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2003 NEWS STORIES
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ROAMIN' CATHOLIC
Contents © 2003
by Jim Holman.
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NEWS
September 2003
THE TORRANCE SCHOOL DISTRICT has dropped Planned Parenthood from its sex education program, said the June 13 Torrance Daily Breeze. The move comes after a year of dispute between those who oppose Planned Parenthood's presentations and those who support them. Critics of Planned Parenthood said that the group taught teens how to use condoms and how to protect against diseases gotten through oral and anal sex. Critics, though, are guarded in their optimism. "We don't want [Planned Parenthood] replaced by another group that has the same unethical philosophy," said one parent.
The Torrance school board, however, said it did not drop the Planned Parenthood program because of its lesson content. Superintendent Steven Fish cited Planned Parenthood's public accusation that three school board members met illegally to alter the sex education program. "When any board member's integrity is questioned on their activities, we just don't think it's appropriate to continue that relationship," said Fish.
A SURVEY OF 1,200 HIGH SCHOOL parents conducted by the Torrance school district showed a majority, 56 percent, want teenagers to receive sex education unless parents specifically exempt them, said the Daily Breeze. Forty-four percent said students should not be included in sex education classes unless parents give specific permission for them to do so. A school district may choose either option, according to state law. Ninety-one percent, however, said sex education should give students a "clear message" that abstinence is the safest way for teenagers.
According to the July 9 Daily Breeze, the school district hired a health teacher to teach the sex education course but did not require parental permission before students attended the course. Parents, though, may opt their children out of the course.
THE NEW GENERAL INSTRUCTION for the Roman Missal will not bring great changes to the celebration of the Mass, Cardinal Francis Arinze said in a July 20 interview, published in the August 1 Tidings. "Frequent change disturbs people in these matters," said the prefect for the Holy See's Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments. "And change is not the best way to describe the third edition of the General Instruction, and it is not what we should be emphasizing. It is more important to emphasize our faith." Arinze noted that the Vatican was not "cracking down on liturgical abuses, said the Tidings. Rather, "we are appealing to priests to celebrate the Mass, and all liturgies, according to the approved books," the cardinal said. "We are saying to priests and all who plan liturgies, 'Do not imagine that you must create something spectacular,' because that is not what Catholics seek when they come to Mass on Sunday. They are seeking to grow in their faith." However, Arinze noted that problems arise when priests or liturgists "add on their own idiosyncrasies to the celebration. They think they need to create something new every time for God, but that is not the correct route." The "sound" approach, Arinze said, is "noble simplicity -- doing what the liturgical books direct us to do. When we add our own personal idiosyncrasies, we turn attention to ourselves rather than to God. The Mass should be God-centered, not human being-centered."
Cardinal Arinze was in Los Angeles July 19-20 for the dedication of a shrine to Blessed Cyprian Michael Iwene Tansi at St. Cecilia Church in Los Angeles and to meet with Nigerian Catholics. With Cardinal Mahony, he concelebrated Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.
SANDRA DOOLEY, director for the Los Angeles archdiocese's office for worship, told the August 1 Tidings that General Instruction changes to the liturgy would be minimal. "At least three-fourths, probably more, of the new GIRM is the same as it was before," said Dooley. "It is important to note, too, that the new GIRM and 'Gather Faithfully Together' [Cardinal Roger Mahony's 1997 pastoral letter] fit very well together." Dooley said that the General Instruction calls for some rubrical changes, changes in the roles for eucharistic ministers, and in the posture of the faithful.
Dooley said Liturgy Training Publications and Liturgical Press will sponsor worships on the General Instruction in October. Until then, "parishes shouldn't change what they do liturgically," Dooley told the Tidings. "We are suggesting they begin the changes in Advent, the start of the new liturgical year, but we also recommend that changes, although they are not major, be introduced carefully over a period of time, with proper catechesis." The Tidings said "the exact implementation of the changes are being decided by local bishops, based on the GIRM as well as the adaptations sought by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and approved by the Vatican's Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of Sacraments."
RIGHT TO KNEEL. In June, Cardinal Francis Arinze, prefect of the Holy See's Congregation for Divine Worship, affirmed that the faithful maintain the right to kneel or sit after receiving communion. In seeking to implement the new General Instruction on the Roman Missal, some bishops had insisted that the faithful stand until everyone had received communion. Responding to a dubium (question) submitted by Cardinal Francis George of Chicago -- whether it were the intention of Roman Missal to forbid "kneeling or sitting in personal prayer" after communion, Cardinal Arinze said, no. Arinze said that the General Instruction intended "on the one hand to ensure within broad limits a certain uniformity of posture within the congregation for the various parts of the celebration of Holy Mass, and on the other, not to regulate posture rigidly in such a way that those who wish to kneel or sit would no longer be free."
