Angelus News | July 14, 2023 | Vol. 8 No. 14

ANGELS AT WORK 

How a new church is rising in Pacoima 

ANGELUS 

July 14, 2023 Vol. 8 No. 14

ANGELUS 

July 14, 2023 

Vol. 8 • No. 14 

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ON THE COVER 

VICTOR ALEMÁN 

Father Luis Estrada, new administrator at 

Guardian Angel Church in Pacoima, takes 

part in a Sunday, June 18, groundbreaking 

event for a new 17,000-square-foot church. 

On Page 10, Tom Hoffarth reports on how 

determined parishioners in one of the poorest 

corners of LA overcame a series of setbacks 

to make their dream a reality. 

THIS PAGE 

OFFICE OF LIFE, JUSTICE, AND PEACE 

Volunteers handed out donated clothes, toiletries, and 

other supplies to more than 150 refugees at the Cobina 

Posada del Migrante Shelter in Mexicali, Mexico, on 

World Refugee Day June 20. The archdiocesan Office of 

Immigration Affairs, together with the nonprofit Border 

Compassion and SoCal Immigration Task Force, collected 

the donated items at St. Cornelius Church in Long Beach to 

be taken across the border. 

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Pope Watch.................................................................................................................................... 2 

Archbishop Gomez..................................................................................................................... 3 

World, Nation, and Local News.......................................................................................... 4-6 

In Other Words............................................................................................................................. 7 

Father Rolheiser............................................................................................................................ 8 

Scott Hahn................................................................................................................................... 32 

Events Calendar......................................................................................................................... 33 

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CONTENTS 

World-famous Eucharistic miracle exhibit arrives to more than 30 LA parishes 

San Gabriel Mission celebrates latest ‘visible sign of resurrection’ 

John Allen on the winds of change blowing at the Synod on Synodality 

Charlie Camosy: What California’s Catholic leaders are getting right 

Is this short story collection the best new Catholic fiction out there? 

Sign up for our free, daily e-newsletter 

Always Forward - newsletter.angelusnews.com 

26 

30 

Greg Erlandson weighs in on the modern manhood crisis 

Heather King: ‘Omelas,’ suffering, and the price of happiness 

July 14, 2023 • ANGELUS • 1

POPE WATCH 

Rediscover adoration 

The following is adapted from the 

Holy Father’s June 19 address to the 

Organizing Committee of the National 

Eucharistic Congress in the United 

States. 

All of us are familiar with the 

multiplication of the loaves 

recorded in the Gospel of John. 

The people who witnessed this 

miracle came back to the Lord the 

following day in hopes of seeing him 

perform another sign. Yet Christ 

desired to transform their hunger for 

material bread into a hunger for the 

bread of eternal life. 

The Eucharist is God’s response to 

the deepest hunger of the human 

heart, the hunger for authentic life, 

for in the Eucharist Christ himself is 

truly in our midst, to nourish, console, 

and sustain us on our journey. 

Sadly nowadays, there are those 

among the Catholic faithful who 

believe that the Eucharist is more a 

symbol than the reality of the Lord’s 

presence and love. It is more than a 

symbol; it is the real and loving presence 

of the Lord. 

It is my hope that the Eucharistic 

Congress will inspire Catholics 

throughout the country to discover 

anew the sense of wonder and awe at 

the Lord’s great gift of himself and to 

spend time with him in the celebration 

of the holy Mass and in personal 

prayer and adoration before the Blessed 

Sacrament. 

We have lost the sense of adoration 

in our day. We must rediscover the 

sense of adoration in silence. It is a 

form of prayer that we have lost. Too 

few people know what it is. It is up to 

the bishops to catechize the faithful 

about praying through adoration. 

I likewise trust that the Congress 

will be an occasion for the faithful to 

commit themselves with ever greater 

zeal to being missionary disciples. 

In the Eucharist, we encounter the 

One who gave everything for us, who 

sacrificed himself in order to give 

us life, who loved us to the end. We 

become credible witnesses to the joy 

and transforming beauty of the Gospel 

only when we recognize that the love 

we celebrate in this sacrament cannot 

be kept to ourselves but demands to 

be shared with all. This is the sense of 

a missionary spirit. 

You go to the celebration of Mass, 

receive Communion, adore the Lord 

and then what do you do after? You 

go out and evangelize. Jesus asks this 

of us. 

The Eucharist impels us to a strong 

and committed love of neighbor, for 

we cannot truly understand or live the 

meaning of the Eucharist if our hearts 

are closed to our brothers and sisters, 

especially those who are poor, suffering, 

weary, or who may have gone 

astray in life. Two groups of people 

come to mind whom we must always 

seek out: the elderly, who are the 

wisdom of a people, and the sick, who 

are the image of the suffering Jesus. 

This congress marks a significant 

moment in the life of the Church in 

the United States. May all that you are 

doing be an occasion of grace for each 

of you and may it bear fruit in guiding 

men and women in your nation to the 

Lord. 

Papal Prayer Intention for July: We pray that Catholics may 

place the celebration of the Eucharist at the heart of their 

lives, transforming human relationships in a very deep 

way and opening to the encounter with God and all their 

brothers and sisters. 

2 • ANGELUS • July 14, 2023

NEW WORLD OF FAITH 

ARCHBISHOP JOSÉ H. GOMEZ 

San Gabriel and the American mission 

On July 1, Mission San Gabriel 

Arcángel fully reopened to the 

public for the first time since 

the pandemic and the devastating 

arson attack in July 2020. 

I had the privilege a few days 

beforehand to bless the exquisitely 

renewed altarpiece, along with the 

new museum and garden space, and 

to take part in an emotional ceremony 

with descendants from the original 

mission. 

The mission was founded in 1771 by 

St. Junípero Serra and his Franciscan 

brothers and was built by and for the 

Tongva natives, the first peoples of this 

land. 

The ceremony was built around their 

prayers, rituals, and sacred music, all 

in their native tongue. 

One of their songs included these 

moving lines: “O my ancestors, listen 

to my heart / O my ancestors, here is 

my heart.” 

It reminded me of those words from 

the Letter to the Hebrews: “We are 

surrounded by so great a cloud of 

witnesses.” 

These words remind us that our faith 

is never a solitary journey. We owe the 

gift of faith to our ancestors, to those 

who have gone before us, that great 

cloud of witnesses down through the 

ages, who professed the Catholic faith 

and proclaimed it. 

The missionaries came to this country 

with that noble intention, to share 

what they believed was the greatest 

gift they could ever give, the gift of 

knowing Jesus Christ and his love and 

salvation. 

As you enter into the restored mission 

museum, you encounter a white 

wall inscribed with the names of the 

7,054 Native Americans baptized at 

the mission from 1771 to 1848. 

It is a striking visual testimony to the 

truth that every soul is precious in 

the eyes of our loving God. And it is 

beautiful to reflect that the original 

baptismal font used by Junípero and 

the Franciscans is still there in the 

mission’s baptistry. 

The Franciscans kept track of every 

baptism, every marriage, and every 

burial. For them, this was not simply 

paperwork, it was “soulcraft.” They 

were charting the faith journeys of the 

souls entrusted to their care, as they 

made their way through the challenges 

of this world to the love that never 

ends in heaven. 

The new mission museum is world-class. 

And as its co-curator, University 

of California historian Steven 

Hackel, Ph.D., said in the opening 

ceremony, there is no museum in 

Los Angeles that tells the story that 

the mission museum tells, “a unique 

and vibrant history where the past so 

palpably informs the present.” 

He is right. The past is alive and 

“present” here. As I walked the mission 

campus, I felt the strong sense 

that I was on holy ground, walking 

among the souls of the 5,000 Natives 

who are buried here, proud sons 

and daughters of this land’s ancient 

peoples who had met Jesus Christ and 

decided to make him the way and the 

truth for their lives. 

In one of the museum rooms, along 

with some masterpieces of colonial-era 

Spanish painting, there is 

a confessional that scholars believe 

Junípero used. I thought of all the 

countless souls reconciled to God 

through the mission’s ministry, all 

those men and women who heard 

those beautiful words from the mission 

priests: “I absolve you from your 

sins. ...” 

Mission San Gabriel will always be 

the true spiritual heart of Los Angeles. 

The mission marks the birthplace of 

the Christian faith here and, 10 years 

after the mission was established, the 

city itself was founded by men and 

women who came from the mission. 

The mission is a sign of the Christian 

beginnings, not only of our city, but of 

our nation. 

I have often remarked how, in God’s 

providence, the feast of St. Junípero 

Serra falls on July 1 and the celebration 

of America’s independence on 

July 4. 

This too is “God’s reminder” that 

the missionaries were here first, that 

the people of this country were called 

Christians long before they were 

called Americans. 

The same “worldview” and values 

that inspired Junípero and the missionaries 

are reflected in our Declaration 

of Independence, which is rooted in 

the belief that all men and women 

are created by God out of love and 

endowed with equal dignity and equal 

rights, and called to a transcendent 

destiny. 

The American dream still depends 

on this belief. 

Pray for me and I will pray for you. 

And as we mark America’s independence, 

let us pray that our neighbors 

and leaders will continue to treasure 

our Christian heritage and know that 

these Christian values are essential to 

our nation’s ideals and institutions. 

Let us entrust ourselves and our nation 

to the Immaculate Heart of Mary 

our Blessed Mother. 

By her intercession, may we be 

renewed in our dedication to continue 

the work of the missionaries and 

to bring Jesus into the lives of every 

person in this land. 


WORLD 

■ Fátima visionary, Black American 

sister closer to sainthood 

Mother Mary Elizabeth Lange (left) and Sister Lúcia dos Santos. | CNS 

■ Catholic sister who revolutionized 

Indian education dies at 86 

Girls at the Rainbow Home in Kolkata, India, get 

a goodnight blessing from Loreto Sister Cyril 

Mooney in 2011. | CNS/ANTO AKKARA 

Catholics in India 

are mourning the 

death of an Irish nun 

who helped expand 

education access to 

the country’s poor. 

Sister Cyril Mooney, 

IBVM, died June 

24 in Kolkata at the 

age of 86. While a 

school principal in the 

1980s, she founded a 

program that covered 

tuition for poor 

students using the 

payments made by 

students from well-off 

families. 

The program’s 

model, which allowed 

more than 450,000 children in poverty to attend school, was 

imitated by the entire country of India, which since 2010 has 

required private schools to follow a 25% quota for disadvantaged 

students similar to Mooney’s. 

Mooney also opened a home at the school for roughly 200 

street children with no families. 

She was awarded India’s highest civil award, the Padma 

Shri, in 2007, and Ireland’s distinguished service award in 

2013. 

Pope Francis recognized the heroic virtues of two influential 

Catholic sisters June 22, moving both closer to sainthood. 

Born in Cuba to Haitian parents, Mother Mary Elizabeth 

Lange moved to Baltimore in 1813 and later started a 

school there for Black children who had no access to free 

education. She later founded the Oblate Sisters of Providence, 

the first religious order for Black women at a time 

when Black Catholics were barred from religious communities 

in the U.S. 

“She was determined to respond to that need in spite of 

being a black woman in a slave state long before the Emancipation 

Proclamation,” reads Lange’s official biography for 

her sainthood cause. “She used her own money and home 

to educate children of color.” 

Sister Lúcia dos Santos was one of the three children — 

including her cousins, Francisco and Jacinta — that the 

Virgin Mary appeared to at Fátima starting in 1917. Her 

written memoirs have been an important account of the 

message of the Fátima apparitions. 

