ARTICLES

Man of Contradictions

How Does Bishop Maher Stand the Test of Time?

By Robert Kumpel

When Leo Maher became the bishop of San Diego in the summer of 1969, he inherited a diocese that had been shaped by San Diego's first bishop, Charles Buddy, and had not changed since Buddy's death in 1966 (interim Bishop Francis Furey had little time to change what Buddy had established). San Diego was a diocese made up of four counties (San Diego, Imperial, Riverside, and San Bernardino) that were growing in population and needed priests.

The need for priests was not lost on Maher, who seemed as willing as Buddy to take all comers. Father Ben Castle (not his real name) is a retired priest who once served in the diocese of San Diego. Father Castle was ordained by Bishop Buddy in the 1950s and served the diocese throughout the 1960s. While Castle was no fan of Maher, he believes that it is unfair to place the blame some of the unworthy priests who ended up in San Diego on his shoulders. "Bishop Buddy would take in anybody. We used to call the diocese 'refugium peccatorum,' which means 'the refuge of sinners'. He had a lot of parishes to take care of. Just about everybody in the world knew that if you wanted to come to the diocese of San Diego, it was easy. Buddy was easygoing. Sometimes he would get mad, but not often."

As the first bishop of Santa Rosa (established as a diocese in 1962) Maher was experienced at looking the other way. According to an August 28 1999, story in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Maher had run up $12 million of debt in a building program of churches and schools. Maher's public relations problems started when it was discovered that he was spending money from a charitable trust on remodeling his four-acre home in Montecito Hills -- a home that would later be sold to Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz by the next bishop in order to help restore the diocese's finances. The property included a swimming pool, 12 rooms, and a three-car garage, until Maher added a wine cellar, bar, and another wing that included a chapel and library.

Ted Mancuso (not his real name) followed Maher closely in both Santa Rosa and San Diego. "He was a big spender, and he liked to live large. There was a foundation in Santa Rosa, Hanna Boys School, and it had a big endowment. Apparently, he treated the endowment as a kind of big cookie jar that he could use for whatever. I'm not even sure that he filled out the proper papers. In principle, he could borrow from it if it was done on a sound basis, but the money was used rather freely for other purposes. I was told by one monsignor that in the end, they had to make a political appeal to the attorney general to avoid prosecution -- that kind of behind-the-scenes arrangement was frequently done in the past. Maher left the diocese in considerable debt, and I don't know if the Hanna foundation was ever paid back or not.

"In San Diego, he took pretty much the same approach. There was quite a flap when Brom was scheduled to come as coadjutor. Maher went out and bought a rather nice home for him in Kensington. Part of what I gathered was that he didn't want Brom to get the idea that if Maher retired as bishop that Maher would move out of his mansion on Sunset Boulevard in Mission Hills." Maher's largesse extended to his secretary, Elvia Aguilar, to whom he deeded a four-bedroom house in Chula Vista and, later, a condominium in University City.

Serving as the founding pastor of a new parish, Father Castle ran afoul of Bishop Maher when he dared to question the bishop's position on the mortgage payments owed to the diocese. "I had an accountant look over the parish books, and he told me that we didn't owe the diocese $14,000, but that, in fact, they owed us $14,000 because they kept changing the rates of what the parish owed. Whenever they [the diocese] felt like it, they upped the percentage on it, which is against the law. So we made a 21-page report and bound it nicely, and I brought it down to the bishop and said, 'My men who have advised me in the parish asked me to come down and talk to you about this. I'm rather embarrassed by it, but we don't owe you $14,000. In fact, you owe us $14,000.' He looked at the papers and said, 'That's nonsense!' and threw the report off his desk on to the floor. I was in his bad graces ever since. In my opinion, money was all that he ever had on his mind. He was all money and, frankly, he had a vicious temper."

