NEWS
1998 NEWS STORIES
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ARTICLES
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ROAMIN' CATHOLIC
Contents © 1998
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.
NEWS
APRIL 1998
IN A HOTLY CONTESTED RACE to fill the 22nd Congressional District seat left vacant by deceased Congressman Walter Capps, Democrat Lois Capps, wife of the former congressman, beat Republican Thomas Bordonaro with 53 percent of the vote. In this race for the congressional district that includes Santa Barbara, Capps and Bordonaro represented opposite ends of the spectrum on each of the campaign issues. Capps, a supporter of partial birth abortion, stated emphatically that she would vote to uphold President Clinton's veto of the Partial Birth Abortion ban, while Bordonaro promised to vote to override the veto of the law passed by both houses of congress. In January of this year, Bordonaro had beat Republican "moderate" Brooks Firestone. The Catholic Alliance had thrown their support behind Bordonaro.
This election saw a great deal of grass roots campaigning by the Santa Barbara pro-life community. Mary Ellen McCaffery of the California ProLife League said she had never seen so many pro-lifers involved in any campaign before. Ironically, many Catholic churches in the Santa Barbara area were intentionally frustrating efforts by pro-lifers to spread any type of literature that would have alerted voters to the importance of this election. This included banning not only pro-life literature but even non-partisan voter guides. The most blatant example of these efforts against pro-lifers took place at the Old Mission, Santa Barbara. The Old Mission had organized a team of parishioners for the sole purpose of removing literature put out by pro-lifers. According to Rick Heist who was distributing voter information guides at the Old Mission by placing them on windshields of cars in the parking lot, the "pastoral assistant", Pat Sandall, confronted him and pro-lifer Nancy Ulmer telling them it was illegal for them to put their literature on the cars. Heist and Ulmer then produced a copy of the Pruneyard decision, a California Supreme Court decision that held that parking lots are a public forum for the purpose of distributing literature. Sandall then turned to one of the team members who happened to be an attorney and showed him the Pruneyard decision. The attorney confirmed that Heist and Ulmer had every legal right to distribute their literature. Sandall then replied that "she would then have to break the law because she was not going to stop removing literature." During the confrontation Sandall physically accosted Ulmer. When the Mission called Ms. Sandall about this altercation, she refused comment. When asked if there had been a confrontation between her and the pro-lifers, she told this reporter that she would not term the incident a "confrontation" but rather an "exchange." "That's as far as I want to take it" was her comment.
Another veteran pro-lifer was confronted by the pastor of Holy Cross parish in Santa Barbara. "As we were almost finishing distributing our voter guides as well as political literature, the pastor approached us and told us not to distribute the literature." When told that the California Supreme Court allowed this activity, the pastor shot back saying that he still did not like what they were doing, and that despite the decision, he still did not approve of the activity. The pastor told her: "the parishioners will think I gave you permission to do this."
Pat Riehle of Santa Maria noted that her parish, St. Louis de Montfort Church, stated in the bulletin for the Second Sunday of Lent that "[o]ur Church does not condone any distribution of flyers on the windshields of vehicles in and around the parking lot areas."
The Catholic parishes near Santa Barbara were not the only ones who frustrated the efforts of pro-lifers. The Interfaith Alliance of California, based in San Francisco, sent out a mailing addressed to" Pastor/Religious leaders" cautioning them against the Catholic Alliance, whom they painted as "extremists."
A GRAND TOTAL for the Los Angeles cathedral has been given by officials of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. As reported in the Thursday, March 20, 1998 Los Angeles Times, the cathedral project at Temple and Hill Streets in Los Angeles will cost a total of $163.2 million. According to the Times, construction costs, "including site work, security, and off-site utilities and improvements" come to $110 million. The $163.2 million figure covers furnishings, fixtures and fees for a complex that will include, besides the cathedral itself, a three-level parking garage, a three-acre plaza, the cathedral office, a conference center and Mahony's two-story rectory.
This new estimate is over triple the original $45 million figure originally given for the cathedral project. Later, the cost was estimated at $50 million. Earlier in March, Cardinal Mahony stated that the "absolute cap" for construction costs would be $102 million. "We will build to the cap," he told the Times. "The cap rules."
According to a March 5 Times report, the Los Angeles Archdiocese had never used the $50 million figure as an estimate for the project at Temple and Hill Streets. "Fifty million is the figure we used at St. Vibiana," said Cardinal Mahony--others had applied it to the new cathedral site. The Temple and Hill cathedral itself, said Mahony, will be twice the size of the one that could be built on the site of the current St. Vibiana's Cathedral.
At a news conference on Thursday, March 20 archdiocesan officials released a list of nearly 100 donors who together have contributed $110.5 million to the cathedral project. The largest donations to date--$35 million--are from the Dan Murphy and the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey foundations. Other contributors include the Walt Disney Company; former owner and current chairman of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Peter O'Malley; comedian Bob Hope; Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan; Betsy Bloomingdale, whose in-laws founded Bloomingdale's department stores; and Roy and Patty Disney, who made a private donation to the project. Archdiocesan officials would not disclose specific amounts for individual donors.
