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Contents © 1998
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.
LETTERS
SEPTEMBER 1998
SUBSTANTIAL ERRORS
In reference to the article by Maggie Garcia, "She's Okay, Vote for Her" [September 1998 Mission], I must point out that there are substantial errors in her story. In her desire to ridicule the Catholic Church, she writes without knowing the facts required. I will respond only to those allegations which are directly about me.
Allegation: "...pastor, Monsignor Wilbur Davis, introduced Sanchez from the pulpit praising the freshman congresswoman's record in Congress." Fact: I spoke from the presider's chair, not the pulpit, at the end of the Mass at the time of the announcements. I simply said that the congresswoman was present. At all Masses, every Sunday, we welcome visitors, and if there are distinguished visitors or groups present, we say a welcoming word. We are the parish closest to Disneyland, and we have many visitors. Thus the custom we have. I did not say a single word of endorsement or praise. I would never do that for any candidate. I have always been very careful about that.
Allegation: "Sanchez had called him and asked to be introduced during the Mass." Fact: Her office called the parish and left a message that she would be here. There was no request that she be introduced.
Allegation: "Monsignor Davis seemed unfazed by the parishioners' concerns." Fact: This is a hostile interpretation lacking substance. It also happens to be false.
Promoting rancor and division seems to be the agenda of the Lay Catholic Mission. Thus, there is little commitment to truth and understanding. This saddens me, for the role of the Catholic press should be to have a rigorous commitment to accuracy, truth, understanding and community for the building up of the Body of Christ.
Rev. Monsignor. Wilbur Davis
Pastor, St. Boniface Church
Anaheim
Editor's note: Maggie Garcia interviewed several parishioners present at the March 1 Mass at St. Boniface, who witnessed to the details presented in our article.
A SLEEPING GIANT
My profound thanks for your article on the Declaration of Loyalty and Grievance which I am planning to send to the Holy Father within the next few months (and, God-willing, every pastor of every parish in the archdiocese as well) [See "News", June 1998]. Before you ran your article, I had a half-dozen signatories and several other sympathizers who were in full agreement, but for varying reasons were not willing to sign a public document of this nature. (For the most part, they work for or with the archdiocese--or plan to at some point in the future--and fear reprisals.) The problem with getting support for a document of this kind is that those who work closely enough with the archdiocese to know it is true tend to be those who have something to lose by daring to say so publicly. "Whistle-blowers" always take a risk.
Anyway, your article changed the situation tremendously. I am reminded how one of America's former enemies, General Yamamoto, who planned the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, said later: "I fear we may have awakened a sleeping giant." I think lay Catholics loyal to Rome are also a sleeping giant, of sorts, and I believe God is using your publication to awaken them. In the two weeks since your article reached mailboxes, I have received ten requests by mail, two by e-mail, and three by phone or in person. The requests have come from persons in widely varied locations, ranging from Anaheim and Long Beach to Somis and Santa Barbara. Several of the requests were accompanied by statements promising to get other signatories. As the effort continues to "snowball" I believe we may--with God's help--be able to influence the course of our archdiocese away from its present corruptions, towards its right and proper direction: Rome.
We can remind our leaders, as they used to remind us: As you are Christians, you must be Romans.
I still welcome any inquiries or requests for copies at these addresses: 8244 Laurelgrove Ave., N. Hollywood, CA 91605; or e-mail: larmarcarstens@compuserve.com. Thanks, once again, and God bless you for your work.
L. A. Carstens
North Hollywood
LETTER FROM NEW ENGLAND
Greetings from an orthodox Catholic family in Maine! However, my wife and I are both native Californians (she grew up in L.A. area and I went to college there), so we desperately miss the area.
I'm glad to see there are plenty of folks back home fighting hard in the trenches for the faith. We are carrying on the battle here in Maine, where liturgical experimentation, roving tabernacles, altar girls and disappearing kneelers are unfortunately becoming the norm. Fortunately, we have a weekly Tridentine Mass in Portland to charge up our batteries when we feel low.
We are new subscribers to your wonderful publication and just wanted to let you know you are in our prayers.
Times such as ours may test our faith in our Savior's words that he would never abandon his Church. We must continue to pray for all our priests, orthodox as well as confused, and ask the Holy Spirit to inflame them with a love for God and his sheep.
Ad majorem Dei gloriam!
Frank and Monica Fisher
Augusta, Maine
A FAN OF COULOMBE
Many thanks to Charles A. Coulombe for your entertaining review of our Sunday 11 a.m. liturgy in the June issue [See "Roamin' Catholic", June, 1998]. Every month when the Mission appears unsolicited in my mailbox, I eagerly read the "Roamin' Catholic" first before getting to all the muck you folks like to rake up. Each morning my perusal of the L.A. Times begins with the funny pages too.