The big problem, in Father Castle's opinion, was with Maher's take on Vatican II. "Before that, homosexuality wasn't a problem, and dissent wasn't a problem. It started in the 60s, and it just got out of control. After Vatican II, I'd been in a parish for eight years, and Maher gave me eight days to wind up my affairs and go away to study for a year -- to be 'Vatican II-ized,' as they called it. He wanted to send me to Berkeley at the end of summer, and I couldn't get a place to rest my head there. I called up 20 to 30 different parishes and could not get a place. I ended up commuting first from San Francisco, and then from San Jose to Berkeley for classes. By Christmastime, I couldn't take it anymore. I was traveling back and forth for hours every day and wearing my car out. Finally, I told the bishop that I couldn't do this. I said I would read every volume they assigned, but I couldn't commute like that every day. He suspended my faculties for seven months! He wouldn't send me a check. If I didn't have my folks to live with, I would have been on the street. He was punishing me for the confrontation about parish finances, but also because I was too traditional for him. He knew I was part of the old guard. He was brutal about Vatican II. He wanted everyone brainwashed."

Why was Maher so adamant about a radical interpretation of the Second Vatican Council? "Look, lots of American bishops were sandbagged at Vatican II. All these heretics that had been under condemnation from Pius XII's time -- all of a sudden every damned one of them popped up in Rome. They all had mimeograph machines, and they were grabbing bishops left and right and propagandizing them. It was constant, and the American bishops weren't ready for it. They didn't care about theology, and they were just swamped. Maher was just one of those who was brainwashed."

Like Father Castle, Mancuso tends to be forgiving about Maher's tendency to accept undesirable priests from other dioceses. "In a general sort of way, California has not been able to produce vocations. It's always been kind of a mission territory, starting with Father Serra. Maybe it's the climate or the water, but native vocations just don't seem to develop. So for a long time, most of the priests here were native-born Irish. Now that's dried up because Ireland doesn't have vocations anymore either. Now it's being replaced primarily with priests from Mexico. But with a general shortage, I think he was too ready to take priests from other places -- but that was all the state's dioceses."

"I think Maher was part of the old clericalism. It's not always that the bishops were soft on pedophilia, so much as, 'Well, we've got to protect the Church, and we have to hope for the best, and Father will be all right if we just get him into counseling. Say nothing about it, and if some lay people are upset, let's just pay them off. We'll be more careful now and keep an eye on Father.' But that didn't take care of the problem."

This old clericalism found Maher keeping some priests in positions where they were not wanted. One of the more dramatic examples was at Holy Trinity Parish in El Cajon. When longtime pastor Monsignor Patrick Walsh was forced into retirement in 1986, Maher replaced him with Father Stephen Dunn, the former vice-rector at St. Francis de Sales seminary. Dunn insisted that the altar rail in the church would have to go and that the tabernacle would be moved to a side altar. Parishioners were aghast at Dunn's desire to change tradition. He kicked parishioners off parish ground for selling tickets to Walsh's retirement dinner and told them to never come back. A group of women who prayed all 15 decades of the rosary before daily 8:00 Mass and a novena afterward were sent packing, because he did not want his Mass "surrounded by that." Parishioners drew up a petition of 660 signatures begging Maher to remove Dunn and reinstate Walsh. A group from Holy Trinity met with Maher, who asked them to be patient and accept Dunn. A parishioner presented their complaints to Maher a second time, and he denounced her as a "troublemaker" and "liar." While the parishioners were successful in fending off Dunn's renovations, they were stuck with him for nearly a year, until he left to work in AIDS ministry. "After he left, he had a 'nervous breakdown,' which he blamed on the parishioners at Holy Trinity."

