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Silence That Priest!

Compton Pastor Challenges Mayor and City Council

By Christopher Zehnder

Last June, the Compton city mayor took an unusual step -- he requested that the Los Angeles archdiocese silence one of its priests. Mayor Omar Bradley of Compton petitioned Cardinal Mahony to order Father Stan Bosch to stay away from all future city council meetings. Monsignor Richard Loomis, archdiocesan vicar for clergy, who met with Bradley and his spokesman, Frank Wheaton, refused to entertain the mayor's request; Loomis told the Los Angeles Times that the archdiocese fully supported Bosch and thought his actions fully consistent with Church social teaching.

What had Father Bosch done to earn Mayor Bradley's ire, and the archdiocese's approval?

Last May, Father Bosch, pastor of Our Lady of Victory and Sagrado Corazon churches in Compton, began taking members of his parish to city council meetings to protest a council proposal to disband the Compton city police department and replace it with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's department. It was not that
Father Bosch objected to the sheriff's department -- he said that he did not really care what law enforcement agency the city used; rather, Father Bosch called the police question a "lightning rod issue" around which he could stir his people to become politically involved in their city.

Though in the late 1970s Compton was mostly black, today the tables have turned. Latino citizens now compose about 70 percent of Compton's population of 90,000, while the black population has dwindled to about 30 percent. Since Latinos have not been politically involved, this change has not been reflected in the city government; according to the Times, the Compton city council has never had a Latino member. Since he thought such a decision (as to disband the police force) should be submitted to a referendum of the voters, Father Bosch chose this issue to educate his parishioners in the art of politics.

Father Bosch told me he traced his concern over the course of Compton politics to the beginning of his pastorate there, three years ago. Last September, he said, the corruption in city politics became more evident when Mayor Bradley suspended Compton police chief Hourie Taylor and police captain Percy Perrodin "without any probable cause." Father Bosch said that he and others started to ask questions about what was happening at city hall. This questioning, said the priest, "was at the same time when we were preparing people for the primary election in November, and the propositions which were difficult to understand. There were no study guides in Spanish, so we started to bring people together to try to connect the Gospel with everyday life and political life.

"Then in January," continued Bosch, "two detectives and two officers were suspended because the police department proclaimed a vote of no confidence against the mayor for some internal reasons. From that place, I started to ask more questions and to bring our people to meetings, simply to ask for some accountability in terms of what is happening in the city. On the heels of that suspension, right after the mayor offered his state of the city address, lauding the police department, he started to advocate for the advent of the sheriff's department to take over and to dismantle the police department. Again, we started to ask the 'why' questions -- what was the provocation? In the meantime, I had been speaking with the officers. They came by here revealing to me some difficult things that are happening in the city. So it's really been a question of asking some accountability on the part of the city. We were asking for simultaneous translations [at city council meetings], since Compton is becoming 70 percent Latino; and we asked for a voice on a vote about a decision with the Sheriff's department. It went unheeded."

Father Bosch stirred his parishioners to act. According to the Times, up to 400 of his parishioners -- men, women pushing strollers, many carrying signs saying "Let the People Decide," and "Si, Se Puede" -- began attending city council meetings in May. At almost every meeting, protesters confronted council members, sometimes interrupting proceedings to demand simultaneous translations in Spanish. On Tuesday, June 9, city police set up barricades around the council chambers after all 160 seats in the chambers had been filled. Outside, protesters, including Father Bosch, waved copies of a city law that requires all council proceedings to be open to everyone.

Frank Wheaton, spokesman for Mayor Bradley, told me that it was the confrontation in the council chambers that led Bradley to ask the archdiocese to silence Father Bosch. At that time, said Wheaton, both he and the mayor thought Father Bosch's intentions were "less than honorable." "The mayor and I visited with the archdiocese," continued Wheaton, "because the mayor was trying to stave off any potential violence that might have occurred in the council meetings. And that's when Father Stan was bringing two to three hundred persons to every city council meeting, many of whom were there for destructive reasons only."

Was there any actual violence at the meetings? No, said Wheaton, "because we increased security; we certainly had metal detectors; we did everything reasonable and possible to place security within the council meetings so that it would prevent any kind of uprising. Basically, after two or three of those meetings, the mayor decided that probably the only way to stave off that kind of continuous disruption was to appeal to Cardinal Mahony. We met with them [i.e., Monsignor Loomis], and asked that they do something, at least have a conversation with Father Stan to understand his motivation, because at that time we certainly didn't. They, I guess, had conversations with Father Stan and, ultimately, basically supported Father Stan's activities -- which presented another problem. But rather than react to what we presupposed to be a greater problem, we just increased security so that we could at least contain whatever destructive forces that might be within Father Stan's ranks."