ACCORDING TO the February 27 Los Angeles Times, the board of the Queen of Angels-Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center has planned to sell the not-for-profit Catholic-run hospital to Tenet Healthcare Corporation, a for-profit healthcare chain, which has offered $86 million for the hospital. Cardinal Mahony has opposed the sale, and threatens to take the matter to the Vatican if the hospital board does not cancel the transaction.
On one side of the debate stands Mahony, the hospital's medical staff, a community coalition, and a labor union, and on the other, the hospital board. Opponents of the sale worry that certain hospital services--such as obstetrics and emergency care--will be threatened if a profit-oriented corporation assumes direction; these services, they say, may not prove profitable enough to maintain. Another fear is that the millions of dollars of charitable services the hospital provides yearly may, in the long run, be threatened, though Tenet has vowed to continue funding $15 million of charitable care a year--a figure opponents say may be too low. Still, some consumer advocates worry about for-profit corporations taking over the health care industry in the United States.
Cardinal Mahony has taken the higher ground. Last year, according to the Times, His Eminence wrote: "As health care becomes more and more viewed as a commodity to be sold for profit rather that as a public good, the basic values and principles which have maintained the integrity of health care delivery have become compromised." Mahony's position relative to the sale is strong: Queen of Angel's bylaws bind the hospital to adhere to the canons of the Catholic Church, over which His Eminence has interpretive authority. This was acknowledged by the California attorney general's office, which said it would defer to the Church's judgment in this matter. The attorney general's office must approve the sale of the hospital.
The cardinal, however, may face a setback--from the Vatican. Among the 124 hospitals operated by Tenet Health Care in the United States, five are Catholic hospitals. One of these hospitals is the St. Louis University Hospital whose president, Jesuit Father Lawrence Biondi, approved a $300 million sale to Tenet. Though this sale was vigorously opposed by St. Louis Archbishop Justin Rigali, along with Cardinals Bernard Law of Boston, John O'Connor of New York, and James Hickey of Washington, it was, nevertheless approved by the Vatican. Cardinal Eduardo Martinez Somalo, prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Religious Life and Cardinal Pio Laghi, prefect for the Congregation for Catholic Education on February 18 told Jesuit Superior General Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach that the Vatican had approved the sale of the hospital to Tenet. According to the National Catholic Reporter, the Vatican attached four conditions to the sale: that "Tenet will observe Catholic principles and practices of health care and provide for spiritual needs at the hospital; all students, interns, and residents will follow U.S. bishops' Ethical and Religious Directives for Health Care Services; Tenet will care for the poor at the same level as the hospital has in the past;" and "Tenet will continue existing education programs in pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology in accord with those at other Catholic hospitals."
IN AN ARTICLE, "Divisions, Dialogue and the Catholicity of the Church," published in the January 31, 1998 edition of the Jesuit journal, America, Father Thomas P. Rausch, S.J., chair of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, deplores the division in the Church between what he calls the "Catholic Left" and the "Conservative Catholic Subculture." Rausch criticizes the extremism of the Catholic Left, as when feminists groups attempt to say Mass without a priest, or remove all gender in references to God. However, referring to an invocation calling God "Creator, Redeemer and Life-giving Spirit of God," Rausch says, despite his "misgivings about the text, it obviously represented a pastoral effort to pray in a more inclusive fashion, one that moved beyond the androcentric character of so much of our God-language." Rausch also is not happy with theology that is too academic and out of touch with moral and pastoral concerns. He sympathizes with conservative Catholics who mistrust this theology, and refers to his experience with Catholic university students ignorant of basic Church teachings, such as the Eucharist.
However, Rausch's criticisms seemed aimed primarily at conservative Catholics. "The mainstream Catholic conservative movement," writes Rausch, "represents an ultramontane position, a magisterial maximalism that sees all questions in the contemporary church as resolvable simply by appealing to the papal magisterium. For this group, acceptance of Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical on artificial contraception, is the touchstone of orthodoxy." "This group" includes The Wanderer, Catholics United for the Faith, Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, EWTN, Thomas Aquinas College (Santa Paula, California), and Fidelity magazine. Others included in the "subculture" are neo-conservatives, such as Michael Novak and Father Richard John Neuhaus; the "new apologists" (Peter Kreeft, Scott and Kimberly Hahn, Thomas Howard, the late Sheldon Vanauken and Dale Vree "all of them associated with the New Oxford Review." et al.) who offer "a polemical apologetics that has much in common with Protestant fundamentalism;" and others, such as the Roman Catholic Faithful and Father Joseph Fessio, S.J. of Ignatius Press who "skillfully exploit the differences between the U.S. bishops, who are trying to hold together a diverse and pluralistic church, and Rome."
