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2004 NEWS STORIES
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ROAMIN' CATHOLIC
Contents © 2004
by Jim Holman.
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NEWS
September 2004
AN ARTICLE IN THE TIDINGS, the newspaper for the archdiocese of Los Angeles, advertised that a June 19 ecumenical gathering, “Who is God for Women?” would feature Sister Christine Vladimiroff. Sister Christine, the prioress of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, Pennsylvania, came into prominence in 2001, the Tidings said, “for opposing a Vatican directive that one of its members, Sister Joan Chittister, not participate in a conference on women’s ordination.” Vladimiroff’s talk for the Second Ecumenical Gathering of Women, held at First United Methodist Church in Los Angeles, was to “center on women’s need to retrieve the prophetic tradition and understand the radical meaning of Jesus’ message and acts in Scripture.”
Vladimiroff told the Tidings that “prophetic means taking a risk and hopefully trying to turn that risk into perceiving the will of God in a particular instance. There’s tension between doing the politically correct thing or being so outside an institution you’re no longer relevant to it.”
IN HER 2001 LETTER to the Holy See, Sister Vladimiroff noted that the Vatican saw Sister Joan Chittester’s attendance at the Women’s Ordination Worldwide Conference “to be in opposition to its decree (Ordinatio Sacerdotalis) that priestly ordination will never be conferred on women in the Roman Catholic Church and must therefore not be discussed.” Vladimiroff said that “after much deliberation and prayer,” she decided to “decline the request of the Vatican” to forbid Sister Joan to attend. She did so “out of the Benedictine , or monastic, tradition of obedience.” A “fundamental difference” exists “in the understanding of obedience in the monastic tradition and that which is being used by the Vatican to exert power and control and prompt a false sense of unity inspired by fear,” wrote Vladimiroff.
Vladimiroff said she did not see Sister Joan’s participation in the conference, “as a ‘source of scandal to the faithful’ as the Vatican alleges. I think the faithful can be scandalized when honest attempts to discuss questions of import to the church are forbidden.” Vladimiroff said she could not be “used by the Vatican to deliver an order of silencing.” Indeed, according to Vladimiroff, Benedictines have a privileged place in the Church. “Benedictine communities of men and women,” she said, “were never intended to be part of the hierarchical or clerical status of the Church, but to stand apart from this structure and offer a different voice.”
DISCO FEVER. To celebrate its 30th anniversary, St. John’s Pleasant Valley Hospital in Camarillo held a disco party, said the July 14 Ventura County Star. The July 13 celebration, titled “Club PV 74: From Disco to Diamonds,” featured ’70s music and food; party-goers dressed in “Me Generation” costumes, and danced inside a tent under a mood-inspiring disco ball. All this was not to suggest that the Catholic hospital is stuck in the ’70s but to reflect its history and celebrate its successes, according to hospital officials. St. John’s opened its doors during the disco decade.
St. John’s vice president of mission integration, Christina Fernandez, organized a “reflection ceremony” for the event, where employees, community members, and the mayor of Camarillo carried flags displaying the hospital’s core values: excellence, dignity, stewardship, collaboration, and justice.
TUCSON-DISNEYLAND CONNECTION. Manuel Moreno, who last year resigned as bishop of Tucson, Arizona, after confessing that he had condoned priest molestation, has longtime connections with Orange and Los Angeles diocese, said a July 16 Orange County Weekly story. To begin with, he was born in Placentia in 1930, attended high school in Fullerton, and graduated from Fullerton College. Moreno also served as a priest in the Los Angeles archdiocese. In a June 2 deposition held in the Pima County, Arizona, superior court, Moreno said that when a priest in the archdiocese, he knew that the Rev. Eleuterio (called “Big Al”) Ramos was molesting boys in Orange County (then a part of the archdiocese). In 1983, when bishop of Tucson, Moreno allowed the Rev. Fernando Monzo serve at a La Habra parish, Our Lady of Guadalupe, after Moreno had learned of a complaint accusing Monzo of performing genital acts with young men and boys. In the ’90s, Moreno also allowed Kevin Barmasse, a Tucson priest whom the diocese knew to be a molester, take boys on trips in Disneyland, in Anaheim. Knowing the Rev. Juan Guillen’s fondness for boys, Moreno allowed him to take altar boys on trips to Happiest Place on Earth. In 1994, on one such trip, Guillen attempted to sodomize a 14-year-old boy. Guillen is now serving 10 years for molestation.