We have a hectic schedule of ten Masses each Sunday (including the vigil), six of them with a completely full church, the rest more than half full. This parish is a community (not a "crowd" as Mr. Coulombe asserts) of Catholics with a high level of understanding of their mission as members of Christ's body.
I love and am very proud of the people of Our Lady of the Assumption Parish, and grateful to be their pastor.
Rev. Thomas Welbers
Claremont
AMAZED AT YOUR CONTORTIONS
It was with a sense of amusement that I read your article, "The Outing of the Church" (June 1998 Mission), for I was amazed at the contortions you endured in your efforts to imply that any number of outreach efforts to the gay and lesbian community were somehow anything less than orthodox.
To begin with, in all modesty, I must take responsibility not only for the article in America to which you refer (odd that you would characterize it as a description of "life among practicing homosexuals," for I did not once mention homosexual activity; are you aware of Church teaching that differentiates between orientation and activity? Are you familiar with the sin of rash judgment?), but also for the biweekly column in Edge Magazine and the advertisements for St. Victor's parish which appear regularly in Edge Magazine. As for your "snickering" group that said this magazine may be found in the sleazier leather bars on Santa Monica Boulevard, I cannot say, for I have never been to a leather bar, nor am I aware of any leather bars on said street (I get my copy at Gold's Gym), but I do know people who read Edge and have been reconciled to the Church after reading the ads we place in this publication. We may not agree with some of the other advertisements placed in Edge, but neither would we agree with all the advertisements one may find in the Los Angeles Times.
For a publication which prides itself on its fidelity to the magisterium, I was surprised that you ascribed a definition of chastity to Father Peter Liuzzi, O.Carm., with the implication that it was a deviation from Catholic teaching. How skillfully you use innuendo and cover yourselves by deft omission of facts. In fact, the quotation you give from his column in Edge ("Chastity is defined as 'integration one's thoughts, feelings and actions in the area of human sexuality in a way that values one's own dignity and that of others.'") was quoted by him directly from a magisterial document. It was wrong of you to suggest that such a statement was somehow deficient, for he was citing exactly the words of the teaching Church as expressed by the bishops of the United States.
The image to which you refer in the St. Victor's advertisement is by Ade Bethune, a well-known and traditional Catholic artist whose works are published by Sheed and Ward. it was indeed an "Ecce Homo" ("Behold the Man") depiction of Christ scourged and humiliated for love of us. Among other images we have used from the same artist in our advertisements are St. Therese of Lisieux, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Augustine, Mary Theotokos, Christ Pantocrator and Christ the King. I challenge anyone to examine any of our advertisements and find the slightest deviation from traditional Catholic teaching. Your citation of a passage from one the advertisements which proclaimed God's unconditional love for all people seemed to indicate that you disagree with such a statement; do you believe that God's love is conditional for gay people?
Your imaginative implication that the archdiocese supports Edge Magazine financially turns upon a comma America omitted from my profile, which should have read, "He is also editor of the religion column in Edge, a gay and lesbian biweekly, that is a project of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles and Congregation Kol Ami, West Hollywood's Reform synagogue." Do you regularly cast such aspersions on grounds as flimsy as faulty punctuation?
As for the opinions expressed by the Anglican and Jewish columnists of "Out in Spirit," the first regular religion column to appear in any U.S. gay publication, I cannot claim any authority, for they express themselves according to their own religious traditions. The column you cite by my friend Father Thigpen, however, was a theologically traditional explanation of Lent that contained an innocent, humorous turn on words. Good preachers and writers sometimes do that, but humor is lost on the humorless.
In summation, it seems you object to the following: that America omitted a comma, that gay people attend Mass, that the archdiocese participates in a column that teaches gay people about religious truths, that a religious priest in the archdiocese quoted from a magisterial document in that column, that a particular gay publication put an image of the crucifixion on its Easter issue, that a particular parish invites people to attend Mass, that an Anglican priest jokingly referred to a film you don't like, that people are being told God loves them unconditionally. It must have been quite a challenge to construct an article making all this seem somehow sinister. Nevertheless, whatever the facts, the doubts have been sown; your job is done.
You may find me someone for whom the appropriate response is "snickering," someone who should be shunned by the Church, unworthy of any attempt at evangelization, as someone who should be extended only conditional love. This is what your article implies; this may be how you read the Gospels and understand Tradition. I can, however, lay claim to the grace of my own baptism, that I am a child of God, and that he loves me, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and gay as I may be, he welcomes me to call out to him, "Abba, Father," not as a slave, but as a son.
