Extreme Makeover Home Edition Builds Priest Rape Crime Victim Rehab Centers, but in the end, it’s all a dream, or is it...

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By Kay Ebeling
TY PENNINGTON: We're here today to visit the Ebeling family in Los Angeles and here’s the deal. Kay, the mother, is a single mom who works two jobs, and not only has she raised her children to be promising adults, but she’s done so while dealing with sometimes devastating physical and mental problems. Kay was raped by a Catholic priest at age five and has been diagnosed with long term PTSD, in her case 40-plus years of PTSD, her nerves damaged from responding to the crime for 40 years. Long term PTSD is a diagnosis many priest rape victims receive, so we wanted to see what we could do about that here at Extreme Makeover Home Edition.

Now, normally you would expect an organization like the Catholic Church to step forward in a case like this, since, well, they are a church. So we sent two members of our design team over to meet with Cardinal Roger Mahony at the temple on Temple Street in Los Angeles. We wanted the cardinal to tell us how he thought we should design the recovery center and how much the church would participate in the costs.

CARDINAL ROGER MAHONY: This is the first I've heard that there are still victims of these unfortunate incidents here in Los Angeles. I thought we settled all this last July.

TY PENNINGTON: As is true with many of our families, this mom Kay Ebeling devotes hours of her time as a volunteer to a cause that's important to her. She’s a journalist who just happens to also be a victim of Catholic Priest pedophilia, so Kay produces City of Angels blog where she is determined to get out the truth, about sex crimes in the Catholic Church.

So here at Extreme Makeover we are going to reward the Ebeling family with a brand new home

AND

We are also going to build a recovery center for victims of priest pedophilia here in Los Angeles.

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CARDINAL MAHONY: In the settlements last summer, as you know we were so generous and willing and caring for these poor victims, and so I thought we could put this all behind us. We gave as much money as we could, willingly, without question.

TY PENNINGTON: We thought that now you might sell several churches and put that money in a fund that we could use to build more recovery centers.

CARDINAL MAHONY: Honest, Mr. Pennington, we thought with the settlements last summer we could put this issue behind us. I had no idea there were still victims of this unfortunate incidents living in Los Angeles.

TY PENNINGTON: You already said that. And they're not incidents they are sex crimes where --

MAHONY (Raises his hand for Ty to stop) Even though Ms. Ebeling’s perpetrator was in Illinois, we acknowledge that the church is a national, nee practically an international source of wide open support of Christians no matter what denomination--

TY PENNINGTON: You are going to pay for some of this?

MAHONY: We will throw open our doors and our hearts to Ms. Ebeling. Anything we can do to help.

TY PENNINGTON: So you will sell severael churches and give those resources to your crime victims?

MAHONY: Well, we've already arranged the transfer of most of those church real estate assets to the Vatican, in fact I finished the paperwork just before meeting with you. But we do have one church we can donate.

CUT TO TY PENNINGTON: Well Sears and ABC provided the materials and most of the financial support needed to do this particular makeover for the Ebeling family. And Cardinal Mahony said the church could not do more, they just no longer have the money or the assets.

However, one of our interns, while doing research into the Catholic Church here in Los Angeles, discovered that there is a strange connection between the Los Angeles Archdiocese and owners of a piece of real estate on Sunset Boulevard. We're talking about:

The Crossroads of the World

-- touted as America’s first mall. The collection of shops and offices sits directly next to Church of the Blessed Sacrament on Sunset Blvd, one of many churches where a Jesuit priest’s Father Mark Falvey sexual molestation of nine children resulted in civil lawsuit and a settlement in 2007.

Crossroads of the World is also birthplace of the pornography industry in Los Angeles.

CARDINAL MAHONY: I had no idea. Is it true, there really is a thriving industry of pornographers in Los Angeles? And the church may have helped them get their fledgling industry off the ground?

TY PENNINGTON: In the late 1960s the main tenant at Crossroads of the World was Pretty Girl International, an agency that connected women with what seemed like legitimate jobs, new modeling and film jobs that opened up when movie industry censorship and ratings standards changed in the 1950s.

Right there directly under the church tower of Blessed Sacrament, in this development of offices that was obviously carved out of the church’s property was the birth of the pornography industry in Los Angeles in 1968-1969.

TY PENNINGTON (CONT'D:) As a designer I noticed that Crossroads and Blessed Sacrament church even have the same architectural touches in their roofs and tiles, and inside the Crossroads property we found several signs that this land used to be part of the church.

This beautiful fountain is dedicated to a saint and is obviously more than a hundred years old.