Father Rausch is particularly upset with "three ultraconservative papers, the San Diego News Notes, the Los Angeles Lay Catholic Mission and The Faith, in the San Francisco Bay area--all funded by a conservative Catholic publisher" who "regularly attack the Cardinal Archbishop of Los Angeles in especially ugly terms. Criticizing the ministries and educational programs of the Archdiocese, particularly its ministry to gays and lesbians and its annual religious education congress, the largest in the country, these papers well deserve the adjective 'mean-spirited.' One article, entitled 'The Only Thing Missing Was the Golden Calf," attacked the closing liturgy at the 1996 congress at which Cardinal Mahony presided, quoting two congress observers who called it 'pagan' and 'blasphemous.'"
In his article, Father Rausch calls for a unity in the Church that allows for a "legitimate diversity." Catholicism, he writes, "erects a big tent." He informs us that heresy signifies, it seems, not false doctrine, but "being sectarian rather than catholic." He assures his readers that Catholics in the parishes are convinced "that the ancient structure of the Catholic Church" will not collapse "if Catholics use a more inclusive language in their prayer, stand during the eucharistic prayer, welcome and support their gay and lesbian children or disagree with the Pope over birth control or the ordination of women." We Catholics, he says, must step beyond our "personal certainties and absolutist positions" and find ways "to acknowledge our own failings and reach out to those who see things differently, so that we may rediscover the good in one another and the truth in positions different from our own."
FOR THE FOURTH YEAR IN A ROW, Roman Catholic Faithful stood outside the Los Angeles archdiocesan Religious Education Congress, held in Anaheim. The week prior to the congress, Roger Cardinal Mahony dismissed the protesters as "simple people with no influence" in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. Roman Catholic Faithful chairman, Kenneth Fisher, notes that as long as the congress features speakers such as Father Richard Rohr and Father Michael Crosby, Roman Catholic Faithful will continue to protest the event: "As long as they have teachers there who are teaching in clear contradiction to the Roman Catholic Church on such matters as women priests, homosexual conduct, married priests, liturgical dance, we will be there and other places as well." Fisher's group has vowed to demonstrate at all of the archdiocesan events where Church teachings are contradicted.
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF CATHOLIC Diocesan Lesbian and Gay Ministries Director Father James Schexnayder of Oakland updated his members on the group's doings in the April 1998 newsletter, which has a new name: Reclaim, replacing NACDLGM News.
Reviewing the organization's January mid-year board of directors meeting, Schexnayder noted the organization's growth among U.S. dioceses, but complained about "well-funded far right attacks" against them. The same issue includes a short interview by Fr. Peter Liuzzi, head of the Los Angeles Archdiocese's gay outreach office, with NACDLGM's new episcopal moderator, Bishop Gabino Zavala, an auxiliary bishop in Los Angeles. After calling the group's successes "a miracle," Liuzzi quoted statements by Zavala that the Church needs to be "welcoming and inclusive" to gays, who have been "discriminated against, judged and excluded within the Church by some."
Says one Catholic activist who attended NACDLGM's September, 1997 conference in Long Beach: "These are code words, but everyone reading knows what they mean--they are trying to force the Church to accept homosexuality as 'normal' and to change Church teaching against the immorality of homosexual sex. This is clear to anyone who attended their conference. These people walked around hand in hand in their Dignity T-shirts, talking openly about how they consider their lifestyle to be good and healthy."
FOR CATHOLICS GROPING for ways to deepen their experience of Lent, the March 6 Tidings offered a unique alternative--"A Lenten mini-retreat with 'Nothing Sacred.'" Yes, the controversial television program can be a vehicle for Lenten reflection for Tidings readers, according to an archdiocesan pastoral telecommunications specialist, Rev. Anthony Scannell, OFM Cap., and Sister Gretchen Hailer, RSHM, who authored this "first in a series of articles" detailing the "retreat."
"The Second Sunday of Lent," write the authors, "centers on the Transfiguration of Jesus, as he faces his passion and death. But the disciples don't 'get it.' They don't know how to handle mystery, or the possibility of suffering, or the threat of change. 'Transfiguration,' like conversion, means seeing things differently, being open to a new perspective, accepting the mystery of life in people and walking the way of the cross with them." The "Nothing Sacred" episode, "Kindred Spirits," say the authors provides fruitful meditation along these lines, for it "is a story of conflicting personalities, and how they handle power and control. It is a call to conversion and change." The subjects for reflection include power role switches, a father unable to face the birth of his Down's syndrome child, a controversy over the parish soup kitchen. Scannell and Hailer ask readers to meditate on these, asking themselves certain important questions: Do they (the readers) help the poor? Do the characters undergo real conversion? What are Father Ray's feelings when the Down's syndrome child is born? Is Father Ray's luncheon invitation to Father Martin a "eucharistic moment?"