In his final years as bishop, Moreno asked the faithful’s forgiveness for condoning priest molesters.
THE SURVIVORS NETWORK for Those Abused by Priests on July 13 called on Cardinal Roger Mahony to repatriate an elderly Franciscan friar to Canada, said an Associated Press report. The 69-year-old friar, Gerald Chumik, has been accused of molesting a 15-year-old boy in Canada in the 1970s. The archdiocese of Los Angeles said that Chumik, who has admitted to the molestation (though he says he perceived the boy to be of age), has been living at Santa Barbara Mission under a kind of house arrest since 2002 and is receiving treatment. “Canada has not sought extradition. They know where he is,” said archdiocesan spokesman Tod Tamberg. “He’s never been accused of a crime here.”
But Sergeant Mark Wall of the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary said Canada has not sought Chumik’s extradition because, according to Canadian prosecutors, a treaty between the United States and Canada does not allow it. A recent re-examination of the case by prosecutors has confirmed this. But though his government cannot extradite Chumik, Wall said, “I’d love to have him back.”
Chumik, who reportedly came to the United States to work with the poor, served in the archdiocese in the late ’70s and in Fresno diocese from 1980 to 1985, when he moved to Santa Barbara. Since then he has served as a jail chaplain and as a chaplain at a mental hospital.
ALLEGED MOLESTATION VICTIMS’ lawyers on June 30 again asked a northern California judge to force Cardinal Roger Mahony to give a sworn deposition in the case of Father Oliver O’Grady, a Stockton priest convicted of molesting minors, said the July 1 Los Angeles Times and July 3 Associated Press reports. Mahony was to be deposed in April; but when victims’ attorneys and archdiocesan lawyers could not agree on the ground rules for the deposition, the cardinal refused to appear. In late April, victims’ attorneys John Manly and Venus Soltan asked a judge to hold the cardinal in contempt of court for his failure to appear. In response, archdiocesan lawyers asked the judge to sanction plaintiffs’ lawyers for filing an improper motion.
Cardinal Mahony does not want to be deposed in the case against O’Grady, said John Manly, “because he knows a lot.” Even if the latest case involves events before Mahony was bishop of Stockton, “the diocese knew in 1976, at least, that this guy’s a perpetrator,” said Manly. But Donald Woods, Jr., another archdiocesan lawyer, said that Mahony testified on four separate occasions about his tenure in Stockton. “He doesn’t know very much about O’Grady,” Woods said. “His recollection about what happened has been exhausted in those transcripts.” Mahony was bishop of Stocton from 1980 until 1985.
IN RESPONSE to the June 30 motion by Manly and Soltan, archdiocesan lawyer J. Michael Hennigan said the cardinal will give his deposition, but, again, with certain ground rules in place. Among the eight conditions set by Mahony ‘s lawyers is a promise that the cardinal will not answer any of the same questions about O’Grady he addressed in depositions made in the late 1990s. Mahony’s lawyers, citing death threats against him, also insist that the depositions be given on archdiocesan property.
In 1998, Cardinal Mahony testified in hearings for a lawsuit involving O’Grady, brought by two young men against the diocese of Stockton. Though as bishop of Stockton, Mahony allegedly knew that O’Grady had been guilty of pedophilia, he nevertheless reassigned him to another parish after referring him to a psychiatrist, who said O’Grady “reveals a severe defect in maturation, no only in the matter of sex, but more importantly in the matter of social relationships.... Perhaps Oliver is not truly called to the priesthood.” Mahony claimed that the psychiatrist in question never recommended dismissing O’Grady from the priesthood. Besides, said Mahony, “at that time, I did feel professional counselors and psychiatrists were capable of helping these people.” The current case against O’Grady and the diocese of Stockton involves events that occurred before Mahony was bishop of Stockton.