Though her cousins both died in childhood and were 

canonized saints in 2017, Lúcia spent 50 years as a cloistered 

Carmelite in Coimbra, Portugal, dying at 97 in 2005. 

A family shares a 

meal at the New 

Church of God 

of Deliverance 

camp for displaced 

people in Port-au- 

Prince, Haiti, June 

19. | OSV NEWS/ 

RALPH TEDY EROL, 

REUTERS 

■ Does Haiti need its own Marshall Plan? 

Haiti needs the help of a “new Marshall Plan” to bring it 

out of the worst humanitarian crisis in its history, one of its 

Catholic bishops believes. 

Bishop Pierre-André Dumas of Anse-à-Veau-Miragoâne 

made the comments to Vatican News in the wake of a new 

UNICEF report showing an alarming increase in endemic 

poverty in the country — especially affecting children. 

UNICEF estimates that territory covering approximately 

2 million people is now controlled by armed gangs, where 

violence, summary executions, kidnapping, and sexual 

assault are more common. 

Dumas called for the international community to step up 

relief efforts in the country, which is also facing a cholera 

pandemic following recent flooding and earthquakes. 

“The humanitarian needs are even greater today than 

after the devastating earthquake of 2010, but with far fewer 

resources to respond,” UNICEF Executive Director Catherine 

Russell told Vatican News. 


NATION 

■ Supreme Court sides with Christian 

postal worker in Sabbath case 

The Supreme Court unanimously rejected a legal interpretation that has been 

used to deny employees religious accommodations. 

In its ruling on Groff v. DeJoy, the court sided with Gerald Groff, a Christian 

postal worker who claimed he had been disciplined by the USPS for refusing to 

work Sundays due to religious beliefs. 

The USPS had relied on the “de minimis” interpretation of Title VII of the Civil 

Rights Act, which allowed employers to reject religious accommodations if they 

imposed more than a trivial cost. 

Under this decision, employers must show that a religious accommodation 

would result in substantial increased costs in order to deny it. The Supreme Court 

has returned Groff’s case to lower courts to be examined under the new standard. 

■ Study: Church attendance up, but still down 

More Americans are going to church this year, but still not enough to match 

pandemic losses. 

According to a Gallup poll released June 26, 31% of survey respondents said 

they had attended religious services in the past seven days. That is up from 30% 

last year, but still below the 34% attendance rate in 2019. It also follows a general 

decline seen since 2009, when 42% said they attended services. 

The rates of decline are starker for Catholics than Protestants: 30% of Catholics 

attend Mass, down from 37% as a 2016-2019 average compared to Protestants’ 

fall to 40% from 44% in the same period. 

■ Biden calls for more contraception access 

on Dobbs 

anniversary 

President Joe 

Biden marked 

the first anniversary 

of the 

Supreme Court’s 

overturning of 

Roe v. Wade by 

signing an executive 

order aimed 

at expanding 

access to contraception. 

The June 23 

order directs 

federal agencies 

to consider new 

Pro-lifers gather near the Lincoln Monument in Washington, D.C., June 24 at a rally 

to commemorate the first anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling that 

overturned Roe v. Wade. | OSV NEWS/EVELYN HOCKSTEIN, REUTERS 

guidelines enabling more over-the-counter access to contraceptives, including 

those that induce an abortion. It also asked the agencies to explore policies 

ensuring private health insurance coverage of all FDA-approved contraceptives 

without cost sharing. 

Five days later at a campaign fundraiser in Maryland, Biden reasserted his 

position favoring federal protections of abortion access provided by Roe v. Wade 

despite personal issues with abortion. 

“So I’m — you know, I happen to be a practicing Catholic. I’m not big on 

abortion,” he said. “But guess what? Roe v. Wade got it right.” 

Bishop Richard Stika in 2019. | CNS/VATICAN MEDIA 

■ Tennessee bishop 

out; Texas bishop under 

Vatican investigation 

Two U.S. bishops made headlines 

last month following news of Vatican-ordered 

investigations. 

On June 27, Pope Francis accepted 

the resignation of Bishop Richard F. 

Stika, 65, of Knoxville, Tennessee. 

The Vatican had been investigating 

Stika for allegedly covering up sexual 

abuse by a seminarian, as well as 

financial mismanagement. However, 

the bishop cited health reasons for 

his resignation, and following the 

announcement told a local reporter 

that a priest had sexually abused him 

when he was a teenager. 

Meanwhile in Tyler, Texas, two U.S. 

bishops completed a weeklong “apostolic 

visitation” in June on behalf of 

the Vatican. 

The cause of the investigation is 

unclear, but news reports claimed that 

the bishops interviewed diocesan staff 

looking into Bishop Joseph Strickland’s 

social media use and diocesan 

management. 

Strickland has gained national attention 

for his social media use, especially 

for criticism of Pope Francis that 

included a May 12 tweet claiming the 

pope was “undermining the Deposit 

of Faith.” 


LOCAL 

■ USC Catholic 

institute founder marks 

50 years as a priest 

Father James Heft, the founder and 

longtime leader of the Institute for 

Advanced Catholic Studies at USC, 

celebrated his golden jubilee on June 9. 

Ordained in 1973 in Cleveland, Ohio, 

as a Marianist priest, Heft spent more 

than 25 years at the University of Dayton, 

before moving to LA and founding 

the institute, known today as a global 

hub for Catholic thought, imagination, 

and experience. 

An expert on Catholic higher education, 

Heft has written and edited 

numerous books, articles, and journals, 

and was honored with the Theodore 

Hesburgh Award in 2011 by the 

Association of Catholic Colleges and 

Universities. 

Looking back on his priesthood, 

Heft said God has been “prodigal” in 

“blessing me, both as a Marianist and a 

Catholic, with his mercy and love.” 

■ Archdiocese 

to reintroduce 

Communion chalice 

during Mass 

Starting July 15, the distribution of 

the Precious Blood of Christ in the 

Archdiocese of Los Angeles “may be 

reintroduced into parish Masses at the 

pastor’s discretion,” Archbishop José H. 

Gomez announced. 

“Communion from the chalice is to 

be restored, so that all may have the 

opportunity to participate more fully in 

the celebration of the Eucharist,” wrote 

Archbishop Gomez in a June 28 letter 

to priests in the archdiocese. 

Distribution of Communion wine at 

Mass had been officially suspended 

since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic 

in early 2020. 

In his letter, Archbishop Gomez said 

the move “provides an opportunity 

during this time of national Eucharistic 

Revival, to gain a renewed appreciation 

of, and devotion to Jesus who makes 

himself present to us in holy Communion 

at every Mass.” 

■ South LA catechism students add some color 

to Corpus 

Christi 

A South LA parish 

found one creative 

way to keep catechism 

students into 

the start of summer. 

Three catechism 

students at St. 

John the Evangelist 

Church were 

honored as part of a 

Corpus Christi tradition 

that the parish’s 

pastor, Father 

Pavol Sochulak, 

SVD, learned about 

after being ordained 

in Germany. 

Father Pavol Sochulak, SVD, stands in front of the makeshift altar with some of 

the art created for Corpus Christi. | SUBMITTED PHOTO 

Sochulak, who is originally from Slovakia, noticed while in Germany how 

townspeople would create artworks using seeds of different colors and place 

them on altars built to be seen during the traditional Corpus Christi Eucharistic 

procession. This year, he asked catechism students to create some Bible-themed 

art with different seeds before inviting parishioners to vote for their favorite. 

“It was a simple idea, but I really like it,” said Sochulak, who is leaving St. 

John’s for a new assignment in San Bernardino this summer. “I tried to involve 

the youth into this part of religiosity and what we have in our Catholic Church.” 

The winning students were: Kelly Cruz (first place), Diamond Rangel (second 

place) and Jocelyn Parra (third place). 

Crooning at Carnegie — The Bishop Amat High School student Chamber Singers spent six days touring New 

York City, culminating in the group performing “Requiem for the Living” at Carnegie Hall along with the Masterwork 

Festival Chorus and New York City Chamber Orchestra. While touring sites such as the Statue of Liberty and 

taking in two Broadway shows, the students found time to stage impromptu performances at St. Paul’s Chapel and 

Central Park. | JENNIFER ESCOVAR 

Y 


V 

IN OTHER WORDS... 

Letters to the Editor 

The AI balancing act 

Regarding the recent interview on the subject of artificial intelligence 

(AI) in the June 30 issue: Justin Welter and Joseph Vukov both point to 

Catholicism’s capacity to directly answer the debacle of AI through person-centered 

ethics. It seems that more extreme camps of the issue divide into “AI is going 

to take all of our creative jobs and force us into hard labor” and “Human creativity 

is being rightfully supplanted by AI generation.” Their mistake is not seeing 

humans beyond their own function. 

As Welter pointed out, “original sin is probably more powerful than AI.” Technology 

is a tool and a tool will be used to destroy if the holder thinks that is its only 

function. Catholics know there is much more to themselves and the capabilities 

of their creations. Still, with technology as powerful as AI, is the possibility of 

destruction not too much of a risk? Can Catholics remain both hopeful and aware 

of our fallen nature? 

— Dean Robbins is an undergraduate student at Catholic University of America 

in Washington, D.C. 

Y 

Continue the conversation! To submit a letter to the editor, visit AngelusNews.com/Letters-To-The-Editor 

and use our online form or send an email to editorial@angelusnews.com. Please limit to 300 words. Letters 

may be edited for style, brevity, and clarity. 

Mission makeover 

“I used to think that God 

watches people suffer, but 

this showed me that God 

actually suffers with you.” 

~ Musician Trevor Powers, in a June 11 NPR 

interview on how losing his voice gave him a new 

appreciation for God. 

“If it’s circumstantial, it’s 

God’s providence; if it’s 

possibly intentional, that’s 

in God’s providence also.” 

~ Father William Holiday, a priest in Orlando, Florida, 

in a June 25 interview with local news station WKMG 

on whether his burned church was targeted. 

“I would love it if Black 

Catholics know they’re 

not alone.” 

~ Sister Josephine Garrett, in a June 26 Our Sunday 

Visitor interview on the creation of her new podcast, 

“Hope Stories with Black Catholics.” 

“This game might be 

the only Bible some 

people read.” 

~ Game creator Arve Solli, in a June 22 FaithWire article 

on the new Bible-themed video game, Gate Zero. 

“Everybody comes into the 

world being held, and they 

should leave being held.” 

~ Ben Kresse, teacher at St. Xavier High School in 

Kentucky, in a June 27 National Catholic Register 

article on high school students participating in 

pallbearer ministries. 

Andrew Morales of the Gabrieleño San Gabriel Band of Mission Indians helps with singing traditional welcome 

songs and blessing the renewed Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, which reopened to the public on July 1, feast day of 

St. Junípero Serra. Archbishop José H. Gomez was also on hand to bless the mission church’s new interior, as well as a 

“reimagined” museum. Read more about the mission’s reopening on Page 18. | JOHN RUEDA 

View more photos 

from this gallery at 

AngelusNews.com/photos-videos 

Do you have photos or a story from your parish that you’d 

like to share? Please send to editorial @angelusnews.com. 

“The bell bore witness to a 

difficult history but also to 

peace and hope.” 

~ Bishop Jacek Jezierski of the Diocese of Elbląg, in a 

June 26 Catholic News Agency article on the return of 

Nazi-plundered bells returning to Poland. 


IN EXILE 

FATHER RONALD ROLHEISER, OMI 

Oblate of Mary Immaculate Father 

Ronald Rolheiser is a spiritual 

writer; ronrolheiser.com 

The therapy of a public life 

More than 50 years ago, Philip 

Rieff wrote a book entitled 

“The Triumph of the Therapeutic.” 

