Angelus News | April 19, 2024 | Vol. 9 No. 8

ANGELUS 

PRAYERS 

ANSWERED 

After decades apart, 

families reunite 

at LA parish 

April 19, 2024 Vol. 9 No. 8

April 19, 2024 

Vol. 9 • No. 8 

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Los Angeles, CA 90010-2241 

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ANGELUS 

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ON THE COVER 


On March 30, more than 30 seniors from 

Mexico reunited with relatives they hadn’t 

seen in decades at a special event hosted by 

St. Frances X. Cabrini Church. On Page 10, 

Theresa Cisneros has the inside story of the 

cross-border team effort between community 

and church leaders that made the improbable 

reunions happen just in time for Easter. 

THIS PAGE 

OSV NEWS/CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS, REUTERS 

Workers carry out operations April 4 at the site where a 

building collapsed following a 7.4 magnitude earthquake near 

Hualien, Taiwan. At least nine people died when the quake 

struck April 3, and more than 1,000 people were injured. In a 

telegram to the island’s bishops, Pope Francis assured all those 

affected of his “heartfelt solidarity and spiritual closeness” and 

prayed for “all the divine blessings of consolation and strength.”

CONTENTS 

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 

14 

18 

20 

22 

26 

28 

30 

Photos: Holy Week 2024 in downtown Los Angeles 

John Allen: The paradox of Pope Francis’ ‘empty chair’ phase 

Mike Aquilina on how Christianity changed the world’s view of widows 

A disability advocate’s concerns about California’s new mental health law 

Robert Brennan spends Palm Sunday among the Catholics of Silver Lake 

‘Irena’s Vow’ pays tribute to Catholic heroism in the Holocaust 

Heather King: Dante, purgatory, and a poem worth dying for 

April 19, 2024 • ANGELUS • 1

POPE WATCH 

Jesus is our Pasch 

The following is adapted from the 

Holy Father’s homily at the Easter 

Vigil in St. Peter’s Basilica the evening 

of March 30. 

The women go to the tomb at 

daybreak, yet they still feel the 

darkness of night. A stone has 

sealed the fate of Jesus. Yet once they 

arrive, they are taken aback when they 

see the amazing power of the Easter 

event: “When they looked up, they 

saw that the stone, which was very 

large, had already been rolled back” 

(Mark 16:4). 

The question troubling their grieving 

hearts was: “Who will roll away the 

stone from the tomb?” That stone 

marked the end of Jesus’ story, now 

buried in the night of death. That 

stone, an overwhelming obstacle, symbolized 

what the women felt in their 

hearts. It represented the end of their 

hopes, now dashed by the obscure 

and sorrowful mystery that put an end 

to their dreams. 

It can also be that way with us. 

There are times when we may feel 

that a great stone blocks the door of 

our hearts, stifling life, extinguishing 

hope, imprisoning us in the tomb of 

our fears and regrets. We encounter 

such “tombstones” on our journey 

through life in all the experiences 

and situations that rob us of enthusiasm 

and of the strength to persevere. 

When we experience these disappointments, 

do we also have the sensation 

that all these dreams are doomed 

to failure, and that we too should ask 

ourselves in anguish: “Who will roll 

away the stone from the tomb?” 

Yet the same women who bore this 

darkness in their hearts tell us something 

quite extraordinary: “When they 

looked up, they saw that the stone, 

which was very large, had already 

been rolled back.” This is the Pasch 

of Christ, the revelation of God’s 

power: the victory of life over death, 

the triumph of light over darkness, 

the rebirth of hope amid the ruins 

of failure. It is the Lord, the God of 

the impossible, who rolled away the 

stone forever. Even now, he opens our 

hearts, so that hope may be born ever 

anew. 

We too, then, should “look up” to 

him. Raised up by the Father in his, 

and our, flesh, in the power of the 

Holy Spirit, he turned a new page in 

the history of the human race. From 

now on, if we allow Jesus to take us by 

the hand, no experience of failure or 

sorrow, however painful, will have the 

last word on the meaning and destiny 

of our lives. Henceforth, if we allow 

ourselves to be raised up by the Risen 

Lord, no setback, no suffering, no 

death will be able to halt our progress 

toward the fullness of life. 

Jesus is our Pasch. He is the One 

who brings us from darkness into 

light, who is bound to us forever, who 

rescues us from the abyss of sin and 

death, and draws us into the radiant 

realm of forgiveness and eternal life. 

Let us welcome Jesus, the God of 

life, into our lives, and today once 

again say “yes” to him. Let us lift our 

eyes to him, the Risen Lord, and press 

forward in the certainty that, against 

the obscure backdrop of our failed 

hopes and our deaths, the eternal life 

that he came to bring is even now 

present in our midst. 

Papal Prayer Intention for April: We pray that the dignity and 

immense value of women be recognized in every culture, 

and for the end of discrimination that they experience in 

different parts of the world. 

2 • ANGELUS • April 19, 2024

NEW WORLD OF FAITH 

ARCHBISHOP JOSÉ H. GOMEZ 

Under the sign of our salvation 

This Easter, we welcomed nearly 

3,600 new Catholics to the family 

of God here in Los Angeles, 

including more than 2,000 catechumens 

who were baptized at the vigil 

Masses across the archdiocese, and 

more than 1,500 candidates who were 

newly confirmed in the faith. 

Of course, these are not statistics. 

Each is a precious soul, a brother or 

sister who by grace has found joy and 

life in Jesus Christ. Praise God! 

As I’ve been praying for these new 

Catholics and their families, I find 

myself reflecting on the beautiful rites 

of initiation that we use for adults 

preparing to enter the Church. 

There is a powerful moment in the 

welcoming ceremonies when the priest 

traces the sign of the cross on the foreheads 

of catechumens and candidates; 

in some celebrations, they may also be 

“signed with the cross” on their hearts 

and hands, as well as on their eyes, 

ears, nose, and mouth. 

This practice is thought to date back 

to the first baptisms performed by the 

apostles, who Jesus commanded to 

baptize “in the name of the Father and 

of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” 

St. Paul said to the newly baptized 

in Ephesus: “In him you … who have 

heard the word of truth, the gospel of 

your salvation, and have believed in 

him, were sealed with the promised 

Holy Spirit.” 

Catechumens are signed with the 

cross to signify the “seal” that the Holy 

Spirit places upon our souls in baptism. 

The sign is the “imprint of Christ.” It 

means our lives belong now to Jesus. 

It assures us that by his sacrifice on the 

cross, we can have salvation. 

In the Bible’s final book, the redeemed 

are identified by the sign of the 

cross — called “the seal of God” or 

“his Father’s name” — written on their 

foreheads. 

The cross is the great sign of Our 

Lord’s victory of love over sin and 

death, the great sign of the paschal 

mystery of his passion, death, and 

resurrection that we celebrate during 

these 50 days of Easter. 

And Easter is a good time for us to renew 

our practice of this ancient prayer. 

For many of us, this is the first prayer 

that our parents taught us when we 

were young. And I know many of you 

are teaching this prayer to your own 

children now. 

With this simple gesture we invoke 

the most holy name of the triune God 

— Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — and 

we recognize that we live now under 

the sign of the Lord’s cross. 

The early Christians would begin and 

end their prayers with the sign of the 

cross, as we still do. 

They would cross themselves many 

times during the day to remember the 

Lord’s love and to sanctify all their chores 

and duties. Still today, making this 

sign can be a powerful way to remind 

ourselves that everything we do, we 

should do for the glory of God. 

St. Cyril of Jerusalem said in the 

fourth century, “Let us make the sign of 

the cross … in all circumstances: when 

we eat, and when we drink, when we 

come in and when we go out, before 

we sleep, when we lie down and when 

we arise. Here is a great protection.” 

Catholics have always made the sign 

of the cross to seek strength to overcome 

their temptations, to ask God’s 

protection against evil, and to help 

them in their daily struggles against sin 

and selfishness. 

It is a holy sign, so we should always 

make it slowly, thoughtfully, reverently. 

Not casually or in a hurry. 

“Make a large cross, taking time, thinking 

about what you do,” the Servant 

of God Romano Guardini recommended. 

“Let it take in your whole being 

— body, soul, mind, will, thoughts, 

feelings, your doing and not-doing.” 

As you trace the sign of the cross from 

your forehead to your heart and across 

your shoulders, remember that by this 

sign Jesus gave his life for you. 

“When you make it,” St. John Chrysostom 

said, “remember what has been 

given for your ransom, and you will be 

the slave to no one.” 

By making the sign of the cross we 

are declaring our love for Jesus and our 

identity as Catholics. We are saying yes 

once again to his call to take up our 

own cross and follow his way for our 

lives. 

Pray for me in this holy season, and I 

By making the sign of the cross, we are saying yes 

once again to his call to take up our own cross 

and follow his way for our lives. 

will pray for you. 

And as we thank Jesus for the gift 

of new life that we receive by our 

baptism, let us remember the sign of 

the cross. 

May holy Mary our mother help us to 

live from the cross, as her Son showed 

us: as sons and daughters of the Father, 

sealed with his Spirit, and strengthened 

by his love until the day of our 

redemption. 


WORLD 

■ Shroud to Turin not 

a European forgery, 

researchers say 

The Shroud of Turin was woven out 

of Middle Eastern flax, a new study 

shows, strengthening its claim to be 

the burial shroud of Jesus. 

Though many Catholics hold the 

shroud to be authentic, skeptics have 

long claimed it to be a medieval 

forgery. But a recent series of isotope 

tests run on this sample of the cloth 

have revealed that the flax used to 

weave the shroud likely originated in 

Israel, Lebanon, or the western parts 

of Jordan and Syria. 

“With a probable Near Eastern 

origin, new doubts must be raised 

about interpreting the shroud as 

A contrast enhanced facial image from the Shroud of 

Turin. | CNS/BARRIE M. SCHWORTZ, COURTESY MUSE- 

UM OF THE BIBLE 

simply a fake relic made in medieval Europe,” William Meacham, an American 

archaeologist who commissioned the study, told the Catholic Herald, “and new 

questions arise about what the image on the cloth signifies.” 

■ Pope’s ambassador to UN: Ban child surrogacy 

The Vatican’s representative at the United Nations repeated Pope Francis’ recent 

call for an international ban on child surrogacy. 

Surrogacy, which usually involves a woman agreeing to carry another woman’s 

child, created via in-vitro fertilization in exchange for money, “has far more in 

common with trafficking, of both women and children, than its proponents are 

willing to admit,” said Archbishop Gabriele Caccia, the Holy See’s permanent 

observer to the U.N. 

