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Contents © 2003
by Jim Holman.
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NEWS
MAY 2003

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PILGRIMAGE OF PEACE. Three prelates, representing the Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox Churches in California, planned to make a pilgrimage to shrines of their religions to pay for Christian unity and peace, said the March 14 Catholic San Francisco. Archbishop William Levada of San Francisco, California Episcopal bishop William Swing, and Metropolitan Anthony, Greek Orthodox bishop of California and the West, were to lead the April 1-12 pilgrimage to Cantebury, England, Rome and Constantinople. The California prelates will visit Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams in England, His All Holiness Bartholomew, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople in Constantinople, and Pope John Paul II in Rome.

The goals of the pilgrimage, said the three prelates, include a demonstration of "an earnest desire to become more knowledgeable and appreciative of each other's faith traditions." They also want to show "an often fractured and divided world that there are religious communities reaching out to one another."


CHARLES HARVEY, beloved by many Catholics in the San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco areas, died of a sudden heart attack in San Francisco on February 28. He began working for Catholic Answers, the San Diego-based Catholic apologetics organization, in the late 1980s. There he met and became close friends with Mark Brumley and Jack Gergurich; all three eventually went to work for Ignatius Press in San Francisco, where Brumley and Gergurich remain employed. Harvey went to work at Ignatius Press in 1998, assisting Brumley with magazine promotion and editing tasks for various publishing projects. He became the full-time managing editor of Homiletic & Pastoral Review in 2001, which is one of the two magazines currently published by Ignatius Press (the other is Catholic World Report).

"Charlie was a good and holy man," said Brumley. "He had a deep love for the Lord, His blessed mother and the rest of the Church. He was misleadingly simple; he seemed like a very simple fellow, and yet he was very intelligent, very well read, very knowledgeable, an extremely humorous and funny fellow and always a source of good ideas."

Harvey "attended the University of Dallas for a couple of years and his mentor down there was the eminent Catholic philosopher Frederick Wilhelmsen; they became very good friends," said Gergurich. "Charlie worked with L. Brent Bozell on Triumph magazine. In fact, Charlie was involved in the first public pro-life protest, with Brent Bozell and a few others. He was one of the funniest people I ever met; he could do just about any accent. Charlie was a very courtly Catholic gentleman. He treated women with the utmost respect, as sort of a deference to the Blessed Virgin."

The wake for Harvey was held on March 6 in San Francisco. His funeral Mass was held on March 7 at St. Dominic's Church in San Francisco, where Harvey was a parishioner. The main celebrant was Father Joseph Fessio, who made a special trip from Florida for the occasion.


A "TEACHING MASS" was celebrated by Father Mark Stetz, pastor of Holy Cross church in Santa Cruz, on Saturday, March 15. For over two hours, Father Stetz explained the various parts of the Mass as they occurred and answered questions from the congregation. He explained that the posture of standing, as in the military, is a sign of respect and that is why we stand for the Eucharistic prayer and the Ecce Agnus Dei. On the other hand, kneeling, Father reminded us, was a posture originally assumed in the Middle Ages by people who were begging for something. Stetz instructed attendees to stand at the consecration.

What is controversial about Stetz's instructions is that they seem to contradict the American adaptation of the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, which states: "in the dioceses of the United States of America, they should kneel beginning after the singing or recitation of the Sanctus until after the Amen of the Eucharistic Prayer, except when prevented on occasion by reasons of health, lack of space, the large number of people present, or some other good reason." The words "or some other good reason" invites the question -- how much power does the local bishop have to change the liturgy in spite of the norm practiced in the rest of the country? The same problem exists in the General Instruction regarding the adopted posture immediately following the Lamb of God: "The faithful kneel after the Agnus Dei unless the Diocesan Bishop determines otherwise."