In it, he argued that widespread 

reliance upon private therapy 

today arose in the secularized world 

largely because community has broken 

down. 

In societies where there are strong 

families and strong communities, he 

contends, there is less need for private 

therapy. People can more easily work 

out their problems through and within 

the community. 

If Rieff is right, and I suggest he is, 

then it follows that the solution to many 

of the things that drive us to the therapeutic 

couch today lie as much, and 

perhaps more, in a fuller and healthier 

participation within public life, 

including ecclesial life, than in private 

therapy. We need, as Parker Palmer 

suggests, the therapy of a public life. 

What is meant by this? How can public 

life help heal us? 

In caption: Public life (life within 

community, beyond our private intimacies) 

becomes therapeutic by immersing 

our fragility into a social network 

which can help carry our sanity, give us 

a certain rhythm within which to walk, 

and link us to resources beyond the 

poverty of our private helplessness. 

To participate healthily in other people’s 

lives links our lives to something 

bigger than ourselves, and this is its 

own therapy because most public life 

has a certain rhythm and regularity to 

it that helps calm the chaotic whirl of 

our private lives, which are often racked 

with disorientation, depression, psychological 

fragility, paranoia, and a variety 

of obsessions. 

Participation in public life gives us 

clearly defined things to do: regular 

stopping places, regular events of 

structure, a steadiness, a rhythm. These 

are commodities the psychiatric couch 

does not provide. Public life links us to 

resources that can empower us beyond 

our own helplessness. What we dream 

alone, remains a dream. What we 

dream with others can become a reality. 

But all this is rather abstract. Let me 

try to illustrate with an example. While 

doing doctoral studies in Belgium, I 

was privileged to attend the lectures of 

Antoine Vergote, a renowned doctor of 

both psychology and the soul. I asked 

him one day how one should handle 

emotional obsessions, both within 

oneself and when trying to help others. 

His answer surprised me. He said something 

to this effect: 

“The temptation you might have as 

a priest is to simplistically follow the 

religious edict: ‘Take your troubles to 

the chapel! Pray it all through. God 

will help you.’ It’s not that this is wrong. 

God and prayer can and do help. But 

most paralyzing obsessional problems 

are ultimately problems of over-concentration 

. . . and over-concentration 

is broken mainly by getting outside of 

yourself, outside of your own mind and 

heart, life, and room. Have the emotionally 

paralyzed person get involved 

in public things — social gatherings, 

entertainment, politics, work, church. 

Get the person outside of his or her 

closed world and into public life!” 

He went on, of course, to qualify this 

so that it differs considerably from any 

simplistic temptation to simply bury 

oneself in distractions and work. His 

advice here is not that one should run 

away from doing painful inner work, 

but rather that doing one’s inner work 

is sometimes very dependent upon 

outside relationships. Sometimes only a 

community can stabilize your sanity. 

As a corollary to this, I offer this example: 

I have been teaching theology in 

a number of colleges for more than 40 

years. Many is the emotionally unstable 

student, fraught with every kind of inner 

pain and unsteadiness, who shows 

up at these colleges, hangs around 

its classrooms, cafeteria, chapel, and 

social areas, and slowly gets steadier and 

stronger emotionally. And that strength 

and steadiness come not so much from 

the theology courses, but from the 

rhythm and health of the community 

life. These students get better not so 

much by what they learn in the classrooms 

as they do by participating in the 

life outside of them. The therapy of a 

public life helps heal them. 

Further, for us as Christians, the 

therapy of public life also means the 

therapy of an ecclesial life. We become 

emotionally healthier, steadier, less 

obsessed, less a slave of our own restlessness, 

and more able to become who 

and what we want to be by participating 

healthily within the public life of the 

church. 

Monks, with their monastic rhythm, 

have long understood this and have secrets 

worth knowing: Program, rhythm, 

public participation, the demand to 

show up, and the discipline of the 

monastic bell have kept many a man 

or woman sane — and relatively happy 

besides. 

Regular Eucharist, regular prayer with 

others, regular meetings with others 

to share faith, and regular duties and 

responsibilities within ministry not only 

deeply nurture our spiritual lives, they 

also help keep us sane and steady. 

Robert Lax, who greatly influenced 

Thomas Merton, suggests that our task 

in life is not so much finding a path in 

the woods as of finding a rhythm to walk 

in. Public life can help us find that 

rhythm. 


PATIENCE PAYS IN PACOIMA 

After years of priest changes, construction delays, and tamale sales, a 

new church is rising in one of the toughest corners of LA. 

BY TOM HOFFARTH & PABLO KAY 

Archbishop José H. Gomez blesses the crowd at the 

groundbreaking for the new Guardian Angel Church 

building in Pacoima. | VICTOR ALEMÁN 

Over the last 20-plus years, 

plenty of guardian angels have 

watched over the effort to build 

a new church for parishioners of the 

Guardian Angel Catholic community 

in Pacoima. 

But last month, at last, trucks were 

moving dirt and pouring concrete 

behind a gate adorned with a piece of 

plywood that reads “12305 Terra Bella 

Street.” 

The milestone was celebrated as a 

testament to the faith of Guardian Angel’s 

parishioners at a Sunday, June 18, 

ground-blessing ceremony attended by 

Archbishop José H. Gomez and nearly 

400 people at the four-acre parcel of 

land steps away from Pacoima’s Hansen 

Dam Recreational Center. 

The new 17,000-square-foot church, 

on track to open in summer 2024, will 

seat some 1,300 people. The project 

calls for parking space for more than 

200 cars, parish office and meeting 

room space, plus widened surrounding 

streets and new sidewalks. 

It is a notable improvement over the 

site of the current 200-seat church that 

sits about a mile east, built almost 70 

years ago at 1088 Lehigh Ave., just off 

Van Nuys Blvd. It is surrounded by the 

densely populated and landlocked San 

Fernando Gardens, one of the oldest 

low-income public housing project 

developments in Los Angeles that has 

overcome a troubled past with gang 

violence. 

Parking there is almost nonexistent. 

Even when the church celebrates five 

Masses every Sunday, it only allows for 

about 1,000 total worshippers. A small 

patio behind it with folding chairs 

serves as a gathering spot, whether for 

Mass overflow or fellowship afterward 

despite often baking in the San Fernando 

Valley summer sun or on chilly 

winter days. 

“I have seen parishioners stand outside 

in the rain for Mass,” said Gerardo 

Ascencio, a Guardian Angel parishioner 

for more than 40 years and president 

of the parish’s capital campaign for the 

new church. 

Ascencio said he was first drawn to 


Guardian Angel when in high school 

while helping his father in music 

ministry. Ascencio met his future wife 

at a church fiesta and they now have 

three sons who attend school there. 

He’s been inspired by the parishioners’ 

resolve, including the drive to make 

this new church happen. 

“They would never give up on 

Guardian Angel,” Ascencio said of 

his fellow parishioners. “I think that 

standard sent out a strong indication 

of how they were brought up. For a 

new church, we can ask the Mexican 

American community to think of this 

as a heritage building, like they do in 

small towns in Mexico. They can put 

their muscle and money into making 

this a reality.” 

Jose Ponce said the parish’s peaceful, 

welcoming ambiance has kept them 

for all his 28 years. Witnessing the 

groundbreaking gave him hope. 

“I look forward to having everyone 

being able to be inside the church, not 

sectioned off, all coming together,” said 

Ponce. 

For a community that already has 

a source of pride in Eric Mejia, a 

28-year-old 

parishioner 

raised by a single 

mother in the 

surrounding 

projects who was 

ordained a transitional 

deacon in 

June and has one 

year of studies 

left at St. John’s 

Seminary, the 

Currently, Guardian 

Angel Church only 

holds some 200 people. 

For years, the overflow 

crowd has had to listen to 

Mass while sitting in an 

outdoor patio area. 

| VICTOR ALEMÁN 

opening of the new church is expected 

to coincide with his planned ordination 

to the priesthood and only adds to their 

gratitude. 

But few in the crowd that day knew 

the history of the project as well as 

Bishop Gerald Wilkerson. 

Soon after taking over the San 

Fernando Pastoral Region as a new 

auxiliary bishop in 1998, Wilkerson 

heard from the pastor of Guardian 

Angel at the time, Father Juan Enriquez, 

about plans for a new church. 

After a feasibility study was completed, 

the bishop and Enriquez’s successor, 

Father Steve Guitron, canvassed the 

area to find a site. 

Once the property at Terra Bella was 

agreed upon in 2003, Wilkerson needed 

a new source of help. 

While the Guardian Angels parishioners 

could do fundraising — sales of 

tamale or menudo or fruit drinks on 

Sundays, or larger raffles and fiestas 

— it wouldn’t be nearly enough. 

Wilkerson asked leadership at the 55 

parishes of his region to help purchase 

the land through a three-year donation 

added on to their Together in Mission 

commitment. When some $2.5 million 

was raised, a six-acre L-shaped spot was 

bought in 2009, with the plan to have 

not just a larger church on one end, 

but room for the school, a rectory, and 

parish hall. 

Now the challenge was finding a way 

to pay for all the construction. 

Guitron’s plans to the archdiocese 

building commissioner were considered 

not financially viable. After 

revisions, more land entitlements, and 

permits, architectural firm Jp Darling 

& Associates was hired for the project 

in 2014. Wilkerson retired in 2015, 

but not before he reluctantly agreed 

that two acres of the original six-acre 

plot had to be sold off in order to fund 

construction. 

When Father Rafael Lara arrived as 

pastor in 2018, he tried to rebuild momentum 

and tamp down discouragement, 

but was dealt two new setbacks 

in 2020: the death of architect Darling 

and the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In 2021, architect Chuck Kluger — 

with more than 25 years experience in 

archdiocesan projects — was brought 

in to work with the existing designs. 

Hoffman & Associates Building in Van 

Nuys was asked to take over construction. 

Today, a project that the Archdiocese 

of Los Angeles estimates will come 

to $12.7 million is only half funded 

with the latest influx of donations and 

grants. Those include the steady support 

provided by the annual Cardinal’s 

Award fundraisers and the philanthropic 

efforts of the Shea Foundation 

through Brother Hilarion O’Connor, 

operators director and Strategic Capital 

Projects leader for the Cathedral of 

Our Lady of the Angels. 

There is still $6.5 million outstanding 

to pay a construction loan. 

The circular irony is not lost on 

Wilkerson, who was asked by Archbishop 

Gomez last fall to come out 


of retirement 

and oversee the 

San Fernando 

Pastoral Region 

once again while 

Auxiliary Bishop 

Alex Alcan recovers 

from a stroke. 

Bishop Gerald Wilkerson 

has been involved in 

efforts to build a new 

church at Guardian 

Angel for 25 years. 


“I know I wasn’t sure if I would still 

be here to see this,” Wilkerson, 82, said 

with a laugh. “The archdiocese and 

the region should really be proud of 

this. Guardian Angel Church is going 

to rise a year from now as a result of 

every pastor and every person in this 

region continuing their effort to make 

it happen.” 

Kluger described the new Guardian 

Angel church with its arches, tiles, and 

colors as a modern interpretation of a 

traditional Spanish architecture. He 

said he feels it fits well into the personality 

of the community it will serve. 

“They have really embraced this 

design from the start, and those who 

were here at the start took community 

involvement into it,” said Kluger. 

“Considering the story of where it started 

and where we are now, you see God 

may not have a plan that’s straight, but 

Architect Chuck Kluger 

looks at blueprints during 

a visit to the church 

construction site. Kluger 

took over the project in 

2021 after the original 

architect died in 2020. 

| TOM HOFFARTH 

it will be done 

right. It’s having 

faith in the 

process.” 