Caccia made the remarks at a March 19 panel event about faith-based organizations 

promoting women’s leadership. Among the other speakers was Olivia 

Maurel, a woman who was born via surrogacy and now speaks out against it. 

“There is no ethical way of selling children, like there is no ethical way to rent a 

woman’s body,” said Maurel. “Women and children pay way too much of a price.” 

■ Chaldeans pull back on Easter celebrations in Iraq 

Tensions with Iraq’s government led the Chaldean Catholic Church to cancel 

all nonliturgical Easter events. 

“The Chaldean Patriarchate announces the cancellation of all festivities, 

media coverage, and receptions of government officials on the occasion of 

Easter,” read a March 25 statement from the Chaldean Church, “opting instead 

for prayers, in solidarity with our Father, Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako, who has 

been staying away from his historical headquarters in Baghdad for six months 

now.” 

Since 2013, Sako has been the leader of the Chaldean Church, one of 23 

autonomous Eastern churches in communion with Rome. 

But last July, Iraqi president Abdul Latif Rashid issued a decree that revoked 

Sako’s civil recognition as leader of the church, removing his ability to administer 

the church’s assets and other civil privileges. In response, Sako went into a 

self-imposed exile to the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan. 

■ Vatican clergy chief: 

Married priests won’t lead 

to more vocations 

Solving the Church’s crisis in vocations 

to the priesthood is not as simple 

as ending clerical celibacy, a top 

Vatican cardinal said. 

In a March 21 interview with the 

Irish Catholic, Cardinal Lazzaro You 

Heung-sik, prefect for the Dicastery 

of the Clergy, explicitly dismissed the 

idea that solving the shrinking number 

of priests is as simple as letting 

priests marry. 

“If that were the case, take for example 

the Orthodox Church, they would 

be flourishing in terms of vocations, 

but we have to look at the reality,” said 

the South Korean cardinal, who pointed 

out that the Orthodox Church is 

also experiencing declines in priestly 

vocations, despite the ability for priests 

to marry. 

“I say to the lay faithful to have more 

children and to promote vocations in 

their families and among their children,” 

the cardinal said. 

Cardinal Lazzaro You Heung-sik. | LORENZO IORFINO/ 

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS 


NATION 

■ Pennsylvania Catholic school 

district gets a police force 

To boost school security and mentorship opportunities 

at its schools, a diocese in Pennsylvania 

has a surprising plan: employing retired 

police officers. 

“Our goal is to have a full-time officer 

assigned to each building, because then they 

become a member of that school community,” 

Lt. Ryan Maher, a 25-year veteran of law 

enforcement and director of security for the 

Diocese of Greenburg, told Catholic News 

Agency. 

“We don’t want a hard-nosed law enforcement 

officer in there with blouse pants that’s 

walking around like the Gestapo,” he said. “We 

want that person that’s going to be a mentor to 

the kids and be a part of that community. So 

it took a while to find the right folks to fill the 

positions.” 

The initiative involved formally filing the 

diocese as a private police force, giving police 

full authority on diocesan property. It began in 

2022 and has grown to 18 retired officers, each 

with at least 20 years’ experience, now working 

at the diocese’s 12 Catholic schools. 

Father Roger Landry in 2022. | CNS/GREGORY A. 

SHEMITZ 

■ New York priest to 

walk 1,500 miles for 

Eucharistic pilgrimage 

Each of the four routes of the 

upcoming National Eucharistic 

Pilgrimage will be walked by a 

rotating contingent of priests. But 

so far, only one priest has signed up 

to walk an entire route himself. 

Father Roger Landry, a priest of 

the Archdiocese of New York and 

chaplain at Columbia University, is 

scheduled to walk the entire 1,500 

miles planned for the Seton Route 

(named after St. Elizabeth Ann Seton) 

from New Haven, Connecticut 

to Indianapolis, where the 2024 

Eucharistic Congress will be held. 

“To be really the only priest who’s 

going to be able to accompany the Eucharistic Pilgrimage from beginning 

to end is just an extraordinary gift of the Lord and source of gratitude for 

me,” Father Landry told Catholic News Agency. 

Twenty-four lay “Perpetual Pilgrims” have also committed to walking the 

entirety of each of the four routes, which begin in San Francisco; Brownsville, 

Texas; and Lake Itasca, Minnesota. All four routes end in Indianapolis. 

Rebuilding together — Lora Hargrove, interfaith outreach director for Maryland Gov. Wes Moore 

and a parishioner of St. Bernardine Church in West Baltimore, shakes the hand of Baltimore City 

Police Lt. Col. Nicholas Edwards at a March 26 Mass at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen in Baltimore. 

The Mass of healing was celebrated for those affected by the collapse of the city’s Francis 

Scott Key Bridge earlier the same day. | OSV NEWS/KEVIN J. PARKS, CATHOLIC REVIEW 

■ Washington cardinal calls 

Biden a ‘cafeteria Catholic’ 

Cardinal Wilton Gregory of Washington, 

D.C., referred to President Joe Biden as a “cafeteria 

Catholic” during a March 31 interview on 

national TV. 

“I would say that he’s very sincere about his 

faith,” Gregory said in reply to a question about 

the president’s religious beliefs. “But like a number 

of Catholics, he picks and chooses dimensions 

of the faith to highlight while ignoring or 

even contradicting other parts.” 

“There is a phrase that we have used in the 

past — a ‘cafeteria Catholic’: You choose that 

which is attractive, and dismiss that which is 

challenging,” he said. 

The comments followed controversy after the 

president’s office announced that the “International 

Transgender Day of Visibility,” which 

was created in 2009 and is observed on March 

31, would be officially celebrated at the White 

House on Easter Sunday. 

Though Biden also released an Easter message, 

the White House instructed participants 

at its traditional Easter egg art contest to refrain 

from designs with religious symbols or themes. 


LOCAL 

■ USC parish wins national 

award for campus ministry 

USC’s Caruso Catholic Center team will 

receive the prestigious Father Bob Beloin 

Award from the Catholic Campus Ministry 

Association this year. 

The award, given “for creativity, collaboration, 

and innovation in the field of campus 

ministry,” was named for Father Bob 

Beloin, Yale University’s longtime chaplain 

until his death in 2018. 

“Winning the Father Bob Beloin Award 

is a significant accomplishment and a 

well-deserved recognition of your team’s 

talents and expertise,” said Rosie Chinea 

Shawver, CCMA’s executive director. 

“Your passion and drive inspire us all to 

reach greater heights and strive for excellence 

in everything we do.” 

The Caruso Center’s team, led by Father 

Richard Sunwoo, Father Joe Kim, and 

President Jamie Cappetta, will be honored 

during CCMA’s national conference, 

CALLED24, during its banquet dinner on 

June 5 in College Station, Texas. 

An encouraging Easter — Pat and Jane McDade, left, pose with employees of the nonprofit Many 

Mansions after parishioners, school families, and supporters at St. Jude the Apostle Church in Westlake 

Village donated 778 Easter baskets for organizations that assist needy children, including Many Mansions, 

Moorpark Catholic Charities, Harbor House, Kids and Families Together, RAIN, and Friends of Fieldworkers. 

| ST. JUDE THE APOSTLE CHURCH 

■ Archdiocese 

welcomes increase 

in new Catholics 

on Easter 2024 

The Archdiocese of 

Los Angeles had more 

than 2,000 catechumens 

baptized into the Catholic 

faith, the biggest number 

since at least 2016. The 

archdiocese also had the 

second-most candidates 

since 2016 entering into 

full communion with the 

Catholic Church. 

The archdiocese had 

A catechumen is baptized at the Cathedral 

2,075 catechumens at Easter 

Vigil liturgies this year, 

Easter vigil on March 30. | JOHN RUEDA 

of Our Lady of the Angels during the 2024 

a 38% increase since 2016, 

when there were 1,508. 

There were also 1,521 candidates in 2024, a 20% increase since 2016, and a 

67% increase in total candidates since a pre-pandemic low in 2019. 

Since 2016, the archdiocese had a high of 1,719 total candidates in 2023. 

Catechumens are adults or children who have never been baptized, while 

candidates are those who have been baptized, but receive the sacrament of 

confirmation and the Eucharist during the Easter Vigil. 

■ Catholic Charities San 

Diego gets mobile hot 

shower units for homeless 

Catholic Charities’ San Diego chapter 

recently welcomed new portable 

shower units for the use of the homeless 

population it serves. 

Each unit, which can be towed to a 

location, features three compartments 

with walk-in showers, dressing areas, 

mirrors, sinks, and paper towel dispensers. 

Propane tanks power the showers 

to produce hot water. The units are 

supplied by water tanks that can serve 

up to 250 individuals per day, or more if 

connected to a water supply at a parish, 

business, or participating location. 

“This is a dream for Catholic Charities 

to work along with our parishes to 

provide care for those who are out on 

the streets,” said Appaswamy “Vino” 

Pajanor, executive director of Catholic 

Charities Diocese of San Diego. 

In addition to helping the homeless, 

Pajanor said the showers could also be 

deployed to help people displaced by 

natural disasters. 

Y 


V 

IN OTHER WORDS... 

Letters to the Editor 

Courage on Palm Sunday 

I was overjoyed to read Robert Brennan’s column on the Palm Sunday 

procession in Silver Lake online April 3 (also in this issue on page 26) 

and see that some parishes are not cutting corners on this beautiful tradition. 

There’s been more emphasis in recent years on doing Eucharistic processions, 

which are good and important. But the Palm Sunday procession is the oldest one 

in the Church’s history (technically, Jesus himself started it) and one of the very 

few actually in the liturgical books. 

Sadly, this procession is often skipped or done in a parish parking lot to save time 

and effort. Bravo to St. Teresa of Avila Church for making this public profession of 

faith in the most challenging of circumstances. 

— Anonymous priest, Northern California 

Abortion and the president 

Contesting Francis X. Maier’s criticism of President Biden in the March 22 issue, 

Claire Marmion begins by saying, “Joe Biden is a man of faith” (Letters to the 

Editor, April 5). But is Biden’s faith ours? 

St. Pope John Paul II, addressing the U.S. bishops in Los Angeles in 1987, criticized 

the “tendency on the part of some Catholics to be selective in their adherence 

to the Church’s moral teachings.” 

In his encyclical Evangelium Vitae (“The Gospel of Life), John Paul affirmed that 

procured abortion is murder, and that lawmakers who promote and approve laws 

permitting them are among those who are morally responsible for them. 

