NEWS
2005 NEWS STORIES
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ROAMIN' CATHOLIC
Contents © 2005
by Jim Holman.
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NEWS
September 2005
THE LOS ANGELES ARCHDIOCESE must turn over to the grand jury internal church documents concerning two former priests accused of molesting minors, the second district court of appeals in Los Angeles ruled on July 25. Cardinal Roger Mahony and his lawyers have argued that the documents, subpoenaed by the grand jury three years ago, contain confidential, internal church communications and so are protected by the First Amendment. The three court of appeals justices, however, disagreed. In a 49-page opinion, Presiding Justice Joan Dempsey Klein wrote, "while it is true the right to religious freedom holds a special place in our history and culture, there also must be an accommodation by religious believers and institutions to the rules of civil society, particularly when the state's compelling interest in protecting children is in question." Further, the court said, enforcing the subpoenas does not "result in excessive entanglement by the government," nor does it violate state laws that protect the privileged communications of clergy and penitents, psychotherapists and patients. Only one page of the 20 pages of documents, said the court, may remain secret. Others, however, because they were not intended to remain secret, may be given to the grand jury. Among these was one between Cardinal Mahony and his vicar of clergy which, the court said, discusses an accused priest's "cooperation with his therapists" and "strategized about possible legal problems and discussed church assignments," while another dealt with an accused priest's psychotherapy.
Late last year, a lower court ordered the archdiocese to turn over the documents by January 28, 2005, but Mahony's lawyers appealed the decision. The court echoed a decision made by Judge Thomas Nuss. The archdiocese retained Nuss, a retired judge, in 2002 to decide on the status of the documents. Archdiocesan lawyers, however, rejected Nuss' decision, calling it "novel" and "inconsistent" with a Ventura County judge's dismissal of a grand jury subpoena for similar documents, though courts in Northern California and in five other states laid down decisions similar to Nuss'.
Archdiocesan lawyer, Donald Woods, said he might appeal the latest decision to the state supreme court.
A PRIEST WHO WARNED the United States bishops over 20 years ago of the impending sexual abuse scandal has called California the "epicenter" of the scandal. Dominican Father Thomas Doyle prepared a confidential report for the U.S. bishops after the Church in Louisiana was hit by a sex scandal. Doyle's report urged the bishops to form a national crisis intervention team, to research the effect of abuse on victims, and to minister to victims. Doyle warned the bishops that a sex scandal could cost dioceses $1 billion, a figure that has already been surpassed. According to a June 26 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story, addressing a Milwaukee chapter of Voice of the Faithful, Doyle said the fallout of the abuse scandal in California will be more serious than elsewhere. "One diocese just paid out $36 million, and the Diocese of Orange paid out $110 million," said Doyle. "When Los Angeles bursts, it will make Boston look like an altar boys' picnic."
SAN BERNARDINO DIOCESE will become the first in the United States to have two Hispanic bishops, the Catholic News Agency reported on July 27. Pope Benedict XVI has appointed Father Rutilio Del Riego, pastor of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Riverside, as auxiliary bishop of San Bernardino, to replace Bishop Dennis Patrick O'Neil, who died in 2003. Born in Spain, Father Del Riego came to the United States in 1964 and the following year was ordained priest. He previously served as director of the Spanish Catholic Center in Washington, D.C. as well as in the diocese of El Paso before coming to Southern California. During a press conference, Bishop-elect Del Riego said of his appointment, "I have to be absolutely frank: I would not have asked for it.... My life is going to change radically, and I was very happy where I was, doing what I was doing." But, he said, "I believe God is calling me to do this, and so I have no excuse."
According to the July 29 Tidings, the newspaper of the Los Angeles archdiocese, Del Riego said in a statement that he believes in "a church that is open and inclusive of all peoples and cultures" and that he will work to promote vocations. "Moreover," he continued, "new models of ministry and cooperation are developing to respond to the challenges of the present and the future and I believe we have to be open in our discernment and skillful in our guidance of this process." The bishop-elect has in the past worked as a vocations director, and in 1999 he was appointed vice rector of Blessed Junipero Serra House, a formation center for seminarians in the San Bernardino diocese. After his episcopal ordination on September 20, Del Riego will take up residence at the formation house.