Jean Liuzzi is a local Catholic and private investigator who was so troubled by priestly scandals during the Maher administration that she began her own investigation into diocesan affairs in the 1980s. "In the case of Father Dunn, Maher more or less told the parishioners to find another parish. It was like, 'O.K., I know about this, but I'm not going to do anything.' When I met with Maher, I presented him with factual information about some of his prize priests. Two of them are still in the diocese, and I believe they are lovers. One of them was in my parish, and he was blatantly gay -- he even made a pass at a male parishioner. Maher couldn't face it, and he didn't know how to handle it. He didn't give the priests with sexual problems the proper help -- he just passed them on. I finally told him that I was putting together a committee of prominent Catholics with the aim of redirecting money away from the local church, and then he started to clean up the acts of some of those priests."

Other priests given high-profile positions by Maher who would go on to embarrass the diocese included ex-priest Nick Reveles, Monsignor William Kraft, Monsignor Rudolph Galindo, and Monsignor William Spain.

Two former seminarians who were never ordained spoke about Bishop Maher on condition of anonymity. One of them insisted that his relationship with Maher was always cordial, and he found Maher to be generally orthodox. The other had some problems with Maher but felt that even with his weaknesses, Maher had good intentions. "Maher was not what you would call an intellectual. He was very intimidated and impressed by intellectuals and academics. As a result, he was insistent that the priests in his diocese receive the best possible education. Many who went on to post-graduate studies went on to Rome."

The seminarian was aware of Maher's problems with his priests. "The biggest complaint I remember as a seminarian was the circle of priests he kept around him, a basically gay clique. He was aware of it, but he considered it to be calumny, detraction, and gossip, and he tolerated them because of their fund-raising abilities. They had access to people in town who donated lots of money to the diocese. They all had connections in town with people like Doug Manchester. He would lend out his mansion in La Jolla to faculty members and seminarians for various functions."

Maher's weakness for the good life was noticed by this seminarian and many of his peers. "When bishops go to Rome for their ad limina visits, they usually stay at a parish or residence connected with a Roman church. Maher would always book a hotel suite. He'd go to Vegas and get hotel suites there. He was personally entertained by Julio Iglesias. A very extravagant man, and very much a contradiction."

One place where Maher's detractors seem to find nothing but praise for his memory is on the issue of abortion. Mancuso says that Maher was stalwart when it came to protecting the unborn. "There was the infamous coat-hanger incident with the local National Organization for Women (NOW) chapter. This was in the late 70s. Catholic women who supported abortion were supposed to wear coat-hanger pins or maybe carry coat-hangers as a symbol of illegal abortions. It was to test the priests at the various parishes, and when they went up to receive Communion, many priests denied them. It was meant to be provocative. They meant to get media attention by announcing the time and place where they were going to attend Mass. If I remember right, one church delegated the Knights of Columbus to keep the peace, lest there be some violence on the part of the harpies. Maher was away, and Bishop Chavez issued some kind of statement that was fluffy. Bernie Campbell, the Paulist chaplain at UCSD then proclaimed that Chavez had 'de-fanged' Maher's approach."

Maher told pro-choice "Catholic" assemblywoman Lucy Killea that she could no longer receive Communion. "He notified her by fax. That may have been the first faxed excommunication in history. Actually, I don't know that he formally excommunicated her, but he did inform her that she was not entitled to receive Communion. I think he had interpreted the fact that she had excommunicated herself, and it was time for her to recognize the reality of it.

"Of course, Brom folded on that, and so did the bishop of Sacramento at that time, Francis Quinn. He [Quinn] was consulted in the noon hour outside his cathedral and he said, 'No, no, no, no, no. I would absolutely not do that. No violence.' As if that was violent. He said, 'These pro-choicers are good people.' The media loved it. One reporter asked him what he would do, and he said, 'I would recommend that they work on other social issues.' When asked for an example of other social issues, he said, 'Slavery and child labor!' The guy who was Killea's campaign manager said that he was absolutely delighted with Maher's move. He said he had been trying to bring up the Catholic position on abortion, because he thought that it was a winning issue for his side. His words were, 'I never expected I'd hook a bishop.' Of course, some of the other bishops have used that as an excuse not to hold politicians accountable for their positions on abortion.