TWO MOMMIES, TWO DADDIES LEGAL IN CALIFORNIA. The California Supreme Court on August 4 overturned a 2001 appeals court decision that had rendered adoptions by homosexual couples illegal. The 6-1 decision by the supreme court said that second parent adoptions -- a procedure by which a parent allows adoption by a second party while maintaining legal right to the child -- were legal in California.
The case in question involved two San Diego women, Annette Friskopp and Sharon Silverstein, the latter who had given birth to two sons by artificial insemination. Friskopp had adopted the first son and was in the process of adopting the second, when her relationship with Silverstein ended. Silverstein claimed that Friskopp's adoption had been illegal, since Silverstein had never given up custody of the older son. The California appeals court agreed; but the Supreme Court hearkened back to a 1925 court decision that allowed stepparents to adopt a child through a second-parent procedure. According to the August 5 San Francisco Chronicle, the Supreme Court's decision recognized as many as 20,000 adoptions by homosexual couples.
In writing the decision for the majority of the court, supreme court justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar noted, "unmarried couples who have brought a child into the world with the expectation that they will raise it together, and who have jointly petitioned for adoption, should be on notice that if they separate the same rules concerning custody and visitation as applied to all other parents will apply to them." In her dissent, Justice Janice Rogers Brown wrote that the majority's decision "trivializes family bonds."
CATHEDRAL IS SIGNIFICANT. The Vatican has honored Los Angeles' new Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels as "one of the largest and most significant Christian churches in the world," said a July 17 Catholic News Service story. On June 28, the cathedral, which, built at the cost of around $200 million, could also be called one of the world's most expensive Christian churches, had its name laid into the floor of St. Peter's basilica in Rome. It joins other churches, the names of which are laid out along the main aisle of the basilica according to their relative length. Catholic News Service explained that "while church size is one of the factors" considered for inclusion in the basilica, "the approval process focuses primarily on the structure's historical and cultural importance and on the significance of the local church community it serves." The story did not mention what the historical and cultural importance of the Our Lady, Queen of the Angels is.
DOLLAR CHASE. Using the expertise and contacts he gathered from his many years as fund-raiser for Loyola-Marymount University in Los Angeles, Father Maurice Chase now raises money for the homeless, said a July 17 Catholic News Service story. Raising about $100,000 a year from personalities such as Irene Dunn, Loretta Young, Bob Newhart, Eli Broad, the late Bob Hope, and the late Gregory Peck, Father Chase gives it to the homeless in one-dollar increments per person -- sometimes in higher denominations to women with children or to those in special need. Every Sunday finds Father Chase on Skid Row in Los Angeles at the Fred Jordan Mission at Fifth and Towne Streets, giving out dollars the needy. To the people of Skid Row he is known as "Father Dollar Bill."
Though criticized in some circles for irresponsibility -- since a dollar bill does not go far or because he does not oversee how the money he hands out will be spent -- the 83-year-old Chase sees what he does as more than handing out money. It is about telling the homeless that they have dignity. He told the Redding Record Searchlight (November 30, 2002) that the homeless "like the dollar, but it's more than that. Mother Teresa said 'touch the poor,' and that's what I try to do. By my looking into their eyes, I'm saying 'you have dignity, you're a human being, you are made in the image and likeness of God.'"
SOCIAL WORKERS will no longer enjoy the absolute immunity enjoyed by prosecutors, said a July 24 Pacific Justice Institute press release. In the case Miller v. Gammie, the ninth circuit court of appeals in San Francisco ruled that social workers will have a more limited immunity, similar to that of police officers, in dealing with families. "For the last fifteen years, [social workers] had unfettered discretion to do what they wanted," said Pacific Justice attorney Donnie Cox, who assisted with the case. "They will now be held accountable when they maliciously violate the rights of parents or their children."
PARISHIONERS AT ST. ANGELA MERICI'S church in Brea were split over the diocese of Orange's dismissal of a long-time choir director who, 18 years earlier, had been convicted for lewd conduct with a minor, said a July 28 Associated Press report. John Michael Catanzaro, who, over the last 16 years, has also worked at St. Martin de Porres church in Yorba Linda and at St. Joseph's in Placentia, was fired in accord with the diocese's zero-tolerance policy. The dismissal occurred after a Los Angeles Times reporter asked the diocese about Catanzaro's conviction, which was discovered because of the diocese's new policy of mandatory finger-printing for all diocesan personnel. While some St. Angela parishioners welcomed the dismissal, saying, however, that it should have been done several years before, others were upset by it. One parishioner, Mario Martinez, said, "they said this happened two decades ago, when [Catanzaro] was a young man. He's changed his ways and turned his life around since then. I'm sure we all did things earlier in life that we regret."