We have a grave and clear obligation to oppose abortion laws by conscientious 

objection. It is not licit to campaign or vote for them, except to make permissive 

abortion laws more restrictive so as to limit the number of authorized abortions. 

— Steve Serra, St. Nicholas Church, Laguna Woods 

Y 

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may be edited for style, brevity, and clarity. 

An Easter miracle 

“Easter is a difficult mystery, 

not so much because of the 

difficulty of the dogma, but 

because of our difficulty in 

welcoming it and living it.” 

~ Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin patriarch of 

Jerusalem, in his homily for Holy Thursday. 

“Their work should earn 

respect and admiration, not 

demonization.” 

~ Kerry Alys Robinson, president and CEO of 

Catholic Charities, on the rising number of antiimmigrant 

threats made against Catholic Charities 

staffers around the U.S. 

“It’s like preparing for your 

deathbed.” 

~ Scott Berman, founder of Sky Cave Retreats, in a 

March 26 Outside article on dark-cave retreats. 

“To be awakened, let us first 

be sleepers.” 

~ Nell O’Leary, in a March 30 Word on Fire 

commentary on allowing God to silence our lives 

and be reawakened to him. 

“The problem is, fish don’t 

pay for water.” 

~ Duane Winter, charter boat captain, in a March 

31 LA Times article on the struggling salmon 

population in California. 

Organizers and volunteers receive a round of applause for their efforts at the conclusion of an event at St. Frances X. 

Cabrini Church in South LA on March 30 that reunited families from Mexico that hadn’t seen one another in decades. 

See the full story on Page 10. | VICTOR ALEMÁN 

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. 

“I was young enough to not 

even understand that death 

was part of my world.” 

~ Roxanne Olson, in an April 1 NPR article on a 

stranger who helped her after her father died. 


IN EXILE 

FATHER RONALD ROLHEISER, OMI 

Oblate of Mary Immaculate Father 

Ronald Rolheiser is a spiritual 

writer; ronrolheiser.com 

God’s silence in the face of evil 

Theologians sometimes try to 

express the meaning of Jesus’ 

resurrection in one sentence: In 

the resurrection, God vindicated Jesus, 

his life, his message, and his fidelity. 

What does that mean? 

Jesus entered our world preaching 

faith, love, and forgiveness, but the 

world didn’t accept that. Instead, it 

crucified him and by that seemingly 

shamed his message. We see this most 

clearly on the cross when Jesus is taunted, 

mocked, and challenged: If you are 

the son of God, come down from there! If 

your message is true, let God verify that 

right now! If your fidelity is more than 

plain stubbornness and human ignorance, 

then why are you dying in shame? 

What was God’s response to those 

taunts? Seemingly nothing, no commentary, 

no defense, no apologia, no 

counterchallenge, just silence. Jesus 

dies in silence. Neither he nor the God 

he believed in tried to fill that excruciating 

void with any consoling words or 

explanations challenging people to look 

at the bigger picture or to look at the 

brighter side of things. None of that. 

Just silence. 

Jesus died in silence, inside God’s 

silence and inside the world’s incomprehension. 

And we can let ourselves 

be scandalized by that silence, just as 

we can let ourselves be scandalized by 

the seeming triumph of evil, pain, and 

suffering in our world. 

God’s seeming silence in the face of 

evil and death can forever scandalize 

us: in the Jewish holocaust, in ethnic 

genocides, in brutal and senseless wars, 

in the earthquakes and tsunamis which 

kill thousands of people and devastate 

whole countries, in the deaths of countless 

people taken out of this life by cancer, 

and by violence, in how unfair life 

can be sometimes, and in the casual 

manner that those without conscience 

can rape whole areas of life seemingly 

without consequence. Where is God in 

all of this? What’s God’s answer? 

God’s answer is the resurrection, the 

resurrection of Jesus and the perennial 

resurrection of goodness within life 

itself. But resurrection is not necessarily 

rescue. God doesn’t necessarily rescue 

us from the effects of evil, nor even 

from death. Evil does what it does, 

natural disasters are what they are, and 

those without conscience can rape even 

as they are feeding off life’s sacred fire. 

Normally, God doesn’t intervene. 

The parting of the Red Sea isn’t a 

weekly occurrence. God lets his loved 

ones suffer and die, just as Jesus let his 

dear friend Lazarus die, and God let 

Jesus die. God redeems, raises us up 

afterwards, in a deeper, more lasting 

vindication. Moreover, the truth of that 

statement can even be tested empirically. 

Despite every appearance to the contrary 

at times, in the end, love does triumph 

over hatred. Peace does triumph 

over chaos. Forgiveness does triumph 

over bitterness. Hope does triumph 

over cynicism. Fidelity does triumph 

over despair. Virtue does triumph over 

sin. Conscience does triumph over 

callousness. Life does triumph over 

death, and good does triumph over evil, 

always. 

Mohandas K. Gandhi once wrote: 

“When I despair, I remember that all 

through history, the way of truth and 

love has always won. There have been 

murderers and tyrants, and for a time 

they seem invincible. But in the end 

they always fall. Think of it, always.” 

The Resurrection, most forcibly, 

makes that point. In the end, God 

has the last word. The resurrection of 

Jesus is that last word. From the ashes 

of shame, of seeming defeat, failure, 

and death, a new, deeper, and eternal 

life perennially bursts forth. Our faith 

begins at the very point where it seems it 

should end, in God’s seeming silence in 

the face of evil. 

And what does this ask of us? 

First, simply that we trust in the truth 

of the Resurrection. The Resurrection 

asks us to believe what Gandhi affirmed, 

namely, that in the end evil will 

not have the last word. It will fail. Good 

will eventually triumph. 

More concretely, it asks us to roll the 

dice on trust and truth, namely, trusting 

that what Jesus taught is true. Virtue 

is not naive, even when it is shamed. 

Sin and cynicism are naive, even when 

they appear to triumph. Those who 

genuflect before God and others in 

conscience will find meaning and joy, 

even when they are deprived of some of 

the world’s pleasures. 

Those who drink in and manipulate 

sacred energy without conscience will 

not find meaning in life, even when 

they taste pleasure. Those who live in 

honesty, no matter the cost, will find 

freedom. Those who lie and rationalize 

will find themselves imprisoned in selfhate. 

Those who live in trust will find 

love. God’s silence can be trusted, even 

when we die inside of it. 

We need to remain faithful in love, 

forgiveness, and conscience, despite 

everything that suggests they are naive. 

They will bring us to what is deepest 

inside of life. Ultimately, God vindicates 

virtue. God vindicates love. God 

vindicates conscience. God vindicates 

forgiveness. God vindicates fidelity. Ultimately, 

God vindicated Jesus and will 

vindicate us too if we remain faithful. 


TEARS OF RESURRECTION 

They hadn’t seen their relatives from Mexico in decades. On Easter 

weekend, a South LA parish hosted their improbable reunion. 

BY THERESA CISNEROS / PHOTOGRAPHY BY VICTOR ALEMÁN 

A reunited family tearfully hugs after seeing 

one another for the first time in decades 

during a special event at St. Frances X. 

Cabrini Church in South LA on March 30. 


Twenty-two years ago, Maria Perez 

Cardenas’ 16-year-old son set out 

from their hometown in Jalisco, 

Mexico, to find work in the United 

States. 

His quest was successful, and over the 

years he got married, had children, and 

carved out a life for himself in a new 

country. 

Cardenas kept in touch with him as 

best as she could through phone calls 

and video chats. But seeing him in 

person was out of the question: She 

lacked the legal documents to visit 

him in California, and he lacked legal 

documents to return to Mexico. 

After several failed attempts, she recently 

secured a visa through a special 

program that helps seniors from Jalisco 

reconnect with their families in the 

U.S. 

The heart-stirring moment finally 

came on March 30, Holy Saturday, at 

a special reunification ceremony at St. 

Frances Cabrini Church in South Los 

Angeles. 

“We tried so many times but were unsuccessful,” 

she said, her eyes brimming 

with tears. “Thanks to God and to these 

people who have helped us, we are 

here today.” 

Cardenas was among 33 seniors who 

received visas through the program 

— led by the Asociación de Clubes 

Jalisciences de California (California’s 

Association of Jalisco Clubs) — and 

made the 2,500-mile journey on Good 

Friday so that they would arrive in time 

to celebrate Easter Sunday alongside 

their families. Participants were expected 

to stay with their loved ones for three 

weeks before returning home. 

The reunion — nearly two years in 

the making — was the fruit of efforts 

from community and church leaders 

on both sides of the border. Organizers 

said they felt compelled to assist the 

visitors as a way to answer Christ’s calls 

to unity, compassion, and service, and 

to help them share in the joy of Christ’s 

resurrection by reuniting with their 

long-lost relatives for Easter. 

After landing at LAX early on Holy 

Saturday, participants were shuttled 

to the church hall, where about 20 

parishioners had spent several hours 

preparing for their 

arrival by cleaning, 

decorating, cooking 

breakfast, and praying 

for all involved. 

The seniors were 

reunited with their 

Los Angeles Auxiliary 

Bishop Matthew 

Elshoff, right, stands 

with several of the 

organizers who 

helped put on the 

reunification event. 

kin during a 10 a.m. ceremony in the 

hall, which began with remarks from 

organizers and a welcome from Auxiliary 

Bishop Matthew Elshoff, on behalf 

of Archbishop José H. Gomez. 

“Your presence with us is a privilege as 

we start the Easter season,” Elshoff told 

the crowd. “It’s a time of joy and hope, 

and we are experiencing the resurrection 

of the Lord in this moment as you 

are here with us and with your families 

once again.” 

Javier Wenceslao, the association’s 

president, took to the mic to thank the 

church community for its hospitality, 

drawing a parallel to its namesake. 

Traveling to a new country can be 

scary for some, he said, but the hospitality 

the group received from the parish 

and the archdiocese made them feel 

right at home. 


Bishop Matthew Elshoff welcomes the seniors 

from Mexico when they arrived from the 

airport prior to reuniting with their families. 

“It’s a great honor for us to be welcomed 

into this church named for the 

missionary saint St. Cabrini who, like 

us, also came here as an immigrant,” 

he said. 

Then, finally, the moment everyone 

was waiting for: One by one, the travelers 

walked up to the front of the hall, 

where they were received by multiple 

generations of relatives carrying balloons, 

flowers, and other gifts. 

The families spent a few tear-filled 

minutes embracing in front of a crowd 

of about 150, then made their way 

together to their seats. 

