One year ago the ArchAngel Institute presented an online introduction that begins with our former Executive Director right here ….  Click on the blue to learn what makes the Institute tick.  Just advance through the posts of last February and you will take a virtual walk through the Institute and learn much about us as you click the next pages.  (Just click on front and center above on the left if you get lost while clicking through our many, many past posts.)

As our Executive Director recently stated in the Catholic press, he has been called onto other tasks.  His retirement speech from 20 years of pro-life activism starts here.  (He is a man who is seldom at a loss for words!)

Stay tuned for more on the Institute, but do realize that 2009 is the Year of the Raphael Division.  We are interested in networking with the living victims of abortion and building, out of 827 Webster Street, a unified voice telling the truth about what happened there and vowing, together, “never again.” 

We have a great start.  The work of the ArchAngel Institute continues.   Please come join us in that important work. 

Email us at archangelinstitute@gmail.com to learn more, or simply drop by the former abortion clinic just northwest of the Allen County Public Library during our office hours of 9:30 – 2:30.

PS  Please pray for Jim Leeson. who just underwent quadruple bypass.  He is recovering.

More than 300 visitors came through the ArchAngel Institute (downstairs at 827 Webster Street) and a few less through the Donegal Corridor (upstairs at 827 Webster Street) on Saturday.  We missed Ms. Susan Hill (three hyperlinks) and Ulrich George Klopfer (two hyperlinks). We hope that they know they are welcome at any of our open houses or prayer meetings.

Here are some pictures of those who did drop by after the March for Life …

THANKS TO ANDY AND CHRIS OF SUPREME COFFEE FOR MAKING OUR OPEN HOUSE A BIG SUCCESS!!!  Call this pro-life fine hot beverage service when you are throwing a party:  627-8100

p.s. Click here to meet a new friend of the Institute.

Station Seven is our last stop on the open house tour of the Institute’s headquarters.   This post builds upon the previous post on Station Seven.  Read that post here:

This is the northwest corner of the Institute. Note the new ceiling tiles. Note the banner that hung in the front window throughout advent. It now hangs in the front office.

What a different message than that which greated those who entered the building when Susan Hill and George Klopfer held court over little lives and God’s people from the same location.

The frame on the left contains the final station in the open house walk through.

It reads as follows:

The Pro-lifer’s Portico Project

of the Donegal Corridor, LLC

The chimneys on this building must be repaired or removed. The bushes in front of the building are slated for removal. The concrete in the front of the building is in need of repair. Pro-lifers have spent countless thousands of hours counseling, praying and even sitting-in near the front door of this building.

The Donegal Corridor, LLC, in conjunction with the Raphael Division of the Institute, plans to harmonize the above statements in one fine work of art that memorializes the pro-life movement in Fort Wayne.

This plan is the Pro-lifer’s Portico.

Once completed, this front porch area will be a patio of inscribed bricks fashioned out of the chimneys. Each brick will be inscribed with the name of a pro-life individual or family that stood against the child killing that took place in this building in the years between 1977 to 2007.

The Donegal Corridor is using this project to raise monies for the much needed repairs to this building. Pro-life families whose member or members have stood against child killing on Webster Street are asked to pledge moneys toward this project. Once the pledges are met the chimney bricks will be inscribed and set in place as a silent memorial to faithful pro-life witnesses.

The suggested pledge amounts are as follows:

* The one percent of fees pledge: Pledge to pay off one percent of the amount of the legal fees that the Rescue Defendants were ordered to pay to the abortionist operating out of this building back in 1991. This one percent amount is $616. More on the quite symbolic nature of this amount is available upon request.

* The one percent of income pledge: Pledge to donate one percent of your household income for 2008 to the Donegal Corridor, LLC and a brick will be inscribed with your family name and set in place.

Donations to the Donegal Corridor, LLC are not tax –deductible. Other items in this building of historic interest are available for sale to support the mission, including some of the steam radiators. See John R. Brown for details. If you wish to take part in this program but lack the funds see Bryan J. Brown for an alternative program toward the same end.

This is a picture of the area between the building and the public sidewalk at 827 Webster Street.  It is land that belongs to the building owner.  Which means that it was land off limits to pro-lifers back when Susan Hill owned the property. 

Take this front page newspaper picture, for example.  The pro-lifers are crawling toward the steps and toward the choice piece of real estate pictured above.  Three times in 1989 pro-lifers scuttled around those raggedly bushes to sit, in large quantities, on the contested ground pictured above. 

Donegal Corridor has announced plans to remove the ratty bushes with the spring thaw.  