Chris Hoffman 

said his construction 

company 

rarely gets to 

build churches 

from the ground up nowadays. 

“This is more than building a church. 

It’s building a community,” said 

Hoffman, a parishioner at Our Lady 

of Grace Church in Encino. “It is very 

much ministry work for us. No shortcuts. 

This building has to be around for 

a long time.” 

One of Hoffman’s first steps in a focus 

on “value engineering” was to change 

from an expensive steel structure framing 

plan and move to a more flexible 

wood-frame approach, in the wake of 

current escalating prices for materials. 

While the parish school will stay at 

its current site, the future use of the 

soon-to-be former church is still to be 

determined. 

Meanwhile, the start of the construc- 


tion project coincided with another 

change: the departure of Lara, who 

was assigned as pastor in the town of 

Guadalupe outside Santa Barbara. 

“For me as a pastor, this experience 

was almost like touching heaven,” said 

Lara. “The church will be a great benefit 

and spiritual comfort to hundreds 

of families in Pacoima.” 

New administrator Father Luis Estrada, 

who comes from St. Rose of Lima 

Church in Simi Valley, knows how 

hard his new parishioners have worked 

to get to this point. 

“I am sure we can raise what is still 

needed,” said Estrada. “This is a mission 

not just for Pacoima, but for all of 

us in Los Angeles to say thank you to 

God. 

“I can envision still having five Masses 

every Sunday,” he added, “and all of 

the seats filled in each one.” 

Tom Hoffarth is an award-winning 

journalist based in Los Angeles. 

Pablo Kay is the Editor-in-Chief of 

Angelus. 


Bringing miracles home 

Thanks to an unplanned twist during a pilgrimage to Italy, 

Blessed Carlo Acutis’ exhibit on Eucharistic miracles is 

coming to more than 30 LA parishes. 

BY GREG HARDESTY 

Visitors check out the exhibit on Eucharistic miracles at Christ the King 

Church near Hollywood on June 11, the day it opened. | VICTOR ALEMÁN 

14 • ANGELUS • July 14, 2023

Being three minutes late was all it 

took to change Patrick Magat’s 

life. 

Magat and seven other members of 

his church group had made it to the 

Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi last 

September during a tour of Italy, but 

they were turned away at 7:03 p.m. 

from viewing the body of Blessed 

Carlo Acutis. 

Closing time was 7 p.m. sharp. 

Rather than leaving with the rest of 

the church group, Magat and his aunt 

stayed overnight in Assisi to venerate 

Acutis the following day. 

“Something told me that this was 

about more than a visit,” Magat 

recalled. 

Turns out that it was. 

Magat, who oversees livestreaming 

of Sunday Masses at Christ the King 

Church in Hollywood, had become 

interested in Acutis’ life after Pope 

Francis beatified him on Oct. 10, 

2020. 

That and Magat’s experience in Assisi 

inspired him to bring an exhibition 

to Christ the King that is based on a 

website Acutis created that catalogs 

the 100-plus Eucharistic miracles 

recognized by the Catholic Church. 

Much like Acutis’ faith grew during 

his brief life, the exhibition has caught 

fire and will be traveling to more than 

30 other parishes in the Archdiocese 

of Los Angeles through next spring, 

fueled by growing interest in Acutis’ 

life at a time when the National 

Eucharistic Revival is in full swing. 

“We never expected so many parishes 

to say yes to hosting the exhibit 

— that was something surprising to 

all of us,” said Father Juan Ochoa, 

pastor of Christ the King and director 

of the archdiocese’s Office for Divine 

Worship. 

Maybe not so surprising considering 

Acutis’ life story. 

After Acutis was beatified, interest 

grew in a website he created that catalogs 

Eucharistic miracles throughout 

the ages and around the world. 

Acutis, a gamer and computer 

programmer born in London and 

raised in Italy, was 15 when he died 

of leukemia in 2006. He was devoted 

to serving the poor, and his deep faith 

led to the conversion of his family 

and sent him on pilgrimages to the 

birthplaces of saints and the sites of 

Eucharistic miracles. 

Acutis asked to be buried in Assisi 

because of his love for St. Francis of 

Assisi, patron saint of the poor. The 

teenager was known for buying sleeping 

bags for the homeless and giving 

away what money he had. 

And Acutis was passionate about the 

holy Eucharist. 

“The more often 

we receive 

the Eucharist,” 

Acutis wrote 

on his website, 

“the more we 

will become 

like Jesus, so 

that on this 

Earth we will 

have a foretaste of heaven.” 

The body of Carlo 

Acutis, who died in 2006, 

is pictured after his tomb 

was opened in the church 

of Santa Maria Maggiore 

in Assisi, Italy, Oct. 1, 

2022. | CNS/COURTESY 

DIOCESE OF ASSISI-NOCERA 

UMBRA-GUALDO TADINO 

The Eucharistic miracles Acutis 

chronicled consist of unexplainable 

phenomena such as consecrated hosts 

bleeding. Some Catholic saints reportedly 

survived for years on nothing but 

the holy Eucharist. 

Although the exhibit has already 

been hosted at more than 3,000 parishes 

worldwide, the Archdiocese of 

Los Angeles is believed to be the first 

diocese in California to host it, Ochoa 

said. 

The exhibit debuted on June 11 at 

Christ the King, and will be featured 

in July at St. Columbkille Church 

and nearby Nativity Church in South 

Los Angeles, then at St. John Chrysostom 

Church in Inglewood before 

moving on to other parishes. 

Acutis is nicknamed the “millennial 

saint” because of his youth and 

computer skills. Although he loved 


to play video games like “Halo” on 

his PlayStation, he reportedly limited 

himself to an hour of gaming a week. 

Ochoa believes the timing of the 

Eucharistic Revival and Acutis’ youth 

is a reason for his rise in popularity. 

“He’s a teenager, which means our 

youth can relate to him so much 

easier,” Ochoa said. “Usually when 

we speak of religion we are relating 

to adults. Many times, it’s difficult to 

relate to teenagers. 

“At our exhibit, I asked people, ‘Do 

you realize the person who put this together 

was a teenager between the ages 

of 12 to 15 years old?’ It’s so difficult 

to get younger generations to become 

active in the Church. This is an opportunity 

for us to speak to teenagers. 

“And, of course, with the Eucharistic 

Revival, we are speaking about 

Eucharistic miracles. This exhibition 

provides an opportunity for Catholics 

to deepen their faith and recognize the 

presence of Jesus in the Eucharist.” 

Parishes that want to host the exhibit, 

known as the Blessed Carlo Acutis 

International Exhibition of Miracles 

of the Eucharist Across the World, can 

visit Acutis’ website and download the 

free PDF files they can enlarge for 

display. 

Magat, 33, considers Acutis, who 

would have been 32 this year, a shining 

example of faith — especially to 

people his age. 

He said he’s glad he was moved to 

spend the night last September in 

Assisi to pay 

his respects to 

Acutis. 

“I want to 

return to Rome 

when he is 

canonized as a 

saint,” Magat 

said. 

Father Juan Ochoa, pastor 

of Christ the King Church, 

blesses the parish’s Carlo 

Acutis Eucharistic miracles 

exhibit June 11. 


For information on local parishes 

hosting the Eucharistic miracles exhibit, 

visit LACatholics.org/Eucharist. 

Greg Hardesty was a journalist for the 

Orange County Register for 17 years, 

and is a longtime contributing writer to 

the Orange County Catholic newspaper. 


Mission San Gabriel pastor Father John Molyneux speaks at the start of 

the June 27 blessing ceremony for the historic church’s restored interior. 

OLD CHURCH, NEW LOOK 

Three years after its near destruction, Mission San Gabriel’s fully 

restored interior and ‘reimagined’ museum are open to the public. 

BY PABLO KAY / PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHN RUEDA 

Grand reopenings don’t always happen all at once. 

In the case of Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, which 

was nearly destroyed in a July 2020 arson fire, its reintroduction 

to the public has happened gradually, carefully, 

in stages. 

First, there was the closing of the mission’s 250th anniversary 

Jubilee Year in September 2022, when the restored adobe 

church opened its doors for a single Mass celebrated by 

Archbishop José H. Gomez — only to close them again so 

that artisans could complete delicate restoration work on the 

church’s interior. 

This past Easter, celebration of Sunday Mass resumed, even 

while scaffolding covered the church’s restored altarpiece, 

the crown jewel of the historic church. 

Finally, on June 27, the scaffolding came down and the 

renovated church was ready for its first official closeup. More 

than 100 people — a mix of parishioners, members of the 

Gabrieliño-Tongva tribe, benefactors, and staff involved in 

the restoration project — were on hand to witness Archbishop 

Gomez bless the church’s new interior, as well as a 

transformed mission museum. 

“It’s beautiful,” said parishioner Mary Acuña Garcia, 71. “It 

looks like a brand new church.” 

Acuña’s ties to the mission run deep. Having lived in the 

city of San Gabriel all her life, she was baptized in its church 

and got married there, just as her parents did. She has served 

in all kinds of ministries at the parish over the years. She 

and other parishioners at the Tuesday afternoon event were 

impressed by how the restoration seemed to bring the best 

out of the old and the new. 


“It amazes me how everything can be 

refurbished and brought back to the 

original thing that was done,” Acuña 

said. 

The most visible example was the 

church’s restored altarpiece (also 

commonly known as the “reredos” or 

Archbishop José H. 

Gomez blesses the new 

mission museum, which 

features a collection of 

30 mission era artifacts. 

“retablo”) featuring statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and 

Sts. Gabriel the Archangel, Joachim, Dominic, Anthony 

of Padua, and Francis of Assisi. Even before it narrowly 

escaped destruction in the 2020 fire, the altarpiece needed 

restoration work. Long hours of investigation by artisans 

and historians into what the original 19th century “reredos” 

looked like served as the basis for the color scheme used in 

the renovation. 

“There wasn’t enough historical data to know exactly how 

the ‘retablo’ was done,” said project manager Jill Short of the 

Archdiocese of Los Angeles’ construction department. “So 

we took the historical data we had and tried as best we could 

to stay faithful to the original.” 

Short oversaw a team of artisans and historians that included 

Enzo Selvaggi, the Orange County-based creative director 

of Heritage Liturgical, a sacred art and architecture firm. She 

credits him with helping pull off the delicate balancing act. 

“You want to embrace the tradition, but you also have to be 

cognizant that we’re in the 2020s,” said Short. “It needs to 

have elements that speak to us today.” 

After Archbishop Gomez blessed the altarpiece, the 

ceremony moved outside, where tribal chief Anthony Morales 

led members of the Gabrieleño San Gabriel Band of 

Mission Indians in singing traditional welcome songs, while 

remembering the approximately 6,000 Gabrieleño-Tongva 

natives buried on mission grounds. 

Then it was time to see the mission’s museum, a “reimagined” 

version of its pre-fire predecessor featuring interactive 

displays, artwork from the mission era, readings from the 

letters of St. Junípero Serra, and maps detailing the tribal history 

of the Los Angeles Basin and its transformation following 

the arrival of the first Spanish missionaries and settlers. 

Steven Hackel, a historian at UC Riverside and a wellknown 

expert on the mission period in Southern California, 

worked as curator of the museum alongside Gabrieleño 

Tongva tribal member, Yve Chavez. 