BISHOP DEL RIEGO will bring the number of active Hispanic bishops in the United States to 25 -- a number that barely reflects the changing demographics of the American Church. Currently, Hispanics make up about 40 percent of Catholics in the United States, and their numbers continue to grow. According to the Catholic News Agency, Denver's Archbishop Charles Chaput, for one, praises this growth. Speaking at a retreat for Hispanic business leaders, the archbishop said, "all of America is changing, and Latinos will shape the nature of that change." Chaput opined that "Hispanics can bring to the table a Catholic sense of family, a Catholic sense of community, a Catholic love for life, generosity and a respect for the dignity of the person."
"American life has lost its soul," Chaput said to the Hispanic businessmen. "You can change that. America needs to change. Be different. Remember who you are. Remember the faith and Catholic understanding of the world that shaped you. Make your success a success of the soul -- a success for the common good -- and you'll leave the world a better place than when you entered it."
MAHONY, RESIGN! Security guards attempted to arrest a group of pro-life demonstrators outside the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels on July 1. The demonstrators, part of the American Life League's 2005 Crusade for Life walks, were protesting a Mass celebrated by Cardinal Roger Mahony for the inauguration of Los Angeles' mayor, Anthony Villaraigosa, a pro-abortion Catholic. "It is an outrage that an event honoring a pro-abortion Catholic public figure that openly supports the killing of the pre-born would occur at Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral," said American Life League president Judy Brown. But, she said, "it is even more shameful that Cardinal Mahony and others would attempt to censor faithful Catholic students from proclaiming the truth."
The "censorship" occurred when cathedral security threatened to arrest the dozen or more demonstrators; the Los Angeles police department had to intervene to tell security that arresting the protestors would violate the First Amendment. The demonstrators were then allowed inside the cathedral.
In a press release issued the same day of the protest, Brown called on Cardinal Mahony to resign. "American Life League calls for the immediate resignation of Cardinal Roger Mahony in light of his continued defiance of Church teaching," said Brown. "His coddling of pro-abortion Catholic public figures in California is beyond reproach and should not be tolerated by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church."
ANOTHER PROTESTER did not fare so well as the pro-life demonstra tors. James Robertson of Mount Washington handcuffed himself to the cathedra at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels during the 10 a.m. Mass there on Sunday, June 26, while Cardinal Roger Mahony was delivering the homily. Robertson, 58, who says he was a victim of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in the 1960s, later said the cardinal's homily "got me all fired up. My point was to inform parishioners everywhere. To hear victims' stories rather than the cardinal and his spin." Robertson said he had been planning the protest for three weeks.
Security guards surrounded Robertson, and the Mass continued. After Mass was over, about 12 police officers arrested Robertson. According to archdiocesan spokesman Tod Tamberg, archdiocesan officials ordered Robertson's arrest because "we owe it to the people who come to the cathedral and to the Mass. Right away the concern is the safety of Cardinal Mahony and all the people in the cathedral. Does he have the potential to do something else?" Perhaps, but at the time, Robertson was unarmed. He was charged with a misdemeanor, booked, and released after a few hours without bail.
Prosecutors filed misdemeanor charges against Robertson on July 22, the Times reported on the 23rd. Robertson could face up to one-and-a-half years in jail and $2,000 in fines if convicted. Defending the prosecution, Tamberg said, "it's really about making sure that the rights of the people who want to worship are respected." And though, according to the Times, many of the 2,000 worshippers gathered in the cathedral at the time of the incident "seemed oblivious to it," "people in the first few pews," said Tamberg, "knew something was terribly wrong."
"This is supposed to be a church of Christianity," said Steven Sanchez, director of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, addressing the prosecution. "Whatever happened to forgiveness? Whatever happened to turning the other cheek?" But, said Tamberg, "disrupting a religious service only scares people and does not promote healing."
SOCIAL ENGINEERING FOR ALL. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Los Angeles Unified School District on June 28 settled out of court a federal lawsuit alleging that teachers and staff at Washington Preparatory High School in Los Angeles have routinely harassed homosexual students, the Los Angeles Times reported. The lawsuit, filed by the ACLU in behalf of two students and Washington Preparatory's Gay Straight Alliance Network club in U.S. district court last October, claimed that teachers and staff called homosexual students names and told them that homosexuality is "wrong" and "unholy." The lawsuit also claimed that students were suspended for being homosexual or for complaining about harassment and that teachers threatened to tell parents that their children were homosexual.
