people, including an odd younger male who asked me a series of awkward questions while eyeing the young B. Dalton woman proprietor at the counter seated behind me. She was a winsome blonde in her twenties, no doubt a student, the only one working in the bookstore at the time. When the guy in question had had enough of me he went into the bookstore where he remained for a long time. When he exited, I noticed that not only was he walking very fast but that he was being followed by the proprietor who came up to me in a panic.

“I need to talk to you,” she said. She told me that the man who had just left the store had performed a public act of biblical onanism, between the pages of a book and then had given her the book as he left.

The fear caused by his perversity provoked her perspiring wildly. She wanted to know if she now needed to get an HIV AIDS test. The next 25 minutes or so was spent in a panicked medical consultation.

The Cliffs of Aries had become The Cliffs of AIDS.

The Gallery in those days was all about the food court: cheap fast food of every variety. Always packed, people often sat with strangers in the food court, although in the Gallery at large public benches were slowly beginning to disappear. The same time the benches were disappearing, Gallery management decided to cover up the gushing Zen canal and replace it with tile. How did this happen? No doubt some bureaucrat got it into their head that the beautiful gushing stream was a safety hazard. Society was becoming increasingly cautious and overprotective: The Nanny State in velvet gloves, a precursor to the endless pre-recorded “For your safety” announcements one hears today in subways, trains and buses. Shoppers who sought to take a break from walking or shopping risked being approached by security guards if they sat too long on one of the rare, free benches on the mall’s second level. Sadly, the Gallery was slowly becoming a hostile environment.

Gallery I and Gallery II then shut down for a period of three years although it seemed much longer to most Philadelphians. Skyscrapers have been built in less than three years. Comcast One and Comcast Two were built in less than three years. Liberty Place I and Liberty Place II were built in less than three years. Walking past the walled up old Gallery, behind which the Great Rehab was taking place, people asked: What are they doing in there? What’s taking them so long?

“Oh yes, it’s a union town so of course there are a zillion complications.” Etc.

During the Gallery reconstruction, the 16.5-million-dollar wreck-o-vation of JFK Plaza had been completed. The wreck-o-vation was hailed as a great achievement by cutting edge design enthusiasts. Created by Hargreaves Associates, the new design was even lauded by the Fairmount Park Conservancy. But the new design was as if Walter Gropius himself had returned from the dead and set about obliterating what made the old plaza, despite its wear and tear, such a magnificent space: the splendid tall fountain and pool which perfectly framed the view of the Museum of Art in the distance. The new Love Park has been called everything from “Love, Blunder Park” to “Car Park,” a nod to the ten-foot-high sign that advertises underground parking. The barren landscape (with no shade) is a sterile, hostile unwelcoming space. It’s no wonder that those opposed to the new design—and their numbers are legion—have staged lawn chair sit ins to demonstrate what the plaza lacks. The new JFK Plaza might be compared to a parking lot with a pock marked sprinkler system. complex below-grade

I visited the so-called Philadelphia Fashion District (the new Gallery) a couple of days after the opening. There were still huge clusters of balloons around the entranceway on Market Street and great numbers of curiosity seekers like me were going inside to see what the place was like. What struck me most was the spaciousness of the place; it was very Kimmel Center, very clean and “big walled.” I rode on an escalator that smelled like a new car. I had never seen a new escalator in my life and marveled at its gliding virginity, wondering what it might look like in 4 months. At the bottom of the escalator there were men in suits, all of them with that smiling opening day festivities look.

The first store I spotted, H&M, loomed like the Great Wall of China. Gone was the old Gallery boardwalk neon look, of stores on top of stores, which I never found objectionable. This was corporate sparseness with a moving upmarket feel. I remembered something I had read in Next City: “They are trying for a different tax bracket. They are weeding out the people who can’t afford to shop that high.” Walking in front of me were black girls looking longingly at expensive purses and cowboy boots encased in small plastic dimly lighted MOMA-like display boxes. These goodies were obviously aimed for the denizens of Rittenhouse Square, the same “money is no object” ladies who hit the Ball on the Square every year and who appear in the back pages of Philly Style.