Jose Toscano was among those who 

reconnected with their parents during 

the event. He’d been separated from 

his mom, Alicia Rafael Bernabe, for 

decades, and although the two communicated 

regularly through Facebook, he 

still couldn’t wait to see her. 

“Seeing her on a video call is not the 

same as being able to hug her in person,” 

he said, with his arm around his 

mom’s shoulder. “We’ve been waiting 

for 20 years for this moment.” 

Like Cardenas and Bernabe, many of 

the participants’ children made the trek 

to the U.S. 15, 20, or nearly 30 years 

ago, but for various reasons were not 

able to return home to their parents. 

For Antonia Bernardino Toscano, it 

had been 23 years since she’d seen her 

daughter and 20 years since she’d seen 

her son. The native of San Andres, 

Jalisco, said she found out about the 

program through Facebook and spent 

nearly two years completing the steps to 

obtain her visa. 

She said she was so excited to see her 

adult children again that she stayed 

awake all night on the plane ride, and 

hoped to spend the next few weeks 

reminiscing with them and making up 

for lost time. 

“I am so thankful to my God in heaven 

for getting us to this step,” she said. 

For some participants, the years spent 

apart from their children also brought 

chronic illnesses, the death of a spouse, 

and other unexpected situations. 

Many of the reunited 

families had children 

who left Mexico for the 

United States decades 

ago and hadn’t seen one 

another in person since. 

For Juana Seda 

Vazquez, 27 years 

had passed since 

she last saw her 

oldest son, who 

came to the U.S. 

at age 13. Although 

her vision 

is nearly gone 

now, the thought 

of seeing her 

four children in 

person — instead 

of on a phone 

screen — was almost too much. 

“I give thanks to God for allowing me 

to come and see them,” said Vazquez, 

who had never been on an airplane 

before. “I feel like maybe I’m not going 

to be able to handle it.” 

Gladys Oliver, who led the ceremony 

and reception planning, said she and 

other parishioners got involved to help 

unify families across borders, evangelize 

through hospitality, and heed Christ’s 

call to put themselves at the service of 

others. 

“As long as we have life and Christ 

lives in us, we will be able to serve our 

brothers,” she said. “Just as the gospel 

tells us, we need to become one.” 

Looking to the future, Wenceslao told 

the crowd that his group will work to 

reunite more families going forward. 

“There is much need and many more 

people to help,” he said. “We will continue 

doing what we can to make a little 

bit of a difference so that others like you 

can be reunited with their parents, so 

that there is hope for families.” 

Theresa Cisneros is a freelance journalist 

with 24 years of experience in the 

news industry. She is a fourth-generation 

Southern California resident and lives in 

Orange County with her husband and 

four children. 


A WEEK 

WITH 

JESUS 

Massgoers with blessed palm fronds 

prepare to process into the cathedral on 

Palm Sunday March 24. 

Special moments from 

Holy Week 2024 at 

the Cathedral of Our 

Lady of the Angels. 

PHOTOGRAPHY BY 


Archbishop José H. Gomez pours balsam 

into the chrism oil as he blesses the oils 

used for sacraments throughout the year 

during the March 25 Chrism Mass. 


Faithful pray before the 

Blessed Sacrament in St. 

Vibiana’s Chapel after 

Mass on Holy Thursday. 

Archbishop 

Gomez washes 

the feet of one of 

12 people during 

the bilingual 

Mass of the 

Lord’s Supper on 

Holy Thursday, 

March 28. 

People had the opportunity to 

venerate the cross and receive 

holy Communion during the 

Good Friday liturgy March 29. 

Archbishop Gomez and other priests lay 

prostrate before the cross during the Good 

Friday liturgy March 29. 


Blocks away from the cathedral, Archbishop Gomez blessed goats, dogs, and all kinds of animals at the annual 

Blessing of the Animals at Placita Olvera Church on Holy Saturday, a tradition that has gone on since 1930. 

A catechumen smiles after being baptized in the cathedral’s 

baptismal font at the Easter Vigil March 30. More than 

2,000 catechumens were baptized and received into the 

Catholic Church around the archdiocese this year. 

Thousands prayed with candles lit from 

the paschal candle during the Easter 

Vigil on Holy Saturday March 30. 


EMPTY CHAIR, FULL AGENDA 

As he scales back his schedule, Francis’ hands-on 

governance style matters more than ever. 

BY JOHN L. ALLEN JR. 

Workers remove the chair that had been set 

up for Pope Francis atop a hillside overlooking 

the Colosseum in Rome, after the Vatican announced 

at the start of the ceremony March 

29 that the pope would follow the event from 

home. | CNS/LOLA GOMEZ 

ROME — Such is the frenetic nature of the Pope 

Francis papacy that even though Good Friday was less 

than a week ago, just a few days later it was hard to 

remember that it actually produced news. In the meantime, 

of course, we’ve had not only the pontiff’s traditional Easter 

activity but his latest tell-all interview book, once again, for 

a moment, transforming the papacy into a species of reality 

TV. 

In this instance, Francis lifted the veil on the inner workings 

of two conclaves, those of 2005 and 2013, and also 

dished on his predecessor’s top aide, German Archbishop 

Georg Gänswein, claiming that he lacks “nobility and humanity” 

for the way in which he allegedly tried to pit Pope 

Benedict XVI against Francis. 

As Italian journalist Massimo Gramellini put it, “At 

bottom, Bergoglio [the pope’s given name] is no more than 

a man of his times. We live in an era in which, some more 

and some less, we’re all exhibitionists, devoured by an insatiable 

need to make our lives public, in the hope of being 

appreciated and understood.” 

Despite all that, it’s still worth returning to Good Friday 

for a moment, because it produced an iconic image of the 

late stages of the Francis papacy: an empty white chair at 

Rome’s Colosseum, where the pontiff had been scheduled 

to preside over the traditional Way of the Cross procession, 

but where he ended up being a no-show at the last minute 

due to health concerns. 

In a way, it was odd that anyone ever seriously entertained 

the idea that the 87-year-old pope would physically attend 

the Via Crucis (Stations of the Cross) on a chilly yet humid 

Roman evening, exactly the wrong conditions for someone 

struggling to kick the after-effects of a series of colds, flu, 

and bronchitis. In all probability, it was likely Francis’ determination 

that kept the possibility alive until the very last 


moment, and which led to the specter of his empty chair 

having to be carted away in front of live TV cameras. 

To be sure, Francis promptly bounced back, as he has after 

multiple health scares before. He presided over the Easter 

Vigil Mass Saturday evening, the Easter morning Mass on 

Sunday, and then delivered his traditional Urbi et Orbi message 

(“to the city and to the world”), all 1,300 words of it, in 

his own voice. All in all, it did not seem like the specter of a 

pope on death’s door. 

Yet, the empty chair of Good Friday remains as a reminder 

that, more and more, the price of Francis being able to 

perform in key moments as he did on Easter is scaling back, 

or skipping altogether, other aspects of his usual activities. 

Where that gradual withdrawal will be most obvious to 

the naked eye will be missed public moments: General 

Audiences he decides to shorten or skip, for instance, or 

international trips he doesn’t take, or traditional liturgical 

celebrations he hands off to someone else. 

Yet there’s a sense that the pope’s being out of the public 

eye is only the tip of the iceberg, because a limited Francis 

will translate quickly into limited Church governance. 

We’ve seen 

popes publicly 

decline before, 

most recently 

during the final 

years of St. Pope 

John Paul II. His 

increasing frailty 

had consequences 

for ecclesiastical 

administration, 

most 

notably with 

regard to the clerical 

sexual abuse 

crisis, which 

erupted into full 

public view in 

the United States 

in 2002. Vatican 

officials from that 

era will tell you 

important decisions 

sometimes 

were either delayed or resolved with only half-measures, on 

the basis that “we can’t bother the pope with this right now.” 

Yet in a routine sense, you almost wouldn’t have known 

that the pope was struggling. Bishops continued to be appointed 

around the world, teaching documents continued 

to be issued (including the encyclical letter “Ecclesia de 

Eucharistia” (“The Church from the Eucharist”) in 2003), 

legal decrees were promulgated, disciplinary decisions were 

made, and in general the ecclesiastical trains continued 

running on time. 

To a great extent, that was because John Paul was never 

terribly interested in internal governance, even when he 

was in the flush of health. He was a decidedly ad extra pope, 

engaged in the broad human questions of his time, and had 

relatively little patience for the minutiae of management. As 

a result, he delegated. 

He had a powerful priest secretary, Archbishop (later Cardinal) 

Stanislaw Dziwisz; a commanding Secretary of State, 

Cardinal Angelo Sodano; and his key intellectual potentate 

in Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. He also had stocked the Vatican 

with strong department heads, each capable of moving 

the levers of power in the general direction the pope desired 

but without requiring his input on the particulars. 

Things are quite different today, as Francis very much 

wields the reins of governance himself. 

Francis has clipped the wings of his Secretary of State, 

Cardinal Pietro Parolin, making him more of a diplomatic 

mouthpiece than a genuine prime minister. He essentially 

dissolved the role of the priest-secretary, having two or three 

clerics handle pieces of the job rather than entrusting it all 

to one central figure, and rotating them in and out every 

few years. Francis also works around the established departments 

of the Vatican at least as much as he does through 

them, lessening their capacity to take up the slack someday 

if needed. 

This is both the 

Pope Francis delivers his Easter blessing 

“urbi et orbi” (“to the city and the world”) 

from the central balcony of St. Peter’s 

Basilica March 31. | CNS/LOLA GOMEZ 

blessing and the 

curse of a highly 

engaged pope: 

Nobody has 

to guess who’s 

really pulling the 

strings, but equally, 

there’s no one 

else to pull them 

when the pope’s 

hand is missing. 

Whether a 

slowdown in 

governance as 

Francis’ limits 

become more 

pronounced 

is positive or 

negative may 

depend, as with 

most things, on 

point of view. If 

you’re the kind of 

Catholic who believes the Church has been on Mr. Toad’s 

Wild Ride for the past 11 years and could do with a breather, 

you may welcome a slowdown; if you’re a Francis aficionado 

anxious to see him nail down as much of his legacy as 

possible, then all of a sudden his do-it-yourself-style papacy 

may seem a drawback rather than a strong suit. 

However one chooses to look at it, the bottom line seems 

the same: As Francis increasingly leaves his chair empty, 

the Vatican — and the broader Church — will slow down. 