In settling the lawsuit, neither the school nor the district admits the truth of the allegations. The school district, however, must pay attorneys' fees and $2,000 to the Gay Straight Alliance club. It must provide anti-bias training for Washington Preparatory's teachers, staff, and students.
The ACLU conducted three-day faculty training sessions at Washington Preparatory in the spring and will conduct another in the fall. Faculty members will also have to attend a 50-minute follow-up session each year over the next two years. According to the settlement, if the ACLU perceives that the climate on campus has not improved, it can request more training. The group, Gay and Lesbians Initiating Dialogue for Equality, in the spring also conducted 50-minute classroom training sessions for 10th and 11th grade students. Training will be given to the next two freshmen classes and to students coming from feeder middle schools.
A FEDERAL JUDGE in Orange County refused to rule on the consti tutionality of the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act, said the June 17 Los Angeles Times. Two men, Christopher Hammer and Arthur Smelt of Mission Viejo, filed suit in Orange County last September after the county twice denied them a marriage license. Hammer and Smelt, said the Times, "have been a committed couple since 1997." The homosexual couple argued that the Defense of Marriage Act, in reserving federal benefits such as joint-tax filing and others to opposite-sex married couples, violates their fundamental rights. But U.S. district court judge Gary Taylor did not agree. On June 16, Taylor ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act promotes "the stability and legitimacy of what may reasonably be viewed as the optimal union for procreating and rearing children by both biological parents." Citing a Supreme Court ruling, fundamental rights, said Taylor, are only those "deeply rooted in this nation's history and tradition" for at least 50 years; the United States have no tradition of same-sex marriage, he said.
Hammer and Smelt will appeal Taylor's ruling. Their case may end up before the federal Supreme Court.
DOMESTIC PARTNERSHIP IS MARRIAGE in all but name sums up an August 1 California supreme court decision. The case, according to the August 2 Los Angeles Times, involved two lesbians who are registered with the state as domestic partners. The couple sued a country club in San Diego that refused to give them the same golfing privileges it grants to spouses. The supreme court decided, 6-0, in favor of the couple, saying "a business that extends benefits to spouses it denies to registered domestic partners engages in impermissible marital status discrimination." Until this decision, state law only ensured employee benefits to domestic partners, mandating that business grant them the same benefits it grants to married couples. Now the supreme court has extended this mandate to the clients or customers of businesses. Most domestic partners are same-sex couples, homosexuals or lesbians.
The court's decision did not address the issue of same-sex marriage per se. Gerald Uelman, a University of Santa Clara professor of law, told the Times that the decision "does not bode well for same-sex marriage," since it could undermine the claim that not granting marriage to same-sex couples amounts to discrimination. Indeed, for it seems only the designation "marriage" is now denied homosexual couples in the state of California. Whether the court will deem this sufficient grounds for a ruling of discrimination against homosexual couples will be seen in the coming months.
FIVE PRIESTS WHO SIGNED a pro-homosexual rights declaration no longer serve in the diocese of Phoenix, the July 19 Arizona Republic reported. The five were among nine priests who signed the 2003 interfaith Phoenix Declaration, which said, in part, "we stand with the countless Christian ministers, scholars, and laity who ... find no rational biblical or theological basis to condemn or deny the rights of any person based on sexual orientation." In April 2004, Bishop Thomas Olmsted, who only four months previous had been appointed to Phoenix, asked the nine priests to remove their names from the declaration. Only one priest, the Rev. Andre Boulanger, refused and subsequently was prohibited from public ministry. Another signer, the Rev. John Cunningham, was removed from public ministry for allegedly concelebrating a marriage Mass with a Lutheran minister and for mingling Church and private funds. Another declaration signer, the Rev. Ken Van de Ven, had to resign as pastor of a Glendale parish, said Bishop Olmsted, because of "confidential information and an allegation of sexual harassment toward an adult." The Rev. Hugo Gonzalez said he resigned because of Olmsted's lack of "genuine concern" for him, which "translates into an inability to listen, to demonstrate compassion, and to welcome the disenfranchised with the very mercy and forgiveness found at the heart of the Gospel."