The real test will be the food court, I told myself, remembering the Fellini-like atmosphere of the old food court with its grass roots democracy rowdiness. Suddenly, there it was, although it appeared much smaller than the original food court but still filled with the same sort of people that populated the old one: Scores of giddy, sometimes loud school kids in long lines waiting to give their food orders. Sitting alone at a small table in the middle of the ruckus an elderly Chinese woman seemed to be fast spooning her soup as if she’d just made the decision to leave as quickly as possible. A food court band belted out rap.

So where was the Brahms and Beethoven for the ladies of Walnut Street?



I met two friends after my tour of the new Gallery—I am not able to call this the Fashion District--and told them what I had experienced. They agreed that with my view that an upscale redesign will have absolutely no effect on the base population that goes to malls. You can reinvent and rehab buildings but reinventing populations is perhaps another matter.

Stupid Satanism

By Thom Nickels• Wed, Aug 28, 2019

   The Philadelphia Free Press

Most everyone has heard of Anton Szandor LaVey’s Church of Satan, founded in 1966 in San Francisco. LaVey’s real name, however, was Howard Stanton Levey. The purported author of the Satanic Bible (LaVey plagiarized large parts of it for AVON Books), died in 1997. On his deathbed in a Catholic hospital he had a vision of something that terrified him. His daughter reported that he saw something and said, “Oh my, oh my, what have I done? There’s something very wrong.” His daughter said that her father then begged God not to send him to hell.

Howard Levey was an atheist and did not believe in a literal Satan. As he told one reporter before his death, “Look, I’m an atheist. Satan is symbolically representative for us, and when you see the kind of liberating freedom that people are feeling when they say something like ‘Hail, Satan,’ well, it seems like it’s needed. Hating yourself for being human seems pointless.”

A lot of adolescent bravado surfaces when it comes to Satanism. Think of kids in black clothing listening to heavy metal as they suck on five pointed Pentagrams, or light bonfires in cornfields before going out to the local cemetery and toppling tombstones with crosses on them.

A 2018 article in Philly Voice asked, ‘Who Are the Philly Satanists? What Do They Do?” As was pointed out, they don’t eat babies and they don’t want churches to be burned down. “We are Satanists. Full stop. Most of us are also atheists,” as one member stated. A look at the Facebook page, Satanic Philadelphia, reveals posts like, “Pride is the most fabulous sin,” and “We don’t apologize for our nature.” Satanic Philadelphia sponsored a so-called Black Mass on October 12, 2018, traditional Columbus Day, which also happens to be my birthday (and the birthday of Aleister Crowley, ‘the Great Beast,’ a poet and founder of his own school of mysticism, Magick).

Philadelphia Magazine reported on the Black Mass. “New Jersey resident Joan Bell has been camped out in front of 12th and Spring Garden since 6 p.m. on Thursday. She has a three-foot-tall statue of the Virgin Mary. And she has her rosaries. She’s there to prayerfully protest the appearance of the Satanic Temple at PhilaMOCA on Friday night.”

The magazine reported that “the blasphemy-based Salem, Massachusetts religious organization” was actually performing the black mass ritual two times. That’s because when the 8 p.m. Satanic Temple black mass sold out in a heartbeat, another black mass was added at 10:30 p.m. The later black mass sold out as well.

Who are these devoted Satanic followers anyway?

The Philly Voice writer described his visit to the organization.

“It’s a sweltering afternoon in late May. A group of mostly 30-somethings are relaxing in the air conditioning at a South Philly bar discussing movies and politics. To the untrained eye, this might look like a normal meet-up, but these 11 strangers aren’t getting together to bond over foreign films or to try speed dating. They’re Satanists.”

The reporter describes the Satanists in a bar in Germantown. “A chocolate cake covered in black icing topped with a blood red pentagram sits on the table before them. It’s the group’s first anniversary. They open the meeting with an invocation calling to Satan for power and wisdom. It ends with members intoning, “FIAT, IN NOMINE SATANAS.”