Editor Helen Hull Hitchcock, in the March 2003 Adoremus Bulletin, admits that the matter of the bishop's power to alter the liturgy in his diocese remains as yet unresolved. Yet, she opines, "the Eucharist is the sign of unity of the entire Church -- past, present and future -- and of the one Christ. The bishop is responsible for the integrity of the Liturgy within his own diocese. But the Mass is public worship; it does not belong to the bishop alone."


QUEER BIBLE STUDY. The March 9 bulletin at Holy Cross in Santa Cruz announced "an exciting Bible study series with Father Mike Marini." Details about the meeting were not revealed in the bulletin. A phone call to the rectory revealed the weekly series led by Father Marini began Wednesday March 26 and would probably continue until after Easter.

Besides being controversial for settling two sexual molestation suits against him, Marini holds problematic views. In a June 15, 2002 radio program on a Santa Cruz station, on which he was interviewed with Chris Fahrenbach, current director of Holy Cross' Gay and Lesbian Outreach Ministry, Marini called "problematic" the Church's teaching that homosexual activity is sinful. There is a continuing "revolution and evolution" going on, he said. The Church went from "condemning people for just being homosexual, to saying that it's O.K. to be homosexual if you just don't act it out."

One caller who supported the work of Father Marini criticized a previous caller for believing in the inerrancy of Scripture -- noting the Church, which the caller said was invented by Constantine, rewrote Scripture. The host of the show indicated that Marini and Fahrenbach were nodding their heads in approval. Father Marini encouraged the caller. "Preach on, sister," he said.


QUEER EXEGESIS. In their June radio program, Marini and Fahrenbach addressed Scripture's teaching on the immorality of homosexuality with these statements: "it's more complex than that;" "there is no place in the Gospel where Jesus says, 'Thou shall not engage in homosexual activity;'" "Scripture is much too distant historically to do that [discern moral behavior] with any kind of accuracy;" "Jesus makes it clear that the commandment to love is paramount."

When asked to comment upon Paul's epistle to the Romans, Marini said, "when we talk about how you interpret Scripture, you really have to understand the context in which that Scripture was written. And there was a very heavy influence of Stoic philosophy in what Paul wrote. The lists of sins that you find enumerated in his epistles are almost verbatim lists from the writings of the Stoic philosophers. Now the whole concept that you can take a philosophy of life from the first century A.D. and drop it into the 20th century when the rate of change and difference of structures in society, and the way we look at things politically, is so different. It is just not a healthy use of Scripture."


SAN FRANCISCO SUPERVISOR, Gavin Newsom, has promised that, if elected mayor of San Francisco in November, he will end panhandling in the city, according to a March San Francisco Chronicle report. Speaking to supporters at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, Newsom said his "Care Not Cash" Proposition N, which he promoted during his run for city supervisor, " was a triumph of policy and common sense over politics." The ballot measure, which replaced welfare cash payments to the homeless with services, "embodies," said Newsom, "the platform on which we stand, and the framework in which we will change this city."

On the subject of panhandling, Newsom said, "I'll end the tolerance for panhandling that is literally allowing people to deteriorate right in front of our eyes." At which, said the Chronicle, Newsom received the loudest applause of the day.


"PANHANDLING IS A SYMPTOM of homelessness," said mayoral candidate Jim Reid. In a March 27 conversation with the Faith, Reid said that "if we address the core problem, you could almost make panhandling go away; but if you just attack the symptom, you're not going to." The problem, said Reid, is that "compassionate people" will give money to a panhandler "if we believe that it is possible that this person is using the money for housing or food or whatever. I believe if we house everyone -- that no one can say they don't have housing, because we provide it for them, and it's decent housing -- then you can have a campaign for tourists, saying, 'please don't give people money because they have food, clothing, and shelter, and we can prove it.'"

Reid, a principal opponent of Proposition N, continued, "I think that attacking panhandling before you solve the homeless problem is premature, because we aren't providing our homeless people with anything decent, even with the general assistance we give them, and people desperately need money. And when we take their general assistance away -- which we're going to do because we passed this thing [Proposition N] -- there's going to be more panhandlers. And what are you going to do? Arrest them? Very bad use of public money."


