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Archdiocese: Catholic schools exist to
‘affirm and proclaim’ Gospel of Jesus
VALERIE SCHMALZ
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO
The Archdiocese of San Francisco is
proposing three new clauses to the contracts for the teachers in the archdiocesan Catholic high schools. The purpose
is to further clarify that Catholic schools
– as the ﬁrst clause states – “exist to
affirm and proclaim the Gospel of Jesus
Christ as held and taught by his Catholic Church.”
The archdiocese is also adding detailed
statements of Catholic teaching on
sexual morality and religious practice – taken from the Catechism of the
Catholic Church – into the faculty and
staff handbooks of the four archdiocesan high schools, Archbishop Riordan,
Marin Catholic and Junipero Serra High
Schools and Sacred Heart Cathedral
Preparatory. The handbook additions
will take effect in the 2015-16 school year
and are not part of the contract. About
315 teachers at the four schools belong to
the faculty union. Nearly 500 people are
employed at the four high schools.
The handbook and contract changes
do not contain anything essentially new.
Rather, they are intended to clarify existing expectations that Catholic teachers
in their professional and public lives
uphold Catholic teaching, archdiocesan
Catholic schools Superintendent Maureen Huntington said.
“Because we live in a very secular
society, the truth as revealed by God
gets overshadowed by popular ideology,” Huntington said. “In order to
remain faithful to God’s revelations and
the church’s teachings, additions and
clarifying statements have been developed for our teachers and staff members
articulating speciﬁc fundamental truths,
which are not understood or accepted
within our secular society.”
The intent is not to drive any teacher
out of a job, Huntington and San Fran-
cisco Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone said.
“At the outset, I wish to state clearly
and emphatically that the intention
underlying this document is not to target
for dismissal from our schools any
teachers, singly or collectively, nor does
it introduce anything essentially new
into the contract or the faculty handbook,” Archbishop Cordileone wrote in a
February letter to the teachers.
Archbishop Cordileone was to
address the high school teachers of
the archdiocese Feb. 6 on the topic of
“Catholic education during the time
of Pope Francis.” Faculty from the 14
Catholic high schools in the archdiocese, including the 10 owned by religious communities as well as teachers
at the archdiocesan high schools, were
expected to attend Mass at St. Mary’s
Cathedral and a subsequent talk.
The union negotiating team was
scheduled to present the proposed
contract to the full membership by this
week, said Lisa Dole, president of the
teachers’ union.
“We are pleased that the document
acknowledges that the teachers in our
high school are not all the same – like
many Catholics around the world who
struggle with their adherence to some
of the teachings of the church,” Dole
said late Tuesday in a statement for
Catholic San Francisco on behalf of the
union executive board.
“There are still concerns with the
proposed language and some key issues
that the union and archbishop are hopeful that we will be able to work out,”
Dole said.
A special “Affirm and Proclaim” pullout
section in this issue features an expanded
version of this story, along with the full text
of the archbishop’s letter to the teachers, the
changes to the faculty handbook and other
information about the archdiocesan initiative.
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO
Newspaper of the Archdiocese of San Francisco
SERVING SAN FRANCISCO, MARIN & SAN MATEO COUNTIES
www.catholic-sf.org
FEBRUARY 6, 2015
$1.00 | VOL. 17 NO. 4
Pope to dads: Play with
your kids, be strong,
loving, moral role models
Rome to consider
challenges women
face in society, church
CAROL GLATZ
CINDY WOODEN
CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE
VATICAN CITY – When their lives are all work
and no play, men turn their children into “orphans” who lack a father to guide them, show
them love and teach them values, Pope Francis
said.
“They are orphans in a family because their
fathers are often absent, also physically, from
home, but above all because when they are home
they don’t act like fathers, they don’t dialogue
with their children, they don’t fulﬁll their role as
educators, they don’t give their children, by way
of their example and their words, those principles, values and rules of life that they need like
bread,” he said.
At his general audience Jan. 28, the pope continued a series of talks on the family by focusing
on the role of the father.
Speaking to some 7,000 people gathered in the
Paul VI audience hall, the pope said that in the
past, fathers were sometimes too authoritarian,
treating their children like “servants” and not
helping them take responsibility for forging their
own way in life.
“However, as often happens, we have gone from
one extreme to another,” the pope said.
“The problem today does not seem to be so
much the overbearing presence of fathers as
much as it is rather their absence, their hiding”
from their responsibility as parents, he said.
SEE DADS, PAGE 21
CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE
(CNS PHOTO/PAUL HARING)
Presentation of the Lord
Religious carry candles in procession at the start of a Mass
celebrated by Pope Francis to mark the feast of the Presentation of
the Lord Feb. 2. The Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican also
marked the World Day for Consecrated Life.
VATICAN CITY – Violence against women,
cultural pressures regarding women’s physical appearance, attitudes that subjugate women
or that ignore male-female differences and the
growing alienation of women from the church in
some parts of the world are themes the Pontiﬁcal
Council for Culture is set to explore.
The council, whose members are all cardinals
and bishops, has chosen to discuss the theme,
“Women’s Cultures: Equality and Difference,”
during its plenary assembly Feb. 4-7. A document
outlining the theme was published in late January, and four women involved in writing it joined
Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, council president, at
a news conference Feb. 2 at the Vatican.
The cardinal announced to the press that he
was planning to establish within his office a
special group of female consultants to provide
women’s opinions and points of view on a variety
of issues.
He also noted that if priests had to follow the
Jewish rules for a quorum for prayer – 10 men
must be present – many of them would not be
able to celebrate daily Mass, even though there
would be dozens of women present in the church.
The council’s discussion document, drafted by
a group of Italian women and women who have
lived in Italy for years, looked at the continuing
SEE WOMEN, PAGE 22
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INDEX
On the Street . . . . . . . . .4
National . . . . . . . . . . . . .8
World . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10
Opinion. . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Faith. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Calendar. . . . . . . . . . . .26
2 ARCHDIOCESE
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO | FEBRUARY 6, 2015
Intellect and invention
USF exhibit shows enduring power of Northern Renaissance master Durer
RICK DELVECCHIO
ABOUT THE EXHIBIT
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO
You may need a magnifying glass to fully experience the best of the Albrecht Durer work on display
at a special exhibit at the University of San Francisco,
but if you appreciate powerful religious art, consider
the reward worth the effort.
A restless genius in the restless age before the
Reformation, the German painter, engraver and
printmaker (1471-1528) learned from the Italian
Renaissance masters how to depict the human body
with strength, motion, mathematical proportion and
beauty.
He was as obsessed with measurement as he was
determined to ﬁll a compact space such as the page
of a small book with ﬁgures so individualistic and
energized, cross-hatching so minutely etched, narratives so emotional and perspectives so realistic that
looking at his work can have the effect of being drawn
into a good movie.
Consider his Life of the Virgin woodcut series,
an example of one of his typical contributions to
the burgeoning craft of printing in early-16th century Germany. All 20 images from the series are on
display through Feb. 22 at USF’s Thacher Gallery in a
student-curated exhibit called “Reformations: Dürer
& the New Age of Print.”
The scenes start chronologically with the refusal
of Joachim’s offer at the temple, followed by what
Kate Lusheck, assistant professor of art history and
museum studies at USF, calls “an incredibly inventive
series of moments” in the life of Mary.
“It’s an incredible mixture of looking at New Testament traditions but then also inventing and looking
at medieval traditions and then medieval legends related to the Virgin, drawing from a couple of different
sources, and then using his incredible intellect and
invention to make this look like scenes you’ve never
seen before,” Lusheck told Catholic San Francisco.
Durer knew what he wanted his viewers to do, she
said: “Stop and make you think about what you were
looking at.”
“Reformations: Dürer & the New Age of Print,”
through Feb. 22, Thacher Gallery, University of
San Francisco. Presented by USF’s Donohue
Rare Book Room and Thacher Gallery in partnership with USF’s Masters in Museum Studies Program, the student-curated exhibit is an historically
important grouping of early European books and
prints from the university’s permanent collection. It focuses on the earliest moments of print
and printed book culture in Europe, particularly
concentrating on the impact of new print technologies and their uses in and around Nuremberg,
Germany in the late-15th and early-16th centuries.
The Thacher Gallery is located in the Gleeson
Library/Geschke Center on the USF campus.
(IMAGE COURTESY UNIVERSITY OF SAN FRANCISCO)
This 1509 engraving of Christ’s Passion shows Albrecht Durer’s powers of realism and emotion in a biblical subject.
Durer started out as a goldsmith and later became
“an OK printmaker,” Lusheck said. On display is an
early woodcut that was used for a volume of letters
by St. Jerome, who translated the Vulgate, a Latin
version of the Bible. It’s dated 1497 when Durer was
26 and is workmanlike but no work of art.
“Within a decade of that print, he kind of starts going
off,” Lusheck said. “He goes from a craftsman, which
was a tradition in the north … and he goes to Italy and
starts learning about the idea that an artist can be a
kind of maker that achieves almost God-like status.”
He began adding his famous AD monogram to his
works – and was not pleased when others he deemed
less worthy copied the idea. “He wanted to be a humanist artist of the highest caliber,” Lusheck said.
The breakthrough: Durer learned to use facial expression and hand motions from the Italian tradition
and had a gift for modeling the body with hatching
and cross-hatching, then somehow packed the energy into a compact space using his gift for line.
“That’s the magniﬁcence of it,” Lusheck said.
Peer deeper with your magnifying glass and you
may see something else, in the uneasy, hyper-focused
expressions and twisted poses of many of the ﬁgures
he took from life around Nuremberg: The psyche of
a pious people tensed to break loose in the emotional
outpouring of the Protestant Reformation.
NEED TO KNOW
LENTEN SOUP SUPPERS – SEND PARISH LISTINGS TO CSF: The 40 days of Lent for 2015 begin
Ash Wednesday Feb. 18. Many parishes offer soup
suppers during Lent that consist of a simple meal
followed by an exhortation from a guest speaker.
The events are usually open to all and often a
chance for people from different parishes to meet
and share a prayerful experience. In line with this
Catholic San Francisco asks parishes to send CSF
their soup supper and other Lenten event information to [email protected]. Following the examples below, please include where, when, including times, dates and day of week for each event;
LIVING TRUSTS WILLS
presenter’s name and topic; cost; and a contact
phone number; website and email.
ST. STEPHEN PARISH, SAN FRANCISCO: Feb.
24, March 3, 10 with Taize prayer service March 17,
6:30 p.m., Donworth Hall, 401 Eucalyptus Drive next
to Stonestown YMCA. Franciscan Brother Michael
Minton speaks on the season and Islam, the religion.
Contact Veronica Wong at (415) 681-2444, ext. 27.
ST. TERESA PARISH, SAN FRANCISCO: March 11:
The Challenge of an Interior Life with Carmelite Father
Jack Welch, 7 p.m., followed by Q&A. St. Teresa
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MARRIAGE RETREAT: Speakers Greg and Julie Alexander turned their failing marriage around 10 years
ago, and will offer insights on how every couple can
have a more loving, joy-filled marriage. They will offer
a one-day marriage retreat at Our Lady of Angels in
Burlingame on March 21, 3-9 p.m., ($65/couple, dinner
included), and will speak at parishes around the Bay
Area Feb.-March 27. Visit www.marriageonfire.info.
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO
PROBATE
www.mtslaw.info
of Avila Church, 1490 19th St. at Connecticut. The
Carmelite tradition encourages an interior life of availability to God and challenges today’s pilgrim to live
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ARCHDIOCESE 3
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO | FEBRUARY 6, 2015
‘Nine Days of Grace’ retreat feeds
modern-day hunger for devotions
said. They get people to pray and think about their
faith and their relationship with God outside Mass.
“We’re recognizing that for something like 90
percent of Catholics now, their only contact with
their faith is Sunday Mass,” said Father Sauer.
“And Sunday Mass as wonderful as it may be is not
enough to feed and form the faithful.”
This is the second year the San Francisco Jesuit
community has collaborated to offer the retreat
modeled after the successful daily retreats offered
by the Jesuits in Oregon and Washington.
The retreats are standing room only in the
Northwest, Father Sauer said. “The reason they
have become so popular is because they are meeting a need.”
Nine Days of Grace “has its roots in the traditional Jesuit novena of grace, but it has been
reframed for contemporary Catholics.
Father Sauer said the retreat functions as a
shorter “spiritual exercises in everyday life” that
were popular in St. Ignatius’ day.
Whether for a few days or for many, the Ignatian
spiritual exercises have a common result, he said.
“I experience myself as unconditionally loved,
yet falling short of God’s call, yet blessed and
called again. And I keep trying that over and over,”
he said.
CHRISTINA GRAY
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO
The San Francisco Jesuit community is inviting
busy Catholics, some of whom may have never
done a novena, to prepare for Lent with an urban
retreat held for an hour a day over nine days at St.
Ignatius and St. Agnes churches.
The retreat, “Nine Days of Grace, A Busy Person’s Jumpstart to Lent,” runs from Feb. 9-17. Lent
begins on Feb. 18. The retreat is free, but collections will beneﬁt the Jesuit Refugee Service.
Sacramento-based Jesuit Father Michel Moynahan and Jesuit Father Craig Hightower, who
co-presented Nine Days of Grace in their area last
year, are presenters. The retreat was inspired and
named after a compilation of prayers written by
Jesuits that will be integrated into the nine-day
format.
According to retreat organizer Jesuit Father Stephen J. Sauer, director of worship at St. Ignatius
Parish, the retreat in Mass format was designed for
those who want to deepen their relationship with
God, but can’t “quit life” to do it.
“The beneﬁt of any retreat is to take successive
moments to assess our spiritual status, to pray and
talk to God and have God talk to us,” Sauer said.
Given how busy and noisy and active we are, he
said, when we commit to a succession of days, “we
go deeper.”
Retreat hour starts at St. Ignatius Church at 12:05
p.m. and St. Agnes Church at 7 p.m. Participants
may attend either or both daily sessions. Fathers
Moynahan and Hightower will preach on one
spiritual principle a day – Gratitude, Discernment,
Compassion, Justice, Mercy, Conversion, Charity, Prayer and Love of God. Personal daily prayer
petitions will be included in the Mass on the day
after they are offered, said Sauer. As graces are received, prayers of thanksgiving will also be shared,
anonymously, but communally.
“For those that would like to stay after the liturgy, we will pause and pray with the relic of St.
Francis Xavier,” said Father Moynahan.
The novena of grace is a traditional Jesuit
Lenten devotion addressed to the saint who promised healing to those who implore his help daily for
nine consecutive days.
Father Sauer said the retreat can satisfy a hunger today’s Catholic may feel for devotions and
novenas, which have fallen out of practice and
popularity since Vatican II.
“Long ago, you went to Mass because you had
to, but you were fed by devotions,” he said, recalling his Sicilian grandmother saying the rosary
throughout Mass during his boyhood.
“Today we are fed by the Eucharist,” he said.
“That has become so central to us that devotions
don’t have the same place in our lives,” he said.
But some devotions are worth bringing back, he
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(PHOTO BY CHRISTINA GRAY/CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO)
Jesuit Father Stephen J. Sauer, director of worship at St. Ignatius
Parish, holds a reliquary containing a relic of St. Francis Xavier.
He is coordinating a nine-day pre-Lenten retreat at the two
Jesuit parishes in San Francisco, – St. Ignatius and St. Agnes.
SAINT RITA LENTEN LECTURE SERIES 2015
“We are the Church”
Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Gaudium et Spes
17 February, Tuesday 7:00 PM
17 March, Tuesday
“Discerning Right from Wrong:
Moral Decision-Making in the
21st Century”
“From African Cry to a Gospel Joy
Rooted in Hope: Reading Pope
Francis’ Evangelii Gaudium with
African Eyes”
Rev. Kenneth Weare, Ph.D.
Teresia Hinga, Ph.D.
Pastor, Saint Rita Church
Adjunct Professor of Social Ethics, USF
Associate Professor, Dept. Religious Studies
Santa Clara University
Request a free Wills Kit from CRS.
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7:00 PM
24 February, Tuesday 7:00 PM
24 March, Tuesday
“Gaudium et Spes at Fifty:
Still Charting a Course for
Catholic Social Thought”
“Pilgrimage, Presence, and Place:
Art and the Sacred Journey in the
21st Century”
Rev. Thomas Massaro, S.J., Ph.D.
Kathryn R. Barush, D. Phil.
Dean and Professor of Moral Theology
Jesuit School of Theology, Santa Clara U.
3 March, Tuesday
Thinking about a will?
NINE DAYS OF GRACE RETREAT: Feb. 9-17, 12:05
p.m. at St. Ignatius Church, 650 Parker Ave., San Francisco; 7 p.m. at St. Agnes Church, 1025 Masonic Ave.,
San Francisco. Visit [email protected].
7:00 PM
“A New Edition of the Catholic
Tradition: The Theology of
Conscience in Gaudium et Spes
and Dignitatis Humanae Personae”
Jan Jans, S.T.D.
Associate Professor of Ethics
Tilburg University, the Netherlands
7:00 PM
Assistant Professor of Art History & Religion
Jesuit School of Theology, Santa Clara U.
10 March, Tuesday
7:00 PM
“Classical Music and Quiet
Reflection in Lent”
Michael McCarty, grand piano
Peter Chase, violin
1-800-235-2772
The evenings begin with a Lenten Soup Supper at 6:15 PM in the Parish Hall, followed by the Lenten Lecture.
CATHOLIC RELIEF SERVICES
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All are invited. For further information and Soup Supper reservations please call: 415-456-4815
Location:
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4 ON THE STREET WHERE YOU LIVE
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO | FEBRUARY 6, 2015
Ivy League
and frontline
service put to
very good use
TOM BURKE
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO
What a combo, top shelf education
and experience. Abi
Basch has been an
educator for a dozen
years, the last four
at San Francisco’s
Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory.
The social studies
teacher earned her
history degree at
Abi Basch
Brown University.
“My first teaching experience
was as a volunteer teaching theater
workshops in a women’s prison while
still an undergraduate,” Abi, who
also holds a graduate degree as a
playwright, told me via email. “During that time I also studied abroad
in South Africa where I did similar
work in prisons and townships. These
experiences were incredibly forming
for me.”
And so, she explains, began her
path to an education career though
her own experience as a student
planted the seed.
“My interest started long before
this - my own teachers had had
such a powerful influence on my
life. That invaluable give-and-take
of the teacher-student relationship
has infused so much of what I do,
and provides endless rewards in the
dialogue I have today with my own
students.”
Abi said “teaching at Sacred Heart
Cathedral has been fantastic” and
the “service and social justice aspects of the school’s mission provide
an exciting opportunity to create
curricula and programs to infuse the
students with not only a will to make
the world a better place, but the
agency to do so.”
Abi says technology has put a
new fire under the feet of students.
“Learning how to engage devices in
the classroom as a tool for growth
and means toward meaningful live
learning has been exciting. It’s also
BLESS YOU FATHER: Father Tony McGuire retired as pastor of St. Matthew Parish, San Mateo Dec. 31. Father McGuire was ordained in 1965 and is
former pastor of San Francisco’s St. Anne of the Sunset Parish and Most Holy Redeemer Parish. He has also served as archdiocesan secretary of ethnic and
cultural affairs and director of pastoral care for migrants and refugees for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. “I like best of all celebrating Mass
in different languages with all representatives of the community present and active,” Father McGuire says about St. Matt’s on the parish website. He now
resides at St. Patrick Parish, San Francisco. Pictured from left at a Mass of Thanksgiving for his good work at St. Matt’s are Carmen Busing, Nancy Carroll,
Father McGuire, Michelle Trumpler, Joan Claybrook, Tony Villanueva, Joy Spence, Rosa Pen and Emily Castro.
YOU ARE THE BRANCHES: Missing
the forest for the trees happens methinks when
we take good and constant work for granted
including fundraisers who help keep other
ministry aﬂoat. St. Mary’s Auxiliary Boutique
Committee ﬁts that bill. The group recently
honored auxiliary manager Mary Poppingo
“with an orchid and plaque to acknowledge
her service,” Arlene Fife, committee member,
told me in a note to this column. “You lead us
by your example of care, concern, kindness,
a positive work ethic and always with the
warmth of your smile,” the plaque reads.
a fantastic opportunity for dialogue
with the students - as the technology
is changing so fast, they often have
innovative solutions that engage
social media and other technology.”