THE ARCHDIOCESE OF LOS ANGELES has joined the diocese of Davenport, Iowa, in a case testing the constitutionality of a California state law wiping out for a year the statute of limitations in civil cases involving victims of molestation, said the July 1 Los Angeles Times. The diocese of Davenport was sued in a state court in San Diego over accusations that a Iowa priest molested a young man on a trip to California both took in the late ’60s. Citing the United States Constitution, Davenport has removed the case from state court since, it says, the parties involved are from different states and so should be tried in federal court. Further, the diocese of Davenport is asking a federal judge in San Diego to void the state law that removed the statute of limitations in civil cases. The archdiocese has filed a motion to intervene in the Davenport case.
Last year, the United States Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a California law that removed the statute of limitations in criminal cases. But plaintiffs’ lawyers have said civil cases fall under different standards than criminal cases. The California law regarding the statute of limitations in civil cases involving molestation, said the Times, is a “near duplicate” of another state statute that extended a one-year filing period allowing property owners to sue insurers for property damages suffered during the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Federal appellate courts upheld the constitutionality of this statute. In 2003, a Los Angeles superior court judge upheld the constitutionality of the state molestation law against the Seventh Day Adventist Church, which claimed that the law violated its due-process rights.
If the California molestation statute is declared unconstitutional, “it could potentially lead to the dismissal or invalidation of roughly 800 cases that have been filed in California that previously would have been time-barred,” Susan Oliver, a lawyer who represents the diocese of Davenport, said. This could save Catholic dioceses millions of dollars in settlement costs.
“BISHOP BROWN HAS TAKEN extraordinary steps to do the right thing,” said Raymond Boucher, a Beverly Hills attorney for plaintiffs in clergy sexual abuse cases. One “right thing” the bishop of Orange has done, according to a June 14 Los Angeles Times story, is keep his promise of greater openness with the faithful. On Sunday, June 13, Tod Brown had his priests replace their homilies at Mass with the reading of a letter explaining that the diocese would have to pay a sizeable settlement with the nearly 100 alleged sexual abuse victims. During mediation talks that began last fall, the diocese has offered plaintiffs a $40 million settlement, said the Times. Plaintiffs’ lawyers refused the offered settlement, and the diocese made a new offer on June 14. In working out a settlement amount, Brown told the faithful, “I want to reach out to the victims, and at the same time, I don’t want to shut down the church.”
But the June 14 talks between lawyers representing victims, the diocese, and the diocese’s insurance carriers, ended without any agreement. According to the June 15 Los Angeles Times, both diocesan and victims lawyers said the chief problem was the insurers, who were not willing to contribute to a settlement. Still, all sides seemed optimistic that a settlement could be reached.
BUT OPTIMISM TURNED TO DESPAIR a month later. On July 22, talks between the three sides broke down entirely, ending with plaintiffs’ lawyers asking Los Angeles superior court judge Peter Lichtman to allow them to prepare cases for litigation. According to the July 23 Los Angeles Times, the diocese’s insurers refused to contribute to a settlement — and Bishop Tod Brown is unwilling to sell Church property to pay for one.
On July 23, Judge Lichtman issued an order that would allow plaintiffs’ lawyers to depose Bishop Brown and other diocesan officials. The order also said that further settlement talks would not occur under the strict confidentiality restrictions that had governed earlier talks. Lichtman’s order effectively ended 19 months of settlement talks between the diocese and victims, though the judge said he would continue efforts to negotiate a settlement between the parties.
ECUMENICAL SPIRITUAL DIRECTION. An ancient Catholic practice, spiritual direction, is being sought by people regardless of their religion, said a July 3 Los Angeles Times story. Sister Thomas Bernard MacConnell, who directs the Spiritual Growth Center in Los Angeles, said that “the whole focus [of spiritual direction] is helping people become aware of the way God permeates our lives. Once people begin to become aware of that, that awareness deepens, and then it becomes natural to find God in all things.” The Spiritual Growth Center, formerly the Archdiocesan Spirituality Center, is no longer under the auspices of the archdiocese of Los Angeles. As before, it receives non-Catholics into its program. One who will be in the center’s fall class is Rhoda Blecker, a Jewish author. Blecker told the Times that she wants to combine formal training as a spiritual director with her master’s degree in business administration so she can become a corporate chaplain. “I want to be able to accompany people on a [spiritual] journey, whatever faith they have,” said Blecker. This entails, presumably, searching for the “truth that goes across the spirituality” — a task she hopes to accomplish at the Spiritual Growth Center. “Religions are exclusionary and spirituality is inclusionary,” Blecker said.
