NEWS

ARTICLES

LETTERS

FOLLOW ME

ROAMIN' CATHOLIC






Contents © 1998
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

NEWS
SEPTEMBER 1998

---

CATHOLIC RADIO IS COMING TO SACRAMENTO IN THE FALL. Douglas Sherman, President of Immaculate Heart Radio and founder of Reno's Catholic radio station KIHM, told the Faith on July 15 that his network is raising $575,000 to buy a frequency that would cover "the greater Sacramento area."

The station, says Sherman, would offer both original programming and rebroadcasted material 24 hours a day, making it the sole "fulltime Catholic station in the state." Catholic figures like Scott Hahn`and Jeff Cavins will headline the programming. Bishop William Weigand will have a live call-in show and the diocese will have an "hour a day for their own programming that will be done through the bishops' office," says Sherman.

"We have about three hours a day in Spanish, about 15 percent is devotional, about 25 percent catechetical, 15 percent is news and current events and 20 percent is live call-in shows," says Sherman. This formula has worked in Reno: "About a year and a half ago we began broadcasting in Reno. At that time we were the 7th largest Catholic radio station in the country. That compared to 1600 Protestant stations.... We are being told constantly that this show is touching people's hearts, causing conversions and helping people deepen their faith."

What sparked Sherman's radio apostolate? He says a renewed faith in Catholicism, combined with an awareness of the need for Catholic radio stations in America.

"I had kind of a personal conversion in the last ten years. [I] really didn't understand my faith or know my faith very well for twenty years. But about ten years ago I was put in a position of responsibility where I had to defend the faith and explain the faith to non-Catholics.... In the process of defending and explaining it, I realized that Jesus really did establish one Church and left us a pearl of great price and it is as though it is like a gold mine of nuggets and all we have to do is pass them out to people.... When I was going through this personal conversion I had left on a car trip [or] road trip across the country [and] a friend of ours from the local parish gave me a grocery bag full of tapes of Scott Hahn, Father Mike Scanlan...So I drove across the country listening to all these tapes and then in between tapes I would listen to the radio stations. I could pick up a Protestant radio station anytime of the day or night. And I never found a Catholic radio station.... That started a burning passion where I wanted to start a Catholic radio station."

To make tax-deductible donations to Immaculate Heart Radio, write or call: P.O. Box 180, Tahoma, CA 96142, (530)525-1833.


IN JULY, A STOCKTON JURY AWARDED JOH AND JAMES HOWARD $30 MILLION in damages in a sexual molestation case involving the diocese of Stockton. The Howard brothers, ages 19 and 23, suffered years of sexual abuse by Rev. Oliver O'Grady -- a crime for which O'Grady was sentenced in 1993 to 14 years in prison.

Attorneys for the Howards won the large verdict against the Stockton diocese by arguing that church officials, including Cardinal Roger Mahony, who served as bishop of Stockton from 1980 to 1985, ignored evidence of O'Grady's abuse, citing a letter in which O'Grady confessed to molesting an 11-year-old girl and a psychiatrist's report saying that O'Grady had a "severe defect in maturation." Despite this evidence, O'Grady was appointed pastor of St. Andrew's Parish in San Andreas and later associate pastor of Sacred Heart Church in Turlock.

Stockton Bishop Donald Montrose said the verdict will "effectively destroy virtually all of the services provided by the diocese to its people and the community." One Stockton diocesan official told the Faith that the diocese is "paralyzed" and speculated that it would have to reach an out-of-court settlement, "borrow the money or sell off the Cathedral." "We don't have" the money, he said.


ON JUNE 11, THE OAKLAND DIOCESE HELD A SPECIAL MASS for homosexuals and lesbians at St. Augustine's Church, the site of a secret gay wedding earlier this year. Oakland Bishop John Cummins delivered the homily, which included a passing call to chastity. The message, however, rang hollow in a sanctuary adorned with a rainbow banner, the symbol of homosexual pride and activism. Two men, holding hands and leaning against a white BMW after mass, pronounced the message "conservative" and "outdated."

The mass, whose theme was "Always Our Children, Always Our Church," was not advertised in the Oakland diocesan newspaper, The Voice, but was advertised by Dignity, a heretical organization that supports homosexual acts. The advertisement gave the phone number for Father Jim Schexnayder, chairman of the diocesan Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

"This is our room. Those are our lives. We have courage to move. We have courage to rise," chanted the congregation before the mass. At communion, Margaret Roncalli told the congregation, "Everyone is invited to receive communion by coming up the center aisle." After receiving communion at least one male couple held hands in the style of Marriage Encounter as they returned to their pew.