The Philadelphia group is part of a Salem-based organization known as The Satanic Temple. Satanic Temple “franchises” are popping up all over the country. If a 2014 Pew Research Center survey is to be believed then 1.5 percent of Americans now identify with Paganism, Wicca and Satanism.

The Satanic Temple was founded by Lucien Greaves and Malcolm Jarry in 2012. The temple became famous when they initiated a Missouri Supreme Court lawsuit to reduce undue burdens in abortion procedures. The group also went to great lengths to place a satanic monument on the Arkansas capitol grounds to offset a 10 Commandments monument.

In the 1970s a common figure in Philadelphia’s Suburban Station was a cloaked figure mingling among regional rail passengers while passing out leaflets and magazines. The magazine, called The Process, was published by The Process Church of the Final judgment. The Process Church, some say, had influenced Charles Manson and the Manson ‘Family.’ Process Church co-founder, Robert De Grimston Moore, was once referred to by Manson as his body double. “Moore and I are one and the same,” Manson is on record as saying.

The Process Church was founded by two British ex-Scientologists, Mary Ann MacLean and Moore after their expulsion from the Church of Scientology as “suppressive persons” in 1962. The organization grew rapidly and Process magazine became popular with Hollywood celebrities. It published stories on death, sex, fear and love. MacLean called herself The Oracle and Moore was known as the teacher although the one in control was MacLean. Process Church members had photo ID’s and in some cities there were Process coffee houses.

Process magazine featured stories on Marianne Faithful, Timothy Leary and William Burroughs. A Process band was formed in Toronto and recorded a number of songs. The Process philosophy was that Jesus and Satan were one. Members were encouraged to participate in sex couplings, orgies and go outside their comfort zones. Group sex was a rite of passage. After the Manson murders in Los Angeles, the Church of the Process changed its sinister black cloak and robes to a gray modern leisure suit. That was later changed to a blue modern leisure suit. The Process cross, which once had the look of a Nazi swastika was changed to resemble a soft version of the German Iron Cross. The standard Process cross was a cross with a curled up serpent inside.

In 1974 came a schism when Moore, who was seeing another woman, was kicked out of the Church by the jilted MacLean. The name of the Church was changed to the Foundation Church of the Millennium. In 1979 the name was changed again to the Foundation Church and all references to Satan were dropped. MacLean wanted a purely Christian Church. MacLean changed the name again but this time all religious pretensions were dropped. The new name, Best Friends Animal Society, accompanied a move to a new place, Kanab, Utah. On November 14, 2005, in a satanic twist worthy of director Roman Polanski, a rumor started that MacLean’s death was caused when a group of feral dogs tore her apart.

In Philadelphia’s Suburban Station, the man in the cloak handing out copies of Process went about his task with calm determination. The caped Process caped man could also be seen throughout the city conducting lively debates with evangelical Jesus groups.

Suburban Station in the late 1970s was a teeming metropolis. Within its walls you could find every facet of city life: proselytizing Jews for Jesus, processing Hare Krishna devotees, grim Nation of Islam evangelizers as well as expressionless but always formally dressed Jehovah’s Witnesses standing next to portable magazine racks. An iconic sight for years was an elderly Anglo-Catholic nun in full traditional habit who sat in a folding chair. At her side was a basket for donations. Day after day, year after year, the nun would sit in silence and accept whatever money was offered her. By the early 1990s she had disappeared. I was always sorry that I never approached her and asked me to tell me her story.

Suburban Station was also an early hangout for male prostitutes from the Fishtown and South Philadelphia neighborhoods. In 1975, it was where the murderers of 30-year old newspaper heir John S. Knight, who lived in the Dorchester in Rittenhouse Square, hung out and made their drug deals.

Sometime in the late 1970s the Process man approached a young man named Makin, a Midwestern transplant to Philadelphia. When I spoke to Makin at that time as a reporter for Philadelphia’s The Drummer newspaper, he could list no address. The phrase I used in my Drummer article was that Makin lived “hand to mouth,” meaning that he was homeless.

