The past 12 months could be termed the Year of the Underdog.
Several major ‘can’t wins’ won.
UK voters opted for Brexit last July. It’s just passed the House of Commons.
The Cubs won the World Series after 108 years in early November.
Donald Trump was elected president on November 8. The Electoral College affirmed that on December 19.
On Sunday, February 5, 2017 the New England Patriots won their fifth Superbowl. Tom Brady emerged as the top quarterback of all time. The team beat the Atlanta Falcons 34-28 in the first Superbowl ever to go into overtime.
Pre-game predictions
Earlier on Sunday, Fox’s Bill O’Reilly talked to Trump about his relationship with the Patriots, who supported his candidacy. Trump is also close friends with the team’s owner Bob Kraft. The discussion starts at 8:42 in the video below. Pressed by O’Reilly, Trump predicted the Patriots would win by eight points (8:50). In the end, they won by six!
Weirdly, this is what Trump predicted in 2015:
Predictions as the game progressed
In the third quarter, the Falcons were up by three touchdowns. No Superbowl contender has ever won by coming from behind more than 10 points.
Hence this ESPN tweet:
Trump tweeted:
https://twitter.com/ReelDonaltTrump/status/828467051769561089
Someone crudely responded (see the Twitter feed) that he shouldn’t compare the Superbowl to the 216 election. Oh really?
The Wall Street Journal pronounced:
Donald J Trump Jr, who enjoyed a pre-game repast at home with his family, responded:
Victory for the Patriots
Once more, the usual pontificating pundits were proven wrong.
The Daily Mail has a good overall roundup of not only the game but also the drama surrounding it — as well as a lot of great photos. Emphases mine below:
Tom Brady held the Vince Lombardi trophy high above his head and told New England Patriots fans he was ‘taking this sucker home’ after the team defeated the Atlanta Falcons on Sunday night 34 – 28 in the first Super Bowl to ever go into overtime.
The quarterback broke down in tears after the game, in which the team managed to comeback from a 25 point deficit in the third quarter of the game to even the score and keep their hopes of yet another victory alive.
The Patriots then clinched the victory minutes into overtime when James White plunged past the goal line on the team’s opening drive in extra time.
It was a historic win for Brady and head coach Bell Belichick, who with the victory now each have five Super Bowl rings, the most of any player or coach in the history of the NFL.
Brady made history by also winning the Super Bowl MVP honor for the fourth time in history, more than any other player.
And he did it all in front of his mother Galynn Brady, who is suffering through an undisclosed illness and wore a bandanna over her head as she greeted her son after his victory.
Afterwards
Trump tweeted his congratulations:
The pundits had to walk back their words and predictions. Here’s FiveThirtyEight‘s Walt Hickey:
25 points
It was really one for the record books: No team has come back from a Super Bowl deficit of more than 10 points, and Tom Brady proved — to my chagrin — that he’s the best quarterback ever. He had more completions, pass attempts and passing yards in a Super Bowl than anyone else, ever. His team ran the most-ever offensive plays in the championship. The Pats put together the biggest comeback — 25 points! — in a Super Bowl ever. It’s the most ridiculous achievement — ever. [ESPN]
ESPN produced a series of memorable tweets:
The journey was not easy. The Patriots were hit by a series of penalties from the 2015 season which saw Brady benched at the beginning of the 2016 season. ESPN reports:
As owner Robert Kraft said in the days leading up to Super Bowl LI, Deflategate penalties levied by the NFL against Brady and the team had a deeply rooted impact on the 2016 Patriots. Brady was hit with a four-game suspension for the January 2015 incident that months of court battles couldn’t overturn. Meanwhile, the Patriots were fined $1 million and docked a first-round pick in 2016 and a fourth-round pick in 2017.
However, the Patriots, thanks to Belichick, won without Brady, so by the time he returned to the field:
on Oct. 9 in Cleveland, it felt like a home game, many fans taking advantage of Columbus Day weekend to make the trip to be there for that moment when Brady first took the field.
