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Contents © 1999
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

December 1995

"Therefore, the episcopal classes of 2005-2007, right now, consist mostly of priests in their early to mid 30's, perhaps a little older..."

"How many priests now in their mid-30's can give a cogent homily on natural law, divorce, and contraception? How many bishops in 2006 will be able to read Latin?"


HOME SCHOOLING ATTITUDE CHANGE. Patty Gomez relates how she became a convinced home schooler in the Advent 1995 Catholic Home Educator: "Four years ago I graduated from eighth grade at Nazareth School. I had a beautiful graduation Mass at Mission San Diego de Alcala. My future looked bright as I said goodbye to my classmates and prepared to enter Our Lady of Peace High School with honors-at-entrance. I was ahead, having taken algebra in eighth grade, and I planned to take challenging honors classes during my four years at OLP..." With much doubt and disappointment in not attending OLP, she heeded her parents and began home-school. "In tenth and eleventh grades I was only worried about how my classes and grades compared to what they could have been at OLP. I cherished the idea of returning to Our Lady of Peace High School....

"Had I finished school at OLP, I know I would be confused and, while trying to fit in with everyone else, I would have had to compromise my morals and probably disobey my parents."


WOLVES IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING. The November Catholic World Report: "Every year at Thanksgiving time, American Catholics are called upon to contribute to the Campaign for Human Development (CHD), the official anti-poverty program of the American Catholic bishops. Informed that CHD is an innovative 'self-help' program, the faithful make generous contributions; over $230 million has been donated to CHD since its inception...

"Indeed, even some recipients of CHD benefactions seemed pleasantly surprised by CHD grant-making. Duke Schempp, a 'pro-choice Catholic' and president of a CHD-funded organization in North Dakota, remarked: 'I hear a lot of people talk in the hallways... "My God! I can't believe they're funding that here!" And these are the constituents of the CHD!' Schempp noted that the chairman of his own organization works at an abortion clinic. 'It makes it a little tense when it comes to doing something with the diocese,' he admitted."


WHY ABIGAIL? WHY US? Bizarre story in the September 10 San Jose Mercury News tells of a couple who were "forced" to abort their baby girl, Abigail, who had the fatal disease encephalocoele (in which the brain grows outside of the skull). Viki Wilson recounts, "'I'd seen the devastation from the death of a child, and I was thinking of my two older children and how it would affect them. Bill [her husband] delivered both our kids, and Katie and Jon were going to help deliver this baby. So our dreams of a healthy, happy family in the delivery room came crashing in on us because our child was going to die."

"The Genetic Counselor told the Wilsons about Dr. James McMahon of Los Angeles, one of only three doctors in the United States who specialize in late-term abortions... At 9AM Wednesday, April 6, 1994, McMahon begun the intact dilation and extraction...On the afternoon of April 8 Abigail was cleaned up, dressed in pajamas and wrapped in blankets with yellow and pink cartoons. A white cap was placed over her head before she was presented to the couple, Susanne Wilson, Katie and Jon...The doctor hugged Viki and cried with her family. A Catholic, McMahon used holy water to perform a baptism before leaving the Wilsons to hold their child for the first and last time... 'People thought we were nuts to take pictures of us with Abigail,' Viki says. 'They thought it was sort of sick, saying, "Why would you want to take pictures of a dead child?"'"

The new Congress has drawn up laws making partial-birth abortion illegal. Their opponents have enlisted Viki Wilson. "'I didn't know much but I knew this doctor was a hero,' Wilson says. 'If there was going to be legislation trying to make the procedure illegal then I wanted to fight it. It gave my daughter death with dignity instead of subjecting her to a process that would have taken away all of her dignity.' ...'I hate that Abigail had to die,' says Wilson, 39, who lives in Fresno, in a warm sprawling house that used to be a convent. 'God put me through this because he knew I would be strong enough to be an advocate against this bill. This has given me whole new justification for why I went through what I did.'"


DIRECTING HIS GAZE at the problem of priests and sexual abuse, Fr. Paul Mankowski, S.J., gives this advice in the October Catholic World Report: "It is a welcome development that U.S. churchmen have begun to deal more openly with the problem of clerical sexual abuse. That said, the public treatment of the problem is still more notable for what it omits than for what it includes... The prime responsibility of a pastor...is the care of souls. His position as spiritual shepherd makes sense only under one assumption: that the persons under his care...are at the risk of spiritual harm, including the ultimate spiritual harm, which is damnation....

"But if the Church puts the emphasis on therapy, she sends the wrong message to the public. It suggests that the principal harm inflicted by a priest engaged in sexual abuses psychological or social...yet the chief damage wrought by sexual abuse is moral and spiritual...The priest sexual abuser objectively commits a mortal sin. In no official commentary on this issue have I heard any recognition of or concern for the fact that these men must be living as priests and performing the sacraments in a state of mortal sin for a large part of their ministerial lives. The validity of the sacraments themselves is unaffected by the unworthiness of the minister, of course, but what about the counseling, preaching, confessional judgments, instruction in prayer, retreats, marriage preparations, and the whole business of daily human interactions conducted outside the state of grace?

"Once it can be determined that a priest has lived as an abuser, it should be assumed that all his pastoral work was defective, and the diocese should take it for granted that any parish (or apostolate) at which he worked for a short time requires re-catechesis."