In remarks at the outdoor ceremony, Hackel said the museum 

sought to “put a new emphasis on Native experiences in 

the mission through 1900,” combining “visuals and sounds 

and interactives to suggest the varieties of Catholic experience 

at the mission and the persistence of Native belief and 

practice within an expanding Spanish and Mexican realm.” 

Several pieces in the collection are accompanied by 

scannable QR codes that direct viewers with smartphones to 

historical audio recordings, including a rare one of the Our 

Father recited in the Gabrieleño language. 

One of the most striking features is a wall displaying the 

names of more than 7,000 natives whose names were recorded 

in baptismal records through 1848, along with the years of 

their birth and death, when possible. 

At least a few of them are ancestors of Adela Garcia, a Gabrieleño 

tribe member who grew up coming to the mission 

with her family. She said seeing the restored mission “brings 

me happiness” after seeing it nearly destroyed three years 

ago. 

“There is going to be a lot of healing 

Andrew Morales here,” said Garcia. 

(right) and his father, For pastor Father John Molyneux, 

Chief Anthony Morales 

of the Gabrieleño on July 1 — the feast day of St. Junípero, 

CMF, the mission’s official reopening 

San Gabriel Band of who founded San Gabriel — was the 

Mission Indians, sing culmination of a long journey marked 

at the unveiling of the by unexpected delays and seemingly 

new mission museum. miraculous surprises. Longer, at least, 

than he had envisioned while picking up 

the rubble three summers ago. 

“I didn’t realize that this process was going to take three 

years,” confessed the Claretian priest. 

Still, Molyneux said he and parish staff have seen God’s 

hand at work through all the challenges. 

“I always talk about crisis and opportunity,” said Molyneux. 

“And I think that’s why for me this turned out to be the 

greatest opportunity.” 

Pablo Kay is the Editor-in-Chief of Angelus. 


Pope Francis gives his blessing to members of the Italian bishops’ conference and diocesan leaders 

involved in Italy’s national synod process May 25 in the Vatican audience hall. | CNS/VATICAN MEDIA 

Don’t call it a revolution 

Pope Francis’ reforms suggest this October’s meeting in Rome will be less 

a Synod of Bishops, and more a Synod with Bishops. 

BY JOHN L. ALLEN JR. 

ROME — As a general rule, it’s 

probably not good practice to 

cite Karl Marx as an authority 

on ecclesiastical matters, since he 

famously dismissed religion as the 

“opiate of the masses” and gave rise to 

officially atheistic systems all over the 

world. 

Still, there’s a Marx quote from “Das 

Kapital” that seems remarkably apposite 

in light of Pope Francis’ looming 

Synods of Bishops on Synodality, set 

for this October and October 2024: 

“Merely quantitative differences, 

beyond a certain point, pass into qualitative 

changes.” 

In that spirit, changes made under 

Francis to both the membership and 

process of the synod — while in one 

sense simply extending earlier revisions 

over the years — nevertheless, 

taken together, suggest we’re looking 

at a new ecclesiastical animal. 

What we’ll see the next two Octobers, 

in effect, will be the debut of a 

Synod with Bishops, no longer just a 

Synod of Bishops. 

To be clear, the post-Vatican II Synod 

of Bishops as conceived by Pope 

Paul VI, now St. Pope Paul VI, was 

never exclusively a body of bishops, 

as is the general practice in Orthodox 

Christianity, where synods are usually 

the supreme authority of the Church. 

The “Holy and Sacred Synod,” for 

example, which governs the Ecumenical 

Patriarchate of Constantinople, 

is composed of the patriarch and 12 

other hierarchs, representing the 12 

original apostles. 

The same practice is true of the 

Eastern churches in communion with 

Rome. The permanent synod of the 

Syro-Malabar Church based in India, 

for example, consists of the major 

archbishop and five other bishops, 

with four bishops also as substitute 

members. 


In his 1965 apostolic letter creating 

the synod, “Apostolica Sollicito” (“Apostolic 

Solicitation”), Paul VI allowed 

for the participation of a restricted 

number of additional clerics and 

religious, so that the post-Vatican II 

synod has always included a handful 

of nonbishop participants. 

The clear intent, however, was that 

the Synod of Bishops would become 

a miniature version of the ecumenical 

council, since by the close of the 

Second Vatican Council in 1965, the 

number of Catholic bishops in the 

world (now well in excess of 5,000) 

made summoning all of them to 

Rome again impractical. 

The idea was to act on Vatican II’s 

stress on collegiality, meaning the 

idea that all the bishops together 

form a “college,” which is responsible 

for leading the Church in concert 

with the pope. It was, in other words, 

conceived primarily as a vehicle for 

allowing the world’s bishops to play 

a more regular and structured role in 

governance. 

Over the years, the Vatican’s version 

of the synod evolved to include 

a whole series of other participants, 

The people who presented the working document for the Synod of Bishops pose for a photo in the Vatican Press 

Office June 20. From left are Helena Jeppesen-Spuhler, a synod participant from Switzerland; Sister Nadia Coppa, 

president of the women’s International Union of Superiors General; Cardinal Mario Grech, secretary-general of the 

synod; Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, relator general of the synod; and Father Giacomo Costa, SJ, a consultant to the 

synod. | CNS/CINDY WOODEN 

including women religious and laity, 

ecumenical partners, and invited 

experts. None, however, generally had 

the right to cast votes on the synod’s 

conclusions, and in general the operation 

remained a bishops’ show with 

others as mere advisers, in somewhat 

the same role as the “periti,” or theological 

experts, at Vatican II. 

This time around, however, the stage 

is set for a different kind of assembly. 

Bishops will still cast the majority of 

votes, and five religious women along 

with five religious men will also have 

voting privileges, as will 70 nonbishop 

members, at least half of whom will 

be women and most of whom presumably 

will be laity. 

In effect, and despite the repeated 

insistence of Francis and his advisers 

that a synod is definitely not a parliament, 

this Synod with (not of) Bishops 

will be the closest thing the Catholic 

Church has ever had to a legislative 

branch of government. 

In terms of form supporting function, 

even the setting of this gathering reflects 

the idea that it’s something fundamentally 

new. Instead of meeting in 

the New Synod Hall constructed under 

Paul VI precisely to accommodate 

a limited summit of bishops, this time 

participants will gather in the much 

larger Audience Hall to accommodate 

the larger cast of characters and also 

to facilitate easier transitions between 

plenary sessions and small working 

groups. 

The working document for the synod, 

technically called an “Instrumentum 

Laboris” (“Working Instrument”), 

also reflects awareness that something 

new is stirring. 

One question proposed for discussion 

asks how the consultation involved in 

a synod “truly captures the manifestation 

of the sense of faith of the People 

of God living in a given Church?”, 

meaning not just the bishops; another 

asks participants to ponder the 

creation of permanent ecclesial bodies 

composed of more than just bishops, 

such as the “Ecclesial Conference for 

the Amazon Region” established in 

2020 that includes not just bishops 

but also religious, laity, representatives 

of indigenous communities, and 

others. 

Presumably, that could be a down 

payment on the creation of some similar 

body at the level of the universal 

Church — either a further-transformed 

synod, or some entirely new 

institution. In any event, it certainly 

wouldn’t just be a gentleman’s club 

for members of the episcopacy. 

Critics, naturally, will style all this 

as a worrying erosion of the unique 

teaching and governing authority 

invested in the episcopal office, 

while supporters likely will tout it as a 

long-overdue injection of democracy 

into what, in their eyes, all too often 

remains an all-male oligarchy. 

As ever, settling that debate will 

require seeing how things play out. 

Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich of 

Luxembourg, a leader of the synod 

and a key papal ally, has insisted that 

what’s underway is “an important 

change, but not a revolution.” 

Make no mistake, however: What 

we’re about to witness this October 

isn’t a remembrance of things past, 

but a step into a different, somewhat 

less episcopally dominated, kind of 

future. 

John L. Allen Jr. is the editor of Crux. 


Hope in California 

An outsider’s perspective on what Catholic 

leaders in the Golden State are getting right. 

An estimated 2,500 Catholics participated in an Oct. 

1, 2022, Respect Life Month kickoff event at Christ 

Cathedral in Garden Grove. | DIOCESE OF ORANGE 

BY CHARLIE CAMOSY 

One of the central messages of 

Pope Francis’ visit to the United 

States in 2015 was an invitation 

to resist polarization between 

two simplistic political or ideological 

camps of “good” versus “evil” guys. In 

other words, the righteous versus the 

sinners. 

The problem he described was on 

full display during the Holy Father’s 

address to a joint session of Congress, 

where he got rousing cheers from 

Republicans when he insisted that 

life be defended at all stages, and the 

same from Democrats when he firmly 

denounced the death penalty. 

As the years of his pontificate have 

gone by, Francis has emphasized 

anti-polarization regularly — especially 

when addressing our U.S. context. 

“Polarization is not Catholic,” he said 

in response to our particular situation. 

Instead of adopting the secular spirit 

of the age, we must be about the great 

“both/and” of our tradition. 

Unfortunately, it seems we haven’t 

paid much heed to the pope’s advice 

lately. Nearly everything seems viewed 

through a fight-to-death, good versus 

evil, antagonistic binary. Indeed, it’s 

easier to classify Americans by the 

ideas and people they despise, than by 

those they support and love. 

More and more, “nearly everything” 

includes sex and gender as a central 

matter of polarized difference. When 

asked whether being a man or a woman 

is something that is permanent and 

cannot be changed, 90% of Republicans 

agreed, compared with only 36% 

of Democrats. 

This attitude has infected the 

Church, even on matters that seem 

to be settled cases. My column last 

month made what I thought was the 

uncontroversial point that vicious 

mocking of Catholic nuns and even 

Christ made the “Sisters” of Perpetual 


Indulgence a hate group, but even 

America magazine — normally a 

source of anti-polarization — foregrounded 

the views of one Catholic 

Sister of the Holy Names, who said 

she finds them to be “kindred spirits”! 

If we cannot even agree that a group 

which hosts annual “peep shows” at 

Easter, mocking Christ on the cross as 

a stripper, is anything but a Catholic 

kindred spirit; boy, the polarization 

runs deep. 

Into this mess enters the California 

Catholic Conference, which for many 

years now has been tasked with navigating 

a political and cultural scene 

that is openly hostile on many fronts. 

The group, which serves as the public 

policy arm for the Golden State’s 

Catholic bishops, recently brought me 

to Sacramento to help run a workshop 

retreat exploring best practices based 

in part on my book “One Church” 

(Ave Maria Press, $17.23). 

I was impressed by the group of people 

that showed up: diocesan leaders 

in the fields of communications, 

Hispanic ministry, Catholic schools, 

Respect Life and Family Life ministry, 

religious education and catechetical 

formation, and legislative advocacy, 

among others. 

There was a palpable unity-in-diversity 

at the retreat, something like 

the opposite of polarization. There 

was racial and ethnic diversity, real 

political and ideological diversity, 

and notable ecclesial and theological 

diversity. But all were very clearly 

united in a common commitment to 

the Gospel. There was no idolatry of 

secular politics to be found. 

I guess this shouldn’t surprise me. 

When it comes to anti-polarization, 

Catholics in California have been 

leading the way for some time now, 

particularly as dioceses combined 

their “conservative” pro-life activism 

with their “progressive” social justice 

activism into one Gospel-centered office 

focusing on a consistent vision of 

human dignity. The name Archbishop 

José H. Gomez gave to the office in 

Los Angeles, for instance, is “Life, 

Justice, and Peace.” 

The leadership of Kathleen Buckley 

Domingo, the dynamic and creative 

executive director of the whole conference, 

cannot be overstated either. 