It had a Super Bowl-like feel to it, and what manifested itself the rest of the season was a region showering Brady with its appreciation and love on a daily basis. While Brady had his offensive line protecting him on the field, New England fans, as passionate as ever, were protective of his legacy.
ESPN also has a good play-by-play rundown — ‘Anatomy of a miracle’ — about a Superbowl that will be studied for years to come. There is also a video at the link. The article begins as follows:
Zero-point-two percent. Two in a thousand. The New England Patriots stunned the St. Louis Rams to win the first Super Bowl of the Bill Belichick-Tom Brady era during the 2001 playoffs, but even that upset can’t compare to the comeback New England pulled to beat the Atlanta Falcons 34-28 on Sunday night in Super Bowl LI. The Pats pieced together incredible play with fortuitous bounces and impeccable timing to overcome a Falcons team that had a 99.8 percent shot of claiming its first Super Bowl with 21 minutes to go.
What happened from then on was nothing short of a miracle. The Patriots needed just about everything to go right and had the vast majority of those moments swing their way.
As with so many other wins, ESPN concludes it’s not what the losing team does, it’s what they don’t do that determines the outcome. Worth noting!
Churchmouse Campanologist 
18 comments
February 7, 2017 at 10:38 pm
OIKOS™-Redaktion
Reblogged this on Die Erste Eslarner Zeitung – Aus und über Eslarn, sowie die bayerisch-tschechische Region!.
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February 8, 2017 at 12:12 pm
churchmouse
Thank you for the reblog, much appreciated!
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February 7, 2017 at 10:40 pm
OIKOS™-Redaktion
Hi, have you read this: http://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/3001-did-vatican-attempt-to-influence-u-s-election-catholics-ask-trump-administration-to-investigate
———–
What’s this? Do they really think someone will say the truth? 😉
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February 8, 2017 at 12:18 pm
churchmouse
Thank you for the link from The Remnant.
I had not seen the article. Interesting.
It raises some odd questions. To cite just one, why would the NSA monitor the activities of a conclave? It’s a bit conspiracy theorist to me, and it is unwise to pin the resignation and choice of a pope on the US government.
Any investigation into these questions would be better placed to come from someone at the Vatican who has seen what is really going on, then blows the whistle. Just my opinion.
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February 8, 2017 at 12:25 pm
OIKOS™-Redaktion
Hello, yes i also think this way. It very conspiracy, but some of our catholic members cant accept the chance to Pope Francis, or in clear: they can’t accept a former Jesuit becomes Pope. 😉
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February 8, 2017 at 12:35 pm
churchmouse
I grant you that, but isn’t it for Catholics to appeal to someone in the Church to sort out their problems? I’m sure several of Benedict XVI’s priests or theologians know the truth about the spiritual depravity of the Vatican.
I agree with the letter writers that the present pope has nothing Catholic about him outside of liberation theology. However, that’s not the fault of the NSA, John Podesta or Hillary Clinton.
My objection to the letter is that the signatories make it sound as if the Catholic Church is purely American. It is not. There is enough Church-generated effluent from around the world — thinking of the many cardinals involved — to degrade her without help from a US security agency and Democrats.
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February 8, 2017 at 12:53 pm
OIKOS™-Redaktion
Oh, yes! I also think, the try to etablish a only us-american Catholic Church as the greater part of the new evangelization promoted in the earlier 1990th. Some years ago the tried to assimilate all the other christian churches. In Germany as example the Watchtower Society. The real problem i think are the unsolved cases of abuse by Catholic priests. It seems this group just want to know how these cases, which unfortunately also concealed by Pope Benedict XVI., have come to light.
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February 8, 2017 at 12:59 pm
churchmouse
In which case they should be holding the pope’s feet to the fire. The same applies to his acolytes.
Paedophilia in the Catholic Church is a worldwide problem. I do not understand their logic in placing the problem at Trump’s feet.
It’s a problem of Church discipline. There have been enough exposes written over the years in various countries. Everyone knows about it. It’s almost as if the letter writers are afraid of confronting their own devilish clergy.