The warmer  weather will bring about a fine opportunity for pro-lifers to loiter on the above ground without fear of trespassing charges.  But mud and dirt will not do.  What is needed is a porch of some kind, a portico if you will. 

But where to get the materials for such a structure?

(Hint:  The new gas furnace needs no chimney and the old chimneys need to come down.  Click on the picture below for a closer look.)  

Station Seven will take us back to the front of the Institute and back to a discussion of the Donegal Corridor, LLC.

In other words, Station Seven discusses bricks and mortar.

We traverse the original tile floor in the Institute to travel the approximately 17 yards from the Brown mirror to the front window. The Institute is abit over 7 yards wide. Thus, if my math is correct, the Institute’s entire office space could be renewed with less than 120 square yards of floor covering.

As we walk toward the front of the Institute (traversing from the east to the west, and thus walking toward the First Presbyterian Church) we pass by the kitchenette, using the term loosely, on the north. It was the “sterile room” back when the Institute was used for nefarious purposes, and is anything but that. It needs to be gutted and reborn.

Thus this virtual tour now moves from vision and ideological to the most practical of issues. The Institute could use your help in finishing up the remodeling of this old clinic. Thousands of dollars have been poured into the building by the Brown family already. The Corridor has agreed to allow the Institute to offset rent due by volunteer work and through upgrades to the building.  Thus your donations to the Institute, either in time, in kind or in money, can offset the rent and speed us on our important mission.  (In time gifts are not tax deductible, but Donegal Corridor has agreed to count them as rent.)

For that reason this sign hangs in the brown hallway of the institute . . .

Please Pardon Our Mess – especially the floor!

We are only in the Second Stage of our Launch.

Our Executive Director is officing in this building and will soon relocate his operations to the recently finished offices. (Just as soon as the flooring is finished.)

We are praying that someone will be moved to help with the flooring. We are praying for a donation to cover the cost, or a donation of materials and/or help laying the same.

We are open to donations of office equipment, office furniture, kitchen cabinets, windows, and window treatments and most all else necessary to take us past this Second Stage and into orbit as a fully functioning Institute.

The Institute is able to receive tax-deductible donations.

Thank you for joining us in praying for the success of our mission.

Vision & Mission of the

ArchAngel Institute’s

Titanic Brigade

(an ecumenical & grassroots initiative)

A celebration of Christian chivalry advancing the Culture of Life by organizing Christian men (of various denominational Heritage) to cherish, to defend and to promote faith, family and freedom. 

Operational Goals for 2008

            – Advance ecumenism among Evangelicals in the three major branches of Christendom through informal dialogue, prayer, fellowship and joint service projects.

            – April 13 memorial kick-off dinner memorializing the men who gave their lives while rescuing women and children on the Titanic.

– Structured monthly meetings of the Brigade at 827 Webster Street 

            – Service projects, including, but not limited to . . .  

– security details for local crisis pregnancy centers.

                        – aiding widows, orphans and abandoned women as requested by local CPC’s and other Christian ministries.

                        – joint evangelism projects presenting a unified message based upon the historic teachings of the Christian Faith.

                        – community standards statements intended to shore up the morality of the community.

Note:  A local journalist recently told the ArchAngel Institute’s Executive Director that “getting Christians together is a fine idea, as long as you do not try to get them to pray together.”  The Titanic Brigade hopes to prove this journalist wrong on that front.

 The Titanic Brigade will be a group of men dedicated to, in the words of the Apostle Paul, making “every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.” 

We seek men of strong Christian character and Evangelical, ecumenical intent. 

We seek men interested in making ecumenical history in the Fort.

The Titanic Brigade is the next station in our virtual tour of the Institute.

 This station has been set up by the previous posts on current social problems and our wonderful, treasured heritage as Christians in America.  If you have not read the last few posts, this would be a fine time to do just that.

Now we turn to our English cousins, for our wonderful American heritage was European before it was American.

My grandfather (the original owner of the brown mirror discussed in the previous post) was born in 1903 and thus came of age as the world that then was immolated itself on the technological battlefield of modernity.  WWI ushered in a New Age, an age that has led to most of the social problems that we struggle with in contemporary America.

The following is borrowed from the above mission criticals tab.  It prepares us for the coming post on the Institute’s Titanic Brigade . . . 