At the conclusion of mass, Rita Billeci, the diocesan family life director, told the congregation that "Always Our Children" had shown that gays and lesbians were "always God's children, always God's family never to be abandoned or alienated." She thanked Bishop Cummins "for telling us we are precious, we are sacred, we are loved." A standing ovation followed for the bishop and Fr. Schexnayder.

But one visitor from San Ramon was in no mood to clap. "It is unwise to stage a mass based on perversion," he said to the Faith. "Why not hold special adulterer's masses or pedophile masses or masses for people living in a menage a trois? If you are going to stress a particular sin or weakness, it would be better to do it in the context of a communal reconciliation service where emphasis would be on conversion and absolution."


FR. JIM SCHEXNAYDER, THE HEAD OF THE OAKLAND DIOCESE'S homosexual outreach program, spoke on the controversial document Always Our Children at St. Charles in San Carlos on June 18. According to South Bay Catholic Anthony Gonzales, Schexnayder downplayed the value of Courage, an orthodox Catholic group for struggling homosexuals, saying that the group's scope is "too narrow." It only serves "one segment of the homosexual population," namely, homosexuals with "sex addiction." Schexnayder maintains that "many homosexuals are not sexually addicted." Schexnayder spoke of homosexuality as a permanent condition, part of the "person's identity."

Gonzales was shocked. "They have taken a corruption of human nature which comes from original sin and have made it the very core of that person's being," he says. "The homosexualists want each of these poor souls to not only accept their condition as 'incurable' but to embrace it as something beautiful and good instead of perverted and disordered."


SAN FRANCISCO PHILANTHROPIST LOUISE DAVIES DIED on June 22. She was 98. The wife of an oil magnate, Davies donated millions of dollars to cultural and educational causes, including the San Francisco Symphony, the San Francisco Opera, the Exploratorium, and the Conservatory of Music.

A devout Catholic, Davies also donated to Catholic causes. She provided the seed money for the St. Ignatius Institute at the University of San Francisco. "She was living charity," said a San Francisco priest. Davies once told an interviewer that "I don't think could have lived through all my married life, or any life, if I hadn't really believed in prayer, and believed that I had a feeling that I was being helped, that I was not alone."


A REGIONAL CONFERENCE BY THE DISSIDENT GROUP CALL TO ACTION culminated at Notre Dame College in Belmont with a liturgy that featured women around the altar proclaiming words of supposed consecration of the bread and wine.

About 300 people, most of them elderly, attended the conference July 31-August 2.

Bishop Thomas Gumbleton of Detroit exhorted conference participants to renounce lifestyles of consumerism and work to eradicate the abject poverty enslaving one billion people.

Sounding an anti-hierarchical theme that permeated the conference, keynote speaker Diana Hayes, a teacher at Georgetown University, said lay people need only the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and no official Church mandate to do ministry. Jesus left no ordained hierarchy behind, but only stories, parables, prayers and sayings and a "confused few" in charge who discerned their mission, she said.

In a panel discussion following Bishop Gumbleton's talk, Ted Johnson of Catholic Parents of Gays and Lesbians said society should sanction long-term homosexual relationships and allow same-sex couples to adopt children. People in the audience applauded enthusiastically when a man from Los Angeles held up his 22-year homosexual relationship as an example of a long-term, committed union.

Jesse Gutierrez-Cervantes, a "communications specialist" and former monk, urged participants in one workshop to celebrate all sexual orientations and "avoid heterosexism...which assumes everyone is heterosexual or ought to be." The Catholic Church has left virtually all of its members sexually wounded, he said.

Gutierrez-Cervantes displayed a syncretistic altar that included images of the face of Christ and the Lady of Guadalupe, a Native American statue, a jester, and a crystal and pink triangle on a black button.

Apart from Bishop Gumbleton's denunciation of the individual's complicity in social injustice, personal sin was mentioned only in relation to the rich. Fr. Bill O'Donnell of the Oakland archdiocese said, "Bill Gates is an evil man" and, "capitalism is the root of all evil." Oakland priest Declan Dean, homilist at the concluding liturgy, described an imaginary Jesus who called on members of the San Francisco Commonwealth Club to liquidate their assets and give the money to the poor and the Campaign for Human Development.

Dean also portrayed Jesus in San Francisco dining with gays and lesbians, visiting wth prisoners on Death Row, and angering the papal nuncio and the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.

TOP