Some of that’s inevitable no matter who’s in charge, but the 

effect will be more pronounced on his watch, which is a 

natural byproduct of his imminently hands-on approach. 

John L. Allen is the editor of Crux. 

April 19, 2024 • ANGELUS • 19

Widows’ Might 

Christianity gave widows a 

social dignity they didn’t have 

before. Culturally, the change 

was revolutionary. 

BY MIKE AQUILINA 

“The Widow’s Mite,” by Ignaz Dullinger, 1803- 

1878, Austrian. | WIKIMEDIA COMMONS 

Through all the years of my 

childhood, widows were just 

next door. The lady in the 

apartment behind us was very old, 

lived alone, spoke no English, and 

always wore black, but I don’t recall 

ever seeing her without a smile. Based 

entirely on her expression, I have to 

assume the things she said to me were 

kind. I couldn’t understand a word of 

Italian. 

When I was in fifth grade, we moved 

to a proper house, and a widow 

occupied the tidy place next to ours. 

She had lost her husband many years 

before in the mining disaster that was 

legendary in our town. Her yard was 

immaculate, her house well kept. 

When I was hawking stuff for school 

fundraisers, I could count on her to be 

my first customer. When I shoveled 

her walk, I knew she would pay me 

well. 

The widows of my childhood were 

generous like the widow of Zarephath 

and like the Gospel widow who put 

her two small coins into the treasury. 

In that sense, they confirmed the data 

of revelation. But only in that sense. 

Almost everywhere else in the Bible, 

widows appear as a symbol of misery. 

In the Law of Moses, you’ll find 

frequent reference to “the sojourner, 

the fatherless, and the widow” (e.g., 

Deuteronomy 27:19). These are classes 

of people who have no stable home 

or regular means of support. 

In both the Old Testament and the 

New, widowhood is a synonym for 

poverty, social isolation, and vulnerability. 

They are a protected class in 

the law — but we can assume that 

their legal protection was routinely 

ignored, because the prophets raged 

often against this particular injustice 

(Ezekiel 22:7, Malachi 3:5). 

Even in the New Testament, just 

moments after the founding of the 

Church, the first Christians settled 

into the customary neglect of widows 

(Acts 6:1). 

So why didn’t any of our neighborhood 

widows look oppressed or 

destitute? 

It has everything to do with the 

Christian revolution. In the beatitudes, 

the constitution for his 

kingdom, Jesus took conditions that 

were formerly accursed and declared 

them now to be blessed: “Blessed are 


the poor … Blessed are those who 

mourn” (Matthew 5:3–4). These 

were, in fact, the defining conditions 

of widows in Jesus’ time. They were 

bereft and impoverished. Jesus knew 

this because he was the only son of a 

widow, and his choice to be a wandering 

rabbi would have dire implications 

for his mother’s life. 

Yet his mother never faulted him 

for this. In fact, she left behind the 

poverty she had known and took up 

the more radical poverty of her son, 

who had “nowhere to lay his head” 

(Matthew 8:20). 

We have no record of her complaining 

about her lot. In fact, she seems 

serene as she provokes the launch of 

Jesus’ ministry. She simply observes, 

in a moment of crisis, “They have 

no wine” for the wedding feast; and 

then she says to the bystanders, “Do 

whatever he tells you.” 

As the Gospel unfolds, the widow 

Mary emerges as the model disciple. 

She is close to Jesus to the last. 

Like the other heroic widows of the 

Bible — like the widow of Zarephath 

and the widow in the treasury — she 

has little, but she gives everything she 

has. And, as the beatitudes promise, 

she is blessed: the Blessed Virgin 

Mary, the Blessed Widow Mary. 

The sacred writings bear witness to 

the Church’s concern for widows. 

Visit them in their affliction, says 

St. James (1:27). But that’s really no 

different from the Old Testament 

commands, which were ignored. 

What’s revolutionary in the New 

Testament is the choice for widowhood. 

What’s new is the existence of a 

consecrated order within the Church 

of women who voluntarily bore the 

hardships of widowhood. The Apostle 

to the Gentiles urges widows to take 

up this life with gusto “and remain 

single as I do” (1 Corinthians 7:8). In 

the First Letter to Timothy, we find 

this life described and prescribed in 

detail. It is a life of constant prayer, 

work, and hope. 

This must have arrived as scandalous 

in the Gentile world. It had not been 

long since Caesar Augustus had enacted 

laws requiring widows to remarry, 

for the good of the state. Now came 

Christianity declaring that widows 

“The Crucifixion,” by Master of 

Guillaume Lambert, active about 

1475-1485, French. | J. PAUL GETTY 

MUSEUM 

should freely do as God 

bid them to do. 

This order of widows 

seems to have been 

extremely popular. It 

appears often in the 

documentary record of 

the early Church. St. 

Ignatius of Antioch, writing 

around A.D. 107, 

referred to its members 

as “the virgins known as 

widows,” so renowned 

were they for their chastity. 

His contemporary 

St. Polycarp of Smyrna 

compared them to “the 

altars of God.” Indeed, 

the third-century “Didascalia 

Apostolorum,” 

which, among other 

things, sets out the duties 

and responsibilities 

of laypeople, bishops, and widows, decreed 

that widows should be revered 

like “the altar of sacrifice.” 

The great Fathers — Sts. Basil, Ambrose, 

Jerome, Augustine, Chrysostom 

— wrote letters of counsel to consecrated 

widows. In Rome and Antioch 

(two cities for which we have reliable 

statistics) the order of widows counted 

thousands of members. 

It was liberating. Traditional Roman 

society offered women no place of 

their own. A pagan woman found her 

identity in the men in her life: her 

father, her husband, and her sons. If 

she had no man, she was no one. She 

had no face before the law. She could 

not even testify in court. There was 

no flourishing of women in classical 

antiquity. 

In the Church, however, the most 

abject of women — widows — found 

themselves at the forefront of great 

social movements. They were leaders. 

Some, like Fabiola and Olympias, 

were among the first founders of 

hospitals. Others, like Monica and 

Macrina, were teachers and formators 

of the intellectual giants of their age. 

Still other widows, in fact the majority 

of them, quietly did the work that 

keeps the Church moving forward: 

catechesis, sacramental preparation, 

and charitable programs. 

The history of the Church could be 

convincingly told as the story of such 

women. They were refreshingly free 

of the clericalist mindset that would 

see their lives as less because they 

lacked holy orders. 

In their poverty, and even in their 

grief, they lacked nothing because 

they possessed Christ, and they could 

fulfill the most heroic ambitions 

because they did so in Christ. 

Knowing the widows of my childhood, 

I have no trouble believing 

Christianity’s historical record. 

Knowing the historical record, I recall 

the widows of my childhood, and I see 

no incongruity between the constant 

black dress and the constant smile. I 

see perfect consistency between the 

poverty and the perfectly maintained 

house. 

Mike Aquilina is a contributing editor 

to Angelus and the author of “St. Patrick 

and His World” (Scepter, $15.99). 


CARRYING 

THE STATE’S 

SUFFERING 

Recently approved Proposition 1 

will steer billions toward California’s 

mental health and homelessness 

crisis. But does it go too far? 

BY CHARLIE CAMOSY 

A homeless person in San Francisco 

sits on a corner in this 2021 file photo. | 

CNS/CARLOS BARRIA, REUTERS 

Last month, California voters 

narrowly approved Proposition 1, 

a measure that expands the state’s 

mental health and substance abuse 

treatment infrastructure by authorizing 

$6.4 billion in bond money toward 

building treatment facilities and housing 

for the homeless. 

While supporters have hailed the 

measure as an important step in 

addressing California’s homelessness 

crisis, not everyone is convinced. 

Meghan Schrader is an instructor and 

mentor at the E4Texas (Texas Center 

for Disability Studies) program at the 

University of Texas at Austin and is on 

the board of the Euthanasia Prevention 

Coalition USA. Her experience growing 

up with a learning disorder inspired 

her to serve on the governing board 

of the Boston Autistic Self Advocacy 

Network in 2015 and to volunteer as 

an education advocate for disabled 

students in foster care. 

In an interview with Angelus, Schrader 

shared her concerns about Proposition 

1’s potential effects on the mentally 

disabled and her thoughts on how 

Catholics can help advocate for their 

protection. 

There is a lot going on in California 

at the moment, much of which is 

concerning to disabled populations. 

What are your thoughts, in particular, 

about Proposition 1? 

Proposition 1 was sold to the public as 

a way to increase housing and treatment 

for people with severe mental 

illnesses. In reality, California has been 

given an inappropriately high level 

of latitude to institutionalize people 

against their will. 

Involuntary treatment was already legal 

for hard cases, but now the process 

of placing people in institutions has 

been streamlined and ramped up. This 

will subject people with psychiatric 

disabilities to various forms of abuse, 

both systemically and interpersonally, 

and will intersect with other forms of 

oppression, such as racism and poverty. 

The motivation behind this program 

is not necessarily humane, even if it’s 

sold as such. We certainly need better 

community options for homeless 

people experiencing mental illness, 

but Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed this 

law to make homeless people disappear 

from sight. 

He’s not alone in his support for what 

disability advocates call “Modern Ugly 

Laws;” New York politician Andrew 

Yang suggested that homeless New 

Yorkers with psychiatric disorders 

should be institutionalized so they do 

not harm tourism or property values. 

President Trump suggested institutionalizing 

mentally ill people to stop gun 

violence. These sorts of policies stigmatize 

and undermine civic equality for 

people with psychiatric disorders. 

How do you think this would have unfolded 

differently if they had listened 

to the voices of the disabled? What 

are better ways of addressing the very 

real problems here? 


Institutionalization has a strong historical 

link to the eugenics movement, 

which still influences contemporary 

public policy. Proposition 1 fits into 

our country’s deep history of killing, 

sterilizing, and confining persons with 

disabilities, and I think that if people 

listened to the disabled community’s 

knowledge about this history, efforts like 

Proposition 1 would be less popular. 

Complicating the issue is that deinstitutionalization 

efforts have sometimes 

been abused as a way to save money 

instead of a way to redirect or improve 

community treatment. Andrew Cuomo 

closed a lot of New York’s mental 

institutions but never properly 

funded or oversaw the community 

alternatives. 

When President Kennedy 

signed the Community Mental 

Health Act in 1963, he promised 

federal funding for the alternatives 

that were never effectively 

provided or overseen. There’s 

a pattern of the powers that be 

spending the money they save 

with deinstitutionalization on 

things other than community 

support, so that no matter what 

system is being used, people 

with severe mental illnesses are 

ignored and abused. 