THE PLAN BY SAN FRANCISCO SOCIAL SERVICE officials to fingerprint every person who seeks a bed in a public shelter has been rejected by the city's department of human services, said a March 20 San Francisco Chronicle report. Critics of the fingerprinting plan charged, last month, that it would only scare undocumented workers from city shelters. The fingerprinting plan, as an implementation of the "Care Not Cash" initiative, will now apply only to the roughly 2,500 people affected by the initiative. People receiving city welfare payment already have to provide fingerprint identification in order to get their checks each month. Still, said the Chronicle, people coming to shelters will have to place their fingers on an imaging system at the shelters to determine whether they are in the welfare database.


THE FOUNDING BISHOP OF MONTEREY diocese, Bishop Henry Anselm Clinch, 94, died March 8 in Santa Cruz from complications of pneumonia. Born in 1908, Clinch was ordained priest in 1936 for the then-diocese of Monterey/Fresno. When Monterey was split from Fresno in 1967, Clinch became its first bishop, serving in that office until 1982. Besides being Monterey's first bishop, Clinch, according to Catholic News Service, was, until his death, the second oldest bishop in the United States and one of the three remaining bishops to have been ordained by Pope Pius XII. Clinch also attended the Second Vatican Council.

The March 14 funeral Mass for Bishop Clinch was attended by several California prelates, according to the March 15 Monterey County Herald: Bishop Sylvester Ryan of Monterey, Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, Bishop John Cummins of Oakland, Bishop Patrick McGrath of San Jose, retired Archbishop John Quinn of San Francisco, and Bishop Tod Brown of Orange, who gave the homily. Clinch, said Brown, "modeled the new diocese [of Monterey] on the spirit of [the Second Vatican] council."


MOLESTATION ROUNDUP. The press in early March reported more molestation cases involving northern California priests. According to the March 15 Monterey County Herald, a San Luis Obispo man has accused the Rev. Orlando Battagliola of having abused him when he was a ninth grader, serving as an altar boy at Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa in the early 1970s. Battagliola died about 1977. The alleged abuse victim filed a suit against the diocese of Monterey in Monterey superior court on March 13. The victim's attorneys claim the diocesan officials had reasons to know about the abuse and concealed it from law enforcement. This was the second lawsuit to be filed against the diocese of Monterey in a month. On February 27, Kim Allyn, Santa Cruz County sheriff's spokesman, and three others sued the diocese for $10 million , claiming that the Rev. Patrick McHugh had molested them when they were altar boys. McHugh died more than 20 years ago.

In San Francisco, Austin Peter Keegan, 67, a former priest, pleaded innocent on March 13 to charges that he had molested two boys in the late 1960s, said a March 14 Associated Press report. After being charged last year, Keegan went to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where he was arrested on March 1.

Another retired priest, Robert Ponciroli, 66, was arrested February 26 at his home in Brooksville, Florida, according to the February 27 San Francisco Chronicle. Ponciroli has been accused of molesting two altar boys in the 1970s and early 1980s. Last March, the diocese of Oakland reported a complaint of sexual abuse against Ponciroli to authorities, who received another complaint from a former altar boy a few months later. According to documents, the diocese of Oakland was involved in a 1994 sexual abuse settlement involving Ponciroli. The diocese removed Ponciroli from priestly ministry in 1995.