It is not without its price though,
she said. “Library research is more
of a challenge for students now, as is
attention span. I find myself breaking up lessons into smaller parts and
shifting between activities more often
to keep students engaged.”
The Catholic school “emphasis on
social justice and service has been
particularly meaningful to me as a
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HELPLINES FOR
CLERGY/CHURCH SEXUAL ABUSE VICTIMS
415-614-5506
This number is answered by Renee Duffey,
Victim Assistance Coordinator.
This is a secured line and is answered only
by Renee Duffey.
415-614-5503
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also a secured line and is answered only by
a victim survivor.
government and economics teacher,”
Abi said. “In a city like San Francisco, the church’s teaching on tolerance
and acceptance of the marginalized
has been especially powerful in creating a safe space for a diverse student
body.”
Abi remembers her roots and the
school’s. “Making sure to incorporate the philosophies of the specific
orders that founded our school into
my lesson plans has been a rewarding
challenge. I grew up around Christian Brothers, as my mother worked
at Manhattan College for much of
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my childhood, so I was familiar with
and fond of the ideology. I also have
enjoyed learning about and being
inspired by the incredible work of the
Daughters of Charity, and incorporating their ideas into my curricula.”
“Do it!” is Abi’s advice to those considering the teaching profession. “It’s
one of the most rewarding jobs there
is,” she said. Would she do it again?
“In a heartbeat.”
VACANCY: Downton Abbey is a
fave of mine and I marvel at the
number of guests the lord and lady –
not to mention others – invite to stay
at the place. If it were I, they’d all
be dispatched to the nearest Motel
Sixpence.
Email items and
electronic pictures
– jpegs at no less
than 300 dpi to [email protected] or mail to Street, One Peter
Yorke Way, San Francisco 94109.
Include a follow-up phone number.
Street is toll-free. My phone number
is (415) 614-5634.
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO
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ARCHDIOCESE 5
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO | FEBRUARY 6, 2015
Jesuits minister to the world’s poor and forgotten
Catholic San Francisco is featuring one
religious congregation from the archdiocese in each installment of this periodic
column, “Wake Up the World!” marking
the Vatican’s Year of Consecrated Life.
PAUL TOTAH
ST. IGNATIUS COLLEGE PREPARATORY
The Society of Jesus, known as the
Jesuits, first came to the San Francisco archdiocese in 1849 when Father
Michael Accolti, SJ, and Father John
Nobili, SJ, sailed on the lumber ship
“O.C. Raymond” from Oregon to San
Francisco, disembarking Dec. 8 on the
feast of the Immaculate Conception,
not in search of gold but of a chance,
as Accolti wrote, “to do a little good.”
What they found, however, was a
wild Barbary Coast San Francisco.
These men persevered, and when
Accolti left for Rome to gather new
recruits, Nobili, at the request of Archbishop Alemany, founded Santa Clara
College in 1851 in the heart of what is
now Silicon Valley. Fellow Turinese
Jesuit Father Anthony Maraschi, SJ,
founded St. Ignatius Parish and College in 1855 amid the sand dunes of
San Francisco’s Market Street. This
one school would later become both
the University of San Francisco and St.
Ignatius College Preparatory.
One of the first teachers at the
college was Joseph Neri, SJ, an early
experimenter in electricity. He built
and perfected his own electrical lighting system to use during his lectures
and built San Francisco’s first storage
battery. He shined the first electric
light on San Francisco from the window of his classroom in 1871 and lit
Jesuits gathered at SI College in 1905 for the school’s 50-year anniversary.
THE SOCIETY OF JESUS
WHEN AND WHERE FOUNDED:
Jesuits first began in Paris in 1534 and
were given the status of a religious
order in 1540 in Rome by Pope Paul III.
WHEN FIRST ARRIVED in the Archdiocese of San Francisco: 1849
ORIGINAL MINISTRY: Parish, education and prison ministry as well as
ministry to the military in the Presidio
CURRENT MINISTRIES: Education,
parish work, spiritual direction, prison
and hospital ministry, community
service, Ignatian Companions and the
Jesuit Volunteer Corps
NUMBERS OF MEMBERS: 2,325 in
the U.S. and 44 in the Archdiocese of
San Francisco.
WAKE UP THE WORLD !
2015 Year of Consecrated Life
His star pupil, John Montgomery,
who graduated from St. Ignatius and
later taught engineering at Santa
Clara, gained fame as the first person
to make a successful glider flight, a feat
he accomplished in 1883.
Jesuit work in San Francisco also
included parish ministry through St.
Ignatius Church between 1855 and
1863; the parish was made famous by
Father James Bouchard, SJ, the son of
a French woman and a Delaware chief.
In the 1860s San Franciscans flocked
to hear him speak and called him “The
Eloquent Indian” for his skill as a
homilist. Much later, in the early 1990s,
Jesuits resumed their parish work,
once again at St. Ignatius Church,
located on the USF campus, and at St.
Agnes Church, two vibrant communities in the archdiocese.
The California Province of the Society of Jesus has a long commitment to
serving the people of the San Francisco archdiocese and expanding its work
beyond these borders. Jesuits help
immigrants through the Kino Border
Initiative, aid former gang members
in Los Angeles through Father Greg
Boyle’s Homeboy Industries, and practice a “preferential option for the poor”
through new Nativity and Cristo Rey
schools around the state.
“The California Province of the Jesuits grew with the city of San Francisco
and the archdiocese,” noted Father
Michael Weiler, SJ, the California Provincial who works closely with the 44
Jesuits currently in the archdiocese.
“From the beginning, the service of
immigrants and education were are at
the heart of Jesuit ministry, and that
focus continues through the present
day. Today Jesuit ministries are carried forward by lay partners, steeped
in the Ignatian tradition. That tradition seeks to help people discover a
personal relationship with God and to
translate that love of God into service
of one’s neighbor. We Jesuits desire
that all our ministry is shaped by the
experience of the poor and those most
forgotten in our world.”
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6 ARCHDIOCESE
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO | FEBRUARY 6, 2015
Marin siblings win prizes in archdiocesan
Respect Life Essay Contest
CHRISTINA GRAY
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO
One home-schooled St. Hilary Parish family has
produced two winners in the 2015 Archdiocese of
San Francisco Respect Life Essay Contest.
Mary Blinn, 9, and her brother Evan Blinn, 7,
both placed in the archdiocese’s annual essay contest coordinated by the Respect Life Program. The
contest was promoted to students in grades one-12.
Mary was named the grand prize winner in the
third and fourth-grade division; Evan received an
honorable mention in the ﬁrst and second-grade
division.
The annual contest consists of a letter-writing
campaign in which students write letters to their
parents, pastors, publications, politicians or the
pope – depending upon their grade level – expressing their thanks, concerns, suggestions and hope for
creating a “culture of life.” The deadline was Dec. 10.
“The contest helps students understand the
signiﬁcance and dignity of every single person God
created,” said archdiocesan respect life coordinator Vicki Evans, who notiﬁed winners on Jan. 20.
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(PHOTO BY CHRISTINA GRAY/CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO)
Siblings Mary and Evan Blinn, winners in the 2015 Archdiocese of San Francisco Respect Life Essay Contest, play a tune
together at their home in Tiburon.
“The ideas they express in writing tend to stay with
them, and their ideas are unique.”
A total of 38 schools, home schools and parish
religious education programs participated in the
contest with 427 entries.
As part of her essay prompt, Mary was asked to
write a letter to her pastor, Father William Brown
of St. Hilary Parish, suggesting ways his ﬂock can
defend the poor, the elderly and the unborn.
She used the metaphor of being Christ’s hands and
feet. “He doesn’t have hands on this earth; we are his
hands,” she wrote in her essay, which described her
experiences praying for scared single mothers, serving food to the homeless and visiting the elderly.
Catholic San Francisco
FEBRUARY
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+ Open
San Jose Women English Cursillo
+ Silent Women:
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Married Couples (Knights of Columbus)
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Feb. 20-22
Feb 13 -16
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Rena Grant & Kathy Miranda
MAR. 4
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Dorothy Charbonneau
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Ustadh Feraidoon Mojadedi
MAR. 17
LENTEN DAY OF RENEWAL
Fr. Patrick Foley
MAR. 28
LENTEN DAY OF RENEWAL
Fr. Vince Mesi, OFM
Fr. Mark Wiesner
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March 6-8
Fr. Michael
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March 13-15
Lenten Sojourn with St. Francis
Feb. 28-March
Fr. Allen Ramirez, OFM. Conv.
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Sacraments: Fr. B. Lamb
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March 22-27
Lenten Sojourn with St. Francis
March 7-9
+ Silent Women:
March 27-29
Gina Bower Sacraments: Fr. B. Lamb
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“Even though my hands are small, I can reverently pray outside Planned Parenthood because my
prayer does not rely on the power of my hands. It
relies on the power of my heart,” she continued.
Like many ﬁrstborn children, Mary is mature,
focused and responsible, her mother said during a
family interview with Catholic San Francisco Jan.
30. She declined a rambunctious dress-up session
with her younger siblings to ﬁnish an assignment
and then made lunch for her family.
“The priests of St. Hilary have always said that
Mary Blinn will be in charge of the planet when
she gets older,” said Father Brown.
Mary, a fourth grader, said she “would actually
like to be either a nun or a nurse.”
Mary and Evan, like their younger siblings, Kate,
5, and Anna, 3, are home-schooled in their Tiburon
home by their mother, Jamie Blinn, 32.
Jamie is seven months pregnant with a new baby
sister the children have affectionately nicknamed
“Honk.” She will be named Clare. “It’s remarkable
to us how inherent our children’s understanding of
the dignity of the human person is,” she said.
She and her husband Matt, 37, a foreign-service
diplomat with the U.S. Department of State, homeschool their four children, in part, so they can have
more inﬂuence on their religious education and
character development.
The family share a decade of the rosary together
each morning; they attend Mass once weekly and
even 3-year-old Anna can retell the story of a beatiﬁed nun from the 14th century with clarity and
drama. On Halloween, they go trick-or-treating as
their favorite saints.
“(Sister) Imelda (Lambertini) is really, really
cool,” she said. From her mother’s lap, Anna happily describes how the devout young woman died
“sooooo happy” after she received her ﬁrst Communion at age 14.
From his handwritten essay, a letter to his parents, Evan reads aloud:
“Thank you for being so willing to have another
baby even though we have ﬁve children,” he wrote.
“I can help by cleaning the house because Mommy
is tired, like St. Therese’s Little Way.”
The contest’s 75 grand prize, ﬁrst prize and honorable mention award winners will be recognized
in an awards liturgy and reception on March 1 at
St. Mary’s Cathedral.
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ARCHDIOCESE 7
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO | FEBRUARY 6, 2015
Cardinal who is papal insider visits Dominican Sisters
MICHELE JURICH
THE OAKLAND VOICE
An old friend was a most welcome
guest of the Dominican Sisters of
Mission San Jose on Jan. 19, as Cardinal Reinhard Marx, archbishop of
Munich and Freising, came by for a
visit.
Particularly delighted were Sister
Imelda, Sister Pia and Sister Margareta, who had lived at the community’s priory at Altenhohenau, Germany, which was closed in 2013 after
90 years of service to the Mission San
Jose community.
A smiling Sister Imelda greeted the
cardinal in their native language before Mass in the motherhouse chapel,
with Bishop Michael C. Barber, SJ,
and Bishop Emeritus John Cummins
concelebrating, with Msgr. Manuel
Simas, pastor of St. Joseph Parish Divine Word next door, and the sisters’
chaplain, Father Carl Seewald.
Cardinal Marx, a member of the
Council of Cardinals, the eight from
around the globe who advise Pope
Francis on church governance, was
in the Bay Area to deliver the annual
Heyns lecture sponsored by the office
of religious life at Stanford University.
“Today you are gifting us with a
bridge of connection with our world
in Altenhohenau, which has been a
treasure to us for over 90 years,” said
Dominican Sister Gloria Marie Jones,
prioress. “It is a great gift to have you
coming to us.”
In his homily, the cardinal said he
was “not happy” at the closing of the
priory in Bavaria. “But we have to
look forward,” Cardinal Marx said
in English. “I think the spirit of the
Dominican Sisters here since the
19th century, coming from Germany,
coming from Bavaria, was looking
forward. What’s our challenge today?
What can we do now?”
(PHOTO COURTESY MICHELE JURICH /THE CATHOLIC VOICE)
Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Germany was principal celebrant of Mass Jan. 19 at the Motherhouse of the Dominican Sisters of Mission San Jose in Fremont. Pictured from left, are
Divine Word Father Carl Seewald; Oakland Bishop Michael C. Barber; Cardinal Marx, master of
ceremonies Andrew Galvan; Oakland Bishop Emeritus John Cummins; and Msgr. Manuel Simas
of Mission Jan Jose.
The day’s Gospel reading, he
said, offered the opportunity for the
church and the people of God, to
look at the two aspects: the new and
the old. “That’s also the dynamic
between exodus and settlement,” he
said.
“Throughout the history of the
people of God, we have this great vision of going, going ahead, exodus,”
he said. “Going into the new country,
but also of the other: to be settled, arriving, being at home.
“You need both. Sometimes in the
history of the church there’s too
much settlement, being at home, being close together. I think our Pope
Francis says, ‘Open. Open the doors.
You’re not charged to be at home, to
be settled. You have not just arrived.
You must go ahead.’
“You need both, but much more
important is the spirit of going, of the
new.”
The land of glory, he told them, “is
not in the past, it is in the future.”
After visiting the sisters in the care
community, who ringed the chapel in
wheelchairs, the cardinal joined those
who were able for a festive Mexican
lunch in the dining room.
Sister Gloria Marie showed a
slideshow of the history of the community, including forward-looking
initiatives such as the partnership
with Alzheimer’s Services of the East
Bay at the motherhouse.
The cardinal’s visit ended at the Old
Mission San Jose, where he received a
tour from Andrew Galvan. Galvan is
a Chochenyo Ohlone, and the curator
at Mission Dolores in San Francisco.
Mission San Jose has been his
parish home for generations, he
told Cardinal Marx, leading him to
the original baptismal font. Mission
records show on Jan. 1, 1815, Galvan’s
great-great grandmother was baptized there.
“Wonderful,” the cardinal said.
As the cardinal departed, in the
rear seat of a golf cart driven by the
congregational prioress, the bells of
the mission – original – rang out.
To view Cardinal Marx’s Stanford lecture,
visit http://web.stanford.edu/group/religiouslife/cgi-bin/wordpress/programs/
roger-w-heyns-lecture/.
JURICH is associate editor of The Catholic Voice, newspaper of the Oakland
diocese.
Lenten
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Wedding Anniversary Celebration
All husbands and wives celebrating a “5-year wedding anniversary” (5, 10, 15…
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8 NATIONAL
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO | FEBRUARY 6, 2015
Thomas Merton at 100: Still inspiring people to get closer to God
DENNIS SADOWSKI
WASHINGTON – When Trappist Father Thomas
Merton addressed persistent racism in his writing
during the 1960s, his message seemingly reached
into the future.
Appealing to society to recognize that all people
are children of God, Father Merton questioned
practices that prevented African-Americans from
achieving full equality and called for the end of
discrimination in all forms.
It was just one of the priest’s stances on important social issues, encompassing race relations,
militarism and war, consumerism and the burdens
posed by technology.
Father Merton’s concerns are as pertinent today
as they were when he wrote about them half a
century ago, said Paul M. Pearson, director of the
Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University
in Louisville, Kentucky, on the eve of the centennial of the Trappist’s birth, Jan. 31, 1915.
“He speaks to us because everything he has to
say is as applicable now as when he wrote it,”
Pearson told Catholic News Service from the
center, which serves as a research center and the
repository of nearly all of the late Father Merton’s
poems, essays, correspondence and notes.
“Those social issues he addressed, I think he
would be horriﬁed that we’re still dealing with
them, that nothing has changed,” Pearson said.
The center will host the 14th general meeting of
the International Thomas Merton Society June
4-7.
Researchers and theologians suggest that
v
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ed into more than 15 languages, according to the
Thomas Merton Center.
A proliﬁc writer, Father
Merton over the course of
20 years wrote hundreds of
poems, dozens of essays,
thousands of letters and
numerous books. He is
acknowledged by scholars
and theologians as perhaps the most inﬂuential
Catholic author of the 20th
century.
“He’s a wonderful writer
and poet. He gives you the
sense that God is present,
God is close and God walks
with us,” said Christopher
Pramuk, associate professor of theology of Xavier
University in Cincinnati.
Today, decades after his
CHRISTINE BOCHEN
Dec. 10, 1968, death from
Professor, Nazareth College
electrocution in Bangkok
while on pilgrimage to better interfaith understanding with Eastern religions, Father Merton’s
works continue to be studied; new books reprinting
his letters and essays continue to be published.
In cities around the world, groups of Merton
devotees through the International Thomas Merton
Society meet for silent prayer and discussion of the
Trappist’s works.
“He was the one who took contemplation and
contemplative prayer out of the monastery,” said
Ursuline Sister Donna Kristoff, coordinator of the
Cleveland chapter, one of 39 in the U.S. and eight
overseas. “He was one of the ﬁrst ones to show that
this is basic Christian practice, that all people need
to learn to sit quietly, to ﬁnd solitude and peace to
ﬁnd God within.”
Sister Kathleen Deignan, professor of religious
studies at Iona College in New Rochelle, New York,
called Father Merton a path maker.
“He bequeaths these paths to us so that we can
actually ﬁnd them. He did make the path by walking. There was nobody in front of him. No cultural
conditions. No family. He did this great pilgrimage
of search,” said Sister Kathleen, a member of the
Congregation of Notre Dame and director of the
school’s Iona Spirituality Institute.
Christine Bochen, professor of religious studies
at Nazareth College in Rochester, New York, and a
founding member of the international Merton society, has edited the Trappist’s work for publication.
She has found the “richness of his personality”
evolving over his two decades of writing.
“What is absolutely fascinating to me is that he
could see what so many could not,” Bochen said.
“He’s withdrawn in a sense, living in a monastery
in rural Kentucky, but he could read what the Second Vatican Council called signs of the times. He
had a deep wisdom and understanding of what was
happening in the world.”
‘He’s withdrawn
in a sense, living
in a monastery
in rural
Kentucky, but
he could read
what the Second
Vatican Council
called signs of
the times.’
CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE
(CNS PHOTO/MERTON LEGACY TRUST AND THE THOMAS MERTON CENTER AT BELLARMINE
UNIVERSITY)
Trappist Father Thomas Merton, one of the most influential
Catholic authors of the 20th century, is pictured in an undated
photo.
Father Merton’s social concerns stemmed from
a deep spirituality and an unending quest to ﬁnd
God. Some consider him a mystic and believe he
deserves to be declared a doctor of the church.
St. John XXIII and Blessed Paul VI were among
church leaders who regularly turned to his writing for inspiration.
Merton was born in Prades, France, near the
border with Spain. His parents – American-born
mother Ruth and New Zealand-born father Owen
– were artists. Ruth Jenkins Merton died when
Merton was 6; Owen died nine years later.
His challenging childhood and his upbringing
and visits to various locales, including France,
Italy, New York (after his mother’s death) and
England shaped the young Merton as much as his
gradual discovery of the love of God after years of
an unsettled, and at times promiscuous, life as a
young adult.
Merton entered the Trappists – formally the
Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance – in
Gethsemani, Kentucky, Dec. 10, 1941, three years
after being baptized in the Catholic Church. He
found the structured and prayer-ﬁlled life of
a monk appealing. The monastery was a place
where he could think about life – and contemplate
the presence of God.
