LITTLE NOTES
2006 LITTLE NOTES
November/December
September/October
July/August
June
May
April
March
February
January
ARTICLES
Letters
Confessions
Talk About Movies
Roamin' Catholic
Follow Me
Contents © 2006
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.
LITTLE NOTES
July/August 2006
ABOUT 40 CATHOLICS GATHERED AT MOUNT SOLEDAD on June 7 to start a 54-day rosary novena for the preservation of the cross. "People traveled from as far as Alpine," organizer Sue Lopez said in her June 7 e-mail that report on the event. "It was very moving and powerful to pray at the cross itself."
The group began by singing "Immaculate Mary," prayed all 20 mysteries of the rosary and ended by singing "Hail, Holy Queen Enthroned Above." Among the group was Charles LiMandri, of the Thomas More Law Center, his wife Barbara, and their five children. LiMandri has been the lead attorney in the effort to save the cross. After the rosary concluded, LiMandri updated the group on the latest developments in the case and urged people to sign the petition to President Bush on the law center's website (thomasmore.org) which urges him to have the Secretary of the Interior use the power of eminent domain to take possession of the land on which the war memorial is located.
"We believe that we should win ultimately in the courts," LiMandri said. "Unfortunately, the court that's going to have to approve or disapprove Judge Thompson's order is the most liberal court district in the country: the Ninth Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. With Proposition A, 76 percent of the people voting last July said that this whole memorial-- at least this half acre that it's on -- should transfer to the federal government. A state court judge, remarkably, held that unconstitutional. We've appealed that ruling and filed an appellate brief on that last week and asked the State Court of Appeals to expedite that appeal to issue a decision by August 1 saying that it transfers to the federal government.
"Politically, we've asked the President to sign an order mandating the Secretary of the Interior to just take the property, which they can do. It's called eminent domain.... The administration hasn't said no.... So there may be that political option; they may just wait and see. If the courts don't provide relief, then the administration may step in. So there is more than one way that we can reverse this terrible ruling that said this cross has to come down by August 1.
"If we don't hear something by July 1, the city council is going to start making plans to remove the cross because they can't afford a $5,000 a day penalty. So we need to keep praying very hard."
The group has decided to meet each Saturday evening at Mount Soledad from 6:00-7:00 p.m. to pray the Rosary together. All are invited to participate in the novena, even if they can't come to Mount Soledad physically. The last gathering at the memorial will be at the novena's conclusion on Tuesday, August 1, the Feast of St. Alphonsus Liguori, 6-7:30 p.m. For more information, call 619-990-1341.
AFTER THE RELEASE OF THE DA VINCI CODE movie, many local parishes offered programs to educate people about the errors and fallacies -- not to mention blasphemies -- purveyed in the film version of the Dan Brown bestseller. Saint Kieran's in El Cajon put on one such program on Tuesday, May 23, which drew over eighty attendees, at least a third of whom were visitors from other parishes. The one-evening session was held in the parish hall.
All attendees were given a free copy of The Da Vinci Deception, published by Ascension Press and distributed by Catholic Exchange, an online news center based in Encinitas. The 130-page soft-cover book bore the subtitle: 100 Questions about the Facts and Fiction of the Da Vinci Code. Attendees also received a 10-page study guide which focused on four primary problem areas in both the book and the movie: Were the biblical manuscripts handed on reliably? Hidden Gospels? Jesus and Mary Magdalene; and Re-writing history: the Council of Nicea.
Deacon Frank Reilly, organizer of the event, welcomed everyone and gave a preview of the evening's proceedings. We then watched a one hour film: The Da Vinci Code and the Bible -- Separating Fact and Fiction, featuring Dr. Edward Sri, assistant professor of theology at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. Sri's lively presentation covered the four chief problem areas outlined in the study guide.
There seemed to be one weakness in Sri's film-lecture concerning Jesus remaining unmarried: the principal argument was from silence (if he had been married, someone would have recorded the fact). The other evidence Sri presented for Christ's celibacy was circumstantial, for example, that the alleged wife of Jesus was called "Mary Magdalene," never "Mary the wife of Jesus," and that at the Cross he entrusted his mother to the care of John but no provision was made for Mary Magdalene, which would be odd were she his wife.
Father Ben Davison, associate pastor at Saint Kieran, who was present for the meeting, addressed this issue. "The strongest argument is the Church's teaching that Jesus is the bridegroom of one bride, the Church." This point is well brought out in The Da Vinci Deception.
During a snack break between the film and the question-and-answer session, I spoke to the father of a large family who is an active member of Opus Dei, which the Code demonizes. "Why do you think Brown made villains out of Opus Dei?" I asked. His answer was simple: "Because he wanted to attack what promotes holiness!"
PRO-LIFE, PRO-FAMILY DEMOCRAT DANNY RAMIREZ ran for Congress in the 51st Congressional District in the June 6 primary election. He was competing with Congressman Bob Filner, the incumbent, and Juan Vargas, who was recently termed out of his seat in the 79th Assembly District. Filner and Vargas have very similar anti-life and anti-family voting records. The obstacles Ramirez encountered and the impact that he had suggest that perhaps his effort to expose Filner's and Vargas' positions on moral issues posed a threat to the local Democratic power structure and made the local secular news media nervous.
Ramirez has alleged that, on March 7, Vargas dispatched an aide to Ramirez to ask him to drop out of the race in exchange for helping him run for the 80th Assembly District. The aide, George Bresnahan, reportedly told Ramirez, "If you run, Juan Vargas will probably lose."
District wide, Ramirez won 6.3 percent, compared to 42.2 percent and 51.5 percent for Vargas and Filner respectively.
