NEWS

ARTICLES

LETTERS

FOLLOW ME

ROAMIN' CATHOLIC






Contents © 2003
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

NEWS
JUNE 2003

---

A BILL THAT WOULD have defined truancy as a form of child abuse is dead, said an April 30 report from Home School Legal Defense. The bill, sponsored by state senator Richard Alarcón (D-San Fernando), would have made truancy a new category of child abuse under California law. Concerned that such a measure could force home schooling families to send their children to school or, worse, lead to loss of custody of their children, Home School Legal Defense joined with Family Protection Ministries, the Christian Home Educators Association of California and other groups to oppose the bill. After his office received many calls opposing the bill, Senator Alarcón said he decided the bill was too far reaching. He tried to amend the bill, but missed the deadline for changes. Alarcón's office said the bill had not been an attempt to crack down on parents who legally school their children at home.


DOUBLE MURDER CHARGE INCLUDES "VIABLE FETUS." Stanislaus County district attorney Jim Brazelton will prosecute a man under a 1970 law that makes killing an unborn, viable fetus a crime, said an April 19 San Francisco Chronicle report. Scott Peterson was taken into custody in San Diego on April 18, four days after the body of his wife, Laci Peterson, 27, and their baby washed ashore a few miles north of the Berkeley Marina. Mrs. Peterson, who had been eight months pregnant, had been missing since Christmas Eve -- the day on which Peterson admits he launched his fishing boat from the Berkeley Marina. Thus far, prosecutors have not said that they have any other evidence against Peterson.

California, said the Chronicle, is one of 23 states that makes the killing of a fetus by a third party a crime. If convicted, Peterson may face the death penalty or life imprisonment.


"CONNER" WAS THE NAME Laci Peterson had already given her unborn child, who was due February 10, said an April 20 Morris County, New Jersey, Daily Report story. But though the unborn child was "wanted," Marva Stark, president of the National Organization for Women in Morris County, New Jersey, has said that calling the child's killing a murder is problematic. "If this is murder, well, then any time a late-term fetus is aborted, they could call it murder," said Stark. "There's something about this that bothers me a little bit. Was it born, or was it unborn?" asked Stark, noting the fact that the baby's body was separated from the mother, though he still had his umbilical cord attached. "If it was unborn, then I can't see charging [Peterson] with a double-murder. He was wanted and expected, and [Laci Peterson] had a name for him, but if he wasn't born, he wasn't born. It sets a kind of precedent." Stark said that the issue was "just something I've been ruminating on."


SHIPWRECKED. Chanting, "save our school!" a crowd of children carried picket signs in front of the chancery office of the archdiocese of San Francisco on April 14, said an April 17 San Francisco Chronicle report. The children were from St. Paul of the Shipwreck Catholic school in the predominately black Bayview-Hunterspoint neighborhood. The school, which serves mainly low-income black children, is one of four archdiocesan schools that are suffering severe financial problems that stem from under-enrollment (tuitions range from $2,550 to $3,927 a year.) Two of the other three, however -- St. Dominic's on Pine Street and Sacred Heart on Fell Street -- will combine into one school next year. St. Emydius, on Montfort Avenue, will combine classes and grades. Only the Franciscan-run St. Paul of the Shipwreck may close, since, besides under-enrollment, it this year raised only one-third of the $300,000 it was required to raise.

Though present at the demonstration, Franciscan Father John Heinz had recommended the closing of the school to Archbishop Levada. Heinz told the April 18 Catholic San Francisco that "the parish has been struggling with the school for six years and they've done an extraordinary job of supporting it." He hoped, he said, "someone, somewhere could see the problem. and come to the aid of the archdiocese and the school and turn this around.... Some billionaire, somewhere." Though not faulting the archdiocese for the school's financial woes, Heinz noted, with some hope, the he had " a responsible and viable plan to open the doors and pay the teachers next year and it would be irresponsible for me to make a recommendation otherwise." An archdiocesan report has said that, over the last decade, St. Paul of the Shipwreck has received $1.8 million in subsidies from the archdiocese. The report stated that the declining number of blacks in San Francisco has contributed to the lower enrollment in black Catholic schools.