Father Merton’s massive autobiography, “The
Seven Storey Mountain,” an assignment from his
superior who recognized his desire to be a writer,
raised his proﬁle among people searching in their
lives. Originally published in 1948, the year before
Father Merton’s ordination, the work has sold
more than 1 million copies and has been translat-
NATIONAL 9
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO | FEBRUARY 6, 2015
Cruel and unusual? Court to review lethal injections
CAROL ZIMMERMANN
CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE
WASHINGTON – When the Supreme Court weighs in on the constitutionality of the lethal-injection
executions in Oklahoma this year,
its ruling will not likely be a tipping
point in eliminating capital punishment in the U.S., but some experts
say it could be the beginning of the
end of this practice.
“It’s not this problem that will end
it, but it’s another straw,” said Richard Dieter, executive director of the
Death Penalty Information Center
based in Washington.
Dieter noted that a lot of public
discussion about lethal injections
took place last year after the botched
execution of Clayton Lockett in
Oklahoma, who writhed in pain for
40 minutes before dying of apparent
heart failure.
The execution was “quite a shock”
and “got a lot of attention,” which
he said explains why the drugs used
to execute him deserve a review.
In April, the court will hear oral
arguments in Glossip v. Gross, a
case brought by four death-row
inmates in Oklahoma. One of the
plaintiffs, Charles Warner, was
executed Jan. 15 after the court rejected a stay in a 5-4 vote. The court
announced Jan. 23 it would take the
case and ﬁve days later it agreed to
stay the upcoming executions of the
other three inmates until it issues a
decision.
The case sounds somewhat familiar because in 2008, the court ruled
A botched execution adds to doubts about
methods, if not about the death penalty itself.
in Baze v. Rees that a three-drug protocol used in Kentucky executions
did not violate the Constitution’s
ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In this drug combination, the
ﬁrst drug causes unconsciousness,
the second brings about paralysis
and the third stops the heart.
But in recent years, a shortage of
those drugs has caused states to try
a variety of drug combinations in
their lethal injections, not the drugs
the court considered and upheld in
2008. Some combinations, as shown
by Lockett’s botched execution, do
not always work as intended.
Currently, the 32 states that have
the death penalty use lethal injections. If they are going to continue
with that method, the deaths can’t
take a signiﬁcant period of time,
said Meg Penrose, professor of
constitutional law at Texas A&M’s
University School of Law.
“The court is saying let’s at least
pause and get more information,”
she said, adding that she doesn’t
think the court would “overturn
the death penalty as a method of
punishment” but the justices might
determine that until better medication is available, states should “use
another method.”
According to the plaintiffs’ case,
the drug midazolam, the ﬁrst drug
used in Oklahoma executions, does
not sedate the prisoner sufficiently
thus creating the risk of excessive
pain, which violates the standards
set in the Baze ruling and in the
Constitution.
Dieter said the lethal injection cases
illustrate the “ambivalence people
have about the death penalty” noting
that they might be willing to have it
but aren’t “comfortable with the way
it’s working.”
Karen Clifton, executive director
of the Catholic Mobilizing Network
to End the Use of the Death Penalty,
said Catholics are becoming more galvanized in their views against capital
punishment.
Last October, Pope Francis called
on Christians and all people of good
will “to ﬁght ... for the abolition of the
death penalty ... in all its forms” out
of respect for human dignity.
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10 WORLD
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO | FEBRUARY 6, 2015
Pope gives guide on contemplative prayer
CINDY WOODEN
CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE
VATICAN CITY – Turn off the television, tune
out the neighbors, and spend 10 or 15 minutes reading a Gospel passage and speaking to Jesus, Pope
Francis told people at his early morning Mass.
“Today ﬁnd 10 minutes – 15 at the most – and
read the Gospel, imagine the scene and say something to Jesus. Nothing more. Your knowledge of
Jesus will increase and your hope will grow,” the
pope said Feb. 3 at the Mass in the Domus Sanctae
Marthae where he lives.
Pope Francis took the day’s Gospel story, Mark
5:21-43, and showed the small congregation how to
read it in a contemplative way:
“I see Jesus was in the midst of the crowd; there
was a big crowd around him,” the pope said, according to Vatican Radio. “Didn’t Jesus ever rest?
I can think: ‘Always with a crowd.’ Most of Jesus’
life was spent on the road, with the crowd. Was
there no rest? Yes, once, the Gospel says he slept in
the boat, but a storm came and the disciples woke
him up. Jesus was always with the people. And
looking at Jesus that way, contemplating Jesus
there, I imagine him. And I tell Jesus whatever
comes into my mind to tell him.”
In the day’s Gospel story, he said, Jesus does not
only see the crowd, “he feels the heart beat of each
person, of each one of us. He takes care of everyone always.”
“What I just did with this Gospel is the prayer
of contemplation,” he said, which involves “taking the Gospel, reading it, imagining myself in
the scene, imagining what happens and talking to
Jesus about whatever is in my heart.”
The key to hope, the pope said, is to keep “one’s
gaze ﬁxed on Jesus.”
It is possible “to have optimism, to be positive”
without listening to the Lord, he said, but hope
is something that only “is learned by watching
Jesus.”
Reciting the rosary every day is a great practice,
he said, as is calling on Mary or the saints when
facing a difficulty. But contemplation is a necessary part of Christian life and that is possible “only
with the Gospel in hand.”
“In your house, for 15 minutes, take the Gospel,
read a little passage, imagine what happened and
talk to Jesus about it. In that way, your gaze will be
ﬁxed on Jesus and not on a television soap opera,
for example. And your listening will be focused on
the words of Jesus and not so much on the gossip
of your neighbors.”
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(CNS PHOTO/ASHAD ARBAB, EPA)
Pakistani women weep during a memorial ceremony Dec. 23,
2014, outside an army-run school in Peshawar, Pakistan, that
was attacked by militants.
Vatican urges UN to act
to protect women,
girls in conflict zones
CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE
UNITED NATIONS – The plight of women and girls
living in conﬂict zones who often are targeted for
violence, including rape, must be addressed without
delay, said an official with the Holy See’s Permanent
Observer Mission to the United Nations.
Msgr. Janusz Urbanczyk, charge d’affaires at the
mission, called upon the U.N. Security Council to
identify programs “to eradicate this scourge,” in an
intervention Jan. 30 as the council discussed challenges to the protection of women and girls in armed
conﬂict and post-conﬂict settings.
Citing Catholic social teaching on human dignity,
Msgr. Urbanczyk said all violence is an affront to that
dignity, but that women and girls are particularly
vulnerable when violence arises.
He said sexual violence against women “tears at the
very fabric of society.”
The Vatican official recalled the words of Pope
Francis, who told members of the diplomatic corps
accredited to the Holy See in an address Jan. 12 that
humanity must not overlook the fact that wars involve
the crime of rape, which the pope described as “a
most grave offense against the dignity of women, who
are not only violated in body but also in spirit.”
Msgr. Urbanczyk also pointed to violence perpetrated against women and girls because of their faith.
The Vatican’s U.N. delegation “remains concerned
about the continued lack of attention and priority to
the protection of women and girls who are targeted
and attacked purely because of the faith they profess,”
he said. “The lack of focus and priority for protecting
them is troubling when Christians face extinction in
some regions of the world and in other regions Christian schools for girls are targeted and attacked.
“This is a shared reality of members of all faiths
and therefore requires the shared commitment of
members of all faiths and governments to condemn
and confront such violence,” Msgr. Urbanczyk said.
OBEDIENCE BRINGS WISDOM, JOY,
HOPE, POPE TELLS RELIGIOUS
PRESENTERS
FR. MICHAEL MOYNAHAN, S.J. & FR. C HIGHTOWER, S.J.
Monday, February 9–Friday, February 13
St. Ignatius Church at 12:05pm (Mass)
St. Agnes Church at 7:00pm (Mass)
Saturday, February 14
St. Ignatius Church only at 12:05pm (Mass)
Sunday, February 15
St. Agnes Church only at 6:00pm (Mass)
Monday, February 16 & Tuesday, February 17
St. Ignatius Church at 12:05pm (Mass)
St. Agnes Church at 7:00pm (Mass)
St. Ignatius Church–corner of Parker Ave. and Fulton St.
St. Agnes Church–1025 Masonic Ave. at Oak St.
[email protected]
VATICAN CITY – Total obedience to God’s will
brings wisdom, joy and hope, Pope Francis told
religious men and women.
“Yes, the happiness of a religious is a consequence of this path of lowering oneself with Jesus
and, when we are sad, when we complain, it will
do us well to ask ourselves how we are living this
dimension of ‘kenosis’” or self-emptying, he said.
The pope’s words came during his homily at a
Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica Feb. 2 celebrating the
feast of the Presentation of the Lord, which the
church marks as the World Day for Consecrated
Life. The Mass also came during the Year of Consecrated Life, which, called by Pope Francis, opened
Nov. 30 and will close Feb. 2, 2016.
The liturgy for the feast, once widely known as
“Candlemas,” began with dozens of sisters, brothers and religious priests carrying lighted candles
into the basilica ahead of the pope.
In his homily, the pope said Jesus came not to follow his own will, but to obey the Father’s will.
“Whoever follows Jesus takes the path of obedience,” which means lowering, emptying and humbling oneself like Jesus, the pope said.
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO | FEBRUARY 6, 2015
11
12 WORLD
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO | FEBRUARY 6, 2015
Pope recognizes martyrdom of Archbishop Romero
CINDY WOODEN
CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE
VATICAN CITY – After decades of debate within
the church, Pope Francis formally recognized that
Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero was killed
“in hatred of the faith” and not for purely political
reasons.
Pope Francis signed the decree Feb. 3, recognizing as martyrdom the March 24, 1980, assassination
of Archbishop Romero in a San Salvador hospital
chapel as he celebrated Mass.
The decree clears the way for the beatiﬁcation
of Archbishop Romero. The postulator or chief
promoter of his sainthood cause, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontiﬁcal Council for
the Family, was scheduled to brief the press Feb. 4
about the cause.
Archbishop Romero’s sainthood cause was opened
at the Vatican in 1993, but was delayed for years as
the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith studied his writings, amid wider debate over whether he
had been killed for his faith or for taking political positions against Salvadoran government and against
the death squads that were operating in his country.
As head of the San Salvadoran archdiocese from 1977
until his death, his preaching grew increasingly strident in defense of the country’s poor and oppressed.
Pope Benedict XVI told reporters in 2007 that the
archbishop was “certainly a great witness of the
faith” who “merits beatiﬁcation, I do not doubt.”
But he said some groups had complicated the sainthood cause by trying to co-opt the archbishop as a
political ﬁgure.
Seven years later, Pope Francis – the ﬁrst Latin
American pope – told reporters that “for me, Romero is a man of God.” However, he said at the time,
“the process must go ahead, and God must give his
sign. If he wants to do so, he will.”
During his general audience Jan. 7, Pope Francis
quoted words that Archbishop Romero had spoken
at the funeral Mass of a priest assassinated by
Salvadoran death squads: “We must all be willing
to die for our faith even if the Lord does not grant
us this honor.”
(CNS GRAPHIC/FRIDA LARIOS)
Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, killed in 1980, has moved closer to sainthood.
Although not seen as exercising any pressure to
move the cause forward, St. John Paul II made it a
point of praying at Archbishop Romero’s tomb in
the San Salvador cathedral during visits to the city
in 1983 and again in 1996.
During his ﬁrst visit, he told people gathered in
the cathedral, “Within the walls of this cathedral
rest the mortal remains of Archbishop Oscar
Arnulfo Romero, a zealous pastor whose love of
God and service to his brothers and sisters led to
the very sacriﬁce of his life in a violent way as he
celebrated the sacriﬁce of forgiveness and reconciliation.”
When Pope John Paul returned 13 years later,
he told the people that he wanted to pray again at
the tomb of Archbishop Romero, “brutally assas-
sinated while he offered the sacriﬁce of the Mass.”
The pope said he was pleased that the archbishop’s
memory “continues to live among you.”
An official decree of martyrdom removes the
beatiﬁcation requirement of a miracle attributed to
the candidate’s intercession. Generally, a miracle
after beatiﬁcation would still be needed for canonization.
The same day that Pope Francis formally recognized Archbishop Romero’s martyrdom, he also
signed a decree recognizing the martyrdom of
two Polish Conventual Franciscans and an Italian
missionary priest who were murdered by Shining
Path guerrillas in Peru in 1991. Franciscan Fathers
Michal Tomaszek and Zbigniew Strzalkowski and
Father Alessandro Dordi, a diocesan priest from
Bergamo, were killed in separate incidents in August 1991.
Dates for the beatiﬁcation of Archbishop Romero
and the Peru martyrs were not announced immediately.
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Gospel for February 8, 2015
Mark 1:29-39
Following is a word search based on the Gospel
reading for the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle
B: Jesus’ work of healing near home. The words can
be found in all directions in the puzzle.
HOUSE
HAND
LEFT HER
POSSESSED
THE DOOR
DEMONS
PRAYED
SIMON
HELPED
SUNSET
WHOLE TOWN
DISEASES
SPEAK
LET US GO
FEVER
(helped) HER UP
SICK
GATHERED
DROVE OUT
EARLY
PREACH
BACK HOME
D
E
P
L
E
H
C
A
E
R
P
O
S
P
E
A
K
T
O
M
L
K
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W
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A
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L
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N
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O
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W
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A
K
I
N
A
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R
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H
T
C
U
O
D
L
E
T
U
S
G
O
H
S
S
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A
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I
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N
A
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A
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A
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© 2015 Tri-C-A Publications www.tri-c-a-publications.com
Sponsored by DUGGAN’S SERRA MORTUARY
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CATHOLIC HIGH SCHOOLS: ‘AFFIRM AND PROCLAIM’ 13
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO | FEBRUARY 6, 2015
Archdiocese: Catholic schools exist to
‘affirm and proclaim’ Gospel of Jesus
Faculty handbook changes emphasize that teachers, staff must not publicly contradict Catholic teaching
VALERIE SCHMALZ
‘AFFIRM AND PROCLAIM’:
THE INITIATIVE AT A GLANCE
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO
The Archdiocese of San Francisco
is proposing three new clauses to
the contracts for the teachers in the
archdiocesan Catholic high schools.
The purpose is to further clarify that
Catholic schools – as the ﬁrst clause
states – “exist to affirm and proclaim
the Gospel of Jesus Christ as held and
taught by his Catholic Church.”
The archdiocese is also adding
detailed statements of Catholic teaching on sexual morality and religious
practice – taken from the Catechism
of the Catholic Church – into the
faculty and staff handbooks of the
four archdiocesan high schools,
Archbishop Riordan, Marin Catholic
and Junipero Serra high schools and
Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory.
The handbook additions will take effect in the 2015-16 school year and are
not part of the contract.
While the handbook and contract
changes reiterate more strongly the
responsibility of teachers and staff
not to contradict Catholic teaching
in school and in their public lives,
they do not contain anything essentially new and are intended to clarify
existing expectations that Catholic
teachers in their professional and
public lives uphold Catholic teaching,
archdiocesan Catholic Schools Superintendent Maureen Huntington said.
The intent is not to drive any
teacher out of the schools, Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone and
Huntington said.
Archbishop’s letter
Archbishop Cordileone speciﬁcally
addressed concerns
about job security in
a letter dated February 2015 to teachers.
“At the outset, I
wish to state clearly
and emphatically that
the intention underlying this document
Archbishop
is not to target for
Cordileone
dismissal from our
schools any teachers,
singly or collectively, nor does it introduce anything essentially new into the
contract or the faculty handbook,” the
archbishop wrote in the letter.
The handbook additions clearly state
that the institution believes in the
listed items, and does not require each
individual staff member or teacher to
assent to each stated item of Catholic
doctrine. That is because the archdiocese recognizes that some Catholic
teachers and other non-Catholic teachers may not agree with all that the
Catholic Church teaches, Archbishop
Cordileone said. The aim of the handbook additions is to specify for all what
the church teaches and require that
high school staff and teachers not contradict Catholic teachings in a school
environment or in public actions.
About 470 full and part-time teachers
and staff are employed at Marin Catholic, Sacred Heart Cathedral, Riordan
and Serra. Approximately 315 full-time
teachers belong to the San Francisco
Archdiocesan Federation of Teachers, Local 2240, American Federation
of Teachers, AFL-CIO and they are
the only unionized Catholic school
teachers among the 14 Catholic high
schools in the archdiocese. About 3,600
Marin Catholic St. Vincent de Paul Society students are pictured with theology chairman Joe Tassone and Heidi McGinness of Christian Solidarity International, documenting slavery in Sudan.
students attend the four high schools
which are owned and operated by the
archdiocese.
Archbishop to address teachers
Archbishop Cordileone was to
address the high school teachers of
the archdiocese Feb. 6 on the topic of
“Catholic education during the time
of Pope Francis.” Faculty from the 14
Catholic high schools in the archdiocese, including the 10 owned by religious communities as well as teachers
at the archdiocesan high schools, were
expected to attend Mass at St. Mary’s
Cathedral and subsequent talk.
The union negotiating team was
scheduled to present the proposed
contract to the full membership by this
week. Lisa Dole, president of Local 2240
and a teacher at Marin Catholic High
School, released the following statement
on behalf of the union executive board
late Tuesday to Catholic San Francisco.
“As our weekly Catholic news
source, we know that you’re aware of
how much good work goes on in our
schools every day, in the actions of our
faculty, staff, students, and families in
support of our mission. The amount of
attention being paid to this proposed
language shouldn’t diminish how
proud we are of the day in, day out efforts of our teachers.
“We are pleased that the document
acknowledges that the teachers in our
high schools are not all the same – like
many Catholics around the world who
struggle with their adherence to some
of the teachings of the church,” she
said.
“However, there are still concerns
with the proposed language and some
key issues that the union and archbishop are hopeful that we will be able
to work out.”
In an earlier statement schools
superintendent Huntington said, “As
Catholic school educators, administrators, and employees, we believe in and
live our lives according to teachings of
Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church.”
“Because we live in a very secular society, the truth as revealed by God gets
overshadowed by popular ideology,”
Huntington said. “In order to remain
faithful to God’s revelations and the
church’s teachings, additions and clarifying statements have been developed
for our teachers and staff members articulating speciﬁc fundamental truths,
which are not understood or accepted
within our secular society.”
Archbishop Cordileone explained the
reasoning in his letter to the archdioc-
esan teachers, saying “I see a need to
provide more clarity for our teachers.”
“For a Catholic high school to attain
excellence, it must be at one and the
same time an excellent institution
of secondary education and a truly
Catholic institution,” he said.
“Changes in our secular society over
the last few decades have brought new
challenges to this endeavor in both
senses, as we now face both increased
difficulties in educating our students
well in an array of academic subjects,
and unprecedented challenges in
forming our young people with a deep
and strong Catholic identity as well as
knowledge and practice of the Catholic
faith,” the archbishop wrote.
“The faculty and staff at Marin
Catholic High School play an integral
role in delivering on our mission to
support and encourage the highest
quality education within the values
and beliefs of the Catholic Church,”
said Marin Catholic president Tim Navone. “We are very proud of their commitment and understanding of this
mission. Upcoming language changes
in our handbook reﬂect this belief and
conﬁrm their understanding. Whether
they are Catholic or not, we expect
them to understand and support the
teachings and beliefs of our church
every day on our campus as well as in
their public and professional lives.”
Riordan president Joe Conti said “we
welcome these clariﬁcations, as they
will help us to live our professional and
public lives as Catholic educators in a
manner that is in alignment with these
beliefs.”
Changes cover ‘hot button’ issues
The additions to the faculty handbooks cover what Archbishop Cordileone termed “hot button” issues and
are drawn directly from the Catechism
of the Catholic Church. They include
statements of Catholic teaching on
abortion, same-sex marriage, artiﬁcial
contraception and artiﬁcial means of
reproduction such as in-vitro fertilization as well as affirming the authority
of the magisterium of the Catholic
Church and the real presence of Christ
in the Eucharist.
“Confusion about the church’s
stance is prevalent in areas of sexual
morality and religious practice,”
Archbishop Cordileone said. “For this
reason, the statements for inclusion in
the faculty handbook focus on these
two areas. This focus does not imply
lesser importance to Catholic teachings on social justice, which in fact are
The archdiocese is proposing
three new clauses to the archdiocesan Catholic high school
teachers contracts to further clarify that Catholic schools “exist to
affirm and proclaim the Gospel of
Jesus Christ as held and taught
by his Catholic Church.”
