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1997
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Contents © 1997
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

May 1997

"First, we need to have a supreme confidence that when the pope... declared the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women, he was speaking with the unchanging, unchangeable authority of the Petrine office....And he wants us, especially on the brink of a new century, to teach this as laypeople to the ends of the earth and to teach it in new and interesting ways, to explore the truths of male and female, and of the beauty of the male priesthood....

"I do find feminism a bore. I loathe the stupid, modern, silly rewriting of language. I am fed up with over-paid, much-traveled Catholic feminists going from conference to conference, with all the boring conference trimmings -- the badge, the polystyrene cup of coffee, the clipboard, the jargon -- 'I share your pain,' 'I want to workshop with you on this,' 'I'm a counselor.' I'm tired of it all. But I'm not going to give up. Because these are the heretics of today, and presumably the Arians and the other heretics were just as boring in their day. Presumably, you met boring Arian heretics going around saying, 'Hello, I'm Sister So-and-So, and I do pain workshops.' And, presumably, the Catholics of then got bored. Heresies always go on just a bit longer than you think you can really endure."


IN RESPONSE TO ESCALATING complaints by parents who say their children are being harassed by over-zealous enforcement of an anti-truancy measure, in early February, the Monrovia Police Department instituted a tagging system with flourescent orange-yellow badges for private school and homeschool students who will be outside during the hours of the city's tough new daytime curfew law (8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.).

Several weeks before the city-introduced identification cards were introduced, police sergeant Bill Couch (head of Youth Services and author of the law) told Riggio that the family's daily walk to morning Mass at Immaculate Conception parish constituted a violation of the curfew. Couch informed her, says Riggio, that if she continues to allow her older children to ride their bicycles to the church ahead of her, they would be stopped, and possibly given truancy citations ($127 fine for the parents for each citation). Fearing fines and harassment by police, the Riggio family has curtailed their daily Mass attendance. When they do go, says Riggio, they drive to a parish outside the city bounds.

Although they have stopped none of Riggio's children for curfew violation, police have stopped many of her friends' children, including Rosemary Harrahill's 15-year-old son Jess, who has been stopped 14 times since September, and her 13-year-old, Ben-Joe, who has been stopped five times. The Harrahills' two eldest children each attend two classes at local public schools, then return home in the morning to be home-educated for the remainder of their subjects.

Jess Harrahill, walking home from school one day, heard someone hissing from behind bushes, "Hey, you. Get over here." He turned and saw two men in white polo shirts, helmets and gloves. Jess' first instinct was to run, fearing an attack. Then he noticed the men's bicycles, hidden behind the bushes, and realized they must be a police bicycle patrol (their only official markings are on the backs of their helmets and shirts). Telling his mother about the incident later, he told her that at first it did not occur to him that the men could be police officers because "police don't usually do that."

Jess showed his I.D. to the officers. After that incident, a patrol car sped up and cut Jess off as he started to cross a driveway. Again, he had to convince the officers that he was not truant.


THE SATURDAY, APRIL 19, 1997 Los Angeles Times religion section, under the headline "Quotable" recorded a statement made by His Eminence, Roger Cardinal Mahony, speaking on KCET's "Life and Times." The subject? The neutering of pets.

Said the cardinal: "I think if we're going to take care of the animals, I think we have to make sure they're spayed and neutered, so that we don't have an excessive number of animals who end up having to be euthanized. I think that's a terrible waste. We're the ones responsible. I have my two cats. [They are] neutered. And I think everyone else should do the same."


THE ST. AUGUSTINE VOICES is not a professional choir; the members are not all highly trained musicians. Rather, they are, says their director Ben Friesen, "folks making music in the ordinary way, who love the Church and love the pope." These "folks" are two familes, the Gates family of Huntington Beach: Ronald and Katy, with their daughters Theresa (age 18), Nora (14) and Maggie (11); and the Friesens, Ben and Sue with their two eldest, Johnathan (15) and Elizabeth (12). Ben Friesen's sister, Ruth Friesen, a recent convert to the Church, also joins the group.

The St. Augustine Voices represent a response to the longing many Catholics feel for a more authenticly Catholic worship. Both families attend St. Mary's By The Sea parish in Huntington Beach. Ben Friesen says that he and his family discovered the parish, Christmas 1995, when his local parish "decided to have midnight Mass at 10 p.m. because it was too much of a hassle for everyone to come at midnight; so we decided maybe we should go somewhere else for midnight Mass. It's very sad changing all those old traditions [to make] things convenient, as opposed to putting the Church first. We're saddened to leave, we'd like to go close by."

"We wanted to perform music that fits with the tradition of the Church, the ones the Holy Fathers have said are the most important and key kinds of music to sing--mostly polyphonic music from the 15th and 16th centuries [Byrd, Palestrina, Vittoria, et al.], the chant, and the music that would fit with the same spirit."


IT IS ALMOST LIKE A GRIM situation comedy.

Nurse: (breezily): "Sure, we have a super-saver discount on D & E's!"

Patient (bewildered): "D & E's?"

Doctor (nightmarishly cheerful): "Yep! That's when we go in 'ya with a hook shaped knife and chop the little critter up and then scrape out the broken pieces"...

So runs the dialogue in "The Clinic", a cartoon tract put out by Operation Rescue National. "The Clinic" is humorous, but only if you don't think too deeply about its subject. It is ironic, for if abortionists were any way honest as to their procedures, many would probably not be unlike the doctor in the tract--clean-cut, "nice", thoughtlessly brutal.

Colette Wilson, a sidewalk counselor in front of American Family Planning Associates in Inglewood, says she was doubtful: "I said, Woah! This is a little bit blunt! I don't know if I am going to use this." However, on account of a couple of incidents she decided to use the tract.

"A girl, a friend of mine, was sitting in my office. She's not a Christian, she did have an abortion. Seeing the tract on my desk, she picked it up and read it and said, 'this is really good!' Secondly, when I was talking to Norma McCorvey [of Operation Rescue], I said, 'if the people inside the clinics get a hold of this tract, they're going to say, "oh, we're not like that!"' Norma laughed and said that they are like that, maybe not directly to the client, but among themselves they're just that callous."

Wilson says that she is not without some misgivings about the tract. She admits that the picture of an aborted, dismembered baby in the cartoon can be shocking, and when asked whether the repeated use of such pictures might not desensitize people to their horrors, she answered, "Actually, I think [such desensitization] happens to us pro-lifers. We see the pictures and forget that they're shocking to people that see them for the first time."