It was right here at Crossroads of the World under the church tower of Blessed Sacrament that the pornography industry took off in Los Angeles.

CARDINAL MAHONY: Well in that case, we feel doubly responsible. Somehow the American culture has lost its way, even though the Roman Catholic Church in this country still has hundreds and thousands of members left.

MAHONY: Thank you, Ty, if it weren’t for you, I would not have even know there were still victims of clergy sex abuse in Los Angeles who have not seen justice. And I also would have never know that church property may have been used for non-church purposes such as the production of mainstream pornography back in the 1960s and 1970s which actually I can say that sale and continued operation of that piece of land on Sunset Boulevard did bring us a nice chunk o' cash.

CARDINAL MAHONY: We do see now that maybe we owe some recompense. (He hangs his head in a gesture of penance grasping his $80K gold cross, his body spasms with dry sobs. Then Roger Mahony raises his head.)

MAHONY: I'm going to let you demolish one of our Los Angeles area churches so you can use the land to create a national institute for research and treatment of sex abuse victims.

TY PENNINGTON: The centers will be places where these crime victims, who are so often isolated and in need of support, can come and work on their unique problems together, and maybe even begin some sort of social action to get justice at the same time.

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EXT. LARGE PIECE OF CHURCH REAL ESTATE IN LOS ANGELES.
Thousands of people in blue shirts stand on the streets and nearby rooftops cheering. The church building shows signs of neglect, the grounds are unkempt and there is mold on the walls. A fish pond is full of algae. On either side of the church are two large electronic structures pointed at the church.

TY PENNINGTON: Since we're in Los Angeles, home of so much of our nations’ aeronautic and astrophysical research and at the same time home of Hollywood and the movie industry,

This week we are going to demolish a church using these giant sound ray boom devices designed by NASA JPL in Pasadena. And to make things even better, George Lucas has come down out of the redwoods of Northern California to join us here and try out his new sound wave special effects device, to make this demolition the most astounding and amazing one ever here at Extreme Makeover Home Edition.

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TY PENNINGTON IN FRONT OF HUGE CROWD, THE NASA JPL ELECTRONIC SOUND WAVE DEMOLITION DEVICES ARE POISED, GEORGE LUCAS' SOUND EFFECTS ENHANCEMENT ANTENNA IS SET

TY PENNINGTON: So let the demolition begin!

No one knows exactly how to explain what happened that day. Scientists say it was a combination of the extreme power of the JPL sound wave device combined with the electronics of George Lucas’ sound effects enhancement machine.

As the church disintegrated where these devices were pointed, at the same time Catholic Churches in cities across the country disintegrated in exactly the same way. National news reporters realized that the same crimes were committed using the same modus operandi in each church across the country that disintegrated, they had aided and abetted pedophile priests while lying to the victims.

National news reporters finally realized the connection between these crimes across the country and a wave of news stories resulted in Senate hearings. Today in 2015 several dozen bishops are behind bars in American prisons.

Weeks after the synchronous demolitions, Pope Benedict stood at one of these Ground Zero Halos as they had come to be called, because of the strange glow that remained where each of the disintegrated churches had stood.

The pope raised his arms in supplication saying, Lord, what is it you are telling me. His face went red with rage and then as white as his own robes. He turned to the assembled crowd, bishops and other hierarchy, and said, “The message is clear. We need to start over from square one.”

The bishops and the pope stripped off their vestments and began to dig with their hands in the rubble, then someone turned on a radio and The Village People began singing YMCA and these newly bare chested priests and bishops started dancing --

And I woke up.

And realized I was late. Gotta run, no time to blog I’m doing these 16-hour shifts with about three hours sleep a night--

WORKING Extreme Long Hours
On Extreme Makeover Home Edition
We're all trying to get through House 522 - 525 so we can all take a three month hiatus.

It never ceases to astound me how this one TV show on one network is doing more for the poor and needy in this country than either the US government or the Catholic Church, both of which are obviously asleep at the controls while families in this country are living in Third World conditions.

I'm only a sub-sub contractor for Extreme Makeover Home Edition, but I'm still more proud right now to be working for them than I ever would be of being Catholic.

These days I have Ty Pennington and Pedophile Priests in my head all the time. No wonder I had this weird dream.

Onward.

(When Extreme does go on hiatus in a few weeks I’ll have about 20 more hours a week to put into this blog.)

In the end all we want is justice, which will happen when the whole story comes out. Me, I plan to write about this until I die, and I’ll be able to retire in a few years and do this blog full time.

So stay tuned.