Comparing the problem to the "alcoholic" priest whose abuse is ignored, he advises, "Bishops whose priests have confessed to sexual abuse should require 'fateful glass of beer' testimonies and make them known to their clergy and seminarians: honest accounts by the offenders of their degradation and the cause-and-effect relationships as they understand them.

"The problem of clerical sexual abuse of minors will continue to worsen until the Church puts an end to a deeper problem: the high percentage of gay priests. Putting an end to the problem of gay priests means...discharging them from positions they hold and refusing gay admittance to the seminaries. This is necessary not because gay priests are pedophiles but because they are bad priests. In using the word 'gay' here I refer to a homosexual who by conviction, declaration, or activity is tolerant of sodomy."


BISHOP ELDON CURTISS of Omaha gives advice for solving the U.S. "vocation crisis" in the November-December Social Justice Review: "I am personally aware of certain vocation directors, vocation teams and evaluation boards who turn away candidates who do not support the possibility of ordaining women or who defend the Church's teaching about artificial birth control, or who exhibit strong piety toward certain devotions, such as the rosary. When there is a determined effort to discourage orthodox candidates from the priesthood and religious life, then the vocation shortage which results is caused not by a lack of vocations but by deliberate attitudes and policies which deter certain viable candidates. And the same people who precipitate a decline in vocations by their negative actions call for the ordination of married men and women to replace the vocations they have discouraged. They have a death wish for ordained priesthood and vowed religious life as the Church defines them. They undermine the vocation ministry they are supposed to champion."


CUM VIX JUSTUS SIT SECURUS. The November 2 New York Times gives this obituary: "Of the nation's 1.5 million abortions a year, only about 13,000 are performed after 20 weeks of gestation. And only two doctors, Martin Haskill of Ohio and James McMahon of California, have said publicly that for the late-term abortions they perform, they prefer the method the legislation would ban. Dr. McMahon died on Saturday in California...Dr. McMahon was medical director of Eve Surgical Centers and trained Ob-Gyn residents at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Other doctors, who either were taught by Dr. McMahon, or who read Dr. Haskill's 1992 paper on the method... also use the method."


MASTER DRAFTSMAN AND POINT MAN. In Mothers' Watch (Fall, 1995) Randy Engel recounts the ascendancy of Bishop James T. McHugh from his early involvement in sex education to head of USCC/ Family Life Bureau. Engel quotes the bishop: "'I would like to make clear that one of the concerns of the Family Life Bureau, and an important personal concern to me, one which has required a great deal of effort over the past 2 to 3 years, is the whole question of sex education, from birth to maturity.'"

Engel says, "The tragic story of the undermining of prolife efforts during this critical moment in American history, which McHugh orchestrated from his National Right-to-Life Office at the USCC, is a matter of public record as are all the charges in this article.

"A factor in McHugh's survival rate and ascendancy within the American hierarchy has been his ability to cover up his early associations with Church dissenters while refashioning his image as a long-time defender of the Catholic Family and Human Life."


BIRTH AS PREVENTABLE DISEASE. Paul Greenberg, editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, writes in the October 9 Weekly Standard, "As an editorial writer back in 1973, I had thought -- and written -- that Roe vs. Wade sounded like a pretty sensible decision.... By 1995, what had seemed a purely private decision in rare circumstances would become a standard method of birth control, an industry, a political litmus test, a rite of passage...a central tenet of a whole culture that centers not around life, its promise and responsibility, but around self, its creation and cultivation....It used to be said, in the kind of jest that is half serious, that Americans look upon death as a preventable disease. Now it can be said in all seriousness that we come to look on birth in the same way."


"THANK GOD FOR THE POPE," says Robert Scheer in an October 31 Los Angeles Times editorial. "Never thought that I would write that sentence, being so pro-choice and civil libertarian, but I'm getting pretty desperate. Why is it only the Catholic Church that speaks out loud and clear for the poor? On his recent trip to this country, the Pope called for 'openness' to immigrants and 'creative generosity for the poor.'

"If it's going down like that, I'll stick with the Pope, who believes that 'each and every child is a gift from God.' Better a consistent pro-life position that affirms the dignity of all human beings than a pro-choice stance that only respects the lives of those children born to parents of means. I hope that's not the case, and that Congress will soon hear, loud and clear, from the many pro-choice people, male and female, who are also pro-life."


THE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER '95 issue of Beginnings, the newsletter for Pharmacists for Life International, told of an unexpected problem in the "no questions asked" policy of contraceptive availability. A Dallas woman had had her 11-year-old daughter implanted with Norplant three years ago after discovering that the child was being sexually abused by her husband. Police and child abuse experts expressed their shock that this further chemical abuse of a little girl's body is perfectly legal. James Roderick, President of Planned Parenthood of Dallas and Northeast Texas, defended the use of contraceptives on children.


THE DIOCESE OF ORANGE, in the November/December '95 issue of its Liturgy newsletter for priests and parish lay leadership, stressed that until such time as approval is granted for the new Sacramentary translation (expected to be finished in 1998), "we are not permitted to anticipate the final Sacramentary and begin implementing either translations or rituals from the draft now in progress." The proposed changes (such as a "nonsexist" renditions of the Creed, standing during the Eucharistic prayer, and a complete revision of the Mass, removing Penitential Rite, Gloria, and Kyrie), must be approved by Rome before priests can begin incorporating them into liturgies. Vatican approval is not certain, judging by Rome's recent rejection of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible and the original inclusive-language translation of the new Catechism.

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