According to Catholic San Francisco, the archdiocese has made no final decision regarding St. Paul of the Shipwreck. The archdiocese's superintendent for Catholic schools, Maureen Huntington, said the archdiocese will provide placement opportunities for St. Paul students at other Catholic schools.


THE HIGH COST OF LIVING in the Bay Area, which forces families to look for less expensive housing elsewhere, has had its effect on Catholic schools, said the April 17 San Francisco Chronicle. "A lot of families are moving out to Tracy and Stockton -- places they can afford," said Mark De Marco, superintendent of the diocese of Oakland's schools. The diocese's schools have lost 539 students in Alameda and Contra Costa counties, said the Chronicle, -- since last year, a 2.6 percent drop to 20,639 students. The diocese, seeking to reverse the trend, has hired a Connecticut-based company that specializes in helping Catholic schools turn themselves around financially. The company's plan, which will involve 22 Catholic elementary schools, has each school research its own needs, which research will form the basis for a school mission statement. Thence parents and other concerned individuals will form school boards to address those needs.

The archdiocese of San Francisco is looking to marketing to shore up its schools and plans, by July 1, to hire a marketing director, at $95,000 a year. It will also require schools in San Francisco and San Mateo counties to draw up their own marketing plans.


THE DIOCESE OF MONTEREY has responded to molestation accusations made by four men against a priest of the diocese, said an April 23 Associated Press report. 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 at St. John's church in the 1960s. McHugh died more than 20 years ago. The plaintiffs, said the diocese of Monterey, have failed to show that the diocese knew anything about McHugh's "prior unlawful sexual conduct." The diocese also noted that the 1960s knew no law mandating the reporting of sexual abuse cases.


CALLING THE CHARGES against him "inconclusive," the archdiocese of San Francisco has reinstated in his parish a priest accused of molestation, said an April 14 San Francisco Chronicle report. Last August, the Rev. Daniel Carter was suspended as pastor of the Church of the Immaculate Heart in Belmont after a woman, identified in court documents as Jane Roe 3, accused Carter of fondling her in the late 1970s, when she was eight. Roe's lawyer filed the suit last August but then withdrew it, since it would not be covered by the state law which has removed the statute of limitations against those accused of molestation. The suit was refiled in San Francisco Superior Court on March 27.

After being placed on administrative leave, Carter continued saying Mass in private homes for invited guests. He also sent pre-printed postcards (with the parish's return address) asking supporters to urge his innocence to the archdiocese. His supporters, in turn, have raised a $100,000 defense fund for the priest.

Though it reinstated Carter to the Belmont parish, the archdiocese plans to reassign him to a new parish on June 30, though Carter wishes to remain at Immaculate Heart. As for the allegations, the April 11 Catholic San Francisco said, "unless new facts come to light in the course of the civil suit, and/or any criminal investigation that may still be in process, then the Archdiocesan Independent Review Board finding that the allegations of child abuse were inconclusive shall remain in place."


IN RESPONSE TO LOBBYING by the Los Angeles district attorney's office, the California legislature has passed a law extending the statute of limitations on molestation cases. Governor Gray Davis signed the bill on April 4. The legislature took action because of a dispute between the Los Angeles district attorney's office and the archdiocese of Los Angeles over the release of confidential personnel files of priests. The district attorney's office said that without evidence allegedly available in the files, the 12-month statute of limitations on several cases would have run out by the second week of April. The new law extends the statute of limitations until the dispute over the files is resolved.

According to the March 21 National Catholic Reporter, the 12-month process here cited does not refer to a state law, passed last year, that removes the statute of limitations on all sexual molestation cases, but to a 1994 California court ruling that prosecutors could press 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.


BUMS BEGONE! The San Francisco Hotel Council has launched an anti-panhandling campaign, spending $65,000 in billboard advertisements with messages that link begging with deviant behavior, said the April 23 San Francisco Chronicle. Under the leitmotiv, "Giving to panhandlers doesn't help, it hurts," the campaign offers various billboard images, such as one that shows a tourist couple saying, "Today we rode a cable car, visited Alcatraz and supported a drug habit," and a smiling gentleman declaring, "Today I did Tai Chi, donated some change and helped spread STDs."