At times Makin could be spotted carrying a free copy of Anton Szandor LaVey’s Bible, given to him (so he told me) by the Process man himself. I’d see Makin reading La Vey’s book in Suburban Station. Makin explained his choice of reading material by calling himself a “spiritual investigator.” There were times when he carried both La Vey’s book and the Gideon Bible. It was as if he was deciding which path to follow.

It soon became obvious to me that Makin was one of the station’s notorious rent boys who hung round the indoor ice skating rink and the Alexander Calder sculpture in the Penn Center courtyard. The rent boy ragamuffins used the Calder sculpture as a leaning post and in the warmer months as a changing post where they would hang their ‘perspired’ T-shirts up to dry.

Suburban Station in 1976 had a commercial sunken ice skating rink surrounded by floor to ceiling windows through which regional rail passengers waiting for departing trains could watch the skaters. Suburban Station provided Makin with new life, albeit under the radar but sometimes in the direct lens of the police. His life as a rent boy meant that he was well dressed: he often wore pinstriped sneakers and Swedish boathouse trousers with big pockets and wide belt loops.

The city Morals Squad was alive and well in the late 1970s. There were cool looking long haired undercover agents in London Fog coats who canvassed the station with watchful eyes, while other undercover agents wore faded blue jeans while pretending to “look available.”

Homelessness takes its toll, however, and soon Makin was taking more drugs than he could handle. He began standing in the middle of Suburban Station wobbling and zoning out as hundreds of commuters whirled past him.

He eventually became so careless he didn’t mind falling asleep outside the skating rink in the warm weather. At 8 a.m. on my way to work, I would sometimes find him flat on his belly on one of the station’s outdoor concrete benches, pigeons fluttering about him in a wild fashion. And there beside him on the bench would be the nearly shredded and coverless Anton Szandor LaVey Bible.

Mary Baker Eddy

By Thom Nickels• Wed, Sep 11, 2019

     Philadelphia Free Press
 

Mark Twain was half in love with her and called her “the most interesting woman that ever lived, and the most exciting.”

Who was she? She was Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), a healer, public speaker, businesswoman and author (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures) whom the Atlantic Monthly called one of the “100 Most Influential Americans of all times.” Twain, an incorrigible skeptic, praised Eddy’s Christian Science as “a religion which has no hell, a religion whose heaven is not put off to another time with a break in the gulf between but begins here and now…”

Other people disagree.

In 1999, a writer for Salon.com, Laura Miller, wrote a piece entitled The Respectable Cult.

Picture a relatively new American religious sect founded by a charismatic, paranoid, authoritarian leader. The church has a set of secret doctrines, and it threatens legal action against those who would reveal them. It vigorously pressures journalists, publishers and booksellers who attempt to disseminate anything but the officially sanctioned accounts of its deceased founder or its current autocratic leadership.

The history of First Church of Christ, Scientist in Philadelphia dates back to the early years of the 20th century. After its preliminary years of organizing, First Church of Christ Scientist, Philadelphia held its first services in 1910 in a new edifice at 4012 Walnut Street.

It wasn’t long before the Church saw a booming membership and plans were made to establish branches in other sections of Philadelphia. In October 1919, there was a schism of sorts when, twenty-six members left the First Church and formed the Fifth Church in Center City. The Fifth Church saw some success and in 1930 purchased Christ Church (Episcopal) Chapel at 1915 Pine Street.

“Physician, heal thyself” is the quote that occurs to me whenever I pass a Christian Science church. Whenever I think of Christian Science, I remember my years as an operating room technician. That’s when I witnessed my share of unnecessary and excessive surgical procedures: patients hacked to steak tartar, then stitched up just so they could have a few more minutes of life; life support measures and corrective remedies that caused more pain then the diseases they sought to eliminate. I’ve witnessed the horrors of exploratory surgery before the days of MRI and cat scans, of watching surgeons cut open patients from the chest to the lower abdominal region.