"The ousted men are among at least 11 Catholic priests who have left active ministry since Olmsted became bishop in late 2003," noted the Republic. "Olmsted is known for his orthodox ways. He has put a stop to what he considers liturgical violations, has brought back Mass in Latin and has written three articles about church teachings against homosexuality."
REMEMBER THE SABBATH. Bishop Olmsted charged Catholics to keep Sunday holy during a recent ordination Mass, the July 17 Arizona Republic reported. "Keep the Lord's day holy," Olmsted said during his homily; "... refrain from all shopping and enjoy Sunday as a day of rest, a day of leisure, a day for family, a day for celebrating the Eucharist." According to a 2003 survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an average weekend or holiday finds 33 percent of the workforce on the job. Many or most churchgoers use Sunday as day to run errands, do yard work, or shop.
SENT TO PRISON. Bishop John Steinbock of Fresno has finally found a place for Father Jean Michael Lastiri -- prison. On July 28, according to the Fresno Bee, the diocese of Fresno announced that Lastiri will direct the diocese's detention ministry. The priest will be in residence at the Shrine of St. Therese, a parish in Fresno, though, according to St. Therese' s pastor, Monsignor E. James Petersen, Lastiri "won't be working here on the weekend." Bishop Steinbock removed Lastiri as pastor of St. Patrick's parish in Merced for what the bishop called "inappropriate" behavior; Lastiri had frequented a homosexual dating internet site where he solicited liaisons. In May an audit of St. Patrick's finances revealed that Father Lastiri had "misspent" $60,000 in parish finances, spending it on personal travelling expenses, purchase of personal goods and services, personal loans, a down payment on a car, and other items. According to the Bee, the diocese cited administrative problems as the source of the misspending and repaid the money to the parish.
In June Bishop Steinbock appointed Lastiri as associate pastor of St. Philip's parish in Bakersfield, but meeting protest from some parishioners and others, the diocese announced that Lastiri would not be assigned to the parish.
SAVE THE CROSS. Los Angeles County citizens who have been circu lating petitions to restore the cross to the county seal will receive help from the Pacific Justice Institute, a legal defense group which specializes in cases of religious freedom, parental rights, and other civil liberties issues. In September 2004, the county board of supervisors voted 3-2 to remove a small cross from the county seal under threat of a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU claimed the cross constituted a government endorsement of religion. On July 11, Pacific Justice's president Brad Dacus held a press conference with Pastor Jack Hayford and Los Angeles county supervisor Mike Antonovic to "pledge to defend the citizens of Los Angeles County against attacks by individuals or organizations who would try to compel local governments to be hostile to our religious heritage." The city of Redlands has asked the Pacific Justice Institute to defend its city seal if it is challenged in court.
TWO LOS ANGELES SUPERIOR COURT judges have ruled that the Pro-Family Law Center of Southern California may proceed with lawsuits against Planned Parenthood of Los Angeles, Christian Wire Service reported on August 2. The first case, Jones v. Planned Parenthood, involves Arthur Jones, an ex-employee of Planned Parenthood, who charges that Planned Parenthood of Los Angeles has overcharged the state of California for services and goods and has engaged in unfair labor practices. The second case was brought by a former vice president of Planned Parenthood Los Angeles who says he was wrongly dismissed after he brought up similar issues, as well as racism and anti-religious comments made at Planned Parenthood. The case involves documents that allegedly show that Planned Parenthood Los Angeles sought to suppress and conceal from state officials the findings of an independent audit.
BISHOP PHILIP STRALING will be a key witness in the 150 sexual abuse lawsuits facing the diocese of San Bernardino, the Associated Press reported on August 1. Straling, 72, who retired in June as bishop of Reno, previously served as bishop of San Bernardino from 1978 to 1995. The lawsuits say that Bishop Straling knew about abuse by priests in the diocese but did nothing to stop it. However, Riverside lawyer, William Light, who is handling some of the lawsuits, said, "we don't know if Straling knew anything, but as leader, all knowledge of employees is imputed to him." San Bernardino diocese's spokesman, Father Howard Lincoln, said Straling "never knowingly placed children in danger by the placement of a priest. He did not shuffle priests." Lincoln praised the bishop for his efforts to protect children from abuse.
ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST PARISH elementary school in Costa Mesa adopted new admissions guidelines in the wake of a controversy over the attendance of two young boys whose adoptive "parents" are a homosexual couple, said the June 14 Los Angeles Times. The newspaper said it had obtained a copy of a May 6 memorandum from the school, run by the Norbertine fathers of St. Michael's Abbey in Silverado. According to the memorandum, distributed to teachers, the school's admission's policy, adopted in January, means, "practically speaking," that "the children adopted by a same-sex couple" may enroll "on the condition that the same-sex couple agree not to present themselves as a couple at school functions."
According to a parish news release which gives a summary of the main points of a parents' meeting held June 16, the actual language adopted for the school's 2005-06 school handbook, and approved by Bishop Tod Brown, is as follows: "no one in the context of the St. John the Baptist school community is to give witness to a lifestyle that is in conflict with the morality of the Gospel. A coherent witness to Catholic moral teaching is expected at the school, especially in behavior which is evident and public. Any other kind of behavior needs to be addressed and may need to be corrected. The Pastor is the final judge in applying this principle."
The news release announced a "new administrative model" for the school -- the "rector/principal" model. Under this model, the pastor appoints a president or rector who oversees the "areas more specific to the Catholic nature of the school." The rector does not replace the principal, who "continues to be responsible for the day to day educational operations of the school." Norbertine Father Hildebrand Garceau replaces outgoing pastor Father Martin Benzoni. Father Norbert Wood has been appointed rector, while Sister Mary Vianney Ennis remains principal. According to Father Norbert, "the Catholic school needs to provide a protective environment, a kind of oasis, where its children, in the most formative and impressionable period of their lives, are never intentionally exposed to situations which would cause confusion or even deformation of a truly Catholic conscience." And Sister Vianney, whom factions in the school have portrayed as heterodox so far as Catholic teaching on homosexuality goes, pledged her fidelity to Church teaching. "As principal of St. John's," said Sister Vianney, "I am seriously concerned with the distortion and misrepresentation of my views in regard to the teachings of the Catholic Church and their implementation at St. John's. In collaboration with the Pastor and Rector of the school, I continue to be absolutely committed to upholding the teachings of the Church and their day-to-day implementation in the school."
WHAT WILL THE NEXT HUNDRED YEARS bring to the Church? In his column published in the July 1 Tidings, the newspaper of the Los Angeles archdiocese, Father Ronald Rolheiser gave some predictions. In the Christian churches taken together, said Rolheiser, "we will see a return more to the both the theology and pastoral practices of the early church. We will have to learn again, as was the case in the first generations of Christianity, what it means to be church." What this return to early church practices might entail is unclear in the article, but one doubts that Rolheiser means public penance and lifelong excommunication for grievous sins. Nor, it seems, does he mean a return to the early church's more exclusive understanding of salvation, for, says Rolheiser, "we will learn to understand salvation in a deeper and more inclusive way. We will slowly understand more deeply how God's universal salvific will is all-embracing, plays no favorites, is never a question of luck or chance, and is ultimately beyond all human and ecclesial manipulation."
Rolheiser assures us that over the next hundred years "women will continue to assume more leadership inside the church." He says, "we will understand more deeply our own role of binding and loosing inside the body of Christ and the community of the sincere." What does that mean? We shall probably know in about a century.
NO "G" WORD ALLOWED. A student at Victor Valley Community College in Victorville was given an "F" grade for a term paper for using the word God in it, said the June 28 Victorville Daily Press. Bethany Hauf, a 34-year-old mother of four, said her paper topic for an English 101 class -- "Religion and Its Place Within the Government" -- had been approved by her instructor, Michael Shefchik. But with one condition, that she not use the "God" word in the paper, Shef chik told Hauf in an e-mail message. Hauf met with Shefchik and the English department's chairwoman, Judy Solis. According to Solis, Hauf was given two options: either hand in the paper as is or rewrite or edit it. "She continued to write her paper," Solis told the Daily Press. "She knew what the consequences were." Hauf handed in the paper, the name of God and all, and received a failing grade.
Hauf has received legal assistance from the American Center for Law and Justice, founded by Dr. Pat Robertson, which is demanding that her paper be regraded, Shefchik apologize, and that he "receive some kind of training to sensitize him to the constitutional dimensions of his employment in a public educational institution, including his duty to respect constitutional freedoms of expression."