Beginning in January, Loyola Marymount University will be a training center for spiritual directors, working the instruction into its master’s degree in pastoral theology program. Wilkie Au, a former Jesuit priest, a spiritual director, and a professor of theology at Loyola-Marymount, said spiritual directors “are responding to a need because life is so hectic, so fast-paced. “People want some grounding for their life that helps them live more peacefully — in more harmony and balance.” Both Au and Abbot Francis Benedict of St. Andrew’s Abbey at Valyermo have been for six years spiritual directors for the Rev. Frank Alton, pastor of Immanuel Presbyterian in Koreatown. Alton said that his “ best experiences of spiritual direction have helped me connect my emotional and spiritual journeys. Spiritual direction helps make sure that my faith journey is experiential, not just intellectual.”
ONE OF THE BUSH CAMPAIGN’S biggest fundraisers is the Brentwood multi-millionaire Bradford Freeman. In June, the Los Angeles Times did a long feature on the man who has not only helped raise tens of millions of dollars for the Bush campaign but who is a Bush family friend. Freeman’s connections with the Bush family go back to 1979 when he was introduced to them by Ron Spogli, George W. Bush’s classmate at Harvard Business School and now Freeman’s business partner. Freeman invested in George W’s failed Arbusto oil company and became one of George H.W. Bush’s “Team 100” fundraisers. Another of Freeman’s business partners has been former Los Angeles mayor, Richard Riordan. According to the Times, to Freeman goes the credit of winning George W’s endorsement for the pro-abortion Riordan during the 2002 California gubernatorial primaries.
Freeman’s backing of Riordan is scarcely surprising since, according to the Times, the Brentwood millionaire thinks the California Republican party supports candidates who are far too conservative to be elected. Freeman also supports legal abortion and the expansion of fetal stem cell research.
RECENT IMMIGRATION RAIDS into Latino neighborhoods have “generated fear, confusion and anger throughout the Hispanic neighborhoods in Southern California,” said Cardinal Roger Mahony in a letter to Robert Bonner, commissioner for the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, a branch of the federal department of Homeland Security. According to the June 25 Tidings, the cardinal and his auxiliary bishops have joined with L.A. Metro-IAF (an association of multi-denominational and multi-ethnic community groups) to call on the Spanish and English media to stop spreading inflammatory reports about the raids. L.A. Metro-IAF (now One L.A.), has organized actions to speak out against the immigration raids and has asked the U.S. bureau to clarify its procedures, policies, and tactics. The cardinal requested a meeting with Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein and the Bureau of Customs and Border Control.
The raids reportedly have spread fear in Latino neighborhoods, even among documented immigrants and U.S. citizens. The federal bureau sets up checkpoints on freeway off ramps and in neighborhoods. One was set up across the street from Norwood Elementary School on June 22 during a graduation ceremony for children in the school’s healthy start program. Though many undocumented immigrants have been arrested, Father Jarlath Cunnane, pastor of St. Thomas the Apostle in Los Angeles, said one Latina parishioner who has documents was detained for two hours. Cunnane said the racial profiling involved in the raids is “creating unnecessary suffering and fear and panic among people who are just trying to live and work and raise their families.”
FOR A TOUCH OF THE MACABRE, one may visit the Body Worlds exhibit at the California Science Center until January 23, 2005. The exhibit, the work of Dr. Gunther von Hagens, features about 200 specimens of dead human bodies preserved through a “plastination” process. Most of the specimens are body parts, but 25 of them are whole bodies, flayed and posed in interesting attitudes. One shows a flayed man holding his skin; another a woman, pregnant in her eighth month, with her child in her womb; yet another, a man, his brain exposed, playing chess. The Body Works exhibit has traveled through Europe and Asia, with about 14 million having viewed it. Of these, according to the June 26 Los Angeles Times, 6,000 have decided to donate their bodies to Von Hagens as future exhibits.