Under her leadership, it was clear after 

this event that California dioceses 

— despite the significant challenges, 

again, they face in their state — are 

poised to reach new heights of anti-polarization, 

anti-idolatry in service of 

the Gospel. 

As the action plans of the dioceses 

toward this goal were conceived and 

articulated, frankly, I couldn’t help 

but tear up a bit. It is clear that these 

centers of Catholicism in California 

want to marshal their resources to be 

field hospitals for hurting people all 

over the state. 

Among the many great ideas, for 

instance, was a proposal to pick up 

on the Holy Father’s call for intergenerational 

solidarity by creating 

an institution for young Catholics to 

serve elderly Catholics and vice versa. 

This beautiful witness will serve two 

of the most disconnected and lonely 

groups of people through a culture of 

encounter, an effective antidote to our 

polarized throwaway culture. 

As I left the event, I began thinking 

about how I could feel so very positive 

about the Church in a state and 

culture that, again, is so hostile in so 

many ways. I came to the conclusion 

that this authentic Catholicism is 

growing not despite the hostility, but 

because of it. 

Iron sharpens iron. Amid all the 

difficulties, California Catholics 

have developed commitments to the 

Gospel of Christ that are thick and 

tough. Their hands have developed 

callouses from the hard and pressurized 

work required of them. But they 

prove that the end result of this kind 

of persecution — as we know well 

from our Church’s history — need not 

end in cynicism, despair, and defeat. 

In California, mirroring the response 

of our ancestors, they are responding 

with energy, creativity, and above all, 

Christian love. I saw it with my own 

eyes and heard it with my own ears. 

And I cannot wait to see what the 

Holy Spirit will do with it. 

Charlie Camosy is professor of 

Medical Humanities at the Creighton 

University School of Medicine. In addition, 

he holds the Monsignor Curran 

Fellowship in Moral Theology at St. 

Joseph Seminary in New York. 


Fiction 

that cares 

Katy Carl’s struggling 

characters in ‘Fragile 

Objects’ are good 

news for modern 

Catholic literature. 

BY NICK RIPATRAZONE 

you’re writing,” 

the Catholic short story 

“When 

writer Andre Dubus 

once said, “you love somebody as God 

does.” His comment wasn’t meant 

to imply that writers of fiction are 

divine, or all-knowing. Rather, Dubus 

believed that authentic, meaningful 

fiction could only be created by writers 

who loved their characters — in all of 

their follies, paradoxes, and sins. 

Katy Carl loves her characters. In 

“Fragile Objects” (Wiseblood Books, 

$13), her debut story collection, we 

are introduced to imperfect yet deeply 

endearing and believable characters: 

a grown son struggling to placate his 

aging mother. A good-intentioned but 

overzealous convert, “a former fan of 

Fight Club,” who had been reading 

the Desert Fathers but needed a more 

prosaic and contemporary touch of 

faith. An anxious mother who worries 

that her move to the suburbs might 

temper her professional ambition, 

despite its benefits for her family. 

Carl is the author of “As Earth Without 

Water” (Wiseblood Books, $16), a 

well-received novel from 2021, and the 

editor of “Dappled Things,” a Catholic 

quarterly literary magazine. The stories 

in “Fragile Objects” benefit from her 

editorial sensibility. They are neither 

trite nor slight. They are clearly the 

work of a Catholic writer, but they 

don’t read like devotional tracts. 

One of Carl’s great strengths as a writer 

of fiction is her ability to help us be 

more attentive to the complexities of 

the world through careful description. 

In the book’s title story, placed first in 

the collection, a boy nicknamed Bub 

is visiting his grandmother with his 

father. Carl’s description of her house 

is so sharp and believable: “Bronze 

baby shoes, as if just dropped from 

little feet, rested beside plaster hands 

that seemed to pray. Demitasse cups 

yearned open next to porcelain roses 

that fooled you into thinking they 

bloomed. Sprays of dried cotton bolls 

bristled from crystal bud vases.” 

Bub’s father must tread carefully with 

his aging mother, who appears to have 

descended into 

paranoia. The boy 

is understandably 

bored; “he sat studying 

the clementine 

paisley pattern 

of the tablecloth 

and debating within 

himself whether 

Students walk out 

of the Institute of 

Notre Dame building 

in Baltimore in this 

2014 photo. | CNS/ 

COURTESY INSTITUTE 

OF NOTRE DAME 

to trace the teardrops with a fingertip 

might invite reproof.” Yet Carl effectively 

pivots from the passive nature of 

the visit to a surprising and powerful 

ending to the story, a demonstration 

about how unresolved anger can have 

inevitable consequences. 

As a first story, “Fragile Objects” 

demonstrates that Carl is willing to 

take risks and jolt her reader. Flannery 


O’Connor would be proud. 

The story “Hail Thee, Festival” 

begins with a talky character’s monologue; 

a meandering spiel about a 

school fundraising festival. The technique 

works well, as the story pivots to 

a first-person narrator who has moved 

with her family (her husband, Kichiro, 

and their daughter, Ena) from the 

city to the suburbs. Like many parents 

who’ve made similar life changes, she’s 

worried: “Surely part-time accountancy 

in the suburbs is a step down 

in the world, mere counting up of 

other folks’ earnings and dividing out 

Caesar’s share. Would it even be worth 

going back, back in truth to the city, to 

what I am really good at? Could I still 

be good at it now?” 

Carl aptly captures the mental gymnastics 

we perform when reflecting 

on such decisions. “Here, things are 

better,” the narrator hopes. “Here, in 

a smaller, safer city two hours south, 

he doesn’t have to be left out nearly so 

much anymore. His office and mine 

lie within the same twenty-minute 

travel radius as do the house, school, 

church, pediatrician, dentist, orthodontist, 

grocery, pharmacy, and, yes, 

family therapist, and we are happier. 

We are. Happier?” 

The contrast comes into full view 

once the fundraiser actually begins 

— the volunteer-run carnivals the 

likes of which Catholic school parents 

recognize. Carl writes poetically of 

mundane moments: “The low light 

yawns in long bars between the 

poles of tents and the flailing limbs 

of stubborn grade-school-aged game 

players still unwilling to pack it in.” Yet 

an incident that occurs at the festival 

increases the narrator’s worry about 

her decisions. 

Such realistic concerns anchor “Fragile 

Objects.” The collection ends with 

“Awards Day,” possibly the best story of 

the book, a tight, profluent tale about 

a black high school student named Diamond, 

whose mother’s car accident 

led her to being driven to school by 

two white students, Helen and Emilia 

Delacroix. During Lent that year, 

mama “had suffered a seizure behind 

the wheel. The car rolled out of 

control and crashed into the left-hand 

side of the pair of metal handrails that 

ascended the school’s front steps.” 

Author Katy Carl. 

| WISEBLOOD BOOKS 

WISEBLOOD BOOKS 

The Delacroix family offered to help, 

but as Carl illustrates, generosity is 

not always simple. Martine Delacroix 

makes the offer, with an awkward 

caveat that Diamond might come to 

help babysit their youngest: “we’d be 

grateful, but we wouldn’t expect.” It is 

a delicate moment, and Carl renders it 

well: “When Mrs. Delacroix had said 

all this to Diamond’s father after Mass 

on the pebbled front steps of Little 

Flower, hedged on both sides by the 

rose garden that faced the decayed restaurants 

and new brick bank branches 

across Government Street, Diamond 

had known from the angle of his brow 

and the set of his full lips both that he 

wanted to refuse and that he did not 

dare.” 

In “Awards Day,” Carl perfectly captures 

the inherent tensions of Catholic 

schooling, and offers a dynamic 

view of race and class. “Sometimes 

it seemed their whole family life had 

been nothing but saving and saving for 

Diamond’s education,” the narrator explains. 

“All through her middle-school 

years they had striven, squeaked by, to 

keep affording her tuition and to help 

her stay at the top of her class.... They 

had taken turns waiting and drinking 

social cups of coffee and feeling 

the jitters in shiny, freshly renovated 

kitchens while someone with a degree 

explained equations and formulae to 

their brilliant daughter, every step ensuring 

she would one day leave them 

behind.” 

Late in the story, Diamond’s father 

laments about his daughter’s reality: “I 

wish she didn’t, but she’ll always have 

to prove herself, prove her worth. We 

can’t allow one thing to go wrong for 

her, if we can help it.” His wife’s sarcoidosis 

requires expensive and extensive 

treatment — a dramatic turn in 

the story of their family that ruptures 

their plans for 

Diamond. Like 

so many of Carl’s 

tales, there are 

no easy exits and 

solutions, making for deeply engaging 

fiction. 

Short story collections are often not 

the first choice for casual readers, who 

might be more drawn to the singular 

focus of a novel. But “Fragile Objects” 

is an excellent choice for reading 

first-rate Catholic fiction, crafted by a 

writer who cares about her characters 

— and her readers. 

Nick Ripatrazone is culture editor 

for Image journal and the author of 

seven books of fiction, poetry, and 

literary criticism. His most recent book, 

“Wild Belief: Poets and Prophets in the 

Wilderness,” was published in 2021 for 

Broadleaf Books ($25.99). 


INTERSECTIONS 

GREG ERLANDSON 

From boys to men 

SHUTTERSTOCK 

In a recent essay about the German 

theologian Romano Guardini, I 

read this quote: “As long as men 

are unable to control themselves from 

within … they will inevitably be ‘organized’ 

by forces from without.” 

Appropriately enough, it is from 

Guardini’s “The End of the Modern 

World.” Written in the 20th century, it 

would certainly be an apt epigram for 

“Brave New World” or “1984” or other 

predictions of dystopia of that era. 

But it made me think of a very 

21st-century problem in our country: 

The problem of men. Men and boys, 

actually. 

The statistics about the decline of 

my gender are now commonplace and 

ubiquitous. There are fewer young 

men than young women at the top of 

their class, and more young men at the 

bottom. We are told that fewer young 

men are going to college, going to law 

school, going to medical school. Men 

kill themselves at four times the rate of 

women. They are far more likely to die 

of “deaths of despair,” suicide, or drug 

overdoses. 

Too many of my gender seem increasingly 

rootless, unfocused, unable to 

make a commitment. And if we were 

raised without a father or father figure 

in our family, it is much more likely to 

impact us negatively than our sisters. 

Books and articles are coming fast 

and furious on this topic. One article 

even bemoaned the lack of sexual 

activity among young men, because 

sex, it argued, leads to relationships, 

which leads to marriage, which leads 

to stability. This decline of sexual 

activity isn’t due to a rediscovery of 

the virtue of chastity, but rather to a 

lack of interest in the work of dating 

or relationships. I know of at least two 

professors at Catholic colleges who 

are holding seminars on how to date, 

but the complaints of young women 

suggest it is still pretty slim pickings on 

the dating scene and only gets worse as 

time passes. 

The solutions are as varied as the problems. 

In our increasingly gender-fluid 

society, some would suggest a reversal 

of the “My Fair Lady” dictum: Why 

can’t a man be more like a woman? 

The obvious excesses that are labeled 

“toxic masculinity” suggest the solution 

lies in a retreat from masculine stereotypes. 

Others go in the opposite direction, 

encouraging a more aggressive or 

martial masculinity, a nostalgia for the 

“king in his castle” days. There’s even 

the self-pitying Incel movement, angry 

young men who describe themselves as 

“involuntarily celibate.” 

All of which brings me back to 

Guardini’s quote. “As long as men are 

unable to control themselves from 

within … they will inevitably be ‘organized’ 

by forces from without.” 