Unfortunately, this pattern of 

setting disabled people’s interests 

aside is not unique to mental 

health care; it affects all systems 

that serve people with disabilities. 

Even people interested in social 

justice for the able-bodied members of 

other disenfranchised groups have been 

resistant to redressing these dynamics. 

That’s what “systemic ableism” is: a 

group of systems intersecting in a way 

that favors able-bodied people’s preferences 

with grave consequences for people 

with disabilities. If disability justice 

were more culturally visible, things like 

Proposition 1 would be less likely. 

I can personally speak to the issue of 

inadequate mental health support. I 

have experienced episodes of severe 

psychiatric disability since my teens. 

High-quality treatment facilities can 

Meghan Schrader. | 

SUBMITTED PHOTO 

be critically important places of respite 

and care, while other psychiatric facilities 

can be microcosms of hell; other 

facilities being a mixture of both. 

The risk of hospitalization is one 

of the reasons why community treatment 

is so necessary, but the process 

of accessing community support is so 

dysfunctional that people who need it 

never participate. Between 2019 and 

2021, I tried to qualify for Austin, Texas’ 

assertive community treatment program, 

which provides robust, structured 

support for people with severe mental 

illnesses who are living on their own. 

I called 10 different people who 

were listed as being associated 

with the program. None of them 

even knew what the program 

was, so I eventually gave up. 

I have also tried to qualify for 

services for people with my 

neurological disabilities, which 

would significantly reduce the 

environmental stressors that exacerbate 

symptoms of my bipolar 

disorder. At the end of a complicated 

process, I was disqualified 

because my IQ was above the 

state cutoff for those services. 

These wasteful, bureaucratic dynamics 

exist no matter what state 

disabled people live in. We need 

to fix the dysfunction that exists 

for accessing voluntary treatment 

and support. 

Some in California are trying 

to expand physician-assisted 

What’s a Catholic to make of Proposition 1? 

The passing of Proposition 1 represents the most important 

update to California’s mental health care system 

in more than 20 years. In addition to the billions in 

bond money, it also places strict requirements on how counties 

can spend on housing and drug treatment programs. 

But its ultimate outcome is hard to predict, said Kathleen 

Domingo, executive director of the California Catholic 

Conference (CCC). She said the CCC, which represents 

the state’s Catholic bishops, did not take a position on the 

proposition “due to the many unclear specifications surrounding 

the measure.” 

Domingo told Angelus that organizations that “truly help 

the homeless and those with mental illness” weighed in on 

both sides of the Prop 1 debate. In addition, because of “clear 

evidence that previous attempts to address the homeless crisis 

have been futile” and “the excessive amount of funding” that 

Prop 1 required, California’s bishops “were not convinced 

this new plan would be effective or successful,” she said. 

“There is clearly a great need to assist our homeless 

brothers and sisters in California, many of whom struggle 

with untreated or undertreated mental illness,” Domingo 

added. “We will be watching carefully as Prop 1 rolls out in 

communities, keeping in mind both the bodily autonomy 

of individuals and the call to provide adequate assistance to 

those in need.” 

— Pablo Kay 


killing to include those who are not 

dying. Disabled populations are mentioned 

in particular as eligible under 

the new law. That law is bad enough 

on its own, but what would it mean to 

have these two laws together? 

Forced institutionalization will amplify 

the ugly impact of assisted suicide 

on the lives of people with disabilities. 

Making suicide a “treatment” for people 

with disabilities is abusive enough. 

But, some people with “grievous and 

irremediable” medical conditions who 

also have severe mental illnesses will 

absolutely choose to kill themselves 

rather than be placed in an institution. 

Disabled people living in institutions 

will choose to kill themselves just to get 

out of there, and staff will encourage 

them to do it. This is already in play in 

Canada, which legalized forced transfers 

of disabled patients to institutions 

far away from their families at the same 

time that it legalized MAiD (Medical 

Assistance in Dying) for disabled people. 

So, California is setting the stage 

to follow in Canada’s violent, ableist 

footsteps. 

Increasing forced institutionalization 

while expanding assisted suicide to people 

with disabilities furthers able-bodied 

supremacy. This combination of laws 

allows disabled people to have the 

unfettered “choice” of suicide, but not 

community support. Disabled people 

will be eliminated, reflecting our societal 

indifference to — and often hatred 

of — disabled people. 

What are some ways that individual 

Catholics and Catholic institutions 

can resist the cultural forces pushing 

in these terrible directions? 

Catholics must recognize that 

Proposition 1 and laws facilitating 

assisted suicide are the final blow after 

a lifetime of abuse and oppression. 

Early Christians and Jews took the 

lead in opposing the pagan practice of 

infanticide for disabled babies. Today’s 

Catholics must nurture the longstanding 

overlap between Christian ethics 

and disability justice, and they should 

collaborate closely with the disability 

justice movement’s broader goals. 

Catholics must not help the disabled 

community fight assisted suicide and 

then vote for things like Proposition 1 

— they should defeat both. 

They must keep James 2:3 in mind 

and welcome people with severe 

mental illnesses into their communities, 

even if that process feels uncomfortable. 

And they should consider 

Christ’s statement in John 10:9-11 

that he came to give people “life more 

abundantly.” Providing robust support 

for disabled people is a way of making 

that a reality. 

Lastly, they should think about 

fighting institutionalization, assisted 

suicide, and ableist bias in terms of Isaiah 

61:1: “He has chosen me and sent 

me to bring good news to the poor, to 

heal the broken-hearted, to announce 

release to captives and freedom to 

those in prison.” 

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. 


AD REM 

ROBERT BRENNAN 

Palms that speak in Silver Lake 

Altar servers lead the way in St. Teresa of Avila 

Church’s Palm Sunday procession through the streets 

of Silver Lake on March 24. | MIKE GOULDING 

It is hard to imagine what the Silver 

Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles 

looked like in 1921, the year that St. 

Teresa of Avila Church was founded. 

The Glendale Freeway offramp that 

faces the church doors today wasn’t 

there. It was most assuredly a lot quieter 

then, without the constant drone of car 

traffic. And there were certainly no hipsters 

— or the pricey homes they live 

in — surrounding St. Teresa’s in 1921. 

Other terms often associated with Silver 

Lake, such as “gentrification” and “yuppies,” 

had not yet been minted, and 

Silver Lake was far from trendy. 

The century that has passed since has 

seen a lot of change — and challenge 

— for St. Teresa’s. 

In many respects this small parish is a 

microcosm of the Archdiocese of Los 

Angeles in general. The Silver Lake 

of today is much more culturally and 

ethnically diverse than it was when 

the church’s cornerstone was laid, and 

probably less family oriented. 

There has also been another important 

demographic upheaval that challenges 

all parishes. In 1921, the U.S. 

birthrate was 3.29 children per woman. 

In 2021, the rate was 1.78. 

Those changes, together with the 

increasing financial burden on many 

parents, surely led to the difficult 

decision a few weeks ago to close St. 

Teresa’s school. The parish’s roster of 

registered families is just under 200. 

Yet, like so many other parishes across 

the archdiocese, St. Teresa abides, and 

in doing so becomes a mirror of the 

faith universal. 

Many of the homes clustered around 

St. Teresa’s probably don’t boast the 

square footage of a studio apartment, 

but still command price tags north of a 

million dollars. If there are families that 


Robert Brennan writes from Los Angeles, where 

he has worked in the entertainment industry, 

Catholic journalism, and the nonprofit sector. 

attend St. Teresa who live in some of 

these homes, it is probably because they 

have done so for decades and now, like 

a lot of us, live in a home they could 

not possibly afford to buy if they were in 

the market today. 

Despite what appears to be an 

insurmountable challenge, parish 

administrator Father Chidi Ekpendu is 

determined to revitalize his parish. 

Along with his associate at St. Teresa, 

Father Pedro Valdez, the strategy is to 

keep the current parish membership 

engaged, active, and inspired while 

at the same time looking outward to 

draw new people in. In just the past few 

months, they say, they’ve seen evidence 

for hope. 

“I see new faces at Mass, 

and it feels we are moving 

in the right direction, 

even if it is only one step 

at a time,” Ekpendu told 

me. 

These priests are not 

basing their hopes on a 

miraculous demographic 

shift in their neighborhood, 

or a sudden baby 

boom — although I am 

sure they would not be 

averse to that kind of intervention. 

In the meantime, 

Ekpendu believes 

there are other important 

“steps” he can make, and 

they include taking the 

words of Pope Francis — 

“I want the Church in the 

street” — to heart. This 

Palm Sunday gave him 

a chance to put Francis’ 

words into action and 

show his Silver Lake neighbors that “a 

lively church makes for a lively faith.” 

The 11 a.m. Mass of the passion of 

Our Lord started to the sound of the 

peals of church bells. I found myself in 

a large contingent outside the church, 

all of us with palms in our hands. After 

the blessing of the palms, it began: a 

procession not inside the Church, not 

in and around the Church parking lot, 

but out on the streets of Silver Lake for 

all to see. 

Ekpendu’s message was as basic as it 

gets. “Our goal is to let people know in 

our neighborhood that we are here, that 

we are joyful and that we proclaim the 

good news of Jesus.” 

That message may be a tough sell 

in one of the most secular enclaves 

found in the increasingly secular city 

of Los Angeles. But you would not 

have known that on this Palm Sunday, 

walking in procession with this joyful 

and faith-filled bunch of people. 

As I walked amid the throng up the 

steep hills this part of Silver Lake is 

renowned for, we encountered several 

onlookers along the way. There were a 

few people out walking their dogs who 

stopped and smiled at us. I even noticed 

someone recording the procession 

from their kitchen window. I wondered 

Father Chidi Ekpendu, administrator at 

St. Teresa of Avila, blesses palms before 

the procession. | MIKE GOULDING 

if some of the bystanders thought we 

were part of a Horticulturists of the 

World Unite march. But this march 

had no signs, no angry slogans, only 

songs of praise and a beautiful sense of 

worship. 

Ekpendu realizes that apart from 

the disaffected Catholics (which can 

be found anywhere), Silver Lake is a 

place with a substantial population of 

“nones”: those with no religious affiliation 

whatsoever. 

He sees it as missionary territory. 

Maybe the person with the chihuahua 

in the baby stroller saw this procession 

and was briefly taken back to a time 

when she would attend Mass on Easter. 

Maybe the person recording the procession 

on her phone through her kitchen 

window was reminded of a childhood 

that included the Triduum. 