I’ve witnessed the fallibility of doctors as they experimented on patients too numb and shell shocked to protest. I’ve held frightened strong men and women as they were given spinal anesthesia blocks where the anesthetist repeatedly missed the mark and had to repeat the injections many times over. Spinal blocks were painful and often patients screamed in agony, moving their bodies uncontrollably. It was my job to hold them for support. I held hundreds of patients during my two-and-a-half-year sojourn in the operating room; if I close my eyes I can still see some of the faces of these patients. The nurses thought I had a knack for calming people so I was in demand as “a holder.”

Surgeons were the supreme divas and CEOs of the operating room. They ruled with iron forceps. They were the infallible emperors. God help the scrub nurse—they were all women in those days-- who made a mistake during the course of an operation, the most common being the passing of a wrong instrument. The offending nurse was dressed down in the manner of a lowly peasant. Many were expelled from the surgeon’s room in tears. The “refugee” scrub nurse was then assigned to another operating room. Orderlies and technicians were considered too far down the totem pole to be worth yelling at by the surgeons although some scrub nurses worked off the effects of being abused by abusing the orderlies.

Other surgeons acted out by throwing instruments across the room. These experiences were quite common. The tantrums could be long or short, depending on the “offense,” but the idea—indeed, part of the job description of the scrub nurse—was to prevent these outbursts from happening in the first place. The surgeons were considered above reproach; they were coddled in every way, and rudeness and arrogance from them was accepted as a by-product of the stress they were going through as the “gods” of the operating room. This produced a paranoid walking on eggshells atmosphere in the OR.

While researching Christian Science, my thoughts also turned to a man named Dr. Fox of Upper Darby, who saved my life when I was a child. Diagnosed as allergic to my own bacteria, it was assumed that I was a goner at age five until Dr. Fox engineered a series of weekly allergy shots. For 12 years, I shuffled back and forth to Philadelphia’s 69th Street for allergy shots. I still credit Dr. Fox for saving my life.

The love/hate relationship I have with physicians surfaced again when I read Martin Gardner’s book on Mary Baker Eddy. Gardner’s book, however, is anything but an objective account of this spiritualist and medium’s life. In fact, the book mounts a heady attack early on without allowing the reader to come to his/her own conclusions regarding Mrs. Eddy.

Page by page, chapter by chapter, Gardner tells us that this teaching or this belief is absurd or sick. Like a mud bath that keeps getting dirtier, there’s hardly a neutral space in the prose where one can get into the psyche of Mary Baker Eddy without a label or criticism being repeated over and over.

The author tells us that Eddy adopted the healing techniques of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802-1866), a former clockmaker turned mind healer and clairvoyant who had some success in healing individuals through hypnotism. “Almost every bodily ill is the result of wrong thinking,” Quimby wrote.

Eddy hooked onto Quimby’s belief that human beings are not Matter because Matter is an illusion. Since spirit lives forever, illness and death have no effect on humans; it is our belief in their power to overcome us that ages us and that gives disease its power and ultimate victory.

If we believe we will grow old and die, we will grow old and die. If we refused to let this belief influence us (it always must because we’re in the physical body and so therefore subject to its foibles), we might never age.

Gardner writes about Eddy’s fascination with a mountain woman in Eastern Europe who lost track of her age and so never celebrated birthdays. Doctors determined she was 75 but she looked about 26. The mountain woman’s belief system, Eddy tells us, never had a chance to tell her she was getting old, so the aging process was stalled. (It should be noted that in old age, Eddy saw physicians, wore spectacles, and even got false teeth.)

Dying is another matter. If we are really spirit, and matter is a total illusion, then our bodies are temporary transport vehicles and nothing about us dies when we pass over. Gardner insists, however, that Eddy believed she would live forever in the physical body.

When this was obviously not happening, Eddy, the author says, chalked this up to her beliefs not being strong enough, as well as to something called Malicious Animal Magnetism—or negative thoughts/vibrations projected onto her from other people, namely enemies.

Didn’t Sartre say that hell is other people?

According to Gardner, Eddy was a religious tyrant, excommunicating people she was jealous of or felt threatened by. She would not allow church members to read any metaphysical or spiritual books but the Bible and Science and Health. And when she enshrined herself in the regal ‘Mother Room’ in the big church in Boston, Mark Twain, who once claimed to love her, attacked her taste for opulence. The criticism affected Eddy so much that she later dismantled the room.