PIED PIPER'S TRIAL ON HOLD. The trial of former Union City and Fremont priest, Stephen Kiesle, has been put on hold until July, pending a United States Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of a 1994 California law, said the March 14 Oakland Tribune story. The 55-year-old Kiesle faces 13 counts of child molestation in three counties, said the Tribune. The alleged abuse in question dates back to 1968, when the statute of limitations for such cases was three years. But in 1994, a California court ruled that prosecutors could bring charges in molestation cases, regardless of the statute of limitations, provided that the victim report the abuse within one year of the time he comes forward with it. The court ruling, said the Tribune, also stated that, in order for the charges to be brought forward, there must be evidence of "substantial sexual conduct." The question confronting cases like Kiesle's is whether the Supreme Court will uphold the lower court's ruling. If it does not, then charges against Kiesle and hundreds of other child molesters could be dropped. Superior court judge Dennis McLaughlin granted the delay in Kiesle' s case, saying, "it seems senseless to put the victims and witnesses through testimony" while the Supreme Court is considering the matter.

Kiesle, who when a priest called himself the "Pied Piper of the Neighborhood," faces seven charges dating from his tenure at Santa Paula Catholic Church in Fremont, two from his time at Our Lady of the Rosary in Union City, two from his time at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Pinole, and two on account of having allegedly molested a girl in Truckee.


BISHOP PATRICK ZIEMANN, who left the Santa Rosa diocese under the cloud of sexual scandal, is "residing in comfortable, if not luxurious, exile at a monastery in the Arizona desert that doubles as a tourist destination," said a March 19 SF Weekly story. The retired bishop, who admitted to a long-standing sexual relationship with a priest he had brought from South America, has become, said the Weekly, "a fixture on the artsy party circuit in nearby Tucson; he's even spotted occasionally at a karaoke bar." Yet life at Holy Trinity Monastery near Tucson has had its spiritual benefits for Ziemann, who claims, said the Weekly, to spend four hours a day in prayer.

Ziemann, said the article, no longer says Mass. His privileges were removed last year by the Vatican, said the Weekly, when it was discovered that Ziemann had violated the conditions of his stay at the monastery by occasionally filling in for a priest at a nearby town. Ziemann also held seminars for couples engaged to be married.

According to the Weekly, Ziemann has gotten kid-glove treatment because of clerical friends in high places -- Archbishop William Levada of San Francisco, Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, and Bishop Manuel Moreno, until recently bishop of Tucson, Arizona. Ziemann's legal counsel, said the Weekly, is Donald Steier, a Los Angeles criminal defense lawyer. Steier represents many Los Angeles archdiocesan priests accused of sexual molestation. During the year Archbishop Levada ran the diocese of Santa Rosa, after Ziemann's departrre, diocesan officials were instrumental in disuading prosecutors from pursuing criminal charges against Ziemann after it appeared the diocese faced a large financial scandal. Under Levada' s administration, too, said the Weekly, the diocese paid Jorge Hume Salas, Ziemann's former lover, $535,000 in return for dropping a civil lawsuit against Ziemann and to keep him quiet.

The Weekly also made this surprising claim: "Although [Ziemann's] clerical privileges are restricted while he undergoes "spiritual rehabilitation," church officials haven't ruled out the possibility that the disgraced bishop may someday get a crack at heading another diocese." Ziemann, too, has not ruled out this possibility. "It's whatever the Lord wills," he told the Weekly. "Whatever the Lord has in mind for me, I'm willing to accept."


ANOTHER VICTORY. The Life Legal Defense Foundation is celebrating a victory against Planned Parenthood in San Francisco after the California court of appeal reversed a ruling that barred a pro-lifer from protesting in front of the Planned Parenthood Golden Gate.

After pro-lifer Ross Foti, in 1998, sued Planned Parenthood Golden Gate for damages sustained while being attacked by clinic employees and volunteers while carrying out a protest in front of the clinic, Planned Parenthood cross-sued Foti, saying that he was violating a 1995 injunction against Operation Rescue that kept the pro-life group at least 15 feet from the clinic property. Foti was not a member of Operation Rescue and was not a party in the injunction. Nevertheless Planned Parenthood argued that Foti, as well as all clinic protestors, were bound by the terms of the injunction.