LOS ANGELES ARCHDIOCESE'S new director of vocations, Father James Forsen, noted in an interview with the Tidings that we need to look for answers to the scarcity of vocations to the priesthood "in a variety of fields." "Is it the way our church is structured?" asked Forsen. "Has our church made correct decisions concerning married men being ordained? Is it a societal problem that is contributing to this difficulty? And then we must look among our own rank and ask, is it something we are doing to ourselves?"
Asked, "what are some solutions you envision to care for the parishes until the number of priests increases?" Forsen replied, "I hope one result of this entire scenario will be that we view the ministry of lay people as being a genuine vocation in itself. That it, too, is a true calling from God, which requires all of the care and the preparation that any ordained vocation would deserve. And that would mean we would take very seriously the role of lay pastoral associates.... I think we have to have a strong understanding that God is calling lay people to be committed to the parish. That's here for keeps, as opposed to a stop-gap measure until we get our numbers up again. The days when we have three or four or five priests in a parish, those days are over."
TWO ORANGE COUNTY PRIESTS are under investigation for allegedly possessing child pornography, said a July 29 Associated Press story. The Rev. Dominic Nguyen was sent to Orange diocese from the diocese of Boise, Idaho last year after it was alleged that child pornography was found on his computer at St. Edward the Confessor church in Twin Falls, Idaho. Nguyen had been sent to Boise in 2000 after having a sexual affair with woman while he served at St. Columban's in Garden Grove. He is now doing administrative work at an undisclosed location. The Rev. Cesar Salazar will continue to offer Mass at St. Joseph's in Santa Ana while the FBI investigates him for allegedly possessing child pornography. A church employee, Fernando Guido, found images of child pornography on a laptop computer a friend had bought from Salazar. Though the original owner of the computer, Salazar was not the only one to use it; it had been used by a friend of Guido and one other person. While the diocese has placed Salazar in "restrictive ministry," it has suspended Nguyen.
ONE YEAR AFTER the United States bishops laid out their Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, the archdiocese of Los Angeles issued its pledge of cooperation with the National Office of Child and Youth Protection, instituted by the United States bishops. In a statement, published in the June 20 Tidings, the archdiocese said that the bishops' charter "complements an already comprehensive set of Archdiocesan policies and procedures governing sexual misconduct by clergy. These policies and procedures have been in place for several years, and continue to be reviewed and strengthened as needed in order to help ensure the safety of all of our people, especially our children." In addition to "having some of the nation's most comprehensive policies and procedures for dealing with sexual abuse by clergy," the statement said, the archdiocese "also seeks to care for victims of abuse and to work to prevent abuse in the future." The statement concludes by saying, "since 1985, when these problems were first brought to light, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles has been at the forefront of the efforts to understand the problems and effectively deal with them. We will continue to be."
The June 20 statement came only eight days after former Oklahoma governor Frank Keating compared Mahony and other bishops to the Mafia, saying they had tried to derail investigations by the bishops' sexual abuse task force. Keating was then chairman of the bishops National Review Board for clergy sexual abuse. Mahony fired back at Keating. A June 13 Los Angeles Times article quoted the cardinal as saying that Keating's statement was the "last straw" and might lead the bishops to remove him from his post. Mahony told the Washington Post on June 13, "unfortunately, in talking to a lot of bishops, he [Keating] seems to have lost so much credibility that one has to ask, is it able to be recaptured? I personally think it would be almost impossible."
ARCHBISHOP MICHAEL SHEEHAN of Santa Fe, New Mexico, according to a June 21 Los Angeles Times story, said that, in the wake of a sexual abuse crisis in his archdiocese, he decided he "needed to be a priest and to talk to people and to assure them of the apology of the church for what's happened to them. I felt it was better to make a mistake by being too conciliatory than by listening too much to the attorneys.... "If somebody said they were a victim, and I found out about that, I called them, got in touch with them." This pastoral approach, said Sheehan, did not lead to additional costs in lawsuits. Sheehan's predecessor had resigned amid accusations that he had had sexual relations with women in the 1970s and '80s.
Cardinal Mahony, however, whose approach to molestation victims has been different from Sheehan's, said that criticism of his style leaves him frustrated. "The problem is there are so many intertwined pieces to this [California privacy laws, the size of the Los Angeles archdiocese]. It's really very difficult," said Mahony. "Until we can get a lot of these legal things settled, I'm afraid some of the other can't happen," Mahony said. Mahony said that attorneys for both accused priests and their victims will not let him speak to their clients. "That's the heart-wrenching, soul-wrenching part of this for me. My instincts as a priest are to get in the car and go knock on the door of the victims and say 'Can I come in and can we talk?' However, we're dealing with so many unknowns in terms of victims and cases and histories that at the moment, that just doesn't seem to be possible.