Christian Chivalry in America was, at least in part, the “quaint” social order that seventy years of post-War affluence has pretty much undone. Margaret Storm Jameson made this point in her 1965 work, The Early Life of Stephen Hind, therein recording a grandmother’s mourning for the demise of
 “[a]nother civilization … the one I was born into. It has died, I say, not vanished, because it was a living organism. A civilization based upon the family. What has taken its place is not alive; an atomized society, without security, without warmth, a chaos of fragmented mechanical relationships. O, I know as well you do, that in my world there was ignorance and poverty. But the right way was not to tear that world down and replace it by anarchy. The family base should have been extended, cherished, encouraged.”
Indeed.  The ArchAngel Institute stands four square on the concept of protecting the family at all costs.  Without the family civilization as our fore-bearers defined it will cease to exists.  Our social order is taking on water, in fact, because modernity has torn a gaping wound in our cultural superstructure.  Men and women of Faith and Courage must now stand in the gap and fight to repair the damage visited upon our social order by the modernist iceberg — before Christendom — the greatest ship of state known to mankind – sinks to the bottom.Will you stand with the Institute in the Titanic Brigade?More to follow . . .

The hallway is brown, the mirror at the end belonged to Richard Brown (father of John R. Brown, grandpa of Bryan J. Brown) and the poster on the wall is of famed Kansas civil rights activist John Brown of Harpers Ferry fame.

Richard Brown would break out in a smile were he to see his mirror gracing the Institutes’ hallway.  Grandpa went to his great reward back in ‘94.  He was a man who spent much time in the Word of God, and knew it cover to cover.

Nothing made Richard Brown happier than a good discussion of some topic in the Bible.  He looked forward to the second coming as the Hope for all mankind.  Grandpa was not much of a churchgoer, but he loved the Lord and lived his faith. 

Grandpa thought his son and grandson were doing the right thing in standing up for Life and calling the government to account for allowing the wholesale slaughter of the same. 

Grandpa Brown was a poor farmer most of his life,  and never had much of anything worth all that much.  The antique mirror that now hangs in the Institute was attached to  the nicest furniture he ever owned — and that was not all that rich of a unit.

I do not think that Grandpa woud have ever taken the direct action that I took.  Or the action that his firstborn, John, has taken.  (Dad has been an outspoken Christian activist for decades, and has risked arrest, and even been arrested, for the cause.)

Grandpa Brown’s way was less confrontational.  Not that there is anything wrong with that.  Grandpa’s life struck me as a fulfillment of this admonition from the Old Testament: 

Thus Curry stands as a departure gate into post-modernity.  Could this Topeka mural of Brown  be considered as prophetic as it was historic? 

Postscript

Source:  The Kansas State Historical Society

John Steuart Currywas born on November 14, 1897, in the small northeastern Kansas town of Dunavent. The eldest of five children in a farming family, his inclination toward art began at a young age. Curry’s biographer and friend, Lawrence E. Schmeckebier, once wrote that as a youth on his father’s farm Curry was interested in drawing everything:

. . . horses and fighting animals, railroad engines and trains, pictures of battles from the Revolutionary War, hosts of everyday things about him. He kept a scrapbookfilled with newspaper and magazine clippings of cowboy and Indian scenes, illustrations by such westerners as Remington and Dunton, also hundreds of his own pencil sketches of guns and revolvers.

In 1928, Curry finally received national fame with the purchase of his painting “Baptism in Kansas” by the wealthy patron and New York art museum owner Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Curry was then introduced to two other artists who shared his love for the Midwest, Grant Wood of Iowa and Thomas Hart Bentonof Missouri.  Curry’s “Baptism in Kansas” in 1928, Benton’s “Boomtown” in 1928, and especially Wood’s “American Gothic” in 1930, all seem to encapture the unique experience of American rural life. These Regionalists attempted to create a distinct style of art that promoted idealism and rejected the duplication of popular European trends. In 1946 Thomas Hart Benton wrote, “We agreed that unless American Art came back to dealing with things about which American artists knew something it would accomplish nothing.” They painted images promoting a new American identity that included subjects of family, religion, and nature.

The growth of the Regionalist art movement can best be understood in the context of the rising nationalism and isolationism that occurred in the U.S. between the two world wars. Separation from European trends and a focus on American identity were concepts permeating American culture throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

Through the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project, the federal government commissioned Regionalist artists to complete murals on public buildings that promoted the Protestant work ethic and family values.

The first exposure of the Kansas public to Curry’s artwork came in 1930-31, when a traveling exhibition of his paintings was sent from New York to the Mulvane Museum in Topeka. The showing produced harsh reactions from Kansas viewers and critics. Many claimed that Curry focused only on the negative aspectsof Kansas life. They labeled the paintings “The Tornado,” “Holy Rollers,” and “Mnt” as depicting miserable weather, religious fanaticism, and lynch mobs. 