The archdiocese also is adding
detailed statements of Catholic
teaching on sexual morality and
religious practice – taken from
the Catechism of the Catholic
Church – into the faculty and
staff handbooks of the four archdiocesan high schools.
The changes do not contain
anything essentially new and are
intended to clarify existing expectations that Catholic teachers
in their professional and public
lives uphold Catholic teaching.
The intent is not to drive any
teacher out of the schools.
The leadership of the high
school teachers union was expected to present the contract to
its full membership by this week.
widely accepted and well interpreted
in Catholic educational institutions.”
“There is nothing new under the
Catholic sun with this approach,” said
Jesuit Father John Piderit, moderator of the curia/vicar for administration for the archdiocese. “It is in the
Catechism of the Catholic Church. It is
straightforward.”
The 2011-2014 contract, which was
continued for one year under a Memorandum of Understanding, states “the
union and its members recognize the
unique nature of the archdiocesan
high school system in that it is Roman
Catholic, committed to provide education within the framework of Catholic
principles; that Catholic teachings
and precepts shall remain paramount
throughout the terms of this agreement;
and that nothing in the agreement shall
be construed as interfering in any way
with the superintendent’s functions and
duties insofar as they are canonical.”
This is supported by another clause
from the existing agreement: “The
Union and its members recognize that
all lay teachers covered by this agreement shall perform all of their duties
as set forth in this agreement in accordance with the doctrines and precepts
of the Roman Catholic Church, and
shall conduct themselves at all times
during the performance of those duties
in a manner in keeping with the standards of the church.”
Father Mark Doherty, chaplain at
Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory,
and a teacher at Jesuit High School in
Sacramento before he was ordained,
said teachers have to be able to present what the Catholic Church teaches
clearly and attractively. Many students
do not believe what the church teaches,
he said, and his goal as a teacher was
always to get his students to understand church teaching and then perhaps someday, convert to belief.
“We are not imposing. We are proposing,” Father Doherty said. “God never
imposes himself, he proposes himself.”
14 CATHOLIC HIGH SCHOOLS: ‘AFFIRM AND PROCLAIM’
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO | FEBRUARY 6, 2015
Archbishop’s letter to Catholic high school teachers
not all teachers agree with Catholic
teachings?
February 2015
Dear Teachers in the Archdiocesan Catholic High Schools,
The way to assist teachers who
distance themselves or privately
oppose some Catholic teachings is
to alert them to sensitive issues.
Because the school fosters holiness,
virtue and evangelization, teachers
not knowledgeable about the precise contours of Catholic teaching
have to be cautious about what they
say in the school and what they do
in the public sphere outside the
Catholic school. Honest mistakes do
happen, and when they do, reparation can be made. This is not in
and of itself a cause for a teacher
to be punished. At the same time,
teachers and staff at Catholic high
schools have to strive to present
Catholic teachings as consistently
as possible. Dissenting from Catholic teaching or the natural moral
law in a Catholic high school does
not promote holiness, virtue and
evangelization.
Thank you for the work you do
to help our young students learn,
mature, and grow in the Catholic
faith. Know of my gratitude for the
energy, expertise and devotion that
you bring to this wonderful and
most critical enterprise.
This enterprise involves a twofold endeavor, since, for a Catholic
high school to attain excellence, it
must be at one and the same time
an excellent institution of secondary education and a truly Catholic
institution. Changes in our secular
society over the last few decades
have brought new challenges to this
endeavor in both senses, as we now
face both increased difficulties in
educating our students well in an
array of academic subjects, and
unprecedented challenges in forming our young people with a deep
and strong Catholic identity as well
as a knowledge and practice of the
Catholic faith.
The Second Vatican Council, in
its declaration on Catholic education Gravissimum Educationis, insisted on Catholic schools assisting
Catholic parents in their primary
duty of educating their children in
virtue, holiness, and their ability
to evangelize others in society (see
especially nn. 3 and 8). Picking up
on this theme, the U.S. bishops have
affirmed that “Catholic elementary
and secondary schools [are] invaluable instruments in proclaiming
the Good News from one generation to the next” (see Renewing Our
Commitment to Catholic Elementary
and Secondary Schools in the Third
Millennium, US Conference of
Catholic Bishops [2005], p. 2).
As one means of fulfilling this
most serious responsibility, all of
our schools currently have programs to help teachers give more
effective witness to the Catholic
faith. I support these programs.
However, I also see a need to provide more clarity for our teachers.
For this reason, I have developed
a document that clarifies Catholic
issues in our Catholic schools. At
the outset, though, I wish to state
clearly and emphatically that the
intention underlying this document
is not to target for dismissal from
our schools any teachers, singly or
collectively, nor does it introduce
anything essentially new into the
contract or the faculty handbook.
(PHOTO COURTESY MARIN CATHOLIC HIGH SCHOOL)
Marin Catholic students at the 2015 Walk for Life West Coast.
At the same time, we need to face
the current reality in society and
the Church honestly, seriously and
frankly: many people have opinions
directly contrary to the natural
moral law and the teaching of the
Catholic Church. Furthermore,
many Catholics themselves have
beliefs at variance with Church
teaching. This is simply a reality
of our modern society. This reality stems in great part from the
tremendous pressure the contemporary culture places on everyone to
conform to a certain agenda at variance with, and often aggressively
so, our Christian understanding
of the human person and God’s
purpose in creation. This pressure
is exerted relentlessly in the media,
in entertainment, in politics, in
academia, in corporations – in
short, in all of the influencers of
popular culture. This problem in
society in general is already serious
enough, but when people in Catholic institutions endorse such views
it creates a toxic confusion about
our fundamental values among
both students and others in society
at large. As teaching institutions,
therefore, Catholic schools have
to be very clear about what constitutes the true teachings of the
Catholic Church. They owe that to
the teachers, to the students, and to
the parents of the students.
Confusion about the Church’s
stance is prevalent in areas of sexu-
al morality and religious discipline.
For this reason, the statements for
inclusion in the faculty handbook
focus on these two areas. This focus
does not imply lesser importance to
Catholic teachings on social justice,
which in fact are widely accepted
and well interpreted in Catholic educational institutions. The
areas requiring clarification are in
Catholic teachings on sexual morality and religious practice.
Having clear statements especially about “hot button issues” related
to faith and morals is important
to teachers for two reasons. The
first is that a forthright statement
of the Church’s position on these
issues helps teachers provide good
perspectives to their students who
often struggle in these areas.
The second reason is that candid
formulation of Church doctrine
protects those teachers who don’t
agree with the statements. That
sounds counterintuitive, but it
is indeed the case. In a society
in which confusion reigns about
Church teachings, highlighting the
controversial issues alerts teachers to avoid contradicting Church
teaching on these issues either in
the school or in some public way
outside the classroom.
All teachers are expected to contribute to an atmosphere of holiness, virtue, and familiarity with
the Gospel. How can this occur if
Finally, it is important to note the
careful use of language in the document. In front of many statements
of Catholic teaching in the faculty
handbook come the words “affirm
and believe.” This is a statement
made on behalf of the institution,
not all individuals in the institutions. Our Catholic high schools
try to hire people who do believe
what the Church teaches, but in our
schools we have good teachers who
belong to other Christian faiths or
to no faith at all. They are members of the school community. The
language “affirm and believe” acknowledges the good activity of the
entire corps of faculty and staff by
making this claim on behalf of the
institution. That is, in the first instance, “affirm and believe” refers
to the Catholic high school itself,
and, secondly, to many faculty who
identify with the Catholic teachings
behind which the high school as a
whole stands.
My hope is that the document on
Catholic faith and morals that is
becoming part of the faculty handbook in our Catholic high schools
will help the schools better fulfill
their mission, and also highlight
for teachers true Catholic teachings
that are contested by many people
in secular society today.
Sincerely in Christ,
Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone
Superintendent’s statement on the mission of Catholic schools
The Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of San Francisco exist to
teach and evangelize the students
and families we serve. Our mission
is clear. As Catholic school educators, administrators, and employees, we believe in and live our lives
according to teachings of Jesus
Christ and the Catholic Church.
Because we live in a very secular
society, the truth as revealed by
God gets overshadowed by popular
ideology. In order to remain faithful to God’s revelations and the
Because we live in a very secular society,
the truth as revealed by God gets overshadowed
by popular ideology.
MAUREEN HUNTINGTON
Superintendent, Department of Catholic Schools
church’s teachings, additions and
clarifying statements have been
developed for our teachers and
staff members articulating specific
fundamental truths, which are not
understood or accepted within our
secular society.
Our Catholic school educators
are people of faith and integrity.
I am confident that the clarifications offered by our archbishop
will be accepted in light of God’s
call to all of us to remain faithful
to God’s teachings as articulated by
the Catholic Church. We choose to
teach in a Catholic school and this
vocation is a commitment to excellence in everything we do and say
each day. It is the way we live our
lives and engage our students and
families that brings Jesus into their
hearts.
CATHOLIC HIGH SCHOOLS: ‘AFFIRM AND PROCLAIM’ 15
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO | FEBRUARY 6, 2015
Archdiocese releases statement on church
teachings, practice in high schools
The following document, titled “Statement of the High Schools of the Archdiocese of San Francisco Regarding the
Teachings and Practice of the Catholic
Church,” will be included in the faculty
handbook Aug. 1.
We, the Archdiocesan High Schools,
affirm that we are educational institutions of the Catholic Church, and as
such strive to present Catholic doctrine in its fullness, and that we hold,
believe and practice all that the Holy
Catholic Church teaches, believes and
proclaims to be true, whether from
the natural moral law or by way of
revelation from God through Scripture and Tradition.
(PHOTO BY DENNIS CALLAHAN)
Riordan students with Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone at the Rosary Rally in October 2014.
• We, the Archdiocesan High
Schools, Acknowledge that some of
our administrators, faculty or staff
may not be Catholics and some may
be Catholics who are struggling to
achieve ﬁdelity to some of the teachings of the Church, but we are all
nevertheless called and required to
stand as effective and visible professional participants and proponents of
truly Catholic Education. As effective
professionals in a Catholic School setting, we all – administrators, faculty
and staff – are required and expected
to avoid fostering confusion among
the faithful and any dilution of the
schools’ primary Catholic mission.
Therefore, administrators, faculty and
staff of any faith or of no faith, are
expected to arrange and conduct their
lives so as not to visibly contradict,
undermine or deny these truths. To
that end, further, we all must refrain
from public support of any cause or
issue that is explicitly or implicitly
contrary to that which the Catholic
Church holds to be true, both those
truths known from revelation and
those from the natural law. Those
of us who consider themselves to be
Catholics but who are not in a state
of full assent to the teachings of the
Church, moreover, must refrain from
participation in organizations that
call themselves “Catholic” but support or advocate issues or causes contrary to the teachings of the Church.
• We, the Archdiocesan High
Schools, Acknowledge that all
administrators, faculty and staff who
are Catholics, and particularly those
engaged as classroom teachers, have
an even higher calling, according
to which they must not only avoid
public contradiction of their status
as professional agents in the mission
of Catholic Education, but are also
called to conform their hearts, minds
and consciences, as well as their
public and private behavior, ever
more closely to the truths taught by
the Catholic Church. Recognizing as
we do that no person can give perfect
witness to these truths, Catholic educational professionals are nevertheless called to strive for ever greater
assent and ﬁdelity. Attesting that they
believe these things and aware of
their own sinfulness and shortcomings, they are called to strive in their
beliefs as well as their manner of
living to conform themselves to this
statement of mission and beliefs.
In particular, in advancing our mission to proclaim these truths together
with all of our administrators, faculty
and staff, we, the Archdiocesan High
Schools:
• Affirm and believe in One, Holy,
Catholic and Apostolic Church, and
we embrace the teachings about that
Church as enunciated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (cf.
CCC 748-962).
• Affirm and believe that the
Church teaches with God-given
authority, that this authority lies in
the Magisterium of the Church and
that “[t]he Roman Pontiff … enjoys
… infallibility in virtue of his office,
when, as supreme pastor and teacher
of all the faithful … he proclaims by a
deﬁnitive act a doctrine pertaining to
faith or morals” (CCC 891).
• Affirm and believe all that
the Church teaches about the Real
Presence of Christ in the Most Holy
Eucharist. Speciﬁcally, we believe
that Jesus Christ is present Body,
Blood, Soul and Divinity under each
of the forms of bread and wine. We
acknowledge that “[a]nyone who
desires to receive Christ in Eucharistic communion must be in the state of
grace. Anyone aware of having sinned
mortally must not receive Communion without having received absolution in the sacrament of penance”
(CCC 1415). We further affirm that “[i]
ndividual and integral confession and
absolution constitute the only ordinary means by which a member of
the faithful conscious of grave sin is
reconciled with God and the Church”
(Can. 960 CIC). We recognize that all
Catholics have the obligation to participate in Mass on all Sundays and
Holy Days of Obligation (CCC 2180)
and that those who deliberately fail to
fulﬁll this obligation commit grave sin
(CCC 2181), and they therefore must
avail themselves of the sacrament of
penance before presenting themselves
to receive Holy Communion again.
• Affirm and believe that it is possible for a person to choose to remain
separated from God for all eternity and
that “[t]his state of deﬁnitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the
blessed is called ‘hell’” (CCC 1033).
universal Tradition of the Church,
“the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on
women and that this judgment is to be
deﬁnitively held by all the Church’s
faithful” (Pope John Paul II, Apostolic
Letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, n. 4),
and we also accept that this in no way
diminishes “the presence and the role
of women in the life and mission of
the Church … [as] absolutely necessary and irreplaceable” (ibid., n. 3).
• Affirm and believe the Church’s
teaching about the inviolability
of human life, and in accord with
that teaching affirm that human
life is sacred and must be protected
and respected from the moment of
conception until natural death; we
reject direct, intentional abortion
and recognize that any well-formed
conscience always rejects direct,
intentional abortion; we are not “prochoice” (cf. CCC 2270-2283).
• Affirm and believe what the
Church teaches about chastity, and
speciﬁcally, that chastity means “the
successful integration of sexuality
within the person and thus the inner
unity of man in his bodily and spiritual being” (CCC 2337); we affirm that
chaste living necessarily requires
abstinence from all sexual intimacy
outside of marriage, even if by itself
this is insufficient to achieve the virtue of chastity in all its fullness.
• Affirm and believe that every
person is called to chastity in accord
with their present state of life, and
that it is only in marriage between
man and woman that the intimacy of
sexual union can become a sign and
pledge of spiritual communion (CCC
2337-2365). We accept the Church’s
teaching that all extra-marital sexual
relationships are gravely evil and that
these include adultery, masturbation,
fornication, the viewing of pornography and homosexual relations.
• Affirm and believe that those
who die in God’s grace and friendship but are still imperfectly puriﬁed
undergo additional puriﬁcation so as
to achieve the holiness necessary to
enter the joys of heaven, and that the
Church’s name for this ﬁnal puriﬁcation is purgatory (CCC 1030-1032).
• Affirm and believe the Church’s
teaching about the sinfulness of
contraception. We affirm, in accord
with the teachings of the Church,
that “‘every action which, whether in
anticipation of the conjugal act, or in
its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences,
proposes, whether as an end or as a
means, to render procreation impossible’ is intrinsically evil” (CCC 2370).
• Affirm and believe that in virtue
of the sacramental character of the
ordained Priesthood, the example of
Christ himself, and the constant and
• Affirm and believe the teaching
of the Church about homosexual acts
being contrary to the natural law (CCC
2357). We also affirm and believe all
that the Church says about the distinction between homosexual orientation
and homosexual acts. We accept that
homosexual persons do not choose
their condition, and that “[t]hey must
be accepted with respect, compassion,
and sensitivity”; likewise, that “[e]
very sign of unjust discrimination in
their regard should be avoided.” We
affirm that homosexual persons “are
called to fulﬁll God’s will in their lives
and, if they are Christians, to unite to
the sacriﬁce of the Lord’s Cross the
difficulties they may encounter from
their condition” (CCC 2358) and that
“[b]y the virtues of self-mastery that
teach them inner freedom, at times by
the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace,
they can and should gradually and
resolutely approach Christian perfection” (CCC 2359).
• Affirm and believe all that the
Church teaches about marriage, as
an institution, as a covenant, and –
between two baptized persons – as a
sacrament. We believe marriage to be a
partnership of the whole of life between
a man and a woman of permanent and
exclusive ﬁdelity ordered to the procreation and education of offspring and
the mutual good of the spouses (cf. CCC
1601; cann. 1055, 1056, 1057 § 1 CIC) .
• Affirm and believe that the fundamental demands of justice require
that the civil law preserve the deﬁnition
of marriage as the union of one man
and one woman. We believe this to be
the case for the reasons, among others,
taught by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in “Considerations
Regarding Proposals to Give Legal
Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons” (June 3, 2003), with
particular regard for nn. 7, 8 and 11.
• Affirm and believe the grave evil
of artiﬁcial reproductive technology.
We accept that “[t]echniques that
entail the dissociation of husband
and wife, by the intrusion of a person
other than the couple (donation of
sperm or ovum, surrogate uterus), are
gravely immoral,” that these techniques infringe on “the child’s right to
be born of a father and mother known
to him and bound to each other by
marriage. They betray the spouses’
‘right to become a father and a mother
only through each other’” (CCC 2376;
Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith, Donum vitae, n. II, 1).
• Affirm and believe the grave evil
of human cloning, whether for purposes of research and therapy or reproduction. We accept that human cloning
“seeks to give rise to a new human being without a connection to the act of reciprocal self-giving between the spouses
and, more radically, without any link to
sexuality. This leads to manipulation
and abuses gravely injurious to human
dignity” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dignitatis Personae,
n. 28). We therefore also ﬁrmly believe
that embryonic stem cell research can
never be justiﬁed, in that “the use of
human embryos or fetuses as an object
of experimentation constitutes a crime
against their dignity as human beings
who have a right to the same respect
owed to a child once born, just as to
every person,” and that “[t]hese forms
of experimentation always constitute
a grave moral disorder” (Dignitatis
Personae, n. 34).
16 CATHOLIC HIGH SCHOOLS: ‘AFFIRM AND PROCLAIM’
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO | FEBRUARY 6, 2015
Archdiocese releases Q&A on union contract proposals
The Archdiocese of San Francisco released this series
of questions and answers regarding its proposals in its
new collective bargaining agreement with the union representing teachers at the four archdiocese high schools.
Q: Since the Collective Bargaining Agreement (the CBA)
has for many years contained whereas language that
addresses conduct of our Catholic school teachers, what
is the reasoning behind the inclusion of the new whereas
language and the “affirm and believe” statements?
A: The goal is not to add anything new, but to
make more explicit what has always been required.
In relation to the so-called morality clause, this CBA
is different from former contracts only in its clarity.
By spelling out the expectations that have always
been present, we believe it is better for all parties
involved. Teachers have a better idea of what is expected of them as educational ministers of the Gospel, and the schools have a better idea of what goals
and expectations they should have for themselves
as Catholic institutions and with respect to their
faculty. Clarity and transparency help everyone.
Q: Will Teachers be required to sign an “oath” or “affirmation” of religious belief as part of this collective bargaining
agreement?
A: No. the Archdiocese has no intention of “rooting out” those who are not Catholic or those who
do not assent completely to Catholic teaching. The
Archdiocese and the schools stand for the teachings
of the Catholic Church in their entirety, and the
handbook for each of our high schools will contain
a statement affirming certain key facets of these
teachings. But these statements are of the school
as an institution, not of the individual teachers. On
the contrary, the statement speciﬁcally acknowledges that not all of our teachers will agree with
everything the Catholic Church teaches.
Similarly, the point of the CBA is not to require
assent to any of the teachings of the Catholic
Church. But it will, as it has for years, ask teachers
as a matter of professional obligation to honor the
Catholic identity and mission of our schools, which
is now more clearly stated in the teacher handbooks. If they cannot do so in their beliefs, then
they should at least avoid publicly undermining the
lessons taught at the school of their employment.