WILL FEMINISM INFLUENCE EVEN ISLAM? The June 27 Los Angeles Times reported how "on a recent Friday" a Muslim woman, Asra Nomani, stepped over a low partition in a Los Angeles mosque to pray with the men. Traditionally in mosques, women are separated from the men -- sometimes by a curtain, sometimes by a wall, or even in a separate room. But Nomani said she saw it as her right to sit with the men at prayer. Others, however, didn't see it that way. Though she was asked twice to return to the section reserved from women and children, Nomani refused. One man said, "she must be mentally sick." A security guard loomed over her as she prayed. Finally, members of the Islamic Center of Southern California cordoned off the place where she was sitting with a red rope and asked other women to join her.
Nomani, a journalist from Morgantown, West Virginia, is an activist who does what she did in Los Angeles at mosques throughout the country. She has brought "global attention" to what the Times called "a long-festering issue: the limits on female access to Muslim prayer space, religious leadership and decision-making power."
More and more Muslims, men and women, said the Times, are pushing for a wider role for women in Islam. Some are merely calling for an end to sex discrimination in Muslim worship; others are saying that nothing in Islam forbids women to be leaders of prayer. The Progressive Muslim Union of North America in June sponsored a townhall meeting at the University of Southern California's Religious Center in Los Angeles which brought together traditionalists and Muslim progressives.
But how influential the progressive movement will be on Islam is unclear. A 2000 national survey by the American-Islamic council and other organizations found that gender segregation was actually increasing in American mosques. This is because, in part, imams who immigrate from the Middle East or South Asia bring more traditional views with them and continue to oppose even desegregating women at worship.
A COUNT OF HOMELESS found over 90,000 homeless men, women, and children living in Los Angeles County, the June 16 Los Angeles Times reported. Of this number, about 35,000 are chronically homeless -- that is, they have been homeless for over a year. According to previous estimates, the number of chronically homeless stood at only 7,500. According to this year's count, more than 28,000 homeless suffer from mental illness and 16,000 were veterans.
The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development requested cities to make the count, tying it to reception of federal grants. In Orange County, another count found 22,784 homeless, though one county official opined that the actual number may be much higher. "In Orange County a large percentage of our homeless people are the working poor who are in and out of motels," said the official, not in shelters or always on the streets. Counts in other cities rendered these numbers: New York, 40,000; Chicago, about 9,600, and San Francisco, 5,600.
A SEATTLE WOMAN RENEWED a child support dispute with a Whittier priest who fathered her child in 1991, said the July 24 Los Angeles Times. Redemptorist priest Arturo Uribe, now pastor of St. Mary of the Assumption Church in Whittier, was a seminarian serving at a Redemptorist parish in Portland, Oregon when he met Steph anie Collopy. Uribe had come to Collopy's apartment to give communion to her "girlfriend" (as the Times put it); he subsequently had an affair with Collopy that lasted several months. Collopy became pregnant, and the affair ended; but the then-26 Collopy went to court seeking child support from Uribe and to sue the archdiocese of Portland for $200,000 because Uribe, as a seminarian working in a archdiocesan parish, had, she claimed, breached the fiduciary duty he owed to someone who "performed pastoral duties for the archdiocese." The archdiocese, then under Archbishop William Levada, had the case thrown out of court, since it said it had never directly employed Collopy, she and Uribe alone were responsible for the child, and Collopy was negligent since she engaged in "unprotected sex." The court determined that Uribe was responsible for child support; but since he had taken a vow of poverty, the support was set at only $215 a month. The Redemp torists agreed to pay the support in return for Collopy's dropping the dispute. The order then ordained Uribe a priest. A court increased the child support payments by $108 a month in 1998, which was also paid by the Redemporists. Uribe, according to Collopy, has never sought contact with his son.
In July, Collopy again asked a Portland court to order Uribe to increase child support payments and to include her son, now 12, in the priest's insurance policy. The boy reportedly suffers from chronic illnesses. Uribe's argument -- that as a religious he has taken a vow of poverty and that his insurance did not provide for children -- convinced the court, which ordered him to continue paying the $323-a-month child support and encouraged the priest to see if his insurance carrier would include his son.