 In 1937, artist John Steuart Curry was asked to return to Kansas to cover the interior walls of the Topeka capitol with scenes from the state’s history.  

As Curry finished “The Tragic Prelude” and “Kansas Pastorale,” murals adorning the east and west second-floor corridors of the capital building, tensions flared between Curry and the public over his use of fanatical abolitionist John Brown as a focal point.

End of quote from http://www.kshs.org/cool2/curry.htm

Fanatical, funny word, fanatical.  One man’s fanaticism is another man’s only reasonable response.  Some say living for Christ is fanaticism.  Others live for football, hunting or the stock market with the same degree of fanaticism and call it quite normal.  

Richard Brown was meek, mild and harmless, and most who knew him considered his life one live in obedience to the Lord. 

John Brown was outspoken, wild and a man of great action and even violence.  Most who knew him considered his life one lived in obedience to the Lord.

They could be bookends in many ways.  Both are brought to mind in the Institute’s hallway.

Lord help us find the right balance between extremes in all we do and say.  And help us to revere and preserve our heritage.

The Church speaks directly to this issue  — how to respond to a culture of anti-Christian sentiment and actions – in the latest major catechism, the catechism designed to build a “Civilization of Love.” 

FOR JUSTICE AND PEACE

COMPENDIUM OF THE SOCIAL DOCTRINE OF THE CHURCH

b. Starting afresh from faith in Christ

One of the goals of the Institute, and especially the Institute’s Gabriel Division, is to apply the historic teachings of the Church to the problems of the day.

We pause in the middle of our virtual open house to address one such grave concern that recently made the news.  This troubling sign of the times  was recently written up on the Wichita Eagle’s blog.  It is a problem that demonstrates a decrease in Christian charity on the streets of America.

It was posted by editor Phillip Brownlee and reads as follows:

Violence against homeless is skyrocketing

“Not only do the homeless need protection against the elements, they also need protection from teenagers who think it’s fun to attack vulnerable people. Nationally, there were more than 142 unprovoked attacks on homeless people in 2007, a 65 percent increase since 2005, the New York Times reported. And most of the attackers were teenagers and young adults. Why the increase and why such inhumanity? “I think it reflects a lack of respect for the homeless that has reached such extreme proportions that homeless people aren’t viewed as people,” said Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty.”

End of WE Blog quote

The lack of respect for the homeless can be one source of this disturbing trend/statistic.  But another could be a greater acceptance of violence as a personal response among disaffected youth.  Sociological studies have demonstrated that broken families, broken schools and a culture bathed in violence as entertainment (from Arnold’s movies to video games to rock/rap lyrics) have a hand in advancing violence as a response to certain stimuli.

In other words, it may not be that these violent youth view the homeless man as less human, it may rather be that these violent youth view violence as less taboo. 

Is that not the case with our culture in general?  Do children not routinely watch television that would have been considered far too violent two decades ago?  Play video games with unparalleled realism in the realm of graphic violence?  View You-Tube uploads of the most graphic violence known to man, including live beheadings and government-sponsored termination of alleged terrorists?

Our culture in marinating in violence — should we be shocked to learn that our teens are reacting violently to a group of people (the homeless) who are, for the most part and by most of us, unwanted?

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that such cultural violence will bring about more personalized violence:

V. THE PROLIFERATION OF SIN

1865 Sin creates a proclivity to sin; it engenders vice by repetition of the same acts. This results in perverse inclinations which cloud conscience and corrupt the concrete judgment of good and evil. Thus sin tends to reproduce itself and reinforce itself, but it cannot destroy the moral sense at its root.

1869 Thus sin makes men accomplices of one another and causes concupiscence, violence, and injustice to reign among them. Sins give rise to social situations and institutions that are contrary to the divine goodness. “Structures of sin” are the expression and effect of personal sins. They lead their victims to do evil in their turn. In an analogous sense, they constitute a “social sin.”

The real story here is that the increase in violence is news.  What would be shocking, given our choices for violence as a culture, would be a decrease in violence among teens and against the homeless.  In other words, since we have created a culture of violence in our “arts,” we must expect violence in our streets.  As the Church teaches, “sin creates a proclivity to sin … sins give rise to [sin-filled] social situations.” 

The next post in this series will tackle the more difficult question of getting this violent genie back in the bottle.  For the good of the homeless, and all of us who will be interacting with a generation that contains, by the media’s count, a significant number of amoral “superpredators.”