Q: Why are the teachers referred to as “ministers”? Most
of them are not religious leaders. How can, for example, a
math teacher be considered a minister?
A: In the Catholic Church, the word “minister”
has a very wide meaning, indicating anyone who
carries out a role of service in the Church. This
includes forms of lay ministry as well as ordained;
many lay ministers, in fact, do not even have
specialized training for their ministry (e.g., parish
ministers of hospitality). There are other faiths
as well that have many different kinds of leaders,
some ordained and some not, and they go by many
different names (rabbi, elder, pastor, priest, etc.),
while still others do not even have “ordained” clergy. For that reason, the word “minister” does not
refer only to ordained persons or those with any
particular education or title. The Supreme Court
(see EEOC v. Hosanna-Tabor) has deﬁned a minister as one to whom a church gives a leadership
role in, and the primary duty of, helping the church
spread its message and carry out its mission.
Not all employees of the Catholic Church are
“ministers,” but in a Catholic School, all teachers are ministers of our faith. Certainly speciﬁc
religious activities are at the heart of our Catholic
schools: celebrating Mass, class prayer, celebrating
special feast days, fostering the sacramental life of
the Church, etc. But beyond this, it is a fundamental part of the Catholic Intellectual Tradition to
give students the tools they need in life to ﬁnd God
in all kinds of work and all areas of knowledge, to
give them the skills they need to grow into full and
mature Christians and so to stand as a witness of
the Gospel at all times. Moreover, in the tradition
of our Catholic schools, our schools do this not
just for the students but for their families and the
community at large as well. A teacher is the irreplaceable leader in this vital religious activity, and
without whom the school could not fulﬁll this basic
mission that the Church has entrusted to it.
Q: How does the Archdiocese deﬁne the support that
teachers must give to the Catholic mission of the schools in
which they teach?
A: The CBA does not use the term “in support
of.” What the new contract language seeks to do
The Archdiocese has no intention of
‘rooting out’ those who are not
Catholic or those who do not assent
completely to Catholic teaching.
is point out that teachers in a Catholic school
– regardless of their personal beliefs – have a
professional obligation not to act publicly to “contradict, undermine or deny” the religious message that the school exists to proclaim and which
they are hired to advance. From the Archdiocesan
viewpoint, this would mean public and active behavior that by its nature contradicts the
school’s message.
The language is not aimed at the many kinds of
activities that do not in and of themselves send a
message of endorsement, such as mere attendance
at a same-sex “wedding” or ceremony of a family member or friend. Moreover, because many
of our teachers do not assent to all aspects of our
Catholic faith, the language is also not aimed at
private belief or conduct, such as an employee’s
home life or membership in a different faith community. Each situation would be looked at on a
case-by-case basis through the lens of whether a
teacher has chosen by public conduct or speech to
undermine the very message she or he has been
appointed to advance.
Q: Will parents who support children who live a lifestyle
contrary to the Church be terminated?
A: It would depend on the level and type of
support. If their support is on a purely personal,
non-public level, then no, they would not be terminated.
It is important to note that it is not the purpose
of the CBA or the intent of the Archdiocese to
terminate anyone. We value our teachers, who are
our most important educational resource. But we
wish to make clearer what the CBA has long stated:
that teaching comes from actions as well as words,
and some actions and words are consistent with
our message and others are not. As St. Francis is
reported to have said, “Always preach the Gospel.
Use words when necessary.”
On those (hopefully rare) occasions when a
teacher publicly endorses a message opposite to
the one of the school he or she was hired to teach
at, that can become a problem and our teaching
becomes confused and confusing. We hope to avoid
that situation. But not every potential violation of
the CBA by a teacher’s conduct will result in termination of employment. Instead, if such a situation
arises, we would address it on a case-by-case basis
as appropriate.
Q: What groups or organizations are we not allowed to be
a member of? Isn’t this a suppression of our rights? What
about the Democratic and Republican parties? They both at
times support policies that contradict our Catholic values.
A: This would be determined on a case-by-case
basis and would depend on the mission and the
message of the group. A teacher can belong to
virtually any political party. If a party’s platform
differs from Church teaching in places, mere membership does not necessarily imply public endorsement. However, some organizations preach messages that are so hostile to the teachings of the Church
at their core that membership itself is incompatible
with the status of teacher. For example, a teacher
could not be a member of the Board of Directors
of Planned Parenthood and expect to remain a
teacher in a Catholic school. Yes, the teacher has
a perfect right to be a member of whatever legal
organizations he or she desires, but should not, in
honesty, publicly proclaim two contradictory messages at the same time.
Q: If teacher-ministers serve in the armed forces and they
participate in military action that is incompatible with
Catholic teaching, will they be terminated?
A: No, they will not be terminated for serving
their country in the armed forces.
Q: Will Catholic teachers married outside of the Catholic
Church be asked to get married in the Church or be terminated?
A: No, they will not be required to get married in
the Church in order to retain their employment.
But again, every case has to be examined on its
own merits. No scandal is caused by a Catholic
married outside of the Church who does not make
an issue of it. On the other hand, if, for example,
the teacher tells his or her class that the Church is
wrong for providing any regulations for the marriage of Catholics or for teaching at all about the
proper ordering of human sexuality, and presents
himself or herself as a Catholic in good faith,
this would mislead the students regarding the
Church’s teaching on marriage. Such a situation
would constitute a professional issue needing to be
addressed and resolved according to the particulars of the case.
Q: Will teachers who use contraceptives, speciﬁcally
women, be terminated?
A: Unless a teacher voluntarily shares she is
using contraception, it would be impossible for the
school to even know that she is and therefore to
take any kind of employment action. However, if
she did voluntarily offer this information in such
a way as to challenge Church teaching on responsible parenthood, then this, too, would constitute
a professional issue needing to be addressed and
resolved according to the particulars of the case.
Q: Does the Church have a right, by this contract, to force
us to disclose memberships if it has reason to believe we
belong to speciﬁc groups that are “incompatible” with the
Church?
A: School or Church leaders will not be pro-active
in seeking out the memberships of their teachers.
This is far from the case. If something is brought to
our attention, however, we will investigate and take
action if and insofar as appropriate.
Q: Are we not allowed to address current issues in a current
issues class? How do we handle the issue and a student
who states they support that issue if it is against Catholic
teachings?
A: Yes, you can address current issues in a
Current Issues class (or as appropriate in other
classes). A student making a statement in support
of an issue that goes against Catholic teachings is
not relevant to the teacher contract or employment.
The teacher, though, should make clear what the
Catholic teaching is on the issue.
Q: How do we handle a situation where a student comes to
us and says they have same-sex attraction or were born
through in vitro fertilization, etc.? What if that child is being
made fun of for their parents’ decisions? Can we support
that child?
A: Yes, we will support that child in all of these
scenarios. We are ﬁrmly against bullying, and we
have policies and procedures in place to enforce
this.
Q: Why do staff members not have to sign this contract?
Why is this only for teachers?
A: Staff members are not members of the High
School Teachers’ Union and so are not subject to
the CBA, but are “at will” employees. Insofar as
they help spread the Church’s message as teacher-ministers do, they, too, are expected to advance
the moral and ethical teachings of the Church.
Under certain circumstances, they can even be
“ministers” themselves. But most staff members
serve a different role in the school, one that does
not have the standing and authority of a teacherminister.
Q: Who is responsible for enforcing the terms of this
contract?
A: The CBA, like all contracts, sets out expectations, procedures and standards of performance,
and the means of resolving disputes binding on
the employer and the union members alike. On the
employee side, the primary representative of teachers continues to be their union. On the employer’s
side, the Department of Catholic Schools working
with the president and principal, and under the
Archbishop, ensures that procedures are followed
and all standards are met. This is unchanged from
the prior CBA.
Q: What is the mechanism for investigating a violation?
A: A complaint would most likely ﬁrst come to
the attention of the principal or president at the
individual school, who would work in conjunction with the Department of Catholic Schools
and, as appropriate, the Archdiocesan Office of
Human Resources. This is unchanged from the
prior CBA.
OPINION 17
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO | FEBRUARY 6, 2015
Today’s Catholic woman
“I
’m so exhausted from trying to
be both accomplished and attractive; what does it mean to be really happy and fulﬁlled as a woman?”
says one high
school girl. The
other notes:
“I have over
1,000 Facebook
friends, and I’m
constantly posting pictures of
what I’m doing.
So why do I feel
so alone and
unknown?”
SHANNON
When high
CRONAN
school girls
recently shared
these thoughts
with a room full of their peers, little
did they know that they were expressing the sort of questions that have
tugged at the heart of every woman in
our modern culture. Why is it that the
only women who seem to be fulﬁlled
and worthy must be wildly seductive
or exceptionally productive? In a culture where people are so virtually connected, why do our real connections
seem to lack depth and authenticity?
In a world that constantly tells women that they are not enough, where will
they ﬁnd affirmation of their profound
God-given worth? How will fathers
make sure their daughters learn to
cultivate relationships that are meaningful and abiding, when our society’s
depiction of friendship, marriage, and
family is so often misunderstood?
There is now a proven way to restore
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W
Perspectives from Archbishop Cordileone and guest writers
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PAULINE
Endow participant, St. Thomas More Church, San Francisco
invitation into the joy, freedom, and
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“Endow was the answer to a lifelong
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Endow provides a place for women
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women uniting love and truth.
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SHANNON CRONAN is the manager of Mission Advancement at Endow headquarters, Denver, Colorado.
The forgotten plight of Native Americans
hen it comes to the harsh difficulties many Native Americans face every day, the saying “out
of sight, out of mind” hits home.
Many people have only a vague sense of the serious
past and present injustices suffered by Native Americans.
From the very beginning,
starting with Christopher Columbus’ voyages to the Bahamas, we get a sad introduction
of how Europeans, Americans
and Canadians, would steal
from, enslave and kill Native
Americans largely for their
land and natural resources.
Columbus in his quest for
TONY MAGLIANO
gold and power, according to
the late famous social justice
historian Howard Zinn, enslaved and decimated the
peaceful native Arawaks – who greeted him and his
crew with food, water, and various gifts when he ﬁrst
landed in the Bahamas.
Later on in the United States, the federal government would do much the same. In fact, within the
Declaration of Independence, the founding fathers in
a series of grievances against King George III of Great
Britain, included a “grievance” that would haunt
Native Americans throughout much of U.S. history.
The king, they wrote, “has endeavored to bring on
the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian
savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
With an attitude that Native Americans were subhuman “merciless Indian savages” the federal gov-
(CNS PHOTO/NANCY WIECHEC)
Members of the Tekakwitha Conference gather for a sunrise
service July 24, 2014, during the organization’s 75th annual
meeting in Fargo, North Dakota The Native American Catholic
conference, held from July 23-27, drew 750 people from 35
states and Canada representing 135 indigenous tribes.
ernment, U.S. army, and many white settlers forced
countless Native Americans off their lands, away from
ancient hunting grounds, and onto reservations.
The most infamous removal of Native Americans
took place in 1838 when the Cherokee nation was
strongly pressured to give up its lands east of the Mississippi River and to migrate to an area in present-day
Oklahoma.
The Cherokee people called this militarily forced
journey the “Trail of Tears” because of its devastating effects. The migrants faced hunger, disease, and
exhaustion on the forced march. Historians estimated
that well over 4,000 out of 15,000 Cherokees died.
Another tragic example of U.S. injustices toward
Native Americans came on Dec. 29, 1890 when the U.S.
7th Cavalry surrounded a Lakota Sioux camp near
Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and massacred between 150 to
300 men, women and children.
The U.S. Civil Rights Commission in a report titled
“A Quiet Crisis,” states that “in exchange for land and
in compensation for forced removal from their original homelands, the government promised through
laws, treaties, and pledges to support and protect
Native Americans. However, funding for programs
associated with those promises has fallen short, and
Native peoples continue to suffer the consequences of
a discriminatory history. …
“Native Americans still suffer higher rates of poverty, substandard housing, and higher rates of disease
and illness. Native Americans continue to rank at or
near the bottom of nearly every social, health, and
economic indicator. …
“Native Americans living on tribal lands do not have
access to the same services and programs available to
other Americans, even though the government has a
binding trust obligation to provide them.”
Please contact your congressional delegation urging
them to ﬁnally fulﬁll this binding trust obligation.
Chief Joseph, leader of the Nez Perce tribal nation
eloquently said, “Treat all men alike. Give them the
same laws. Give them all an even chance to live and
grow. All men were made by the same Great Spirit
Chief. They are all brothers. The earth is the mother
of all people, and all people should have equal rights
upon it.”
Now that’s the Gospel truth!
MAGLIANO is an internationally syndicated social justice
and peace columnist.
18 OPINION
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO | FEBRUARY 6, 2015
LETTERS
Applying our Catholic faith to our economic actions
Re Kaufer’s Religious Supplies advertisement “To
our faithful customers,” Jan. 23, Page 15:
I am very sorry that Kaufer’s Religous Supplies
store is closing. Going back to its days on Market
street, it has been a place important to my religious
formation, where I could explore books, music,
catechetical and other church resources.
I am also sorry that many similar family-run,
community-oriented enterprises, from family farms
to the local book store or hardware store, the places
that employ our neighbors and are the fabric of
communities where people help each other out,
have been swamped out of business by the internet.
What Walmart did to Main Street, Internet commerce is now being dominated by only a few major
sites such as Amazon, whom Jarod Lanier in his
book, “Who Owns The Future,” calls, “Siren Serv-
Boy and girl altars servers
are complementary
I am greatly troubled by Star of the
Sea’s recent decision to train only boy
altar servers in the future (Jan. 31).
While it is certainly the right of the
pastor to do so, I feel this decision has
widespread implications for all of us in
the Archdiocese of San Francisco.
Without exception, everyone I spoke
to in my parish or in my middle-school
classroom, regardless of age or gender,
was distressed and outraged by this
new policy. They felt it arbitrary,
condescending and inexcusable. In
effect, it is saying the presence of girls
on the altar is partially to blame for a
decrease in priestly vocations. This is
ludicrous in the extreme, has no basis
in fact and paints the archdiocese in
a very negative light. Many will use
this as an excuse to reinforce negative
stereotypes and misconceptions about
our church, to label us as a sexist,
archaic institution. Who knows how
many people, especially young women,
will now choose to leave us, ignore us,
or just plain tune us out?
The boy and girl altar servers at my
parish of St. Charles in San Carlos have
all responded to the call of the Holy
Spirit to serve at the altar and they
do a magniﬁcent job. They work well
together and complement each other
beautifully. I simply cannot imagine
telling the girls who have stepped up
in service that this is not for them, that
we’ll ﬁnd something more “suitable”
for them to do. It’s painful enough just
trying to explain why this is even an issue. In addition, are we seriously trying
to attract to the priesthood young men
who are either intimidated or discouraged by the presence of women on the
altar?
Michael Murphy
San Carlos
The writer is a permanent deacon serving at St. Charles Church, San Carlos,
and teaches religion at Sacred Heart
Schools, Atherton.
Checking facts on vocations
The Rev. Joseph Illo’s opinion that
the shrinking ranks of priests can be
bolstered by only using boys as altar
servers at Star of the Sea is just that –
an opinion unsupported by the facts.
The following are facts:
1. In 1981 there were 58,534 priests in
the United States. That number fell to
38,275 in 2014, a 33 percent decrease.
Since the average age of a priest is now
63, the decrease is expected to worsen
in the coming decade. In every other
denomination, it should be noted, the
total number of clergy has increased
(Center for Applied Research in the
Apostolate at Georgetown University).
2. A recent survey of male Catholic
college students revealed that the main
reason for not wanting to enter the
ers” (like the Sirens whose call attracted Ulysses
and caused their ships to crash on the rocks). We
may be able to buy things we want on the Internet
more cheaply and efficiently, but we cannot see the
effects of our actions, whether buying objects created by exploited labor, or being a part of the cause
of the demise of small businesses and the resulting
unemployment.
Another book, “The Internet Is Not The Answer”
by Andrew Keen explains it this way: “Instead of a
win-win, the Internet is, in fact, more akin to a negative feedback loop in which we network users are
its victims rather than its beneﬁciaries.” He gives
the example of Instagram, with 13 employees, has
caused the demise of Kodak, with 47,000 employees. Taken on a world scale, this will bring about a
massive deﬂationary cycle. Power and control even
priesthood was celibacy (Dean Hoge,
associate professor of sociology, The
Catholic University of America).
It is important to remember that
celibacy was not a requirement in the
early church. Peter, the rock upon
whom Jesus founded his church, was
married. And St. Paul writes in his letters about how bishops should restrict
themselves to a single wife.
Since the Catholic Church existed for
hundreds of years without celibacy, it
could return to its earlier tradition of
allowing married priests to serve. This
would surely bolster the number of
seminarians.
Deacon Dana Perrigan
San Francisco
The writer serves at St. Monica Parish,
San Francisco.
Women saints, martyrs inspire
Thank you for your fair-minded
article on the change in altar service at
Star of the Sea Parish.
I fully support Father Joseph Illo’s
position on limiting altar service to
boys, as had been church-regulated
up to the latter 1990s. I believe, as most
other Star of the Sea parishioners and
insiders that almost all opposition is
coming from non-Catholic ideologues
or rare attendees. I remember back in
the 90s when girls were ﬁrst brought
in to serve Mass, someone would say
to you, “Have you heard the news – St.
Paul’s has started using ‘girl altar
boys’? They weren’t trying to be funny.
There was no other name then for persons who assisted the priest at Mass,
so entrenched was the old practice. As
one who grew up in the church, and
even strayed away during the mid-60searly-70s, I myself never experienced
any need for the feminist movement or
politics. The Catholic Church provides
as much identity, empowerment, idealism and inspiration one could ask for.
We have the stories and biographies
of women saints and martyrs, not to
mention Our Lord’s own mother, as
role models.
For other insights and opinions, I
suggest everyone check out Father
Illo’s blog: frilloblog.com. He is very
articulate and a beautiful writer.
Christin Marie-Angela Creighton
San Francisco
What would Jesus say?
So ... if girls aren’t welcome at Star of
the Sea as altar servers (“Star of the Sea
pastor trains only boys as altar servers,”
Jan. 30) then is it fair to assume that the
moms, aunties and grandmothers of
this parish are not welcome to volunteer
in classrooms, or organize or chair any
fundraising events? Oh! And what about
all those checks that are tossed into the
collection basket signed by these same
moms, aunties and grandmothers?
They’re probably not welcome either?
more concentrated into a few hands, and massive
unemployment.
Our antidote is to apply our Catholic faith to our
economic actions, an “intentional economy,” rather
than being attracted to sirens that cause crashes.
Writers of the early 20th-century, seeing similar
problems which caused the world wars and the Great
Depression, are worth reading, such as G.K Chesterton, Hillaire Belloc, Jesuit Father Heinrich Pesch, Father Vincent McNabb, E.F. Schumacher, and others
whose writings are found in the Distributist Review,
detailing many of the points covered in the major
social encyclicals from Pope Leo XIII onward.
Father John Jimenez
San Francisco
The writer is parochial vicar at St. Charles Borromeo
Church.
I believe Jesus said something to the
effect of, “Permit the children to come
to me and do not hinder them for the
kingdom of God belongs to these.” I
thought we were supposed to be “one in
the Spirit”? What would Jesus say?
Susanne Reed
Pacifica
The writer is a member of St. Peter Parish, Pacifica.
Altar service deepens girls’ faith
Being an altar server was foundational to my spiritual formation as a
young girl. My heart breaks for my
fellow parents’ daughters who are being denied this opportunity to deepen
their relationship with God and their
Catholic faith.
On another level, I am deeply pained
by the unequal treatment of girls and
women that persists in our church.
Can’t we see that when we as a church
discriminate against girls we are complicit in a culture that views women as
“less than?” Can’t we see that this unequal treatment results not only in increased violence against women in our
world, but actual poverty and death?
Women and their children worldwide are more likely than men to be
poor, undernourished, trafficked into
slavery, and at-risk of life-threatening
disease, a phenomenon our bishops call
the “feminization of poverty.”
What might seem like a minor disappointment for a few girls in San Francisco is connected to a life and death
issue worldwide. Can’t we see that?