Body Worlds has met with some controversy, with critics saying it will lead to a lessened respect for the human body. Some have suggested that Von Hagens obtains his cadavers in less than ethical ways. To help it decide whether to bring Body Works to Los Angeles, the Science Center set up a bio-ethics advisory committee that included medical and religious leaders, including Vincentian Father Richard Benson of St. John’s Seminary, Camarillo. According to a June Science Center press release, the committee concluded that “the exhibit has considerable educational value and is appropriate for the Science Center as long as the donation of all bodies for public educational display is verified, and the donation forms meet high standards for disclosure and informed consent.”
AN ENGLISH WRITER who attended a Body Works exhibit in London last year wrote (on the website www.trashcity.org) that he found the exhibit educational. After seeing smokers and non-smokers lungs compared, he concluded, “smoking is bad.” He had, though, a less politically correct observation: the exhibit, he said, leads one to “rethink that position on abortion.” “One of the galleries,” the writer continued, “had a succession of preserved foetuses showing them at different stages of pregnancy. The legal limit for most abortions in the UK is 24 weeks. Looking at the 24 week specimen, it was largely indistinguishable from a newborn baby.” But, said the writer, “I don’t have a problem with this, since I figure abortion should be entirely legal at any point up until the foetus gets off the couch, finds a job and moves out of the house.”
HBO AIRED a documentary on June 28, probing, according to the Los Angeles Times, the question, “why does the Church insist on celibacy among its clergy?” In “Celibacy in Crisis: A Secret World Revisited,” filmmaker Antony Thomas interviewed priests, seminarians, a neurobiologist, a neuroscientist, and ex-priest-turned-sex-therapist and molestation crisis guru, Richard Sipe to come up with the not-unexpected conclusion that clerical celibacy is a cruel imposition. Why Thomas, an Anglican, should be interested in this topic is unclear; but after interviewing priests, most if not all of whom, it seems from the Times account, engage in secret sexual trysts or who express their loneliness, Thomas comes up with a question many Catholics might ask: “Why are they in this position?” After all, no one forced them into ordination; and if they are like the priest, the Rev. Doug Dandurand, who said that the one priest he does not know “is that true celibate,” and who noted that the “empty church” after Mass is over “is really symbolic of the emptiness I feel inside,” the perceptive Catholic might guess at the real problem. Ironically, Father Dandurand, in a telephone interview, expresses the view of the outsider Thomas: “when something comes from the interior life, it’s met with passion and purpose and fulfillment,” said the priest. “When something is imposed, some part of our being is shut down. I think the media missed this piece.” But Dandurand, who wrote a doctoral dissertation on celibacy, falls into clerical chic in his appraisal of the clerical molestation crisis. “The media,” he said, “objectified them [the priest abusers]. They were rubber-stamped ‘abusers.’ But what got them there?”
If a Catholic priest cannot answer this question, what can one expect from an Anglican filmmaker?
A REQUIEM MASS was held for the Reverend Peter Covas on May 19 at Our Lady of the Rosary Cathedral in the diocese of San Bernardino. Covas, who was accused of sexually molesting at least two teenage boys and arrested twice for lewd conduct, was eulogized by the cathedral’s rector, the Rev. Robert Miller, as a “the face of the Catholic Church in Riverside.” Miller wore a rainbow-colored stole.
Joining Miller was Bishop Gerald Barnes, who presided as the principal celebrant. He was joined by several priests, Knights of Columbus, and lay people. Media photographers were not allowed into the service. When asked about the exclusion of photographers at the Mass, one layperson who attended the requiem Mass pointed out the accusations against Covas as well as Covas’ two prior arrests — one in San Bernardino County and the other in Los Angeles County. Court records in Los Angeles County show that Covas was arrested November 10, 1988 by Los Angeles police for disorderly conduct and committing a lewd act.
The allegations of sexual molestation of two teenage boys stem date back to the 1970s, according to two lawsuits filed against Covas and the diocese of San Bernardino in December of last year. Peter DeMarco, an attorney representing the two victims, said that he was appalled that Covas was being eulogized as a model priest.