In a statement to the Times, Uribe wrote, "the leadership of the order agreed to assume my obligations for child support. The order has continued to do so and has provided or offered more support than I have been [legally] obligated to pay ... I will continue keeping my son and his mom in my prayers." According to Collopy, before going to court this year, she approached the Redemporists, who offered her a one-time payment of $3,876; but thinking the amount would constitute a settlement, she returned the check.
Officials for the archdiocese of Los Angeles told the Times that neither Uribe nor the Redemptorists had informed them that Uribe had a son.
GREGORY ELDER, a former Episcopalian priest who became Catholic and was ordained into the Catholic priesthood, will be the first married priest to serve in the San Bernardino diocese, the July 25 Los Angeles Times reported. Elder served as associate pastor at Trinity Episcopal Church in Redlands, beginning in 1991. In 2003, he became Catholic, and on April 2, Pope John Paul II permitted Elder to be ordained a Catholic priest. According to the July 25 Inland Empire Daily Bulletin, Elder said of his conversion, "I felt I could be of more service to Christ in the Catholic Church. I felt, to some degree, a bit dishonest, theologically a Catholic in an Anglican robe." Elder, whom Bishop Gerald Barnes sponsored in seeking priestly ordination, said he heard that Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, personally presented Elder's petition to the dying John Paul.
Elder's wife, Sarah O'Brien-Elder, has been a Catholic since 1987. The couple have two children, ages 16 and 18.
A BILL CALLING FOR A RAISE in the minimum wage has already passed the California state assembly and is currently in the senate, the July 18 Sacramento Bee reported. The state minimum wage stands now at $6.75 hour (about $1080 a month before taxes) -- an amount, when adjusted to inflation, that is 28 percent less than the 1968 minimum wage, according to the bill's supporters. Under the new bill, the state would in July 2006 raise the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour and then to $7.75 an hour a year later. Subsequently, the wage would increase each year in accord with the state's consumer price index. Opponents of the wage hike say it will harm Califor nia's economic recovery and would induce business owners to lay off employees -- an argument used by Gover nor Arnold Schwarzenegger last year when he vetoed another minimum wage hike bill. But proponents say the wage hike will give low-wage workers a needed boost in earnings that will help keep them out of poverty; "the alternatives to raising the minimum wage are homeless shelters and soup kitchens and bread lines. And we don't think that's a reasonable substitute," bill sponsor Sally Lieber (D-Mountain View) said. Some studies suggest that a minimum wage hike leads to an increase in the number of poor and near-poor families, while others indicate a moderate wage hike has no effect on employment. Others admit the decrease in employment but say an increase in wages for some is worth the tradeoff. California currently has the lowest minimum wage on the west coast.
THIS YEAR, NO MONEY FOR THE MISSIONS. Though the United States Congress in 2004 approved a $10 million rescue package for the California missions, none of the money will be released this year, said the July 17 Sacramento Bee. This is because Congress will not give out any money until a lawsuit challenging the right of the government to fund mission restoration is resolved. Americans United for Separation of Church and State filed the lawsuit in federal court in Washington, D.C., saying that since the Catholic Church uses all but two of the missions for religious purposes, funding the missions would violate the First Amendment. "There is some controversy created by the lawsuit," said Representative Sam Farr (D-Carmel), a mission bill supporter and a member of the House Appropriations Committee. "They are not going to put money into this account until that controversy is removed."
The non-profit California Missions Foundation, which works to preserve the missions, was unable to obtain any money from Proposition 40, a state ballot measure passed by voters in 2002 which raises money, in part, for "the acquisition, restoration, preservation and interpretation of California's historical and cultural resources." State law forbids the expenditure of state funds for support of religious institutions. Last October, the California Cultural and Historical Endowment Board, which gives out state money, asked the attorney general's office whether state law indeed forbids state money for the restoration of historical, though religious, buildings. By late July, the attorney general's office had made no ruling.
MISSION SAN MIGUEL, near Paso Robles, which has been closed since December 2003 on account of earthquake damage, is in desperate need of funds. According to John Fowler, project manager for the mission's restoration, at least $16 million is needed to restore the mission so that it can be again opened to the public. So far, only $400,000 have been raised, $100,000 of that from the California Missions Foundation.