Julia Dowd
San Francisco
The writer is a member of St. Philip the
Apostle Parish, San Francisco.
Mary would proudly serve
Reading Father Illo’s reason for
having only boys as altar servers, thus
“awakening a desire for the priesthood by serving at the altar among a
brotherhood of young men,” I worry
that we are heading back along a path
that has torn us apart for the past 20 or
more years.
In the America magazine interview
(Jan. 27, by David Gibson, Religious
News Service), he made the comment,
“Do you think Mary, the Mother of
God, would want to serve the Mass
or be a priest, and even if so, why did
Jesus not include her at the Last Supper?” I have heard this from others, and
I really question their understanding
of the Bible. Mary was in Jerusalem
the night of the Last Supper. We know
this because she was at the cross as
he was cruciﬁed and later when the
Apostles received the Holy Spirit. Do
these people really think he would have
kept her away from his last meal on
earth when she was there to celebrate
Passover with him? He was constantly
traveling with various women as well
as men, so they would have been at the
meal, not just the male disciples.
Let’s be honest. Asking if Mary
would want to serve the Mass or be a
priest is a question that was answered
long ago. Mary was the ﬁrst priest of
our faith. She gave her son in sacriﬁce
to our God for all of us. She would be
proud to serve at the Mass. If she were
allowed.
Denis Nolan
Daly City
Punished for doing a better job?
When you wrote about Father Illo
banning girls from being altar servers,
you failed to include the ﬁrst reason he
gave. From the Huffington Post: “The
ﬁrst (reason), he said, is that ‘boys
usually end up losing interest (in altar
service) because girls generally do a
better job.’” Let’s see now, because girls
do a better job on the altar, they should
be banned? Shouldn’t boys be banned
from the altar instead for not doing a
very good job? If we could extend that
example to priests, might women also
make better priests than men?
Richard Morasci
San Francisco
Attendance drop-off not girls’ fault
I would like to take issue with Father
Illo’s decision. It is sexist and punishment for the girls doing a better job.
The decrease of attendance in church
the last 20 years is not due to girl servers but to Catholics’ reaction to abusive
priests and the cover-up by the higher
authority. It does not speak well of the
boys if, as Father Illo stated, they are
intimidated by the few girl servers.
Do you really want such weak boys to
aspire to be priests?
It is, of course, his prerogative to do
this but there is no church doctrine
that says that there can be no girl servers.
Jennie Jue
San Francisco
Editor’s note: We asked Father Illo for
his response and perspective. He is
planning to write a commentary for next
week’s paper.
LETTERS POLICY
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OPINION 19
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO | FEBRUARY 6, 2015
Evangelical challenges for Vatican diplomacy
T
he bilateral diplomacy of the
Holy See is unique in world
affairs, in that it has little or
nothing to do with the things with
which diplomats typically
occupy their
time: trade
issues, security
matters, visas.
Rather, the
reason why the
Vatican engages in bilateral
diplomacy is
to secure the
GEORGE WEIGEL
freedom of
the Catholic
Church to be itself in the countries
with which the Holy See has, or
wishes to have, diplomatic relations. To be sure, in crisis situations,
the Holy See’s representative in a
crumbling or violence-ridden state
can also serve as an honest broker
amid contending local parties, or a
voice for persecuted Catholic communities, or a channel for humanitarian assistance. But whatever the
situation, the ﬁrst task of the pope’s
representative to sovereignty is to
help maintain free space for the
church’s evangelical, sacramental,
educational and charitable missions,
all of which are essential to what it
means to be “the Catholic Church” in
any human situation.
This unique character can create unique challenges; two such
challenges today involve Cuba and
China.
In Cuba, the role played by Vatican officials and the archbishop of
Havana, Cardinal Jaime Ortega, in
facilitating the recent agreement
between the United States and Cuba
to restore full diplomatic relations
has signiﬁcantly raised the stakes for
M
(CNS PHOTO/WU HONG, EPA)
People pray during Mass at a Catholic church in Beijing in 2014. Full diplomatic relations
between the Holy See and the People’s Republic of China would require the Vatican to sever its
diplomatic ties with Taiwan, George Weigel writes.
how the local Church in Cuba, and
the Holy See, play their respective
hands in the last days of the Castro
regime.
Those “last days” may, alas, be a
matter of years; still, that Castroism has no future seems obvious to
everyone except the brothers Castro.
Some Catholic leaders in Cuba are
understandably concerned to use
what openings may now be available
to build up the church’s infrastructure in that long-suffering island.
But if that buildup involves a kind of
relationship with the present Cuban
regime that precludes strong, vocal
and visible Catholic support for those
hard-pressed Cuban human rights
activists who form the core of the
post-communist Cuban civil society
of the future, the evangelical mission
of the church in a post-Castro Cuba
could be seriously imperiled.
Building-while-resisting, and thus
helping accelerate the change toward
a post-Castro future: That is the challenge for Cuban Catholicism, which
will face the daunting task of re-converting Cuba in the 21st century. The
local church should be ﬁrmly supported in both aspects of that work,
the building and the resisting, by the
Holy See.
Then there’s the new thaw in the
Holy See’s relations with the People’s
Republic of China. It’s no secret that
senior Vatican diplomats have long
sought full diplomatic exchange at
the ambassadorial level with the PRC;
the theory is that such diplomatic rec-
ognition will give the Catholic Church
a more secure place at the table as
China determines its future. But here,
too, there are evangelical concerns to
be considered.
Full diplomatic relations between
the Holy See and the PRC would
require the Vatican to sever its diplomatic ties with Taiwan – the ﬁrst
Chinese democracy in that ancient
country’s 5,000-year history. And
while there is nothing inexorable
about a transition to democracy in
mainland China, there does seem
something inherently unstable about
communist regimes – especially if
they’ve been sitting atop a substantial middle class that’s not going to
accept political disenfranchisement
indeﬁnitely. If and when a Chinese
democratic revolution happens, too
close a relationship with a faltering communist regime with a long
history of persecuting Christians
and pro-democracy activists could be
an obstacle to the evangelization of
China – which, when it fully opens
itself to the world, will be the greatest ﬁeld of Christian mission since
the Europeans came to the western
hemisphere in the 16th century.
We may be sure that Evangelical Protestants and Mormons, who
will not be burdened by having had
diplomatic relations with the PRC,
are already thinking hard about their
missions in a post-communist China.
That, too, should concentrate Catholic minds on how the alleged beneﬁts
of a deal between the Vatican and the
current regime in Beijing are to be
weighed against the potential perils
to the new evangelization in a postcommunist China.
WEIGEL is Distinguished Senior Fellow
of the Ethics and Public Policy Center,
Washington, D.C.
Our eyes as windows to our souls
ost all of us worry about aging,
especially in how it affects our
bodies. We worry about wrinkles, bags under our eyes, middle-age
fat and losing
hair where we
want it only
to ﬁnd it on
places where
we don’t want
it. So every
now and then,
when we look
in a mirror or
see a recent
photograph of
FATHER RON
ourselves, we
ROLHEISER
are shocked at
our own faces
and bodies,
almost not recognizing ourselves as
we see an old face and old body where
we are used to seeing a young one.
But examining ourselves for signs
of aging isn’t a bad practice, except
that we should be looking for things
other than wrinkles, loose skin, hair
loss, and weight gain. With these
bodily things, nature eventually has
its way. Where we should be looking
for signs of aging is in our eyes. It’s
there where the real signs of aging
and senility reveal themselves.
If we were to set up a mirror and
stare straight into our own eyes, what
would we see? Are our eyes tired, unenthusiastic, cynical, lifeless, dead?
Do they radiate mostly anger and
Go to (the) mirror and stare into your eyes long enough until you
see there again the boy or girl who once inhabited that space.
jealousy? Is there any ﬁre there? Are
they so deadened so as to be incapable
of being surprised? Have they lost
their innocence? Is there still a child
buried somewhere behind them?
The real signs of senility are
betrayed by the eyes, not the body.
Loose skin merely reveals that we are
aging physically, nothing more. Bodies age and die in a process as inevitable and natural as the changing of
the seasons, but dead eyes signify a
more deadly senility, something less
natural, a fatigued spirit. Spirits are
meant to be forever young, forever
childlike, forever innocent. They are
not meant to deaden and die. But they
can die through a lack of passion,
through the illusion of familiarity,
through a loss of innocence and wonder, through a fatigue of the spirit,
and through practical despair.
Despair is a curious thing. Mostly
we despair not because we grow
weary of the shortcomings and sufferings in life and, at last, ﬁnd life too
much to take. Rather we despair for
the opposite reason, namely, we grow
cynical of joy. Joy lies in experiencing
life as fresh, as novel, as primal, as
a child does, with a certain purity of
spirit. This type of joy is not pleasure,
though there’s pleasure in it. Pleasure
of course can be had without joy but
that kind of pleasure is the product
of a lack of wonder and reverence in
experiencing. That kind of pleasure is
initially experienced as a victory, as a
throwing off of naiveté, as liberation;
but it soon turns into defeat, into dullness, boredom, and a deadened eros.
Our palate loses its itch for tasting.
Our enthusiasm dies and a certain fatigue of the soul sets in. There is nothing left in us that’s fresh and young,
and our eyes begin to show this. They
lose their sparkle, their childlikeness.
In her poignant novel “Stone Angel,”
Margaret Laurence describes her heroine, a despairing lady named Hagar,
looking into a mirror and saying to
herself: “I stood for a long time, looking, wondering how a person could
change so much … So gradually it happens. The face – a brown and leathery
face that wasn’t mine. Only the eyes
were mine, staring as though to pierce
the lying glass and get beneath to some
true image, inﬁnitely distant.”
A good look in the mirror for most
of us, sadly, reveals much the same,
a lifeless face that’s not really ours
and dull eyes, our own, but hidden
beneath a lying glass. Somewhere the
ﬁre has gone out; our eyes and face
are devoid of wonder and innocence.
What’s to be done? We need to take
a good long look at ourselves in a
mirror and study our eyes, long and
hard, and let what we see shock us
enough to move us toward the road of
unlearning, of post-sophistication, of
wonder, or renewed innocence. Here’s
the counsel: Go to mirror and stare
into your eyes long enough until you
see there again the boy or girl who
once inhabited that space. In that,
wonder will be born, a sparkle will
return and, with it, a freshness that
can make you young again.
Our eyes don’t grow tired, rather
they get buried. That’s what causes
the blank, passionless stare. Bodies tire, but eyes are windows to the
soul and they are forever eager to
see. One of the contrasts between
Christianity and Buddhism has to
do with the eyes. The Buddhist saint
is always depicted with his or her
eyes shut, while the Christian saint
always has them open. The Buddhist saint has a sleek, harmonious
body, but his or her eyes are heavy
and sealed with sleep. The Christian
saint’s body is wasted to the bone,
but his or her eyes are alive, hungry,
staring. The Buddhist’s eyes are
focused inward. The Christian’s eyes
are staring outward, hungry, full of
wonder.
OBLATE FATHER ROLHEISER is president of the
Oblate School of Theology, San Antonio,
Texas.
y
20 FAITH
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO | FEBRUARY 6, 2015
SUNDAY READINGS
Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
He told them, ‘Let us go on to the nearby villages that I may preach there also. For this purpose have I come.’ So he
went into their synagogues, preaching and driving out demons throughout the whole of Galilee.
MARK 1:29-39
JOB 7:1-4, 6-7
Job spoke, saying: Is not man’s life on earth a
drudgery? Are not his days those of hirelings? He is
a slave who longs for the shade, a hireling who waits
for his wages. So I have been assigned months of
misery, and troubled nights have been allotted to me.
If in bed I say, “When shall I arise?” then the night
drags on; I am ﬁlled with restlessness until the dawn.
My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle; they
come to an end without hope. Remember that my life
is like the wind; I shall not see happiness again.
PSALM147:1-2, 3-4, 5-6
Praise the Lord, who heals the brokenhearted.
Praise the Lord, for he is good; sing praise to our
God, for he is gracious; it is ﬁtting to praise him. The
Lord rebuilds Jerusalem; the dispersed of Israel he
gathers.
Praise the Lord, who heals the brokenhearted.
He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their
wounds. He tells the number of the stars; he calls
each by name.
Praise the Lord, who heals the brokenhearted.
Great is our Lord and mighty in power; to his wisdom there is no limit. The Lord sustains the lowly;
the wicked he casts to the ground.
Praise the Lord, who heals the brokenhearted.
1 CORINTHIANS 9:16-19, 22-23
Brothers and sisters: If I preach the gospel,
this is no reason for me to boast, for an obligation has been imposed on me, and woe to me if
I do not preach it! If I do so willingly, I have a
recompense, but if unwillingly, then I have been
entrusted with a stewardship. What then is my
recompense? That, when I preach, I offer the gospel free of charge so as not to make full use of my
right in the Gospel. Although I am free in regard
to all, I have made myself a slave to all so as to
win over as many as possible. To the weak I became weak, to win over the weak. I have become
all things to all, to save at least some. All this I do
for the sake of the gospel, so that I too may have a
share in it.
MARK 1:29-39
On leaving the synagogue Jesus entered the
house of Simon and Andrew with James and
John. Simon’s mother-in-law lay sick with a fever.
They immediately told him about her. He approached, grasped her hand, and helped her up.
Then the fever left her and she waited on them.
When it was evening, after sunset, they brought
to him all who were ill or possessed by demons.
The whole town was gathered at the door. He
cured many who were sick with various diseases,
and he drove out many demons, not permitting
them to speak because they knew him. Rising
very early before dawn, he left and went off to a
deserted place, where he prayed. Simon and those
who were with him pursued him and on ﬁnding
him said, “Everyone is looking for you.” He told
them, “Let us go on to the nearby villages that I
may preach there also. For this purpose have I
come.” So he went into their synagogues, preaching and driving out demons throughout the whole
of Galilee.
Follow the Lord’s lead
A
n old monk had prayed all his life for a vision from God. Finally God appeared to him
in his cell. The man worshipped with tears
of joy and gratitude. At that very moment the
monastery bell rang. It was
time to feed the poor at the
gates, and it was his turn
to feed them. How could
he turn his back on God’s
vision? The monk was torn
between the divine and the
human. It was the dilemma
between heaven and earth,
mystery and reality, prayer
and work, contemplation
and action, and interiority
and exteriority. With much
regret, he left the vision
and went away to feed the
poor. Hours later, when
he returned to his cell, he
FATHER CHARLES
couldn’t believe his eyes.
PUTHOTA
God was still there waiting,
and he said: “My son, if you
hadn’t gone off to feed the
poor, I would not have waited for you.”
We can relate to the monk’s desire and dilemma. As we journey through life, seeking love
and fulfillment, struggling through sadness and
sorrows, we are comforted and guided by the
Catholic faith and its incredibly powerful traditions. One of our struggles may lie in integrating
SCRIPTURE
REFLECTION
POPE FRANCIS
THE GOSPEL CHANGES LIFE
The pope prayed the Angelus with the faithful gathered in St. Peter’s Square Feb. 1, reﬂecting on the Gospel passage that narrates Jesus’
arrival with his disciples in Capernaum and
his freeing a man from possession by a demon.
“The Gospel is the word of life: It does not
oppress people, but on the contrary, frees
those who are enslaved by the many evil spirits of this world: the spirit of vanity, attachment to money, pride, sensuality,” the pope
said. “The Gospel changes hearts, changes
lives, transforms the inclination to evil into
good resolutions.”
We live hectic lives. In the midst of
multitudinous activities, the call is to be
like Jesus: To carry our experiences into
prayer and let prayer inﬂuence and affect
all our having and being and doing.
prayer and life – and learning to view them as
natural and highly beneficial, even necessary,
allies for peace and happiness. Being united with
God and taking that experience into all that we
are and do is the simplest – and surest – formula
for success in life.
Jesus shows us the way. In Mark’s Gospel,
we glimpse into a day in the life of Jesus. Jesus
leads a hectic life. All his activities flow from his
union with his Father: “Rising very early before
dawn, he left and went off to a deserted place,
where he prayed.” Thanks to his prayer, his action is filled with grace for others; his ministry
is filled with purpose, direction, and energy; his
exterior mission is spent in selfless, life-giving
service. Jesus will take all aspects of his work –
teaching, preaching, healing, driving out demons
– back to his contemplation with his Father so
that he could become deeply conscious of his
Father’s will for him, evaluate his mission in
God’s presence, and forge ahead despite opposition and apathy. In other words, his prayer life
flows into his ministry, which flows back into his
prayer life.
It is said that Dorothy Day, co-founder of the
Catholic Worker Movement, before her conversion would attend early morning Mass at St.
Joseph’s Church on Sixth Avenue in New York
City. She was attracted to the simple gesture of
people kneeling in prayer. She said, “I longed
for their faith. So I used to go in and kneel in the
back pew.” Her new-found Catholic faith helped
her discover the profound relationship between
contemplation and social action. She said famously: “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to
be dismissed so easily.” She would rather live a
simple life of faith showing forth in service than
be distracted by titles of honor.
We live hectic lives. In the midst of multitudinous
activities, the call is to be like Jesus: To carry our
experiences into prayer and let prayer inﬂuence
and affect all our having and being and doing. We
are to be contemplatives, even mystics. If we don’t
see more than what our eyes see, we are in trouble.
Through prayer, we peer into the mystery of God
– to touch his presence and love. In prayer, our
consciousness is heightened to capture our inseparable connection with God. Like Jesus, we are to
let this awareness of the divine permeate our daily
lives. We are invited and challenged to a life of faith
that translates into service, one that does justice.
FATHER PUTHOTA is pastor of St. Veronica Church in South
San Francisco.
LITURGICAL CALENDAR, DAILY MASS READINGS
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 9:
Monday of the Fifth Week
in Ordinary Time. GN 1:119. PS 104:1-2a, 5-6, 10
and 12, 24 and 35c. SEE
MT 4:23. MK 6:53-56.
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY
10: Memorial of St.
Scholastica, virgin. GN
1:20-PS 8:4-5, 6-7,
8-92:4a. PS 119:36, 29b.
MK 7:1-13.
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 11: Wednesday of
the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time. Optional Memorial of Our Lady of Lourdes. GN 2:4b-9, 15-17. PS
104:1-2a, 27-28, 29bc-30. SEE JN 17:17b, 17a.
MK 7:14-23.
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 12: Thursday of the Fifth
Week in Ordinary Time. GN 2:18-25. PS 128:1-2,
3, 4-5. JAS 1:21bc. MK 7:24-30.
Apollonia. Died circa 249.
Feast: February 9. The patron of dentists, Apollonia
is also invoked for toothaches and gum disease.
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 13: Friday of the Fifth Week
in Ordinary Time. GN 3:1-8. PS 32:1-2, 5, 6, 7.
SEE ACTS 16:14b. MK 7:31-37.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 14: Memorial of Sts.
Cyril, monk and St. Methodius, bishop. GN 3:9-24.
PS 90:2, 3-4abc, 5-6, 12-13. MT 4:4b. MK 8:1-10.
FROM THE FRONT 21
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO | FEBRUARY 6, 2015
DADS: Play with your kids, be strong, loving, moral role models, pope says
FROM PAGE 1
The world today, especially in the
West, seems like “a world without
fathers” where men are so focused on
their jobs or personal fulfillment that
they neglect their families, he said.
The pope recalled how when he
served as archbishop of Buenos Aires
he would often ask fathers if they
played with their kids, “if they had the
courage of love to ‘waste’ their time
with their children. And their answer
was awful, you know. The majority
said, ‘Well, I can’t, too much work.’”
Christian communities need to be
extra attentive to the crisis of fatherhood in society today and how so
many young people feel “orphaned”
within their own families, the pope
said. So many problems kids have,
some of them serious, stem from them
not having a decent father figure – a
father who is an authoritative, loving
guide and role model, he added.
In fact, the more a father needs to
work or be away from home, the more
important it is he live up to his duty
of providing solid, quality guidance,
he said.
Another problem, the pope said,
is sometimes fathers seem lost or
unsure of what role they are supposed
to play in the family and “so, being
in doubt, they opt out, they withdraw
and neglect their responsibilities,
perhaps hiding behind a dubious relationship of ‘equal footing’ with their
children,” he said.