I asked Wheaton whether he had certain knowledge of any individuals or groups who were at the council meetings "for destructive reasons only." "Yeah," he replied, "of course, we knew that there were trouble makers, whether they were intentionally planted, or whether they were just a part of it. Just like you have organizers with the BNC [Black National Congress] that are here in Los Angeles, on the payroll, paid to disrupt. We knew that those kinds of persons were very much a part of the organized effort by Father Stan."

I asked next what groups Wheaton referred to. "I can't say the names," said Bradley's spokesman. "I don't know the names, but there are persons, you know, who are sometimes paid and sometimes encouraged to be disruptive and to be disrespectful and to basically agitate, and we knew that those kinds of persons were there strictly to try to solicit and elicit a reaction from the mayor."

How did he and the mayor know that these "agitators" were not merely citizens who were unused to the protocol of council meetings? "Well because," said Wheaton, "as we reported to the archdiocese, Father Stan was being protected by known gang members, very blatantly identified gang members."

A priest protected by gang members? When I asked Father Bosch about this, he said he had never received protection from gang members, or from anyone else besides his golden retriever, "Maggie," with whom he walks the streets talking to city residents, including drug dealers and gang members.

Matters seemed to change for the better at the Tuesday, June 27 city council meeting when, according to the Times, Father Bosch and the Reverend Jerome Fischer of Little Zion Baptist Church in Compton asked Mayor Bradley and council members to work with them for peace in the city. The response from the mayor and council was conciliatory, according to the Times, though the meeting ended violently when Bradley lunged at deputy district attorney Eric Perrodin, the former police captain's brother and Bradley's rival for the mayoral office. The next day, the mayor issued a statement in which he apologized for his actions. "My frustrations got the best of me," said Bradley. "I trust that the citizens of Compton and the world community will understand that this aberration will not deter my passion and commitment to restore peace to this resilient community."

Father Bosch told me that he has, since the meeting, sent three invitations to Bradley asking him to meet with him and other religious leaders to discuss their differences. The invitations, said Bosch, have gone unheeded -- despite the fact that Mayor Bradley, on Wednesday, June 28, issued a statement saying he was looking forward to just such a meeting.

Frank Wheaton confirmed that the mayor was eager for what Wheaton called "spiritual summits" with religious leaders -- an idea, said Wheaton, that he himself suggested to the mayor. Father Bosch, Wheaton suggested, misunderstood the mayor. "Father Stan," he said, "was basically trying to encourage more Latin participation in city government, which is no problem at all. In fact, this mayor has the highest order of respect for his Latino constituents, based on the fact that he's learned the language and he speaks it fluently; and he's been instrumental in the hiring of many Hispanic persons." Wheaton indicated that a new spirit of reciprocity now reigns in the city: Compton, he said, is looking to purchase translation devices for city council meetings while Father Bosch is teaching his people the proper protocol to be observed at city council meetings.

When I asked Wheaton how these spiritual summits would be conducted, his answers were none too clear. He cited "the first spiritual summit," held a month ago, between Father Bosch and Compton religious leaders as an example, though no one from the city attended. Instead of the spiritual summits, Wheaton spoke of the recent influx of immigrants which has strained relations between blacks and Latinos in Compton. "Many new influences" have come into the city with this immigration, he said, "which is another reason why the sheriffs and the law enforcement agency create a possible remedy for what might have been misperceived as a haven for crime, vis-à-vis narcotics, murder, robbery, you know felonious crimes, because Compton was not protected by an agency that has a capability of containing crime."

Wheaton indicated that, now that the city council has voted to replace the Compton city police with county sheriff's deputies, Bosch's motivation for organizing his parishioners is gone. Though "those forces in the community who have always opposed the sherriff's move" filed for injunctive relief from the courts, said Wheaton, "the city prevailed. And of course nothing was finalized," he continued, "because the judge took it under submission, which meant that the city could continue to go forward in the transition process. But that's what Father Stan was helping to organize against, and that's what his peaceful intention was; but once the vote was taken, it was a done deal, and so now I'm not so sure they have an issue around which to rally."

Father Bosch disagrees. The police issue, he said, was but the beginning. The city, he said, had to address various issues: homelessness, drug addiction, underemployment, and the use of federal and state grants to the city. When I asked Wheaton about these issues, he said that the city has already committed grant money to community projects such as juvenile diversion programs, after school activities, sports, "so forth and so on" -- though nothing has been accomplished yet.