San Francisco tourism has suffered from a number of causes, said the Chronicle, including over-building of hotels, competition from other vacation spots, and the September 11 scare. "But the homeless have definitely had an impact as well," Hotel Council executive director Bob Begley told the Chronicle. "For a while we were able to tell people that the city was working on the problem, but now people say, 'You told us that last time, and nothing has changed.'" Begley said that the campaign also hands out cards, encouraging tourists to give to charities instead of panhandlers.

"It's slick, real slick," said homeless advocate Paul Boden. "And the message is real clear. Hate the homeless -- they spread drugs, disease and close down businesses. But they don't say the disabled spread drugs or that the mentally ill spread disease. They don't use that as a point of attack."

"Look,"continued Boden, "this isn't at all about solving the homeless problem. This is about making them go away. It's like they think if only the homeless left, then San Francisco would be Disneyland -- it ain't going to happen."


GROOVY EASTER. "Easter is the time when many churches go all out to demonstrate the liveliness of their ministries," said the April 20 Monterey Herald. The churches use the holy day as a chance "to put their best foot forward, attract younger, less traditional audiences and keep their congregations coming back for more."

Carol Kuzdenyi, directress of music ministries at St. Angela's Catholic Church in Pacific Grove, told the Herald that "a lot of people" have "left the church because it was so boring. But the church is trying to draw [them] back, and music is more accessible to kids." Thus, not only has Kuzdenyi festooned St. Angela's with "colorful Easter banners," she has introduced percussion and violins to the music, to jazz it up. All this has an incarnational purpose, according Kuzdenyi. "If we can experience jazzy music in church, you can [think of church] when you hear jazzy music outside," she told the Herald.


IN RESPONSE TO INTERNATIONAL TALKS held in 1999 between the Holy See and the Anglican communion, a panel of American Catholic and Episcopal delegates proposed on April 2 that representatives of the Church and the Episcopal church attend one another's meetings, said an April 3 Associated Press report. The American panel proposes that Anglican and Episcopal bishops join American Catholic bishops in their meetings with the pope as well as in meetings of the U.S. bishops, where they will have a voice, but no vote. Catholic bishops would also attend Episcopal and Anglican meetings. On the subject of papal authority, the panel stated, said Associated Press, that a "reformed understanding and practice" of the papacy is needed.

Archbishop William Levada is co-chair of the American Catholic/Episcopalian talks.


SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS who fail to protect students from harassment based on sexual orientation can be held personally responsible, said the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, according to an April 9 San Francisco Chronicle report. On April 8, the court agreed to hear a case brought in 1998 against Morgan Hill school officials by six former students who are either homosexual or were thought homosexual. The three judge panel cited a 1990 appellate court ruling that said that "state employees who treat individuals differently on the basis of their sexual orientation violate the constitutional guarantee of equal protection" -- though no federal statute explicitly protects homosexuals. Matthew Coles, the national director of the American Civil Liberties Union's lesbian and gay rights project, told the Chronicle that the ruling is the first of its kind in the United States.


THE REAL JESUS is what the April 2003 issue of the widely read Catholic Digest claimed it was presenting to readers in an article titled, "Joe's Boy." "There's the Messiah, and then there's the ordinary person who's a lot like you and me," said the article's teaser. Then is Jesus two persons? The article seems to say, yes; for Joe's Boy is not the Son of God most Catholics are used to. Joe's Boy "must have had a crush on a girl"; he might have "roared at his father, snapped at his mother." Perhaps he "ran naked howling, laughing through the village on a dare," and, "maybe he had way too much wine at a wedding." When his mother found the 12-year-old Joe's Boy in the temple, he answered her inquiries "with some major sass that he had real work to do, and it was all his mother could do to keep her husband from pitching the boy headlong into the manure pile outside the temple." But, unlike most mothers in similar situations, "she treasured those words in her heart."

The author of "Joe's Boy" does admit that some extraordinary events marked the life of the young lad -- he knew the time and manner of his death, for instance, and that his name had come to him through a vision given to his mother. These all form what the article's author called the "legend" of this man. But one must not, in remembering the legend, forget "the skinny intense confusing man himself. for he was once one of us, which to say he is us."

TOP