While it is true fathers need to
accompany their kids, he said, they
must not forget they must act like a
AT A GLANCE
IN HIS TALK on fatherhood,
Pope Francis said the problem
is not fathers’ “overbearing
presence” but their “absence,
their hiding.”
DO FATHERS have the “courage to ‘waste’ their time” with
their children instead of working all the time?
(CNS PHOTO/PAUL HARING)
FATHERS SEEM doubtful of
their roles and may withdraw,
“hiding behind a dubious relationship of ‘equal footing’ with
their children.”
Pope Francis poses with U.N. peacekeepers from Latin America during his general audience in
Paul VI hall at the Vatican Jan. 28.
parent, not a best friend because “that
is not good for the child.”
Society has a paternal role as
well, he said; it must take an active,
responsible role toward young people
and not leave them “orphans” without
prospects for a good education and
employment.
Young people who are “orphaned
of ideals,” values and hope, the pope
said, will fill that void with “idols” and
be driven by fleeting pleasures and
the illusion of “the god of money,”
robbing them of their real treasures
within.
Jesus, who promised he would not
leave anyone behind as an orphan, is
the teacher that can guide families,
he said. He is “the hope that the world
can change, that love conquers hatred
and that there can be a future of
brotherhood and peace for everyone.”
Toward the end of the audience, the
pope said some people might think
his catechesis was “too negative” by
looking only at the failures in fatherhood today.
But he promised the following
week’s catechesis would look at the
beauty of fatherhood, echoing the
audience’s Gospel reading from John
3:17: “For God did not send his Son
into the world to condemn the world,
but that the world might be saved
through him.”
The pope said he wanted “to start
with the darkness in order to arrive at
the light so that the Lord can help us
understand these things better.”
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22 FROM THE FRONT
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO | FEBRUARY 6, 2015
WOMEN: Rome to consider challenges women face in society, church
FROM PAGE 1
quest to ﬁnd balance in promoting
women’s equality while valuing the
differences between women and men;
the concrete and symbolic aspects of
women’s potential for motherhood;
cultural attitudes toward women’s
bodies; and women and religion, including questions about their participation in church decision-making.
The council said the theme was
chosen “to identify possible pastoral
paths, which will allow Christian
communities to listen and dialogue
with the world today in this sphere,”
while recognizing that in different
cultures and for individual women
the situation will be different.
While cautioning against generalizations, the document rejects the
notions that there are no differences
between men and women, and that
each person “chooses and builds hisher identity; owns him-herself and
answers primarily to him-herself.”
In preparing the document and
the plenary discussions, the council
sought input from women around the
world. However, the process was not
without criticism, particularly for the
English version of a video featuring
an Italian actress, Nanci Brilli, asking
women to send in their experiences.
Many women felt the use of a heavily made-up actress ran counter to
the point of seeking input about the
real lives of most women. The council
quickly took the English version off
YouTube.
At the news conference, Brilli
said, “as a woman, a professional, a
mother, I feel like this is the ﬁrst time
we have been asked for our opinion”
by the church. “The women who responded do not want to be cardinals,
but want to take part in the discussion.”
Participating for a year in the group
that drafted the document, she said,
was such a positive experience that
Many women, ‘have reached
places of prestige within
society and the workplace, but
have no corresponding decisional role nor responsibility
within ecclesial communities.’
(CNS PHOTO/ZSOLT CZEGLEDI, EPA)
In this April 20, 2014 photo, Hungarian women walk to church to attend Easter service in
Transylvania, Romania.
it led to a renewal of her faith, but
also to a willingness to do the video
and open herself to comments. Some
people, she said, instead of wanting to
dialogue, “felt represented by making
insults. That’s their problem.”
Cardinal Ravasi said the reactions
from across Europe were mainly positive and garnered a variety of helpful
input about women’s concerns, but
in Anglo-Saxon countries, especially
the United States and Canada, the
reaction focused so strongly on the
video – and not on women’s concerns
and experience – that they decided to
pull it.
Everything he’s done, he said, has
garnered strong reaction ranging
from enthusiasm to “those who even
found satanic dimensions” in what he
was doing. Some feel a need to take
part in a discussion “by yelling,” he
said.
In the section on women and the
church, the document described
“multifaceted discomfort” with images of women that are no longer relevant and with a Christian community that seems to value their input
even less than the world of business
and commerce does.
Many women, it said, “have reached
places of prestige within society and
the workplace, but have no corresponding decisional role nor responsibility within ecclesial communities.”
Council members are not proposing a discussion of ordaining women
priests, the document said and, in
fact, statistics show ordination “is
not something that women want.”
However, it said, “if, as Pope Francis
says, women have a central role in
Christianity, this role must ﬁnd a
counterpart also in the ordinary life
of the church.”
The vast majority of Catholic
women today do not want a bishop’s
“purple biretta,” it said, but would
like to see church doors open “to
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women so that they can offer their
contribution in terms of skills and
also sensitivity, intuition, passion,
dedication, in full collaboration and
integration” with men in the church.
The preparatory document looked
at how much pressure women face regarding their body image and the way
women’s bodies are exploited in the
media, even to the point of provoking
eating disorders or recourse to unnecessary surgery.
“Plastic surgery that is not medicotherapeutic can be aggressive toward
the feminine identity, showing a
refusal of the body in as much as it is
a refusal of the ‘season’ that is being
lived out,” it said.
“’Plastic surgery is like a burqa
made of ﬂesh.’ One woman gave us
this harsh and incisive description,”
the document said. “Having been
given freedom of choice for all, are
we not under a new cultural yoke of a
singular feminine model?”
The document also denounced
violence inﬂicted on women: “Selective abortion, infanticide, genital
mutilation, crimes of honor, forced
marriages, trafficking of women,
sexual molestation, rape –which in
some parts of the world are inﬂicted
on a massive level and along ethnic
lines – are some of the deepest injuries inﬂicted daily on the soul of the
world, on the bodies of women and of
girls, who become silent and invisible
victims.”
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ARTS & LIFE 23
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO | FEBRUARY 6, 2015
Forgiveness not always easy but worth trying, books say
REVIEWED BY JAN KILBY
CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE
“THE BOOK OF FORGIVING: THE FOURFOLD
PATH FOR HEALING OURSELVES AND OUR
WORLD” BY DESMOND TUTU AND MPHO
TUTU. HarperOne (San Francisco, 2014). 240 pp.,
$25.
“THE FORGIVENESS HANDBOOK: A SPIRITUAL WISDOM AND PRACTICE FOR THE JOURNEY TO FREEDOM, HEALING AND PEACE”
BY THE EDITORS AT SKYLIGHT PATHS.
SkyLight Paths (Woodstock, Vermont, 2015). 256
pp., $18.99.
Forgiveness is essential for maintaining peaceful relationships and harmony in society.
This is the message of two new books – “The
Book of Forgiving,” written by retired Anglican
Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa and
the Rev. Mpho Tutu, his daughter and an Episcopal priest, and “The Forgiveness Handbook,”
an anthology created by the editors at SkyLight
Paths publishing house.
The Tutus write from their experience with
forgiveness as citizens of South Africa who lived
during the apartheid. Archbishop Tutu won the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his anti-apartheid
activism and was appointed in 1994, after apartheid ended, to chair the South African Truth
and Reconciliation Commission. Rev. Tutu is executive director of the Desmond and Leah Tutu
Legacy Foundation.
The authors first help readers understand the
nature of forgiveness and why it is important.
They then describe their theory of four steps
in forgiving. These include telling the story of
harm, naming the hurt, granting forgiveness,
and renewing or released a relationship.
In their final chapters, the Tutus focus on
needing forgiveness, forgiving oneself and creating a world of forgiveness. They illustrate their
points through dramatic stories from their lives
and those of others.
The writers convey some important truths
about forgiveness. One is that, as they write, “we
can’t create a world without pain or loss or conflict or hurt feelings, but we can create a world
of forgiveness.” They are optimistic about this
occurring because, as they say, “we are hardwired to forgive and connect.”
Another truth is that both those seeking
forgiveness and offering it can benefit. “It is
how we become whole again,” they state. To
illustrate this, they cite the South African word
“ubuntu,” meaning humanity. “A person is only
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a person through other people,” they write, and
“any tear in the fabric of connection between us
must be repaired for us all to be made whole.”
They show, in addition, how those harmed can
use suffering creatively. They can become more
empathetic with others who suffer, as well as
work to prevent future tragedies, they state.
The authors emphasize the value of practicing forgiveness so that it becomes a “quality of
character.” “When I cultivate forgiveness in my
small everyday encounters, I am preparing for a
time when a much larger act of forgiveness will
be asked of me, as it most certainly will,” they
write.
They discuss, too, why those forgiving others
can be justified in releasing relationships. The
need for self-forgiveness is addressed, as well.
“It is how we make meaning out of our suffering, restore our self-esteem and tell a new story
of who we are,” they write.
“The Book of Forgiving” is a remarkable
psychology and spirituality of forgiveness. The
book reflects the authors’ humanity and high
quality of thinking and writing and offers an
inspiring, hopeful message.
“The Forgiveness Handbook” contains 67
contributions by 52 authors from many faiths.
The writers include clergy and other spiritual
leaders.
One of the primary messages of the book is
that forgiving is difficult because it requires
overcoming fear, pride, anger and isolation.
Another is that it can be a transforming experience that leads to moral growth. The writers describe it metaphorically as a “journey,” “path,”
“bridge” or “gift.”
This growth can lead to developing compassion for others and oneself.
KILBY is a writer in San Antonio.
24 COMMUNITY
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO | FEBRUARY 6, 2015
Catholic San Francisco
and Pentecost Tours, Inc.
invite you
to join in the following pilgrimages
NORTHERN & CENTRAL ITALY
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including a rare
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(PHOTOS COURTESY PATRICK GEE)
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April 13-23, 2015
VISIT: Rome (Papal audience), Tivoli, Subiaco, Siena,
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Tour 50519
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Catholic San Francisco
Salesians from throughout Northern California celebrated
St. John Bosco’s bicentenary Jan. 31 at Sts. Peter and Paul
Church.
Salesians mark
Don Bosco bicentenary
Northern California Salesians including more than 800 students from
Salesian high schools, middle schools
and elementary schools from as far
away as Watsonville celebrated the
feast day of St. John Bosco on Jan. 31
at Sts. Peter and Paul Church in San
Francisco.
Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone
and Auxiliary Bishop William J. Justice and 24 Salesian priests celebrated
the Mass honoring the bicentenary
TRAVEL
DIRECTORY
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invites you to join Fr. Barry Windholtz
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May 11-19, 2015
(415) 614-5642
May 19-29, 2015
VISIT
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Fr. Al DeGiacomo
of the Sardinian-born priest popularly known as Don Bosco. Salesians
around the world are marking the
anniversary in 2015 with celebrations
culminating on the saint’s birthday
Aug. 16.
Don Bosco (1815-1888) is the founder
of the Salesian order and patron saint
of youth. The Salesians are the thirdlargest men’s order and the largest
women’s order (Daughters of Mary
Help of Christians).
Vacation Rental
Condo in
South Lake Tahoe.
Sleeps 8, near Heavenly
Valley and Casinos.
Call
925-933-1095
See it at
RentMyCondo.com#657
Canadian Rockies Tour
Explore Amazing Vistas
Hosted by Father Frank Wittouck, SCJ
14 Days from $1749*
Travel
Departs August 14, 2015. Your
with oth
tour starts in Seattle where you’ll
Catholic er
s!
drive through the lush forestlands
of the Pacific Northwest. Visit the
Grand Coulee Dam and nearby Dry Falls. Head
east to “Big Sky Country” of Montana followed by
journeys through Glacier & Waterton Lakes National
Parks. Travel through Kootenay National Park; visit
Bow Falls and beautiful Lake Louise en route to
Banff National Park for two-nights. Continue north
along the Icefields Parkway and in the heart of the
Canadian Rockies you will experience a remarkable
excursion onto the surface of the Athabasca
Glacier. Your next destinations are Jasper & Yoho
National Parks; Revelstoke; the Lake Okanagan
region; Kamloops and Whistler. Then travel to
Vancouver for your two-night stay before returning
to Seattle. Enjoy a city tour including a stop at Pike
Place Market before flying home. Mass will be
celebrated some days on tour. Your Chaplain is
Father Frank Wittouck, SCJ, from Houston, Texas. He
retired as an Army Chaplain in 2010 yet currently
ministers for Magnificat House and in the Cypress
Assistance Ministries. This will be his 9th trip with YMT.
*
PPDO. Plus $159 tax/service/government fees. Alternate June
- August departure dates available. Seasonal charges may apply.
Add-on airfare available.
Call for Details!
877-832-3404
Please mention promo code EC09106
25
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO | FEBRUARY 6, 2015
SPECIAL NOVENA
USED CAR NEEDED
FATIMA PRAYERS
Retired Senior
needs used car
Lucia dos Santos was one of
the three children to whom
the Blessed Virgin Mary
appeared at Fatima,
Portugal in 1917.
in good condition,
for medical appts.
and errands.
Please Call (415) 290-7160
Email: [email protected]
Pray as Lucia dos Santos
did for “miracles needed”.
Three Hail Marys
and one Our Father
HELP WANTED
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO
CLASSIFIEDS
TO ADVERTISE IN CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO
CALL (415) 614-5642 | VISIT www.catholic-sf.org
ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
PRINCIPALS SOUGHT
TPW
Full-Time Kindergarten
Teaching Position
PUBLISH A NOVENA
Saint Philip the Apostle School
New! Personal prayer
option added
Pre-payment required
Mastercard or
Visa accepted
Cost
$26
If you wish to publish a Novena in the
Catholic San Francisco
You may use the form below or call (415) 614-5640
San Francisco Noe Valley Location
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Your prayer will be published in our newspaper
Send cover leƩer and resume to:
Mrs. Remy EvereƩ
Saint Philip the Apostle School
665 Elizabeth Street
San Francisco, CA 94114
(415)824Ͳ8467
FAX (415)282Ͳ5746
Email: revereƩ@saintphilipschool.org
Name
Address
Phone
MC/VISA #
Exp.
SELECT ONE PRAYER:
❑ St. Jude Novena to SH
❑ Prayer to the Blessed Virgin
❑ Prayer to St. Jude
❑ Prayer to the Holy Spirit
❑ Personal Prayer, 50 words or less
Please return form with check or money order for $26
Payable to: Catholic San Francisco
Advertising Dept., Catholic San Francisco
1 Peter Yorke Way, San Francisco, CA 94109
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HELP WANTED
Executive Administrative Assistant
Archdiocese of San Francisco
Regular Full-time (37.5 hours/week), Non-Exempt
Looking to make a difference?
We, the Archdiocese of San Francisco, pledge ourselves to be a dynamic and collaborative community of faith known
for its quality of leadership; richness of diversity of culture and peoples and united in faith, hope and love.
Essential Duties and Responsibilities Include:
• Assists the Chief Financial Officer by acting as a major participant in various activities with outside business and
financial institutions such as, but not limited to, stock brokerage transactions and insurance and banking arrangements.
• This position also has responsibility for assisting the CFO with major projects as directed.
• Among some of the projects in which this individual would participate are: coordinate events for various public
presentations/seminars, maintain the financial policy and procedure manuals, develop and coordinate various
surveys for financial programs, and coordinate the Annual Parish/School Financial Reporting Program.
• This position has responsibility for the maintenance of accurate and complete records/files for all of the CFO’s
financial documents as well as for coordinating meeting arrangements for various financial groups.
Minimum Qualifications:
The Department of Catholic Schools in the
Archdiocese of San Francisco is seeking
elementary principals for the 20152016 school year. Candidates must be
practicing Roman Catholic, possess a
valid teaching credential, a Master’s
degree in educational leadership, an
administrative credential (preferred),
and five years of successful teaching
experience at the elementary level.
Please send resume and a letter
of interest by April 1st, 2015 to:
Bret E. Allen
Associate Superintendent for
Educational & Professional Leadership
One Peter Yorke Way
San Francisco, California 94109
Fax (415) 614-5664
E-mail: [email protected]
Archdiocese of SAN FRANCISCO
DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS
The Archdiocese of San Francisco seeks a well-qualified Director of Communications. The Director
develops and executes a pro-active media strategy for the Archdiocese. This strategy is nuanced to
embrace three spheres of influence: the Archdiocese, covering the three counties of San Francisco, San
Mateo, and Marin; a national audience; and an international audience focused on the Vatican. Located
in the Archdiocese are over 400,000 Catholics, with over 300 priests and 700 religious. Among the
Catholic institutions in the Archdiocese are 75 elementary and high schools, 3 colleges/universities,
one seminary, and seven Catholic cemeteries.
MAJOR RESPONSIBILITIES & DUTIES
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print, audio, visual and social media.
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Catholic institutions moments of crisis, and preparing other Archdiocese representatives for media
appearances
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QUALIFICATIONS
• Ability to interact professionally, especially in dealing with committees and financial vendors.
• Excellent PC skills with experience in Word, Excel, PowerPoint & Access.
• Good working knowledge of finance and accounting concepts. (Must have experience working in an accounting
office &/or financial institution with sound knowledge of banking and investment operations.)
• Ability to multitask while working fairly independently with a minimum of detailed supervision or guidance.
• Excellent time management and organizational skills.
• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal.
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and theological beliefs of the Catholic Church
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EDUCATION AND/OR EXPERIENCE
Preferred Qualifications:
• Experience and working knowledge of finance and accounting concepts – experience working in an accounting
office and/or financial institution with sound knowledge of banking and investment.
• A general understanding of the Catholic Church and the workings of parishes and schools.
PLEASE SUBMIT RESUME AND COVER LETTER:
Attn: Patrick Schmidt, Acting Director – Human Resources
Archdiocese of San Francisco, One Peter Yorke Way, San Francisco, CA 94109-6602
E-mail: [email protected]
Equal Opportunity Employer. Qualified candidates with criminal histories considered.
R555"&),]-5!,5B-.,]-5!,5*, ,,C5#(5"/'(#.#-65)''/(#.#)(-65$)/,(&#-'65*/&#5
policy or public relations
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frequently fastpaced environment
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Please submit resume and cover letter to:
Attn: Patrick Schmidt, Acting Director of Human Resources
Archdiocese of San Francisco
One Peter Yorke Way R San Francisco, CA 94109-6602
Fax: (415) 614-5536 / E-mail: [email protected]
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26 CALENDAR
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO | FEBRUARY 6, 2015
FIRST FRIDAY: Contemplatives of St.
Joseph offer Mass at Mater Dolorosa
Church, 307 Willow Ave., South San
Francisco, 7 p.m. followed by healing
service and personal blessing with St.
Joseph oil from Oratory of St. Joseph,
Montreal.
TAIZE: All are welcome to Taizé prayer
around the cross, Mercy Center, 2300
Adeline Drive, Burlingame, 8 p.m. Taizé
prayer has been sung on first Fridays at
Mercy Center with Mercy Sister Suzanne
Toolan since 1983; (650) 340-7452. ETHICS: Catholic Marin Breakfast Club
Mass and meeting, St. Sebastian Parish, Greenbrae, 7 a.m. liturgy followed
by breakfast and talk on making ethical
decisions by Jesuit Father John Koeplin, rector, Loyola House Jesuit Community, San Francisco, members $8/
visitors $10; (415) 461-0704 between 9
a.m.-3 p.m.; [email protected].
SATURDAY, FEB. 7
CEMETERY MASS: Holy Cross Cemetery, 1500 Old Mission Road, Colma,
All Saints Mausoleum, 11 a.m., Father
Tony LaTorre, pastor, St. Philip Parish, San Francisco, principal celebrant
and homilist. (650) 756-2060, www.
holycrosscemeteries.com.
MASS FOR SICK: Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone is principal celebrant
and homilist for Mass commemorating World Day of the Sick, 11 a.m.,
St. Mary’s Cathedral, Gough Street at
Geary Boulevard, San Francisco spon-
sored by the Order of Malta. [email protected]; (415) 865-6718.