Or as Ekpendu put it: “If only one person 

sees the procession and comes to 

see what St. Teresa of Avila is all about, 

that will be a win.” 


NOW PLAYING IRENA’S VOW 

RIGHTEOUS UNTIL THE END 

Eighty years later, the little-known story of a Catholic woman’s 

Holocaust heroics gets the treatment it deserves. 

Sophie Nélisse in a scene 

from the film “Irena’s Vow.” 

| IMDB 

BY STEFANO REBEGGIANI 

Soon after the Nazis invaded Poland 

in 1939, they set out to make 

it a “Jew-free” territory. Between 

1939 and 1945, German officers 

oversaw the imprisonment, deportation, 

and eventual murder of approximately 

3 million Jews. 

Not all Poles turned their back on 

their fellow countrymen. There were 

families like that of Józef and Wiktoria 

Ulma and their seven children, Catholics 

who chose to shelter Jewish friends 

in their own home and were eventually 

executed by the Nazis for doing so. Last 

year, the Ulmas were declared martyrs 

by Pope Francis and beatified. 

Despite the terror that such episodes 

were meant to instill in the Polish population, 

many heroic men and women 

continued to hide Jewish fugitives until 

the end of World War II. Among them 

was Irena Gut, whose incredible life 

story is told in the new film “Irena’s 

Vow,” playing in theaters April 15-16. 

Directed by Canadian filmmaker Louise 

Archambault, “Irena’s Vow” tells an 

inspiring story of courage and self-neglect 

with the help of a strong script 

by Israeli-American screenwriter Dan 

Gordon and authentic performances 

from a cast led by Sophie Nélisse (“Yellowjackets,” 

“The Book Thief”). 

Like the Ulma family (and Oskar 

Schindler, the protagonist of Spielberg’s 

1993 epic historical drama), Gut was 

honored as a “Righteous Among the 

Nations” by the Israeli Holocaust Commission; 

a title given to non-Jews who 

risked their lives by saving Jews during 

the Holocaust. 

St. Pope John Paul II also bestowed a 

special blessing on Gut in 1995. Today 

her story is featured in a permanent 

exhibit in the United States Holocaust 

Memorial Museum in Washington, 

D.C. 

Gut, a young Polish nurse, was put in 

charge of a group of Jews employed as 

tailors and seamstresses in a Nazi-run 

hotel in her hometown of Radom. 

None of her employees were actually 

professional, but like others, had lied 

about their abilities and credentials to 

escape the first wave of persecution. 

She witnessed firsthand the horrors 

of the Nazi genocide. In a harrowing 

scene, we see her witness the vicious 

murder of a Jewish child and mother, 

the child crushed to the ground and the 

mother shot at point blank as she cries 

over her dead child. 

Gut’s vow, for which the film is 

named, was to never let it happen 

again. If she could do anything to save a 

Jewish life, she would. Archamabault’s 

film depicts how bold, dangerous, and 

unrealistic her plan was. 

Her boss, Wehrmacht Major Eduard 

Rügemer, moved to a large mansion 


equisitioned from a Jewish family and 

asked Irena to become his housekeeper. 

She accepted and proceeded to hide all 

of her 12 Jewish employees in the Nazi 

officer’s house. 

Over the next two years, Gut succeeded 

in hiding her friends until the end 

of the German occupation, concealing 

them amid countless Nazi parties, a 

blackmail scheme, and even the birth 

of a child. 

During the two years of hiding, one 

of the women became pregnant (the 

group included married couples). 

Delivering the baby while hiding, and 

keeping it hidden, seemed impossible, 

so one of the Jewish refugees, a doctor, 

asked Gut to provide him with the 

means to perform an abortion. 

Gut refused to do so, citing her Catholic 

faith. “I am not going to help Hitler 

get another Jewish baby.” “If we don’t 

have this baby” she adds, “something 

else will die inside of us too.” 

The child was born, and miraculously 

survived. At the end of the film, you 

can see real footage of Gut’s encounter 

with him after the war. “This is my 

baby,” she says in the clip as she hugs 

him. 

Gut’s heroic protection of the unborn, 

whom she regarded as no less worthy 

of risking her life for than the adult 

parents, echo Mother Teresa’s timeless 

words on abortion. 

The late saint regularly reminded 

wealthy western countries — particularly 

ones that expressed concern for the 

death of children from poverty or war 

in poorer countries — that they were 

forgetting the “war against the child” 

waged within their borders, and the 

“millions being killed.” 

According to Mother Teresa, one has 

to be willing to suffer, to risk one’s life 

and time, to ensure that the child and 

mother are taken care of. “How do 

we persuade a woman not to have an 

abortion?” she once asked. “As always, 

we must persuade her with love and we 

remind ourselves that love means to be 

willing to give until it hurts.” 

Gut was willing to give until it hurts, 

and her sacrifice bore much fruit. All 

of the Jews she hid survived, and so 

did Gut, who after the war married an 

American citizen and moved to the 

U.S. She died in Orange County in 

2003. 

As winds of war blow over much of the 

world, this film presents an inspiring 

example of what it means to live one’s 

faith in dramatic times. It is an appropriate 

movie for the Easter season, as it 

presents us with a woman who followed 

to the letter Jesus’ command at the Last 

Supper: “This is my commandment: 

love one another as I love you. No one 

has greater love than this, to lay down 

one’s life for one’s friends. You are my 

friends if you do what I command you.” 

Stefano Rebeggiani is an associate 

professor of classics at the University of 

Southern California. 


DESIRE LINES 

HEATHER KING 

Dante and the poem worth dying for 

Antonio Fazzini appears as Dante Alighieri 

in “Dante: Inferno to Paradise,” streaming on 

PBS until April 15. | OSV NEWS/TIM CRAGG, 

STEEPLECHASE FILMS 

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), 

Italian poet and moral philosopher, 

authored “The Divine 

Comedy.” His three-part journey 

through hell, purgatory, and paradise, 

with the Latin poet Virgil as his guide 

and the ethereal Beatrice as his muse, 

is perhaps the greatest work ever written 

on romantic love. 

Dante started the “Inferno,” his 

description through the nine circles 

of hell, in 1307, five years after he was 

exiled from Florence on politically 

motivated corruption charges. 

Reams have been written about this 

iconic poem: Dante’s innovative jettisoning 

of Latin in favor of the Italian 

vernacular, the terza rima (third rhyme) 

that makes translating so fiendishly 

difficult, the debates over which of the 

109 and counting English translations 

has remained most faithful to the text. 

What we do know is that the poem 

was inspired by Dante’s first encounter 

with the real-life Beatrice Portinari on 

the streets of his native Florence, possibly 

when he was only 8 or 9. 

In “Religion and Love in Dante: 

The Theology of Romantic Love” 

(Kessinger Publishing, $18.95), Charles 

Williams describes her effect on him 

like this: 

“The heart, where [to him] ‘the spirit 

of life’ dwelled, exclaimed to him, at 

that first meeting: ‘Behold, a god stronger 

than I, who is to come and rule over 

me.’ The brain declared: ‘Now your 

beatitude has appeared to you.’ And the 

liver [where natural emotions, such as 

sex, inhabited] said: ‘O misery! How I 

shall be disturbed henceforward.’ ” 

Heady stuff — but if you’re anything 

like me, you’ve read the “Inferno” a 

few times, mesmerized by its gruesome 

punishments, and more or less skipped 

over “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso.” 

Enter PBS with a fantastic two-part, 

four-hour documentary film called 

“DANTE: Inferno to Paradise.” 

The series puts this epic poem, 

almost universally regarded as one of 

the pinnacles of Western literature, in 

historical, theological, political, literary, 

and very human perspective. 


Heather King is an award-winning 

author, speaker, and workshop leader. 

Through images, music, dramatic 

reenactments, voiceover, and commentary 

from scholars around the world, we 

learn of Dante’s childhood, adolescence, 

and young adulthood. 

He entered into an arranged marriage 

and his wife bore four children, but 

Beatrice — who had also married, and 

died in 1290 — never left his mind nor 

heart. 

Exiled under penalty of death from his 

beloved Florence in March 1302, Dante 

would roam impoverished, mostly 

about Italy, for the rest of his life. 

At first, he hoped the vast poem he 

had in mind might both confirm his 

greatness as a writer and grant him 

reentry into Florence. 

But when the “Inferno” was published 

and circulated around Florence, by 

1317, instead the powers-that-be — 

many of whom were skewered in its 

verses — were enraged. Dante’s exile 

was now final and complete. 

Christianity had always conceived of 

heaven and hell, but purgatory was in 

a sense Dante’s invention. Did such a 

place of purification exist? If so, where 

was it? What was it for? In imagining 

such a place in the afterlife, the series 

observes, Dante had a huge influence, 

however indirect, on the development 

of Catholic doctrine. 

Good Friday marks the beginning of 

Dante’s journey through hell; “Purgatorio,” 

the penitential leg of the pilgrimage, 

starts on Easter Sunday. 

While hell is static, frozen, utterly 

stagnant, “Purgatorio” is conceived as 

an ascent up a mountain with its souls 

in constant movement. 

When he finally reaches the top of the 

mountain, Dante is faced with walking 

through the walls of purifying flames 

through which every other traveler 

must pass. Beatrice awaits him on the 

other side, Virgil reminds him. So he 

braves the fire and, in “Paradiso,” meets 

her at last. 

Just as in real life, the long-anticipated 

meeting doesn’t go entirely smoothly 

— but if you want to see how things 

turn out, watch the series, then read all 

three parts of the poem. 

“The Divine Comedy” can be interpreted 

many different ways: as a journey 

from sin to redemption; as an attempt 

to resolve the conflict between erotic 

and spiritual love; as the movement 

from fearful ego-based possessiveness to 

the transformed consciousness that at 

last allows us to know the “love which 

moves the sun and the other stars.” 

However you read it, Dante laid down 

his life for it. His truest abode became 

the poem; the poem became his 

destiny. 

As a human being, as an artist, and 

as a follower of Christ, he saw that his 

vocation was to continue to speak the 

truth — and so he did, and does, for us. 

By 1321, the narrative of the poem 

and Dante’s life had converged almost 

completely. Hollowed out by the rigors 

of exile, and of writing, he completed 

his masterwork at last. 

In September, he made an ambassadorial 

mission to Venice at the request 

of his patron, contracted malaria, and 

died. 

Florence almost immediately regretted 

its mistake and tried to reclaim its 

native son — though it took the city 

council almost 700 years, until June 

2008, to rescind the death sentence of 

arguably the greatest poet the world has 

ever known. 