If men, young or old, are bereft of 

discipline, virtue, or at least some 

self-control, then others are willing to 

take advantage. These days, the forces 


Greg Erlandson is the former president and 

editor-in-chief of Catholic News Service. 

that seek to organize from without are 

often nothing more than entertainment 

and distraction. Porn replaces 

relationships. Gambling and gaming 

replace adventure and accomplishment. 

Political movements also exploit 

the male drift, offering community, 

identity, and purpose in the service of 

radically simplistic ideological causes. 

Proud boys, loud boys, but not men. 

Perhaps we are simply seeing the 

end times of a self-indulgent market 

economy. John Steinbeck, in a letter 

to Adlai Stevenson, wrote, “If I wanted 

to destroy a nation, I would give it too 

much, and I would have it on its knees, 

miserable, greedy and sick.” To which 

we might add, divided, resentful, and 

self-obsessed. 

Too many of us are miserable, sick 

with consumerism and self-indulgence. 

The uber-rich buy themselves a 

one-way tourist ticket to take pictures 

of the Titanic or ride a billionaire’s 

rocket into space, while too many of 

their fellow citizens struggle to make 

ends meet or give up trying. 

A couple I know who were concerned 

about their son and his future life goals 

went to a counselor. The counselor 

told them: If your children have books 

in the house and both parents live with 

them, they already have a huge leg up. 

That is how low the bar is set these 

days. 

The Church has always taken its role 

in the formation of the family and the 

next generation seriously. It bolstered 

families and created community, and 

provided role models in parishes and 

youth movements. It held up ideals of 

fortitude and prudence, of saintly heroism 

or lives dedicated to serving others. 

Today, in many places, the Church 

seems weary and divided, distrusted 

and distrustful in the culture it finds 

itself adrift in. 

Yet the Church is the guardian of the 

virtues and the values that are now in 

short supply, a shortage that is impacting 

the Church itself. 

We need to create a new culture of 

masculine virtues, not nostalgic, not 

toxic, but ennobling, self-controlled, 

and self-sacrificing. Our boys need 

worthy models of masculinity if they 

are ever themselves to become men. 


NOW PLAYING ASTEROID CITY 

LOST IN THE COSMOS 

Weird, confusing, and 

ultimately profound, 

‘Asteroid City’ looks 

to the heavens for an 

answer to man’s oldest 

question. 

BY JOSEPH JOYCE 

is connected but 

nothing’s working.” 

“Everything 

So says the lone mechanic 

in lonely “Asteroid City,” one of those 

dusty desert 1940s pit stops that won’t 

survive the accroaching interstate 

system. 

He is, of course, diagnosing a broken 

car. But if everything is indeed 

connected, as it tends to be on the 

Pinterest board that is a Wes Anderson 

feature, then that could easily apply to 

the broken world itself. 

The car belongs to Augie Steenbeck 

and family, limping into town from a 

bad engine and the recent death of his 

wife and their mother. Augie hasn’t told 

the kids yet, waiting for an opportune 

moment even he knows will never 

come. Like everyone else in town, 

they are here for the Junior Stargazer 

convention, where little Poindexters 

show off their inventions to the judges 

and the sponsoring military-industrial 

complex. 

Alongside the contestants are their 

families, a school bus full of spectating 

grade-schoolers, local astronomers, 

a Marilyn Monroe analogue, and a 

troupe of singing cowboys. The last visitor 

is an extraterrestrial, who ironically 

might be the most down to earth of 

the bunch. His quick visit is enough to 

send this whole little microcosm into 

military quarantine, which resembles 

COVID-19 quarantines but with fewer 

Facebook fights. 

If you’re still following, Anderson 

solves that by adding yet another wrinkle. 

What we’re watching is a televised 

production of the stage play “Asteroid 

City,” and we get intermittent behindthe-scenes 

peeks of our actors playing 

actors preparing to play the roles. Even 

though we oscillate between color and 

black-and-white photography, it still 

becomes difficult to track just who is 

who and where the story ends and reality 

begins. At some point you just give 

up, and it is only in this defeat where 

it all finally makes sense. Everything 

becomes fiction, but then that fiction 

all becomes real. 

Anderson isn’t new to existential 

concerns. From the enigmatic Jaguar 

Shark of “The Life Aquatic” to the 

wind whistling through the graveyard 

in “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” 

Anderson has struggled to reconcile 

a world where nothing has meaning 

yet everything means so much. His 

characters here are no different, their 

pains even harder to hide on this arid 

plain. Everyone in town is nursing their 

own particular hurt; the grown-ups 

are jaded, which is just another way 

of saying grown up. Their kids haven’t 

learned those hard lessons, or even that 

eventually everyone learns them. 

“I feel more at home outside the 

atmosphere,” one contestant confides 

to another, one of those mock profundities 

of youth that cuts closer to the 

truth than we like to admit. 

Anderson doesn’t offer a solution; if 


Jason Schwartzman and Scarlett Johansson star in a 

scene from the movie “Asteroid City.” | OSV NEWS/ 

POP.87 PRODUCTIONS, FOCUS FEATURES 

he solved the quandary of existence 

then this movie would probably have 

opened in more theaters. But like 

Edison inventing the lightbulb by 

narrowing down ways it didn’t work, 

Anderson knows where the answers 

Bryan Cranston as The Host in “Asteroid City.” | 

ROTTEN TOMATOES/FOCUS FEATURES 

aren’t. They certainly aren’t outside the 

atmosphere, yet we feel at home there 

because there’s nowhere to look but 

back at Earth. If there is meaning to 

be found, Anderson suggests we search 

within ourselves rather than in the cosmos, 

preferably through the expression 

of art. 

The alien brings no message, but 

perhaps that’s all right. We learn more 

by what each resident reads into him. It 

drives some to atheism, others to Episcopalianism. 

The military see a threat, 

while the more depressed tenants 

read sadness on his face, as if he pities 

mankind and its inevitable doom. In 

a more unique response, one of the 

schoolchildren writes a country song 

with the cowboys titled “Dear Alien 

(Who Art in Heaven).” The song gets 

the whole class to up and hootenanny, 

which is the closest Anderson gets to an 

endorsement. Art seems like an easier 

response to mystery than baseless worry, 

especially when a fiddle is involved. 

Truth through fiction keeps popping 

up. Augie romances the Marilyn Monroe 

type, each step of their tentative 

courtship under the guise of helping 

her rehearse a part. They can say the 

things they want to say and turn the 

bases they need to turn only with the 

permission of the script. Like Binx 

Bolling in Walker Percy’s “The Moviegoer,” 

reality only gets its benediction 

through unreality. 

At one point our “actors” perform an 

exercise in rehearsal, all pretending to 

fall asleep. Suddenly each bolts awake 

and yells into the camera, shattering 

Anderson’s fourth wall. They shout, 

“You can’t wake up if you don’t fall 

asleep,” with the fury of indictment and 

the frequency of a mantra. It’s about 

as direct as Anderson allows himself to 

get with his viewers: If you want to find 

out what’s actually going on, first you 

must dream. Reality gives us the truth, 

but it’s often all out of order. When we 

create, we are simply shuffling the facts 

back into place. 

The most touching example is on the 

first night of the “performance.” The 

actor who plays Augie runs out of the 

scene and to his director. Even with all 

the rehearsal, he still doesn’t get the 

meaning. 

“Am I doing it wrong?” he quivers. 

“It doesn’t matter. Just keep telling the 

story.” 

Unconvinced, he goes out on the 

balcony and finds the actress who was 

to play his dead wife, before she and 

her scene were cut from the play. They 

run through this gnostic text together, 

and in doing so Augie finally gets a 

grasp on his character. There’s nothing 

supernatural about the encounter, she’s 

just another understudy after all. But it 

isn’t a coincidence that salvation only 

comes from “beyond the grave.” This is 

intercession, and Anderson’s first hint 

that the world alone isn’t enough. 

If the actor finds meaning from a 

scene outside the play, perhaps we can 

too. Stephen Park, who plays a father 

of a young stargazer, plays a different 

father in the Coen Brothers’ “A Serious 

Man.” There he commands that film’s 

existentially racked protagonist to 

simply “accept the mystery.” God and 

the alien are in heaven, and they aren’t 

providing answers anytime soon. You 

might as well spin your partner round 

’n’ round; it’s a blessing just to have 

someone to twirl. 

Joseph Joyce is a screenwriter and freelance 

critic based in Sherman Oaks. 


DESIRE LINES 

HEATHER KING 

The price of 

fake happiness 

SHUTTERSTOCK 

Ones Who Walk Away 

from Omelas” is a dystopian 

short story by California “The 

native and celebrated “speculative 

fiction” author, Ursula K. Le Guin 

(1929-2018). 

“Omelas” came to Le Guin when, on 

a road trip, she saw the words “Salem, 

Oregon” backward in her rearview 

mirror. 

Published in 1973, the story begins 

as the people of the city of Omelas in 

a fictional country are celebrating the 

Festival of Summer. The sun is shining. 

There are sparkling flags, clamoring 

bells, and prancing horses whose 

manes are braided with streamers of 

silver, gold, and green. The procession 

is a dance, led by a “shimmering of 

gong and tambourine.” 

“How can I tell you about the people 

of Omelas?” writes Le Guin. “They 

were not naive and happy children — 

though their children were, in fact, 

happy. They were mature, intelligent, 

passionate adults whose lives were 

not wretched. O miracle! But I wish I 

could describe it better. I wish I could 

convince you.” 

The people of Omelas have no king, 

no sword, no stock exchange. They 

don’t resort to violence. They are joyous. 

But are they happy? The narrator 

isn’t taking sides, only observing. “Happiness 

is based on a just discrimination 

of what is necessary, what is neither 

necessary nor destructive, and what is 

destructive.” 

We’re thus invited to imagine our own 

utopia, our own version of the worldly 

city that we believe would make us 

happy. Technology can be included 

if you like, though the narrator is 

inclined to think the city has neither 

helicopters nor cars. If the whole scene 

sounds too goody-goody, the author 

says feel free to add orgies. “Let tambourines 

be struck above the copulations, 

and (a not unimportant point) let 

the offspring of these delightful rituals 

be beloved and looked after by all.” 

Such offspring, as we know from our 

real cities, would be abandoned, neglected, 

and abused. Still, the narrator 


Heather King is an award-winning 

author, speaker, and workshop leader. 

continues, “One thing I know there is 

none of in Omelas is guilt. But what 

else should there be?” 

Drugs, perhaps? Intoxicants? But no 

need: “A boundless and generous contentment, 

a magnanimous triumph felt 

not against some outer enemy but in 

communion with the finest and fairest 

in the souls of all men everywhere and 

the splendor of the world’s summer: 

This is what swells the hearts of the 

people of Omelas, and the victory they 

celebrate is that of life.” 

But what supports this life? Here’s 

where the story gets to the crux of 

Omelas: In a filthy, fetid dark mop 

closet in the basement of one of the 

city’s mansions, sits a child who looks 

to be 6 years old, but is closer to the 

age of 10. It could be a boy or a girl. 

The door is locked. The child, covered 

with festering sores, sits in its own filth 

and lives on a half-bowl per day of corn 

meal and grease. Every so often, the 

door opens and the child is ordered to 

stand so that the group can gawk at it. 

“The people at the door never say 

anything, but the child, who has not 

always lived in the tool room, and can 

remember sunlight and its mother’s 

voice, sometimes speaks. ‘I will be 

good,’ it says. ‘Please let me out. I will 

be good!’ They never answer.” 

Everyone in the city knows the child 

is there. Some have come to see it, others 

have not. But everyone understands 

that their happiness, health, prosperity, 

wisdom, and beauty — even the city’s 

gorgeous weather — depend wholly on 

this child’s “abominable misery.” 