In March 2002, San Mateo superior court judge Matthew Bergeron ruled in favor of Planned Parenthood. Life Legal Defense Foundation appealed Bergeron's decision to the California court of appeal. In reversing the lower court, the California court of appeal on March 3, 2003 said that the injunction did not apply to Foti since he was not a party to the action. "An injunction is obviously a personal decree ... not effective against the world at large...," said the court. Planned Parenthood Golden Gate had argued that it would be unduly burdened if it had to prove a case against each protester at the clinic. To this argument, the appellate court wrote, "virtually every prong of this argument is erroneous."

Foti's attorney, Life Legal Defense's Katie Short, said that she was pleased by the appellate court's ruling. Planned Parenthood Golden Gate "has a world view that all peaceful pro-life picketing is tortious because it informs women of other viable choices," said Short. "It argued that all peaceful protestors should lose their free-speech rights if unlawful protest activity had previously been enjoined a decade ago. The court definitely settled the matter: a pro-life protester, like any other protestor, cannot lose her free speech rights without proof of her participation in unlawful activity."


ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE REJECTS PRAYER. On Monday, March 10, the California assembly rules committee effectively killed a resolution honoring the National Day of Prayer. The resolution, introduced by Assemblyman Tim Leslie (R-Tahoe), would have encouraged people to pray "for the nation, its people, and its leaders." To alleviate concerns that he was trying to establish a national monotheistic religion, Leslie agreed to add the word "their" before "God's" in the line, "... the people of California are encouraged to gather together in homes and places of worship to pray, each according to his or her own faith, for God's blessings upon our state and our nation...." This gave the resolution the same language as a previous resolution which passed through the rules committee unanimously last year and passed the assembly with only one dissenting vote (Paul Koretz, D-West Hollywood).

The assembly rules committee, however, demanded that Leslie put "their" in front of every instance of "God" in the bill. Leslie refused. After the bill died, Leslie said, "one day this state will realize you can only give God the finger for so long before He exacts some sort of retribution." There are currently no plans to reintroduce the measure.


ISLAMIC REVOLUTION OVER ABORTION. Steven Mosher of the Front Royal-based Population Research Institute predicted in March that the defeat of Saddam Hussein in the United States-led war on Iraq would open up the conquered country to the United States Agency for International Development -- an agency, said Mosher, that is "better at promoting population control and radical feminism than in building free market democracies abroad." According to a March 21 Catholic World News report, Mosher said the agency will "inaugurate programs which will subject Iraqi children, especially girls, to graphic sex education programs. They will stock Iraqi medical clinics with condoms and contraceptives. They will further insist that family planning (population control) programs be in place, warning that the penalty for noncompliance will be a denial of additional aid...." The agency will fund, said Mosher, "radical feminist organizations that lobby for, among other things, the legalization of abortion."

Such lobbying, said, Mosher, will alarm both Islamic and Christian Iraqis. And worse, it could impel "fundamentalist Mullahs, disgusted by the hedonistic lifestyle of Hollywood and the secular materialism of Manhattan," to revolution.


MANWOMAN HONORED. The California assembly, on March 24, chose a man for its Woman of the Year. The Woman of the Year is an annual ceremony held by the assembly to give each legislator the chance to recognize an outstanding woman in his district. This year, Assemblyman Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), himself a homosexual, chose for the honor Theresa Sparks, a Kansas native who underwent a man-to-woman sex change in Thailand in 2000. In 2001, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown appointed Sparks as the first "transgender" appointee to the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, and Sparks was instrumental in the fight to get the city to pay for its workers' sex-change operations. "This is just one step against discrimination," Sparks said at the time. "This is a medical condition, and there are medical procedures that can correct it." Sparks also has the goal of giving transgender issues "more visibility. That seems to be a way to get rid of the perceptions that we're sexual deviants or perverts."