Charismatic Catholics: Thumbs Down!

From the Philadelphia Free Press, City Safari, Thom Nickels

In 2018 the online Catholic Philly.com published a piece on the Catholic Charismatic movement. “Some traditional Catholics might be turned off by the highly emotional exuberance of a Charismatic meeting, which can demonstrate such gifts of the Holy Spirit as prophecy, faith healing and speaking in tongues. Advocates believe this is simply the workings of the Holy Spirit,” the article began. 

Catholic Philly also carried advertisements for the 2019 Philadelphia Catholic Charismatic Renewal Conference. Those ads had the look of an old time southern revival. A traditionalist Catholic may have had to look twice to see if what he/she was seeing was really real. The ad was printed in big bold letters in the style of Big Tent evangelism. The following passages from Scripture were arranged around information surrounding the event.

“Then Jesus said, ‘Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the Glory of God’” John 11:40. Other bold letters followed. The event would take place at the Clarion Hotel Conference, Essington, Delaware County, PA. There would be a guest, Bishop Sam Jacobs, Chairman of the National Service Committee for the Charismatic Renewal. A beautiful woman showing off her bright shiny dental veneers was the guest speaker. She wasn’t just anybody but she was someone who was “baptized in the Holy Spirit in 1957.” The woman’s million dollar suntan gave this event an even bigger biblical punch. The woman, the ad stated, “is committed to making Jesus known to the Nations by the preaching of the Gospel in the Power of the Holy Spirit.”

Not only is all this not the way that Catholics have traditionally talked, I couldn’t get over the fact that the event wasn’t criticized by the normally staid, Catholic Philly.

Karl Keating, in a 2017 piece for Catholic Answers, Ever Heard of the Catholic Charismatic Movement?, wrote:

“The Catholic variant of charismaticism dates from 1967. It began at Duquesne University, spread to Notre Dame, and then went viral, as the current saying has it. A Belgian cardinal, Leo Suenens, was an early patron. Pope Paul VI, while a charismatic event was in progress in Rome, said some positive things about the movement’s emphasis on “communion of souls” and its promotion of prayer. Later, John Paul II encouraged Catholic charismatics to defend the Christian notion of social life against inroads by secularism.”

“The popes,” Keating continues, “never endorsed the notion of a “Baptism in the Spirit,” nor did they speak in favor of glossolalia, or speaking in tongues.” After all, so called speaking in tongues was a one event at Pentecost. It had everything to do with ‘gifting’ the early apostles and disciples with a knowledge of foreign languages so they could go out into the world, and nothing to do with rolling around on the floor in a fever. In fact, the modern concept of “speaking in tongues” (or shaking your booty with upraised hands) was virtually unknown throughout most of Christianity until 1830 when a certain excitable Scottish Presbyterian minister, Edward Irving, manufactured its appearance “through his enthusiastic preaching.” Keating concludes: “After that, speaking in tongues died down until the turn of the twentieth century with the rise of the modern Pentecostal movement. There were no Catholic examples of it until two-thirds of a century later.”

Keating’s views were challenged in a Catholic forum by a pro-charismatic apologist:

“At the heart of the Charismatic Renewal is a call to a personal encounter with Jesus and ongoing discipleship through the power of the Holy Spirit. I think that we can all agree that those are worthy pursuits. Although our faith is rational, it must also transcend mere intellectual assent.”

I grew up on the outskirts of Philadelphia’s Main Line in Frazer, Pennsylvania, where an infamous landmark on Lancaster Pike attracted the attention of passing drivers. The landmark was a huge billboard with the words Jesus Saves in gargantuan block letters. The billboard was twice the size of any other billboard in the area, and missing it while driving on Lancaster Pike was impossible. The billboard’s design included a rising sun with rays of light extending outward in massive bold strokes. There was a short Bible quote in smaller print underneath the main message. A longer quote, perhaps, might have been distracting and caused an accident. The “Jesus Saves” billboard was the subject of family conversations for years. A trip to the supermarket, to the Devon horse show, to my Boy Scout cabin in the forest, even while riding the school bus every day, it was always this billboard that caught my eye and got me thinking about the holy roller evangelicals in the area: the praise dancers, the polite Frazer Mennonites in their white bonnets and all the innumerable summer vacation Bible Schools, all decidedly un-Catholic.