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February 8, 2017 at 1:17 pm
OIKOS™-Redaktion
My full approval. I had already written this to the Vatican, when Archbishop Daneels was still active in the apostolic signature. One of the perpetrators – church music director Georg Friedrich Zimmermann (+ 1984) came from my hometown He had presumably abused 80% of the now 50 – 70 year olds. Papst Brother George became only his successor at the Domspatzen, as Zimmermann’s long-known acts were made public to the investigative authorities. Georg Ratzinger described this change as “divine attachment”.
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February 8, 2017 at 1:23 pm
churchmouse
Thank you for your initiative. (I left the Catholic Church decades ago, but you did the right thing.)
Yes, I read your excellent posts on Zimmermann — good work!
I wonder how much of this would have happened without Vatican II. What do you think?
As for the Jesuits, going back to a previous comment here, while they may be intellectual greats, I doubt their godliness. ‘Holy’ is not a word I would apply to any of them. ‘Men of God’? No, not in the slightest.
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February 8, 2017 at 1:44 pm
OIKOS™-Redaktion
Many thanks! Meanwhile, I must share your assessment of the Jesuits. Until now, I had only met a single Jesuit, whom I would call real integrity. Unfortunately, he died mysteriously a few years ago, at the age of less than 50, in the context of my reconnaissance efforts.
How much of these terrible things would have happened without Vatican II?
I do not think any of these terrible things. The Vaticanum II was, in my opinion, only intended to ensure the continuation of the concordat (Reichskonkordat 1933), which was very money-worthy for Germany.
Above all, religious freedom was not known and in fact never accepted by the Roman-Catholic Church.
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February 8, 2017 at 1:56 pm
churchmouse
Thank you for your response — much appreciated.
I am sorry to read of the mysterious death of your Jesuit friend. A powerful Church investigator should look into the order much more closely on all fronts, worldwide. They have probably committed a lot of nefarious deeds that need exposure.
Very interesting insight on Vatican II. I did not know about the concordat nor its worth to Germany. Hmm!
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February 8, 2017 at 2:09 pm
OIKOS™-Redaktion
Oh thank you! The term “church investigator” gave me a cousin of my mother, a Catholic priest. That I could become that – I had studied law and theological theology at the same time, wanted to finish my studies at Gregoriana, the Catholic Church in Germany had fear until now.
The Concordat with Hitler finances not only the Catholic Church in Germany and Austria, but over 50% the Vatican.
Sorry, information on the concordat is only available in german language: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichskonkordat
I refer to this concordat as a treaty with the devil, because the money for the Catholic Church in the face of the financial situation in Germany could only come from the Jews murdered this way.
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February 8, 2017 at 2:31 pm
churchmouse
Wow, I did not know that. Thank you.
Is that why Pius XII did not speak out much at the time? Here is an article I just found from a 1999 edition of Vanity Fair:
http://www.vanityfair.com/style/1999/10/pope-pius-xii-199910
Excerpt (emphases mine):
‘By the middle of 1997, I was in a state of moral shock. The material I had gathered amounted not to an exoneration but to an indictment … The evidence was explosive. It showed for the first time that Pacelli was patently, and by the proof of his own words, anti-Jewish. It revealed that he had helped Hitler to power and at the same time undermined potential Catholic resistance in Germany. It showed that he had implicitly denied and trivialized the Holocaust, despite having reliable knowledge of its true extent. And, worse, that he was a hypocrite, for after the war he had retrospectively taken undue credit for speaking out boldly against the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews.’
It’s a long article, and I have not read it all yet (will do so now). Please feel free to comment on it, if you like.
Was your mother’s cousin ever afraid of doing his work, i.e. opposing the powers that be? Did he succeed? You must be very proud of him.
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February 8, 2017 at 3:05 pm
OIKOS™-Redaktion
Unfortunately, I still do not know enough about my mother’s grand-uncle. But yes, I am proud. Currently, I am researching something about his life. He was in St. Meinrad, Indiana.