According to Ramirez, his campaign was dealt a series of blows by the Imperial Valley Press. After the paper solicited him, he submitted a full-page ad that provided a doctor's verbal description of the partial-birth abortion procedure, without illustrations. The ad indicated that Juan Vargas and Bob Filner support keeping partial-birth abortion legal. "They refused to sell me the ad," Ramirez said. "I said, 'Why?' She said, 'Well, we just can't.' I said, 'Why? Is it too gross? Too graphic?' 'Yes,' she said." Ramirez further asserted that the newspaper then refused his request to provide written verification that they had refused to publish the ad.
Anthony and Anna Vandiver compiled a voter's guide for Imperial County very similar to the Family Values Voter Guides produced by the Christian Coalition for San Diego County, which screened candidates on seven issues, including life issues and the radical homosexual agenda. Only 15 out of 46 candidates responded. The Vandivers asked the Imperial Valley Press to publish it before the election as a public service announcement for voters. However, the Imperial Valley Press refused, Ramirez says, asserting that publication would be unfair to the non-responding candidates. "Vargas and Filner obviously did not respond to it, nor Ducheny and all the liberals," Ramirez explained.
He said that the Imperial Valley Press informed the Vandivers that, instead, they could submit the same information in the form of a letter to the editor if it did not exceed 350 words in length. The Vandivers then submitted a 335-word letter. "To this date, it has not been in the newspaper," Ramirez declared. "You know why? Because it talks about abortion and homosexuals. So there's another thing that did not help me."
A check of the Imperial Valley Press' website revealed that, in 2006, prior to election day, the only mention of Ramirez as a Democratic candidate was on March 16 in an article by Robert Hong which merely listed all candidates in the 51st Congressional District and 80th Assembly District races, and on March 17, in an editorial on the election which mentioned his name only in passing.
"When the immigration thing was hot, I went to this rally down here in Calexico; they were interviewing all those candidates, so I stepped up too. I crashed the forum," Ramirez recalled. He said that, although the rally was held on public property, there was an attempt to block him from speaking. He threatened to sue if the organizers didn't give him equal time to speak. They relented, he said, but tried to take the microphone away from him after one minute, although other candidates had been allowed to speak for three minutes. "I wouldn't let him take the microphone away until I got through with what I was going to say."
After the rally, Ramirez said, "They were interviewing all these candidates, and I said, 'Hey, I want to be interviewed too,' and they did and wrote everything down, but nothing ever came out in the paper on it. Also, they took pictures and they put the pictures of the other candidates in, but nothing ever came out on me."
Ramirez was invited to participate in a candidate forum at Imperial Valley College. Vargas and Filner sent representatives. "They put the congressional candidates last," Ramirez said. "Imperial Valley Press and everybody took off before we got to speak and we were just talking to a handful of people left there. There were a couple of hundred people there, but they had all left because it was so late. By the time we got to speak, it was already 9:30 or 10:00 at night and it started at 6:30. The I.V. Press didn't make any comments on [Republican Congressional candidate] Blake Miles or me. There is so much bias and discrimination."
Ramirez fared somewhat better in the San Diego Union-Tribune. Caitlin Rother's May 16 lengthy article on the race in the 51st District included four sentences on Ramirez. No mention was made, however, of Ramirez's account of the Vargas attempt to muscle him out of the race event , Ramirez says, though Rother asked him about it. He said she also explained that, unless the Union-Tribune could obtain a response from the Vargas campaign, it couldn't report his story.
Ramirez says he also encountered a glitch in his effort to run a campaign ad on KYMA TV (Channel 11) in the Imperial Valley. "We still have not received a copy of the video of the ad. They were supposed to have started the ad on Friday, June 2 and run it the whole weekend and they didn't. They started it on Monday, one day before the election, and ran it on Tuesday, Election Day."
The ad features Ramirez speaking against the background of an American flag and an image of an unborn child. In the meantime, the station was running ads for Vargas and Filner frequently. His radio ads did run according to plan, June 1 through June 6, on three Imperial County radio stations. The radio ad and TV ads used the same script, which clearly identified Ramirez as being a pro-life, pro-family Democrat.
Forty-seven days before the election, Ramirez put up lots of campaign signs along busy roadways in the Imperial Valley. On the two weekends before the election, Ramirez and several supporters distributed several thousand campaign flyers at several churches and in residential areas in Imperial County and the South Bay area of San Diego County, including Vargas' own Chula Vista neighborhood. Ramirez and a few supporters also waved campaign signs along busy streets in the South Bay on the weekend before the election.
With regard to Catholic churches in his area, Ramirez, a practicing Catholic, asserted, "We never heard anything here from anybody here locally on the election, about voting for pro-lifers." Ramirez speculated that Vargas probably received about 20 percent of the pro-life vote, "but they did it ignorantly, because they didn't know that I was running. The media did a good job of not letting them know." He related two anecdotes of voters who had voted for Vargas by absentee ballot, but expressed shock when they later read Ramirez's flyer exposing Vargas' voting record.
Asked how he would rate the effectiveness of his campaign as far as keeping Vargas out of office, Ramirez replied, "Very effective. The few people who knew I was running knew what my platform was. I got 10.5 percent of the votes in Imperial County."
His campaign expenditures totaled about $3,000. Ramirez had calculated that, if Vargas were elected, he would be hard to dislodge, since he is still relatively young. He views Filner as being more vulnerable, since he has already served for 14 years.
On May 23, Ramirez filed a criminal complaint against Vargas and Bresnahan, alleging that they violated California Election Code 18205 by offering him "substantial campaign assistance to be instead a Democrat candidate for the 80th Assembly District."
This offense is punishable by up to three years in a state prison. Ramirez issued a press release on this action on May 30. Neither the Imperial Valley Press or San Diego Union-Tribune ever reported it, although it was reported by the June 1 issue of Sacramento's Capitol Morning Report.