Father Bosch objects, he said, to Wheaton's idea of a spiritual summit. Wheaton, he said, wants to include not only Compton religious leaders, but members of greater Los Angeles religious groups, including the Moslems. Bosch thinks that Wheaton wants to turn the "whole thing into a race piece." "It's not a race piece," he said, "but a participation issue."

I asked Father Bosch how, as a priest, he justified becoming so involved in secular politics. "Our Catholic tradition has been very involved in the political process from its infancy," he said. "I use with our people the example of our pope's recent travels to the Holy Land and Egypt; it was an absolutely political trip, attempting to be an advocate and instrument for peace and healing."

Father Bosch said that, in the Catholic tradition, priests are not called away from secular, but from partisan politics. "I would never support one candidate over another," he said, "or denigrate one politician for another; but we go after issues quite aggressively, because the Gospel is intimately connected with life. And the word 'politics' come from the Greek word meaning, 'the life of the city,' and if the Gospel doesn't have something to say about the life of the city.... It is important that we awaken in people the reality that the power of Jesus is really a power to transform the society, that we're called to be co-creators with God, every day, in the market place. To negate the fact that corruption and injustice is around us, is really to walk blindly and to separate the gospel message from our day-to-day life."

"We also have ," he continued, "over a hundred year tradition of Catholic social teaching. There are principles in that tradition by which we live our lives -- participation, the rights and dignity of human persons, the common good, care for the environment, option for the poor, among others. We need to connect those kinds of principles and how we are looking at peoples' lives and how folk are suffering, literally, in a place like Compton, in order to make the world a better place."

Father Bosch does not think the Church is a "social service agency;" but neither does he think it merely a social hall. "The North American bishops," he said, "have been very clear that the struggle for justice is integral to the Gospel. If there are injustices around us, I believe the Gospel calls us to name those. I don't think the pope or the Gospel is a mechanism to talk about political things, but I think if we are not addressing the injustices around us, we are not being faithful to the Gospel."

Churches, said Father Bosch, have become social agencies by encouraging "co-dependence," which he defines as adapting behavior "around the weaknesses of others, rather than around their strengths." Father Bosch said he asked himself the question, "what does it mean to help?" Rather than keeping people dependent, he discovered that true helping is calling forth people's strengths. Jesus, he said, "called forth the strengths of people. As the man was sitting by the pool of Bethsaida for thirty-seven years, saying, 'poor me, nobody will put me in the pool' -- Jesus didn't say, 'oh, I feel so sorry for you, let me help you;' he said, 'get up!' So when people come in need, in addiction, or homeless, when we have monies -- and we keep charity monies aside -- we ask people to come and work with us for a while. When we've had break-ins, I've gone to court to offer alternative sentencing for men to come to do social or community service, here."

In the Compton political scene, Father Bosch calls forth people's strengths by "developing leaders and people who might be candidates to bring this place to a place of healing. Over and over, our coalition for change and other groups have wanted to rally behind me because they're looking for someone to lead them. I say, no, my role and place here is a pastoral one, to facilitate healing; it's not to be the front man, necessarily."

Teaching people the political process, how to register to vote or become citizens are also important to Bosch. Bosch, too, says he also emphasizes peaceful resistance in the tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

For Father Bosch, part of being an active citizen is to be serious about life issues. He said he thinks that "speaking about a consistent life ethic is very important. I tell people, 'we can talk about being pro-life, we must start looking at some of the elements that are swaying the public today into anti-life dispositions -- such as [the idea] that life in our society has value to the extent that it produces. Consumerism seems to be a demi-god in our world today, and so unborn life is not valuable, because it is not producing; the euthanasia bills won't go away, because life in its ultimate stages is not producing. So, I think for us to be pro-life, also, we need to be creative in how we are speaking about the roots of those kinds of stances and dispositions and the influences that sway our people into anti-life types of decisions."

To keep his priorities straight, Father Bosch said, "I need to be critiqued every day as pastor and priest by our team and our people. And we ask that all the time -- what are we doing here in the name of Jesus? And we try to be clear about our mission declaration, also, and keep that before our people and allow that to guide us. We have articulated our mission very well -- 'To be a witness to the city of Compton by our gathering as a community to search for Jesus the Light. We desire to reach out to those who need us. We attempt to know, to understand and love one another and to share with the world as we announce that the reign of God is at hand. Concern for the poor and abandoned, while making an active apostle of every parishioner, we will evangelize on the streets, looking for the lost sheep as we are in the active process of spiritual and theological formation for ourselves.'"

And the reign of God, what is that? "That Jesus invites us to a new way of being," answered Father Bosch, "in relationship through Him, with God. This bespeaks or connotes intimacy with God and, therefore, a very essential connection among ourselves."

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