SUNDAY, FEB. 8
VOCATIONS: Open House celebrating
the Year of Consecrated Life: The Dominican Sisters of San Rafael invite you
to St. Rose Convent, 2515 Pine St.,
San Francisco, 3-4:30 p.m. Join us in a
prayer for peace in our Chapel, followed
by visiting and refreshments in the convent. In Marin County, you are invited
to join us at Dominican Convent, 1540
Grand Ave., San Rafael, 3-4:30 p.m. We
will share a prayer for peace, followed
by visiting and refreshments. Please
RSVP for either location by calling (415)
453-8303 or email crbush@sanrafaelop.
org. The Sisters of Mercy invite you to
Sisters of Mercy, 2300 Adeline Drive,
Burlingame. All are welcome to join us
from 9:30-11 a.m. and to stay for Sunday liturgy at 11:15 in our main chapel.
Come visit our home, learn about our
rich heritage, and meet our sisters who
serve in a variety of ministries in the San
Francisco Bay Area. Please RSVP by
calling (650) 340-7400.
BUBBLY & BINGO: SF Italian Athletic Club, 1630 Stockton St. in North
Beach, 11:30 a.m., $40 per person
advance ticket sales only, includes
lunch, champagne, two bingo cards.
Antonette, (415) 509-4810.
100TH YEAR: Archbishop Salvatore
J. Cordileone is principal celebrant of
100th anniversary Mass at St. Paul of
the Shipwreck Church, Jamestown
Avenue between Third Street and Jennings, San Francisco, 10 a.m., Conven-
THURSDAY, FEB. 12
MUSIC TRIBUTE: “Angel of the
Amazon,” a
concert performance of opera
dedicated to
the memory of
Notre Dame
Sister Dorothy
Stang on the
10th anniversaSister Dorothy
ry of her death
Stang, SND
at the hands
of murderous
landowners in the rain forests of
Brazil with composer Evan Mack
conducting. The evening features
the voices of baritone Jeffrey Williams and mezzo soprano Caitlin
Mathes with the Viva la Musica
chorus, Shulamit Hoffman, director. Jim McGarry, jmmcgarry@
ndnu.edu; (650) 508-4120. Cunningham Memorial Chapel, Notre
Dame de Namur University,
Ralston Avenue, Belmont, 7 p.m.
Admission is free. Donations to
the Sister Dorothy Stang Scholarship Fund welcome.
tual Franciscan Father Paul Gawlowski,
pastor, concelebrates; www.stpauloftheshipwreck.org. (415) 468-3434.
FAITH FORMATION: “Sunday Morning Conversations with the Jesuits
and Their Lay Partners,” St. Ignatius Church, Fromm Hall, Parker and
Golden Gate Avenue, San Francisco,
10:50-11:45 a.m. Free and open to the
public. Free parking in all USF lots.
CONSTRUCTION
CA License #965268
•
•
•
•
•
PLUMBING
CAHALAN CONSTRUCTION
Painting • Carpentry • Tile
Sliding • Stucco • Dryrot
Additions • Remodels • Repairs
415.279.1266
Lic#582766
John V. Rissanen
Cell: (916) 517-7952
Office: (916) 408-2102
Fax: (916) 408-2086
[email protected]
2190 Mt. Errigal Lane
Lincoln, CA 95648
ALL PLUMBING WORK
PAT HOLLAND
CA LIC #817607
Kitchen/Bath Remodel
Dry Rot Repair • Decks /Stairs
Plumbing Repair/Replacement
Call: 650.580.2769
PAINTING
M.K. Painting
Interior-Exterior
Residential – Commercial
Insured/Bonded – Free Estimates
License# 974682
ROOFING
S.O.S.
PAINTING CO.
Interior-Exterior • wallpaper • hanging & removal
Lic # 526818 • Senior Discount
415-269-0446 • 650-738-9295
www.sospainting.net
F REE E STIMATES
(415) 786-0121 • (650) 871-9227
Bill Hefferon Painting
Bonded & Insured
Lunch & Dinner, Wednesday, Thursday & Friday
25 RUSSIA AVENUE, SAN FRANCISCO
www.iasf.com
415-585-8059
Cell 415-710-0584
[email protected]
Office 415-731-8065
10% Discount to Seniors & Parishioners
Serving the
Residential Bay
Area for
Commercial over 30 Years
DINING
Weddings, Banquets, Special Occasions
‘9 DAYS OF GRACE’: “Hearts of Fire,”
a preached retreat Feb. 9-17 offered
by the ministries of the Society of
Jesus in San Francisco; presented
twice daily on weekdays, 12:05 p.m.
at St. Ignatius Church, Fulton Street
and Parker Avenue, San Francisco with
Mass; 7 p.m. at St Agnes Church, 1025
Masonic Ave. at Oak Street, San Francisco with Mass. One talk each day on
weekend. Feb. 14, 12:05 p.m. at St.
Ignatius Church with Mass; Feb 15, 6
p.m. at St. Agnes Church with Mass.
Jesuit Fathers Michael Moynahan and
C. Hightower facilitate. [email protected].
ART EXHIBIT: “Reformations: Dürer
and the New Age of Print” through
Feb. 22 noon to 6 p.m. daily, Thacher
Gallery in Gleeson Library – Geschke
Center, Golden Gate Avenue and Parker Avenue on USF campus; (415) 4225178; www.usfca.edu/library/thacher;
admission free. This is a collaborative,
student-curated exhibition on the earliest moments of print and printed book
culture in Europe concentrating on the
impact of new print technologies and
their uses in and around Nuremberg,
Germany in the late-15th and early16th centuries.
ELECTRICAL
ALL ELECTRIC SERVICE
650.322.9288
Service Changes
Solar Installation
Lighting/Power
Fire Alarm/Data
Green Energy
Fully licensed • State Certified • Locally
Trained • Experienced • On Call 24/7
Tel: (650) 630-1835
CA License 819191
Italian American Social
Club of San Francisco
BONDED & INSURED
415-205-1235
O’DONOGHUE CONSTRUCTION
Lic. # 505353B-C36
Serving Marin, San Francisco
& San Mateo Counties
HOLLAND
Plumbing Works San Francisco
[email protected]
Design - Build
Retail - Fixtures
Industrial
Service/Maintenance
Casework Installation
MONDAY, FEB. 9
TO ADVERTISE IN CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO
VISIT www.catholic-sf.org | CALL (415) 614-5642
EMAIL [email protected]
HOME SERVICES
COMMERCIAL
CONSTRUCTION
Dan Faloon, (415) 422-2195; faloon@
usfca.edu; Jesuit Father John Coleman, [email protected]. Feb. 8:
“Seeing God in All Things: What it
means and how to do it” with Jesuit
Father Rob Scholla, University of Santa
Clara. www.stignatiuscff.org/adultfaith-formation/.
HANDYMAN
Quality interior and exterior painting,
demolition , fence (repairs), roof repairs,
cutter (cleaning and repairs), landscaping,
gardening, hauling, moving, welding
All Purpose
Cell (415) 517-5977
Grant (650) 757-1946
NOT A LICENSED CONTRACTOR
FENCES & DECKS
Support CSF
If you would like to add
your tax-deductible contribution, please mail a
check, payable to Catholic San Francisco, to:
Catholic San Francisco, Dept. W,
One Peter Yorke Way, San Francisco CA 94109
IRISH Eoin
PAINTING
Lehane
Discount
to CSF
Readers
415.368.8589
Lic.#942181
[email protected]
John Spillane
• Retaining Walls • Stairs • Gates
• Dry Rot • Senior & Parishioner Discounts
650.291.4303
Lic. #742961
FRIDAY, FEB. 6
CALENDAR 27
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO | FEBRUARY 6, 2015
THURSDAY, FEB. 12
PRO-LIFE: San Mateo Pro Life meets
second Thursday of the month except
in December; 7:30 p.m.; St. Gregory’s
Worner Center, 138 28th Ave. at
Hacienda, San Mateo. New members
welcome. Jessica, (650) 572-1468;
[email protected].
WEDNESDAY, FEB. 18
DIVORCE SUPPORT: Meeting takes
place first and third Wednesdays, 7:30
p.m., St. Stephen Parish O’Reilly Center,
23rd Avenue at Eucalyptus, San Francisco. Groups are part of the Separated
and Divorced Catholic Ministry in the
archdiocese and include prayer, introductions, sharing. It is a drop-in support
group. Jesuit Father Al Grosskopf, (415)
422-6698, [email protected].
SATURDAY, FEB. 21
HANDICAPABLES MASS: The first
50 years of this good work continues
to be celebrated throughout 2015 with
monthly Mass and lunch at noon in
lower halls of St. Mary’s Cathedral,
Gough Street at Geary Boulevard, San
Francisco, Gough Street entrance. All
disabled people and their caregivers
are invited. Volunteers are always welcome to assist in this cherished tradition. Joanne Borodin, (415) 239-4865.
WEDNESDAY, FEB. 25
PRIORY TALKS: “God, Grace of the
World,” with Benedictine Brother
Ivan Nicoletto. In
a world in which
humanity can create and destroy life,
what grace may
God have for our
lives and our communities? 7-9 p.m.,
Brother Ivan
Woodside Priory
Nicoletto
School, 302 Portola Road, Portola Valley, Founders
Hall, admission is free, refreshments
provided, Carrie Rehak, crehak@
prioryca.org, (650) 851-8221. www.
prioryca.org/life/campus-spirituallife/insight-speakers-series/.
THURSDAY, FEB. 26
ICA LUNCH: Celebrating Women in
Business, a lunch
and program hosted by Immaculate
Conception Academy, San Francisco,
Julia Morgan Ballroom, Merchants
Exchange Building,
465 California St.,
San Francisco,
Luanne Tierney
0655; [email protected]. Walk-ins
are welcome.
MONDAY, FEB. 23
GRIEF SUPPORT: St. Pius Grief Ministry is offering a facilitated nine-week
support group session, Feb. 23-April
20, 7 p.m., St. Pius Parish Center, 1100
Woodside Road at Valota, Redwood
City. If you are in the early stages
of your loss, or have not previously
attended a grief support group, this
program may benefit you. (650) 361-
TUESDAY, FEB. 24
DON BOSCO: Don Bosco Study Group
meets 7 p.m., Parish Center, Sts. Peter
and Paul Church, 666 Filbert St. across
from Washington Square Park, San Francisco. We will continue to hear an historical narrative of the saint’s life with time for
11:30 a.m., $75. Carol Squires Brandi
and Luanne Tierney are the day’s
honorees. Brandi is a native San
Franciscan, holds a graduate degree
in filmmaking from San Francisco
State University and has worked for
Lucas Films. Tierney is a branding
expert. She has been featured in the
Wall Street Journal for her leadership
strategies. Celine Curran, (415) 8242052, ext. 32; ccurran@icacademy.
org.
SATURDAY, MARCH 14
FESTIVAL MASS: Archbishop
Salvatore J. Cordileone is principal
celebrant and homilist for Northern
California Choral
Festival Mass, 5:30
p.m., St. Mary’s
Cathedral, Gough
Street at Geary
Archbishop
Boulevard, San
Salvatore J.
Francisco. Student
Cordileone
singers from the
Archdiocese of San
Francisco and around the Bay Area
lead song under the direction of
Richard Robbins of the music faculty
at University of Wisconsin-Superior.
A choral prelude will precede the
liturgy. Visit www.pcchoirs.org.
small group discussions. The group has
met quarterly for the past several years in
celebration of the great saint’s birth bicentenary. All are welcome. Frank Lavin, (415)
310-8551; [email protected].
WEDNESDAY, FEB. 25.
GRIEF SUPPORT: Free monthly grief
support, St. Mary’s Cathedral, Gough
Street at Geary Boulevard, San Fran-
COUNSELING
“The Clifford Mollison Team”
Real Estate
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Michael J. Clifford
Broker Associate
415.209.9036
Peter C. Mollison
Realtor®
415.254.8776
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FINANCIAL ADVISOR
When Life Hurts
It Helps To Talk
• Family
• Work
• Relationships
• Depression • Anxiety • Addictions
Dr. Daniel J. Kugler
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist
Over 25 years experience
Confidential • Compassionate • Practical
(415) 921-1619 • Insurance Accepted
1537 Franklin Street • San Francisco, CA 94109
SALON
FRIDAY, FEB. 27
EVENING PRAYER: Sisters of Mercy
invite women to four Fridays of evening
prayer and conversations about vocation, 7:30 p.m., Mercy Center, 2300
Adeline Drive, Burlingame, Mercy
Chapel: Feb. 27, “Serving with Jesus”;
March 27, “Remaining with Jesus”;
April 24, “Walking Joyfully in the Spirit.”
RSVP to Mercy Sister Jean Evans, (650)
373-4508; [email protected].
SATURDAY, FEB. 28
CRAB BASH: Crab bash benefiting
St. Anthony-Immaculate Conception
School, 299 Precita Ave., San Francisco, 6-9 p.m., $50 by Jan. 30, $55 by
Feb. 13, $60 at door. Evening includes
cracked crab dinner, music, dancing,
raffle, silent and live auctions. Constance Dalton, [email protected]; (415)
642-6130.
SUNDAY, MARCH 1
FAITH FORMATION: “Sunday Morning Conversations with the Jesuits and
Their Lay Partners,” St. Ignatius Church,
Fromm Hall, Parker and Golden Gate
Avenue, San Francisco, 10:50-11:45
a.m. Free and open to the public. Free
parking in all USF lots, Dan Faloon, (415)
422-2195; [email protected]; Jesuit
Father John Coleman, jacoleman@usfca.
edu. March 1: “Helping Couples to Communicate and Engage Their Hearts,” with
family therapist Terry Peterson. www.
stignatiuscff.org/adult-faith-formation/.
TO ADVERTISE IN CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO
VISIT www.catholic-sf.org | CALL (415) 614-5642
EMAIL [email protected]
THE PROFESSIONALS
REAL ESTATE
cisco, third Wednesday of each month,
10:30- noon, Msgr. Bowe Room. Sessions provide information on grief process, and tips on coping with loss of a
loved one. Deacon Christoph Sandoval
leads the group. Mercy Sister Esther,
(415) 567-2020, ext. 218.
HOME HEALTH CARE
Do you want to be more fulfilled
in love and work – but find
things keep getting in the way?
Unhealed wounds can hold you back - even
if they are not the “logical” cause of your problems
today. You can be the person God intended.
Inner Child Healing Offers a
deep spiritual and psychological approach
to counseling:
❖ 30 years experience with individuals,
. couples and groups
❖ Directed, effective and results-oriented
Irish Help at Home
High Quality Home Care Since 1996
Home Care Attendants • Companions • CNA’s
Hospice • Respite Care • Insured and Bonded
San Mateo
650.347.6903
San Francisco
415.759.0520
Marin
415.721.7380
www.irishhelpathome.com
❖ Compassionate and Intuitive
❖ Supports 12-step
Retirement planning
College savings plans
Comprehensive financial planning
Kevin Tarrant
Financial Advisor
750 Lindaro Street, Suite 300
San Rafael, CA 94901
415-482-2737
© 2013 Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC. Member SIPC.
NY CS 7181378 BC008 07/12
GP10-01506P-N06/10
Children, Men Women
(by: Henry)
Hair Care Services:
Clipper Cut - Scissor Cut
Highlight
Hair Treatment - Perm
Waxing - Tinting - Roler Set
Mon - Sat: 9:30 am - 5 pm
❖ Enneagram Personality Transformation
❖ Free Counseling for Iraqi/Afghanistani Vets
Sunday: 10:30 am - 3:30pm
Lila Caffery, MA, CCHT
Appt. & Walk-Ins Welcome
San Francisco: 415.337.9474
1414 Sutter Street (Franklin St & Gough St)
San Francisco, CA 94109
Tel: 415.972.9995
www.qlotussalon.com
Complimentary phone consultation
www.InnerChildHealing.com
HEALTH CARE AGENCY
SUPPLE SENIOR CARE
“The most compassionate care in town”
415-573-5141
or 650-993-8036
*Irish owned
& operated
*Serving from San Francisco to North San Mateo
28
CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO | FEBRUARY 6, 2015
WOMEN IN BUSINESS
TO ADVERTISE IN CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO
REALTOR AND EC O BROKER
Mary attended the Walton School of Business at the University of Arkansas, where she
earned a BSBA in management and has over 19 years of sales experience in residential and
commercial properties.
CALL (415) 614-5642 | FAX (415) 614-5641
VISIT www.catholic-sf.org | EMAIL [email protected]
I need my
own bedroom.
Mary Laughlin Fenton
She is a top producer in the San Francisco real estate market for 12 years, and enjoys working with buyers and sellers - experienced or first-timers. Promoting healthier, cost effective
and green practices are her central goals. Her personable and direct approach coupled with
attention to detail, make for a smooth process for her clients. She has extensive experience
with estates, investment and also distressed properties.
Mary held management positions in the technology sector at CNET and iSyndicate. She has
served on the boards of Junior League of SF, Symphonix, Children of Shelters, Arthritis Foundation, SF Zoo Auxiliary and SF Pi Beta Phi Alumnae Board. She is also an active member of
her church- St.Vincent DePaul assisting for many years with marriage prep classes.
Tell me about it!
She fundraises globally as well-She donates a percentage of each commission to Conservation International, fundraises for Dalit Solidarity, a nonprofit in India that builds homes,
schools and clinics for the underprivileged. She was appointed to the Campaign Arkansas
Committee for Graduate & International Studies.
A member of Top Agent Network and both the California Association of Realtors and the
San Francisco Association of Realtors, Mary holds the GRI and Ecobroker designations
and serves on the technology committee for the SF Board of Realtors. She is also a notary.
CalBRE#: 01265968
Mobile: (415) 205-5218
Office: (415) 901-1721
Fax: (415) 901-1701
San Francisco Brokerage
117 Greenwich Street
San Francisco, CA 94111
T R U S T E D A D V I S O R S I N S A N F R A N C I S C O R E A L E S TAT E
MikeandSueSF.com
Mike Murphy
| Lic# 01440395
415.359.3975
Sue Schultes
| Lic# 01422014
415.307.0153
Sherry Plambeck
Director of Marketing –
The Magnolia of Millbrae
Sherry was born in New York City, an only child
whose father was a diplomat for the Canadian Government. She lived in the UK, the US and Canada.
She graduated from USF, Magna Cum Laude, with a
double major of French and Psychology (National Honor Society, Alpha Sigma Nu).
She spent many years in the pharmaceutical industry as a regional Sales Manager for
Procter and Gamble and worked for Ralph Lauren and Berlex Labs. She was voted
“Top Ten” in the USA by the American Business Women’s Assn. in 1984, and hosted
a television show, “Women Today” (Emmy). Sherry is presently on the healing team
of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church-Burlingame, the honorary Committee for the Peninsula Stroke Assn., and board member emeritus for USF. She loves to sail, cook and
entertain and has a passion for working with the senior population. She feels that
they have much love to give and much knowledge to share.
The Magnolia of Millbrae
www.TheMagnolia.com
650.697.7700
email:[email protected]
Share your heart Share your home, become a Mentor today.
California MENTOR is seeking loving families with a spare bedroom in the counties of San Francisco,
San Mateo and Marin to support adults with special needs. Receive a competitive monthly stipend
and ongoing support. For information on how you can become a Mentor call 650-389-5787 ext. 2
Family Home Agency
Specializes in Short Sales & Property Management
REAL
COMMITMENT
REAL RESULTS
Berta is celebrating her 35th year with
Marshall Realty. She is a former president
of the San Bruno Park School District
(trustee from 1995 to 1999); past member of the San Bruno Youth committee
and Childcare Committee for the City of
San Bruno. Member of NAHREP National
Assn. of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals. Specializes in Property Management
and is top achiever in sales and listings.
650.400.8076
[email protected]
www.GinnyKavanaugh.com
CalBRE# 00884747
Si habla espanol
Marshall Realty
683 Jenevien Ave. San Bruno
(650) 873-6844
Cell - (650) 867-3192

Faith, Love, Community, Service

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MARIA BLANCO - UC Davis School of Law

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Faith, Love, Community, Service

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