When Sparks was introduced, many of the legislators cheered and clapped loudly. Others were seen literally sitting on their hands. One assembly staffer noted that, given the assembly's make-up, the recognition was perfectly logical. "In their view, it's a woman," said a staffer to a conservative member. "It shows how low our state has sunk."


GUYS AND DOLLS. On March 19, the assembly labor and employment committee passed a bill (AB 196), sponsored by Assemblyman Mark Leno, which expands the definition of "sex" to include self-identified transgender for the purposes of defining unlawful employment discrimination. Derisively known around the capitol as "the Klinger bill," the measure defines gender as "the employee's actual sex, or the employer's perception of the employee's identity, appearance, or behavior, even if these characteristics differ from those traditionally associated with the employee's sex at birth."

Supporters of the bill said no one should be subjected to discriminatory treatment in employment and housing because of gender-related characteristics irrelevant to a person's qualifications. Opponents, made up of a cross section of business and family rights groups, said the measure was unfair to employers because it placed "the desires of an employee above the rights of an employer to set reasonable dress codes for his business." Art Croney of the Committee on Moral Concerns told the assembly committee the measure equates employment with crime. "Cross-dressers and transsexuals can do whatever they want in private," he noted. "In the workplace employers have the right to expect a minimum level of civility. Requiring traditional gender roles is not the same as committing a crime against a person."

The bill now moves to the assembly appropriations committee. Members of the committee representing northern California are: Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), Patty Berg (D-Eureka), Rebecca Cohn (D-Campbell), Ellen Corbett (D-San Leandro), Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), Joe Nation (D-San Rafael), Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto), Patricia Wiggins (D-Napa), and Leland Yee (D-San Francisco).


AT A PRESS CONFERENCE on March 3, the Campaign for California Families and several legislators announced the public campaign they would mount against several pro-homosexual bills. The bills are: AB 205, which would allow Vermont-style "civil unions;" AB 17, which would force state contractors to subsidize domestic partnership benefits for homosexual employees or else lose their contracts; AB 458, requiring foster parents to support homosexual behavior among foster children; AB 196, which would fine businesses up to $150,000 if they didn't allow employees to cross dress at work; and AB 1520, which creates the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Veterans' Memorial Commission, which would have the power to build LGBT displays at veterans memorials throughout the state. Another is SCA 5 (Speier, D-San Mateo), which opponents say undermines marriage by awarding a marriage benefit to unmarried cohabitants in the area of property tax.

Randy Thomasson, executive director for the Campaign for California Families, said each of these bills seeks to undermine marriage in some fashion or the other. Assemblyman Tim Leslie (R-Tahoe City) spoke out against AB 205 in particular, saying, "American society and law has consistently affirmed that marriage, as a foundational institution, is the most critical relationship of all.... This is why American law has always extended only to married couples certain rights and privileges as an affirmation of the importance of marriage and as a means of strengthening of that institution.... Those of you who wish to [change the definition of marriage] have a right to your view of morality, but it is not the morality of the majority of Californians. Don't force your morality on us. Don't force your redefinition of marriage on the rest of us. Don't change our legal code in a way that holds marriage no more sacred than any other contract of convenience."


THE CALIFORNIA ALLIANCE for Pride and Equality took issue with the pro-family advocates, saying their "statements are hypocritical and a complete betrayal of the position taken by the proponents of Proposition 22," who said that Proposition 22 was only about marriage and not domestic partnerships. A bill such as "AB 205 will enable all parents, gay and straight, to better protect their families by adding significant new responsibilities for domestic partners," said Alliance executive director Geoffrey Kors. "We believe strongly that marriage and responsible, committed partnerships matter, which is why we think it's so important that all families have access to those protections."

Thomasson countered that such views were "intolerant of traditional marriage [and] intolerant of traditional families." He went on to say that because of an AB 17-like ordinance in San Francisco, the Salvation Army is no longer providing meals to seniors and the indigent in that city.

On April 1, the assembly judiciary committee approved AB 205. Its next hurdle was the assembly appropriations committee.

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