We Catholics, secure in our knowledge that our Church was the original apostolic Church founded by Christ himself, didn’t have to stoop to making cartoon billboards in order to win followers. Jesus was not a commercial product like Ipanna toothpaste or A&P coffee. He was far too serious to trivialize on a billboard along a highway.

However in the years following the Second Vatican Council the Jesus Saves billboard became less of a freak display for Catholics. Suddenly area priests were referring to it during sermons.

In Philadelphia, a Redemptorist brother, Brother Pancratius (Panky) Boudreau (Joseph Andrew Boudreau) is credited for starting the Catholic Charismatic Movement. This was in the 1970s when Brother Panky was transferred to Philadelphia from Washington, D.C., where he had already kick started the movement in the late 1960s. Brother Panky was stationed at Saint Boniface Church at the time where he started a prayer group that later grew to more than 160 prayer groups around the Delaware Valley.

Suddenly Archdiocese of Philadelphia Catholics were hooting and hollering. The era of staid, quiet rosary saying was seen as retrograde and Protestant-unfriendly. Although creeping Pentecostalism existed in mostly isolated parishes with special Masses and events, elements of the Charismatic movement began to seep into heretofore dignified parishes. Suddenly one saw people at Mass praying the Lord’ Prayer in the Orans fashion while others took to holding hands with their neighbors in the pews, a few degrees away from swaying like those Big Tent hysterics. Other lay people, convinced that they had special spiritual gifts, would lay their hands on the heads of fellow parishioners. The only thing missing was outright dancing although that would come later when middle aged women, filled with something they called ‘The Spirit,’ would don chiffon capes and sashay around the altar in what would come to be known as liturgical dancing.

On the heels of the charismatic movement came the Cursillo movement, founded in Spain in 1944 as a way to bring Spanish men back to the Church. The Cursillo retreat was really the Catholic version of an EST or Lifespring retreat. The Cursillo 3-day retreat emphasized non-stop group activity with little or no solitude. Criticisms of the Cursillo movement by traditionalists pointed to “in group secrets” and instructions. Some former Cursillo devotees have even compared it to a cult.

The two founders of Cursillo in Spain, Eduardo Bonnin and Bishop Juan Hervas, saw their movement transported to the United States in 1957 although Cursillo hit its stride in the states in the 1970s in conjunction with the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement. The two movements might be said to have produced a “new” type of Catholicism: the “Jesus Saves” hand clapping “let it be emotional” school and the so called Masonic “secret society” of Cursillo, which started out as a movement exclusively for men but which, falling victim to secular culture, went co-ed.

The confusing state of American Catholicism at this time can be seen in the 1969 Elvis Presley movie, “Change of Habit,” which also stars Mary Tyler Moore who plays a nun.

This Presley Mass is what many considered to be “relevant” during the late 1960s. As Dr. Taylor Marshall commented, “I find it interesting how the presumably secular director prophetically captured the problem by showing the vocational angst of Mary Tyler Moore while interchanging scenes from traditional images of Catholicism (saint statue, crucifix, statue of Mary) with the novelties of the era (Elvis, guitars, dancing Gospel choir).” This is a wild mix Liturgy, so much so that one gets the feeling that all the traditionally robed nuns will soon strip off their traditional habits in exchange for a dark blue stretch pants suit.

While researching this column, I came across a rather shocking post on a SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) website:

“Seeking Fellow Adult Victims / Survivors of sexual abuse by Redemptorist Brother Pancratius (Panky) Boudreau (Joseph Andrew Boudreau) in the Saratoga Springs, NY area from 1964 1969 “

Hooting and hollering, indeed.