In “Dark Wood to White Rose” 

(Morning Light Press, $34.95), Dante 

scholar Helen M. Luke observed: “The 

man who wrote the last canto of the 

‘Paradiso’ knew that we can never come 

to this vision by any shortcut. We cannot 

bypass the experience of hell; and 

still less can we evade the long struggle 

of purgatory, through which we come 

to maturity in love.” 

Or as the series concludes: “Dante 

meant the poem to change our lives. 

Your life matters. Take care of it.” 


LETTER AND SPIRIT 

SCOTT HAHN 

Scott Hahn is founder of the 

St. Paul Center for Biblical 

Theology; stpaulcenter.com. 

Joseph and Herod: Parallel lives 

There are few subjects so challenging for writers as St. 

Joseph. And yet the Church’s calendar presents us 

with two feast days in his honor. One is just around 

the corner, on May 1. We can hardly avoid saying something, 

but what is there to say? 

Joseph seems to go out of his way to be uncooperative. In 

all the reliable records he is as tight-lipped as an NSA agent. 

Christian authors have tended to make up for the dearth of 

information by supplying homiletics laced with legends. At 

the end of such treatments, Joseph can seem more distant 

from us than he was on page one. 

Faced with this challenge, my friend Mike Aquilina wrote a 

book about Joseph anyway — and he succeeded by doubling 

the difficulty. In “St. Joseph and His World” (Scepter Publishers, 

$19.95), 

he composed 

“parallel lives” of 

a most improbable 

pair of 

historical figures. 

He told the 

story of the Holy 

Family’s patriarch 

alongside the life 

of the family’s 

arch-nemesis. He 

gave an account 

of Joseph’s days 

as they were 

bound up with 

the career of one 

of history’s vilest 

despots: King 

Herod the Great. 

And this is a 

breakthrough because 

we cannot 

begin to understand 

the life of 

either man until 

we appreciate the 

life of the other. 

We may not 

“Statue of St. Joseph as Carpenter.” Photo by 

Dennis Jarvis. | WIKIMEDIA COMMONS 

want to spend 

time reading 

about Herod’s 

depravity, but apart 

from it we cannot 

truly see Joseph’s 

virtue. Herod 

loomed large in 

the life of the Holy 

Family. Joseph was 

a carpenter; and 

Herod was perhaps 

history’s most lavish 

patron of the craft 

of carpentry. Herod 

was pretender to the 

throne of David; 

and Joseph was a legitimate 

heir of that 

throne. Herod’s daily 

decisions affected 

the well-being of 

Joseph’s village, his 

clan, and his trade. 

“Herod the Great.” Photo by José Luiz. | WIKIMEDIA 

COMMONS 

Herod’s programs and whims exercised a profound influence 

on their economy and security. 

Joseph must have been concerned about such matters, but 

he never shows it in the historical record. What he shows us 

is prayer and work. So Aquilina shows us how Joseph prayed 

and — in literally nuts-and-bolts terms — how a typical carpenter 

worked in those days: what tools he used, what items 

he crafted, where he got his training, and how he got to and 

from his job sites. 

What we discover, between the lines, is that there were, in 

the first century B.C., two guiding hands in history. There 

was the providential hand of the Lord God. And there was 

a demonic hand manipulating the mad king Herod. As a 

result, there were two rival accounts of kingship; two rival 

ideas of Temple-building; and two rival stories of salvation. 

Joseph was not the only Jew to recognize this, but he was 

perhaps the most important one. Those who recognized it 

were forced to make difficult choices — and face terrifying 

consequences. 

There is much we will never know about Joseph — or his 

wife and Divine Son — unless we come to see them in their 

cultural context, and in contrast with the counternarrative 

that centers on Herod. 


■ SATURDAY, APRIL 13 

Along the Way: A Pilgrim Walk. Mary & Joseph Retreat 

Center, 5300 Crest Rd., Rancho Palos Verdes, 7 a.m.-1 

p.m. 4.8-mile walk through the streets and trails of Palos 

Verdes to the sacred grounds of the retreat center. All 

ages and faiths welcome. Cost: $40/person, $60/family, 

includes picnic lunch. Visit maryjoseph.org/event. 

Rummage Sale. St. Barnabas Church, 3955 Orange Ave., 

Long Beach, 8 a.m.-3 p.m. Accepting donations. Call James 

at 562-221-3296. 

Introduction to Bible Study Leadership. Zoom, 9-10:30 

a.m. Information session will explain the Catholic Bible 

Institute’s three-year process of studying Scripture. 

Registration not required. For more, visit lacatholics.org/ 

catholic-la-events. 

Les Petits Chanteurs de France Choir Performance. St. 

Bede the Venerable Church, 215 Foothill Blvd., La Cañada 

Flintridge, 7 p.m. Internationally renowned French boys’ 

choir will perform Handel’s Messiah and other wellknown 

pieces. Free concert, open to all. 

■ SUNDAY, APRIL 14 

Diaconate Virtual Information Day. Zoom, 2-4 p.m. 

Email Deacon Melecio Zamora at dm2011@la-archdiocese.org. 

“La Nuove Musiche: The Baroque Revolution” Concert. 

St. Andrew Church, 311 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena, 7:30 

p.m. Performed by world renowned musicians Jordi Savall 

and Hesperion XXI. For more information, visit standrewpasadena.org/concerts. 

■ WEDNESDAY, APRIL 17 

Free Narcan Training. St. Louis of France Church, 13935 

E. Temple Ave., La Puente, 2-3:30 p.m. Free English in-person 

training led by End Overdose in how to prevent an 

opioid overdose. Lunch provided. For more information, 

call the parish office at 626-918-8314 or email info@stlof. 

org. 

Record Clearing Virtual Clinic for Veterans. 5-8 p.m. 

Legal team will help with traffic tickets, quality of life 

citations, and expungement of criminal convictions. Free 

clinic is open to all Southern California veterans who have 

eligible cases in a California State Superior Court. Participants 

can call in or join online via Zoom. Registration 

required. Call 213-896-6537 or email inquiries-veterans@ 

lacba.org. For more information, visit lacba.org/veterans. 


Blossoming Spring: Cultivating Your Future. Mary & 

Joseph Retreat Center, 5300 Crest Rd., Rancho Palos 

Verdes, 2-5 p.m. Join on Earth Day to look at phases of 

change and growth with exercises in mindfulness, nature 

immersion, and spiritual reflection. Visit maryjoseph.org 

for more. 

■ WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24 

Shower of Roses: Cloistered Carmelite Nuns Auxiliary 

Annual Benefit Luncheon. San Gabriel Country Club, 

350 E. Hermosa Dr., San Gabriel, 10:30 a.m. social hour, 

raffle, silent auction, 12 p.m. luncheon and fashion show. 

Benefit celebrates 100 years of service for the Cloistered 

Carmelite Nuns. Cost: $75/person. RSVP to Kathy 

Cardoza at 626-570-9012 by April 15, 2024. Send checks 

payable to Cloistered Carmelite Nuns Auxiliary to 710 

Lindaraxa Drive South, Alhambra, CA 91801. 


Bereavement Retreat. St. Brigid Church, 5214 S. Western 

Ave., Los Angeles, 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Register at bereavement. 

ministry@yahoo.com. Cost: $60/person, covers all food 

and materials. Pay by Zelle to 562-631-8844 by April 19. 

■ SUNDAY, APRIL 28 

Sunday Afternoon Concert. Padre Serra Church, 5205 

Upload Rd., Camarillo, 3 p.m. Dominic McAller, piano, 

and Dave Reynolds, guitar, will perform music by Bach, 

Carulli, Handel, Haydn, and more. Free and open to the 

public; donations accepted. 

■ THURSDAY, MAY 2 

Bereavement Support Group. St. Mary of the Assumption 

Church, 7215 Newlin Ave., Whittier, 7-8:30 p.m. 

Five-week support group will meet every Thursday in May. 

RSVP by April 29 to Cathy at bereavement.ministry@ 

yahoo.com or text 562-631-8844. 

■ FRIDAY, MAY 3 

Bereavement Support Group. St. Mary of the Assumption 

Church, 7215 Newlin Ave., Whittier, 9-10:30 a.m. 

Five-week support group will meet every Friday in May. 

RSVP by April 29 to Cathy at bereavement.ministry@ 

yahoo.com or text 562-631-8844. 

Noah’s Flood: LA Opera. Cathedral of Our Lady of the 

Angels, 555 W. Temple St., Los Angeles, 7:30 p.m. and 

May 4, 7:30 p.m. The LA Opera presents the story of 

Noah’s ark set to music, featuring 300 performers of all 

ages. Free admission but advance tickets required. Visit 

LAOpera.org/Noah. 

■ SATURDAY, MAY 4 

Remain in My Love: Separated & Divorced Conference. 

Christ Cathedral, 13280 Chapman Ave., Garden Grove, 9 

a.m.-4 p.m. Separated and divorced Catholics are invited 

to a conference of spiritual healing, encouragement, and 

fellowship. Topics include: self-care, emotional healing, 

and parenting children of divorce. Keynote speaker: Joe 

Sikorra, LMFT. Cost: $40/person, includes lunch and material. 

Register at https://forms.office.com/r/zrK0Ukfnhf. 

■ TUESDAY, MAY 7 

South Bay Catholic Jewish Women’s Dialogue Conference. 

St. Lawrence Martyr Church, 1940 S. Prospect Ave., 

Redondo Beach, 8:30 a.m. “Are You There, God? It’s Me. 

My Relationship with God”: Rabbi Rebeccah Yussman and 

Anne Hansen discuss. Visit sbcjwd.com to register. Cost: 

$25/person, includes continental breakfast and lunch. 

■ WEDNESDAY, MAY 8 

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. 

■ FRIDAY, MAY 10 

Bereavement Retreat. St. Mary of the Assumption 

Church, 7215 Newlin Ave., Whittier, 6-9 p.m. and 

Saturday, May 11, 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Register at bereavement. 

ministry@yahoo.com. Cost: $75/person, covers all food 

and materials. Pay by Zelle to 562-631-8844 by May 3. 

■ SATURDAY, MAY 11 

Santacruzan Marian Celebration. Cathedral of Our Lady 

of the Angels, 555 W. Temple St., Los Angeles, 2:30 p.m. 

Filipino Catholic community will celebrate with a pre-procession 

at 2:30 p.m. and Mass at 3 p.m. 

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 | April 19, 2024 | Vol. 9 No. 8

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