"In fact, Mahony's so-called pro-life representative, Lica Nicassio, recently sent that around in a letter, warning that there should be no excommunications of any pro-abort politicians, because, supposedly, it [the Killea incident] turned out so badly. But Nicassio's letter is inaccurate. Nicassio claims that Killea was running for state assembly, when in fact she was running for state senate after serving several terms in the state assembly. Further, Nicassio says that Killea was 'far behind in the polls,' which is a lie. Nicassio claims that Killea 'only served one term because she was a very poor legislator.' That's not true either. Killea was a very effective legislator for liberal causes and supported most of the Catholic bureaucracy's liberal agenda, and, like the Catholic bureaucracy, supported the culture of death. While the current crop of bishops look upon the Killea affair as a blunder, many of us in the pro-life community still view it as a triumph. The problem was that the other bishops would not stand with him."

One incident Mancuso also admired Maher for was when some pro-life Catholics met with him to inform him that the diocese had a contract with the State Office of Family Planning. "By having that contract, he was providing cover for Planned Parenthood, who also had a contract with the state. Planned Parenthood could then say, 'How can anyone complain about us getting government money to carry out our mission? We and the Catholic diocese both have contracts, even though their contract was about 20 times as big as the diocese's. The other thing was that the diocese would be corrupted by such a contract, because soon enough, people in the pre-Cana marriage courses were complaining, 'How come at the marriage courses, they are displaying and telling us about all these different methods of contraception?' The answer always was, 'Well, we have a state contract, so we have to.' After they met with Bishop Maher, the diocese did not renew the contract."

Father Ray Ryland, a professor at Franciscan University of Steubenville taught at USD when Maher was bishop. A married man with a family, convert and former Episcopalian priest, Ryland was a deacon, then a priest. "He was always kind and generous with me and extremely supportive. He urged me on to apply for the dispensation, and I think mine was the first application to get through the Vatican from this country."

Ryland was aware of Maher's weaknesses but believes they paled in comparison to his commitment to protecting the unborn. "He had an intense loyalty to his priests, which was sometimes misplaced, but his efforts for life were absolutely heroic. He was also very positive in standing up to NOW. I was a permanent deacon at the Immaculata when NOW was protesting the bishop's letter that prohibited abortion supporters from receiving communion. After the letter was published, we learned that the NOW was going to picket the church. Well, a group of Hare Krishnas came down from Santa Barbara, and one of them came to me and said, 'We heard they were picketing our bishop, and we want to come out and support him!' He actually called him our bishop! And they were out there protesting the protestors!

Ryland was impressed when he witnessed Maher discussing a liturgical abuse with one of his priests. "I happened to be in his office, and he was talking with a pastor who is now deceased who was tinkering with the liturgy, including allowing the congregation to repeat the words of the Eucharistic Prayer with him. Maher said, 'I understand you're doing so and so,' and the priest admitted it. So Maher said, 'This has got to stop.' The priest said, 'If I had known you didn't like that, I would have never done it.' Maher turned and said, 'It's not a matter of what I like. It's matter of what's right!' There may have been other incidents of liturgical abuse that he didn't handle or didn't know about, but I saw him handle that one. We could use a huge dose of that today."

Another pro-lifer who had contact with Bishop Maher was Joan Patton, former head of San Diego Right to Life. She remembers one meeting with Maher that found him distracted and troubled. "This was way back in the 1970s. He kept talking about the homosexual issue, and we were there about an hour, wondering when he was going to get to the issue we came to discuss. He spent about a half hour saying, 'This is really a perplexing problem. I've got this book, The Broken Image, and I'm trying to study the issue of homosexuality.' It was like it was a tremendous burden for him. I've always remembered that incident, because that was in the beginning when we were starting to see some things. Obviously there were homosexual priests that he wasn't controlling at the time. I couldn't praise or support him for that.