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Pope Pius XII is really a matter for himself. He had prepared the Concordat as nuncio, in Munich. Two Jesuits were said to have edited Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”. As I had learned only a few months ago, all the bishops in the Diocese of Regensburg, the diocese with the most abuses of clergy, were supporters of the National Socialists. The dom choir “Regensburger Domspatzen” – the eldest dom choir of the world – was Hitler’s favorite chorus.
Thanks for the Vanitiy Fair article!
Currently the matter is still going on. The Diocese of Regensburg still has contrasts here. So-called “money pools” have been created during the last centuries (by clerics and i have to say “Nazis”, in order to create a “new Sudetenland”, wthout knowledge by the czech autorities by straw men. We speak about hundreds billion of Euros, also given by nobility houses, which had a lot of possession in former Bohemia before the end of the Second World.Here in Germany there is still a falsification of history: http://www.regensburg-digital.de/die-domspatzen-als-kulturelles-aufbauwerk-des-fuehrers/25012017/
Sometimes I ask myself whether I had not been careful in studying the history, or had really not even heard of it at all. 😉
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February 8, 2017 at 3:30 pm
churchmouse
The same questions were going around in my mind, too. You are not alone in that respect.
Your information is news to me. And it is good to see that the matter is being investigated. Everyone — even non-Catholics — deserve to know the truth. Amazing that the Regensburger choir was Hitler’s favourite. Oh, my. And that, oddly enough, Regensburg is the diocese with the most abuses of clergy. Hmm!
There’s a lot to be uncovered here, especially regarding donations by the nobility.
I think a lot of what happened was — and is — not deemed ‘to be in the public interest’. I will never forget when Francois Mitterand’s illegitimate daughter — by then 17 — emerged in the French press in the 1990s. Everyone in the media knew about her, but they never revealed that she existed, because ‘it was not in the public interest’, even though taxpayers were financing her — and her mother. What other money had he ‘earned’ other than public? She came up a couple of years ago in a French talk radio discussion, and the media people there defended themselves once again with the same argument.
Of course, perhaps some of these documents had to be kept under lock and key for a number of decades, just like sensitive documents elsewhere. The Vatican is a sovereign state, so one presumes they have policies on this sort of thing.
If Catholics in Europe and North America knew the truth about the Vatican and Nazi Germany, they would be up in arms. I read a lot of defenders of Pius XII but rarely any in-depth history or criticism. I might do a post on this soon.
No surprise, either, that Jesuits helped edit Mein Kampf! That was another new gem of information. Thanks for that.
Here’s another article I just found:
http://www.liberalslikechrist.org/Catholic/1933Concordat.html
Re your mother’s relative, if he was at St Meinrad Abbey, he must have been a Benedictine? My mother always spoke highly of the abbey:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Meinrad_Archabbey
http://www.saintmeinrad.edu/
Incidentally, St Meinrad (797-861) was a Hohenzollern. He also attended a Benedictine abbey school:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meinrad_of_Einsiedeln
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February 8, 2017 at 3:51 pm
OIKOS™-Redaktion
There’s a lot to be uncovered here, especially regarding donations by the nobility.
Oh, yes. The nobility inside germany always has been/ and is a very important group. Someone also have to know, Johannes von Thurn & Taxis maybe was involved into the abuse cases.
‘Here’s another article I just found:
http://www.liberalslikechrist.org/Catholic/1933Concordat.html
‘Re your mother’s relative, if he was at St Meinrad Abbey, he must have been a Benedictine? My mother always spoke highly of the abbey’:
Yes, he was a Benedictine. The abbey must be very important. My mother’s great-uncle has done his missionary work through almost all the US states, according to ancient letters we have. He died in 1935.
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February 9, 2017 at 10:31 pm
churchmouse
God blessed your great-great-uncle greatly. As he died early in the 20th century, he was doing the Lord’s work. How marvellous to be able to travel the United States in His service.
May His blessings continue to be with you, too.
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