Mary Grant, Los Angeles-area leader of Survivors Network for Those Abused by Priests, told the Times that victims haven't reached out to the Church "because we don't want to be re-victimized." She said she does not want to meet privately with Mahony because she wants him to be publicly accountable for any statements or promises he makes.
SISTER JUDITH MURPHY would conclude her "ministry" as the Los Angeles archdiocese's first general counsel, said Cardinal Roger Mahony in early June. Sister Judith was the "Sister Judy" of the e-mail correspondence leaked to the press by KFI radio in April 2002. (See "I Don't Even Know What the Numbers Are Myself!" May 2002 Mission.) In one of these messages, Mahony blamed Sister Judy for archdiocese's "greatest tactical mistake of the past few weeks" in the molestation controversy. Mahony wrote that "of the 8 priests involved [in molestation cases], 5 had already been reported to local law enforcement agencies. That leaves 3. I pressed for you to meet with Det [sic] Barraclough and 'consult' him about the other 3 so that we could state without hesitation that all priests no longer in service had been reported to various law enforcement agencies." Sister Judy's resistance to this "was a huge mistake on our part," said Mahony.
A Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet, Sister Judith began as legal counsel for the archdiocese during Mahony's first year as archbishop, according to the June 6 Tidings. "Upon completing her legal work with the archdiocese," said the Tidings, Sister Judith would "participate in a well-deserved sabbatical before considering her future ministry as a Sister of St. Joseph."
IN WHAT CRITICS are calling a desperate move to garner homosexual support for his quickly diminishing hold on the governor's office, California Governor Gray Davis quietly signed a bill which will prohibit businesses from discriminating against "transgendered" individuals who seek employment. Seeking to avoid publicity, the governor signed the bill sponsored by Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), when signing the budget on August 2.
The bill was supported by a number of homosexual rights groups as well as by others who support homosexual issues. These groups included: California NOW; California Labor Federation; National Center for Lesbian Rights; Service Employees International Union; American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; Lambda Legal; California Church IMPACT; ACLU; Transgender Law Center; the Greater San Diego Business Association; and the California Apartment Association.
THE SAN GABRIEL REGION'S auxiliary, Bishop Gabino Zavala, explained in the July 18 Tidings his commitment to ministry with "homosexual persons." "As a Bishop," he wrote, "I am called to assure that this ministry is exercised appropriately."
Quoting the Catechism of the Catholic Church that homosexuals "must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided," Bishop Zavala insisted on the validity of ministry to homosexuals. He had served, he said, as episcopal moderator for the National Association of Catholic Diocesan Lesbian and Gay Ministers, but "after a very short time of service I resigned from this position." Zavala said he resigned both on account of his "pressing commitments" in the archdiocese and other duties and because "some members of the organization I was serving as Episcopal Moderator held positions on homosexuality and homosexual relations at variance with Church teaching."
Church teaching, rooted in the dignity of the human person, holds, wrote Zavala, that "sexual activity is proper only between a married man and woman for the purpose of achieving two goods: a) procreation and b) mutual edification of the spouses. Because homosexual acts displace these two goods, they cannot be approved under any circumstances.... Second, because these two goods are displaced, there can be no comparison between homosexual unions and heterosexual marriage. Third, "homosexual persons are called to chastity, as are all persons, whether heterosexual or homosexual, who are not married."
THE ORDINATION OF ORANGE'S second auxiliary bishop, Dominic Luong, on June 11 drew 1,500 to St. Columban's church, said a June Los Angeles Times story. Included in this number were 34 bishops from across the United States and from Vietnam. The Vietnamese-born Luong has been ministering to Vietnamese immigrants in New Orleans since 1975. As auxiliary bishop, besides his duties to all the faithful of the diocese, Luong, 62, will minister to the diocese's 32,000 Catholic Vietnamese. Orange County has an estimated 131,000 Vietnamese -- the largest number of Vietnamese outside Vietnam in the United States.
GOVERNOR GRAY DAVIS signed legislation in mid July that forbids church and non-profit organizations from limiting services at hospitals they have sold or leased, said the July 18 Los Angeles Times. The legislation, sponsored by Senator Debra Bowen (D-Marina Del Rey), was a response to attempts to limit services, such as abortion and birth control, by Catholic hospitals at hospitals they have sold or leased. According to the new law, the state attorney general will have the responsibility to void sales or lease agreements if they require a limitation of services by the owner over the buyer.