"But in the pro-life area, he was very courageous. He wasn't afraid to speak out or take a stand, which very few bishops were doing. He was very open to those of us in the pro-life movement, and he made himself very accessible to us. This goes way back. When we were first running into Catholics for a Free Choice -- back when very few people had even heard of them -- we went in to see Bishop Maher about it and asked if they could call themselves Catholics and he replied, 'Absolutely not. You can't be Catholic and be pro-choice.' He said that he would make a strong public statement, and he did. He did the same thing with NOW and spoke out very strongly that Catholics who supported or participated in abortion cannot be Catholics in good standing. They challenged him on that at St. Brigid's at a Sunday Mass -- that pastor down there had no idea why they chose his church, but they chose to challenge Maher at the altar. The priests had been instructed that if anybody came up and were obviously wearing a coat-hanger pin or something identifying them with NOW, they were to refuse them communion. I had friends tell me that there were women who came down the aisle and looked at their friends, sticking their tongue out, whispering loudly, 'I got one!' It was an awful thing, treating the Blessed Sacrament like that and Bishop Maher took a lot of flak for that."

When it comes to life issues, Patton has much more admiration for Maher than for the current bishop, Robert Brom. "Who knows where he really stands? He writes something in the paper every October during Respect Life month. What the clergy does reflects the thinking of the bishop. If he takes a strong stand on things and is forceful on the issues, they do something. But if there is no leadership ... it's just some words from him. He just says, 'This is what the Church teaches, you have a choice, draw your own conclusions.' That's not leadership."

Patton realized the difference between the two bishops during a struggle that took place in the late 1980s when the San Diego Unified School district began to create school-based clinics, which would make it easy to get contraceptives and abortions. "Maher took that issue on completely. I still have my correspondence with him, and I can't believe how many letters we had going back and forth. He would ask me for materials, and he made an absolutely, unbelievably strong statement that he ordered his pastors to read at all the Masses on Sunday. In the statement, he really gave it to Planned Parenthood. I never heard them condemned from the altar of a Catholic Church before, and everyone I knew in the other parishes said that it was read. The board of education said that they had never received so many letters on an issue -- they had at least 1000. Maher stayed strong through the whole thing. Then, when he was stepping down, I was visiting him about something, and I remember saying to him, 'Bishop Maher, we certainly appreciate the strong stand you've taken on so many issues and held up against a lot of criticism.' Then I asked him if he would go through all of that again, and he said, 'I'd do it in a minute. It was the right thing to do.'

"'Anyway,' he said, 'Joan, there's a new bishop, Brom, that's coming in here. Now you get an appointment and get in to see him right away and tell him that you've been working very closely with me on these pro-life issues and give him the background -- but don't wait.' So immediately I started making calls to try to get in to see Brom. But never, not one of the pro-life people who had worked for twenty-five years on the issue could get near him. He brought in his own group and created a new office, the Office of Marriage and Family Life, and I thought, 'Well, maybe something's going to happen'. I would try and try to get to him and mail things, and they would all end up in Rosemary Johnston's office. I called her and said, 'This thing is just one big circle. Doesn't anything get to the bishop?' and she told me that he wants his subordinates to work on these things. Brom started dealing with school superintendent Tom Payzant. He met with him, and Payzant's wife was president of Planned Parenthood! He met with them to try to see if they could come to a compromise. We won the first round of voting, with Bishop Maher's help, and defeated it at the board of education 3 to 2. But the next election came up, and Payzant made sure that he got a couple of his people in there, and Maher wasn't there to help us anymore. So the proposal for clinics passed."

Patton finally did succeed in meeting Bishop Brom, who answered her request with a vague promise. "I ran into him at a meeting. I went up to him and introduced myself and told him I was fighting against the school-based clinics. I told him that although it had passed, they weren't going to get anywhere without funding. I told him that we needed him to take a strong stand against the clinics, because if the local bishop takes a strong stand, nobody would want to buck him. He said, 'Well, I'll think about that,' and we never heard anything."

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