Eric Stoltz
Los Angeles
Editor's note: In our article, we indicated that Liuzzi quoted the bishop's document by placing the quotation from the document within single quotation marks. The context was Liuzzi's statements on the bishop's pastoral, Always Our Children.
FROM GRAVITY TO GIGGLES
In response to James McCoy's "I Try Not to Look" (July/August Mission), I can only say I try not to believe that such repressive self-righteous nonsense is possible.
To begin with the premise as most of us "understand" it: God created Eden, then, realizing it ought to be occupied and appreciated, created Adam. After a while, he figured Adam could use some companionship. So, instead of giving him a buddy, he created Eve. For no sensible reason at the time, he made Adam and Eve very different physically and, presumably, both possessed the faculties required to pleasure and reproduce themselves, but were kept in ignorance of them. (That he wanted them to go about their daily idylls without even seeing the difference, and lacking even the average child's healthy curiosity to wonder why it existed, is a situation too giddily idiotic even to attempt to grasp, let alone discuss.)
Moving right along, they were given to understand that everything would be a jolly if unproductive romp if they didn't partake of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Had they obeyed this tyrannical and petty embargo, then James McCoy would not be writing about the bland and beaming Fathers of "I Try Not to Look," and I would not be composing this desperate attempt to make sense of it all, because none of us would be here. Adam and Eve would have gone on for ever and ever, not exercising what's between their ears with any curiosity about what's between their legs; there would have been no Cain, no Abel and everything which followed, including numberless tortures and deaths in the cause of spreading and defending this paralyzing farrago as unique as inarguable.
So, to anyone not stultified by faith, this alleged beginning of it all, as I have conscientiously tried to summarize it, is an exercise in babbling lunacy and, in fact, an insult to God far exceeding any other heresy, in its contempt for this Mind and Purpose. That a Supreme Being should spend his celestial time creating two naked marionettes who know no purpose other than to eat figs they don't even have to grow, and without realizing what the leaves will be used for if ever they dare to inquire into the crucial and inescapably obvious physical difference between them, and that this brainless picnic should go on indefinitely--if this doesn't portray God as cosmically, cruelly and unforgiveably capricious--then I will run for pope and win with such unanimity that Rome will choke under a cloud of white smoke.
As for the deduced consequences of this whole turgid mess: Did God design the sexual system so that women attract men, and vice versa, for, initially, physical reasons? If so--leave it alone and as long as no one is harmed, it's no one's business but the two human beings involved. If not, then why doesn't the Catholic Church forget all the tripe about "love," adopt the policy of the Rev. Moon and nominate who is to marry whom?
Are the male and female bodies meant by God to be beautiful or shameful? If beautiful, then what is so all-fired sinful and unchaste about looking at and appreciating surely God's most miraculous and generous handiwork, in the flesh or via art? If shameful, why doesn't the Catholic Church adopt the ultimate obscenity, the Mormon nightshirt with its matching midriff apertures so that intercourse (never meant to be pleasurable anyway?) can take place without the participants actually having to see each other as God made them? Or, for that matter, the Moslem logicality of swathing women from head to foot?
There comes a point, in trying to deal with such painful and injurious folly, when one's gravity gives way to the release of a near-hysterical laughter. In this instance, I recall dissolving into hapless gigglement on learning that the Ayatollah Khomeini, in the train through the France which was giving him sanctuary, refused to look out the window in case his gaze was polluted by seeing an unholy country. The matching, absurdly solemn spectacle of He Who Tries Not To Look driving along an American street and averting his smug and sanctimonious eyes from a billboard which shows a pretty girl being pretty, causes, in the undersigned bewildered mortal, the same bubble of levity unstoppably to rise and erupt. Wouldn't it be lovely if he and his overly disciplined colleagues tried, once in a while, to find out what it's like to be the average, moral-enough lay person? The pun is intended.
Norman Hudis
Woodland Hills
A RESPONSE TO RUSHTON
You must be doing something right because every time I read the letters column someone, usually a priest or religious, asks to be removed from your mailing list. May I respond to one of your correspondents of May 1998?
Dear Sister Yvonne Rushton of Los Angeles: You complain that there must be a better way to expose the cancer that is obviously spreading from parish to parish, perhaps even in your own religious order. But if you love the darkness, then the light of truth will pain you and your fellow religious dissidents. Let me guess why you are so upset with the Mission. You disagree with the Church's position on some of the following: abortion, celibacy, homosexuality, ordination of women, divorce, or perhaps you may hold that a priest or bishop may be incapable of sin, vice or heresy.
Tom Z.
Los Angeles