It’s a dreadful setup in which we know 

ourselves to be complicit. We all live 

each day with the knowledge that millions 

of people around the world are 

destitute, sick, starving, enslaved. 

But what if “the poor” weren’t a faceless 

mass of almost a billion people? 

Ursula K. Le Guin in 1995. 

| MARIAN WOOD KOLISCH/ 

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS 

AMAZON 

What if it were only one? Like the high 

priest Caiaphas trying to convince the 

people to crucify Christ, the Omelas 

people’s reasoning is that it’s better for 

a single human being to suffer abominably 

so that many can be “happy.” 

That thought alone generates rich re- 

flection. But I wonder if the story can’t 

be read another way. What if that child 

in the dark is me, or you? Or what if 

we put him or her there ourselves? 

What if the child is our true self, the 

one who longs to step outside the lines, 

to give all of herself, to worship Christ 

in a culture that mostly hates him? To 

seek the good, the beautiful, and the 

true no matter what the cost? 

Instead, we can lock ourselves in a 

closet, promise to be “good,” and stifle 

and starve everything in us that is our 

truest, purest, best. 

A small few in the story cannot live 

with the knowledge of the child in the 

mop closet. They walk away, always 

alone, to an unknown, uncertain 

future. Narrow is the gate. And few are 

those who will risk setting off on their 

lonely, perilous path — and leaving 

behind Omelas. 


LETTER AND SPIRIT 

SCOTT HAHN 

Scott Hahn is founder of the 

St. Paul Center for Biblical 

Theology; stpaulcenter.com. 

Ways to pray 

It’s midsummer, and everyone should be praying. 

Baseball fans are praying for their team — or for the 

conversion of its management. Farmers are praying for a 

bit more rain. Lots of people are praying for relief from the 

heat. 

The truth is, we should always be praying. Jesus said so 

(see Luke 18:1), and our patron St. Paul insisted upon it 

(see 1 Thessalonians 5:17 and Ephesians 6:18). Guidance 

in prayer is what Jesus’ disciples have always sought from 

their Master (Luke 11:1). 

Prayer is necessary for Christian life. And Catholic prayer 

is rich and diverse — a treasury of traditions and techniques. 

Jesuits teach Ignatian methods, while Carmelites 

follow after Sts. Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross. 

Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians follow their 

own ways. And different ritual families — Malabar, Melkite, 

Chaldean, Anglican Use — preserve their ancestors’ 

particular customs. 

Individual Catholics have their own options. We pray the 

Mass. We pray on our rosary beads. We pray on our knees. 

We pray in tongues. 

Catholic ways of prayer are breathtakingly varied. How to 

sort them out and find one’s own way? 

It’s good for us to take a breath and think deeply about 

what they all hold in common. What is it that makes one 

way of all those many ways? 

Pope Benedict XVI considered the matter not just once, 

but repeatedly in his 2010 apostolic exhortation “Verbum 

Domini” (“The Word of the Lord”). And he kept coming 

back to the same answer: “the great currents of spirituality 

in the Church’s history originated with an explicit reference 

to Scripture. … The word of God is at the basis of all 

authentic Christian spirituality. … We 

“Old Woman Praying,” 

by Matthias Stom, 

1615-1649, Dutch. 

| WIKIMEDIA COMMONS 

must never forget that all authentic 

and living Christian spirituality is 

based on the word of God proclaimed, 

accepted, celebrated and meditated 

upon in the Church.” 

Catholic prayer is inconceivable 

apart from God’s word, apart from 

divine revelation. Our most common prayers — from the 

Sign of the Cross to the Holy Mass, from the Hail Mary to 

the St. Michael Prayer, from the Jesus Prayer to the Divine 

Office — are, one and all, expressions of biblical religion 

and fruits of biblical reflection. The path we follow, 

through the ages and stages of spiritual life, is a path blazed 

in the pages of the Bible. 

The history of Christian spirituality, then, can be seen as a 

great community Bible study on the subject of prayer. And 

that is indeed how we treat it in our new study. We range 

in the biblical canon, the Old Testament and the New, and 

we read with the great saints. We learn the ways of adoration, 

contrition, thanksgiving, and intercession by observing 

the prayers of the patriarchs and prophets, the great 

kings and the apostles. We learn the Catholic way of prayer 

from Jesus, whose very life and character and mission were 

defined by his prayer to the Father. 

Our own life and character and mission take shape from 

our prayer, which itself must be biblical if it is to be authentically 

Catholic. 


■ SATURDAY, JULY 8 

“Woman of Hope” Day of Reflection. Mary & Joseph 

Retreat Center, 5300 Crest Rd., Rancho Palos Verdes, 9 

a.m.-7 p.m. Retreat for deacons’ wives hosted by the Office 

of Deacons in Ministry. Lunch and dinner provided. 

To register, email Natalia Dubon at ngdubon@la-archdiocese.org. 

Eucharistic Revival Retreat. Our Lady of Grace Church, 

5011 White Oak Ave., Encino, 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Retreat 

with Father Roch Mary Greiner, CFR, Father Juan Diego 

Sutherland, CFR, and Father Marinello Saguin. Topics 

include “The Healing Power of the Eucharist” and “Becoming 

Eucharistified.” Adoration and solemn benediction 

included. Cost: $20/person before July 3, $25 after. 

For more information, visit scrc.org. 

■ SUNDAY, JULY 9 

Virtual Diaconate Information Day. 2-4 p.m. To register, 

email Deacon Melecio Zamora at dmz2011@la-archdiocese.org. 

■ TUESDAY, JULY 11 

Memorial Mass. San Fernando Mission, 15151 San 

Fernando Mission Blvd., Mission Hills, 11 a.m. Mass is 

virtual and not open to the public. Livestream available at 

catholiccm.org or facebook.com/lacatholics. 

LACBA Unlawful Detainer Answer Clinic. LA Law 

Library, 301 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, 12-3 p.m. Providing 

limited assistance with reviewing unlawful detainer 

complaints, jury demands, fee waiver requests, and more. 

Open to the disabled veteran community in Los Angeles 

County. Spanish assistance available. RSVP to 213-896- 

6536 or email inquiries-veterans@lacba.org. 

■ WEDNESDAY, JULY 12 

St. Padre Pio Mass. St. Anne Church, 340 10th St., Seal 

Beach, 1 p.m. Celebrant: Father Al Baca. For more information, 

call 562-537-4526. 

■ THURSDAY, JULY 13 

Young Adult Rosary. Morgan Park, 4100 Baldwin Park 

Blvd., Baldwin Park, 6 p.m. Rosary for young adults and 

youth groups. Meets on the 13th of every month through 

December. Wear your ministry uniform and bring a flag 

or banner. 


Eucharistic Revival Retreat. St. Denis Church, 2151 S. 

Diamond Bar Blvd., Diamond Bar, 12-4:45 p.m. Retreat 

with Father Roch Mary Greiner, CFR, Father Juan Diego 

Sutherland, CFR, and Dominic Berardino. Topics include 

“The Healing Power of the Eucharist” and “Becoming 

Eucharistified.” Adoration and solemn benediction 

included. For more information, email spirit@scrc.org. 


Mass for Bishop David O’Connell’s birthday. Cathedral 

of Our Lady of the Angels, 555 W. Temple St., Los Angeles, 

10 a.m. Archbishop José H. Gomez will celebrate 

Sunday Mass with a Mass intention for late Auxiliary 

Bishop David O’Connell on what would have been his 

70th birthday. 

Jazz Brunch. Church of the Transfiguration, 2515 W. 

Martin Luther King Blvd., Los Angeles, 12 p.m. Cost: 

$35/person. Call Sonya Robertson at 323-574-4846 or 

email ssonya@sbcglobal.net, or call Evelyn Payne at 323- 

291-8325 or email pookie6@ca.rr.com. 


Blessing of World Youth Day Pilgrims. Cathedral of Our 

Lady of the Angels, 555 W. Temple St., Los Angeles, 10 a.m. 

Local young adults and guardians planning to attend World 

Youth Day 2023 are invited to a special blessing from 

Archbishop José H. Gomez. Pilgrims are invited to wear 

their WYD t-shirts. 

■ THURSDAY, JULY 27 

“The Deepest Sorrow: Discovering New Ways to Bring 

Comfort and Hope to a Grieving Mother” Webinar. 

6:30-8:30 p.m. Parish leaders are invited to participate in 

a webinar hosted by the Office of Life, Justice, and Peace, 

and Sacred Sorrows. For more information, visit lacatholics. 

org/events. 

■ FRIDAY, JULY 28 

Women at the Well Summer Weekend Retreat: Jewish 

Spirituality. Holy Spirit Retreat Center, 4316 Lanai Rd., 

Encino, Friday, 4 p.m.-Sunday, 1 p.m. With Sister Chris 

Machado, SSS, and the Women at the Well Team. Visit 

hsrcenter.com or call 818-784-4515. 


Glorifying Christ: Retreat with Michael R. Heinlein. 

Pauline Books & Media, 3908 Sepulveda Blvd., Culver 

City, 10:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m. Heinlein will share lessons from 

Cardinal Francis E. George’s life and legacy. Donation: $30/ 

person, includes lunch. 4 p.m. Mass. RSVP to 310-397- 

8676 or email culvercity@paulinemedia.com. 

■ THURSDAY, AUGUST 3 

Church of the Transfiguration: Celebrating 100 Years. 

Church of the Transfiguration, 2515 W. Martin Luther King 

Blvd., Los Angeles, 6:30-8 p.m. prayer service. Friday, Aug. 

4: international food and dance, 5 p.m. Saturday, August 5: 

KPC centenary awards, 2 p.m. Sunday, August 6: Mass and 

gala, 10 a.m. 

■ FRIDAY, AUGUST 4 

City of Saints. UCLA, 405 Hilgard Ave., Los Angeles. 

Catholic teen conference runs Aug. 4-6, features dynamic 

speakers, Mass, reconciliation, praise and worship. Cost: 

$260/person, includes housing and meals. For more information, 

visit cityofsaints.org. 

■ SUNDAY, AUGUST 6 

Eight-day Directed Retreat. Holy Spirit Retreat Center, 

4316 Lanai Rd., Encino, Sunday, 4 p.m.-Sunday, 1 p.m. With 

Sister Rosheen Glennon, CSJ, Sister Chris Machado, SSS, 

and the retreat team. Visit hsrcenter.com or call 818-784- 

4515. 

Holy Silence Contemplative Prayer Group. St. Andrew 

Russian Greek Catholic Church, 538 Concord St., El Segundo, 

12-1:30 p.m. Call 310-322-1892. 

■ TUESDAY, AUGUST 8 

LACBA Unlawful Detainer Answer Clinic. LA Law 

Library, 301 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, 12-3 p.m. Providing 

limited assistance with reviewing unlawful detainer complaints, 

jury demands, fee waiver requests, and more. Open 

to the disabled veteran community in Los Angeles County. 

Spanish assistance available. RSVP to 213-896-6536 or 

email inquiries-veterans@lacba.org. 

■ WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 9 

St. Padre Pio Mass. St. Anne Church, 340 10th St., Seal 

Beach, 1 p.m. Celebrant: Father Al Baca. For more information, 

call 562-537-4526. 

Items for the calendar of events are due four weeks prior to the date of the event. They may be emailed to calendar@angelusnews.com. 

All calendar items must include the name, date, time, address of the event, and a phone number for additional information.

Angelus News | July 14, 2023 | Vol. 8 No. 14

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