Catholics Planning 1-Day School Protest : Contraceptives the Issue as Bishop Supports Boycott Over Health Clinics

Bishop Leo T. Maher on Thursday threw the Catholic Church’s support behind a planned one-day boycott of San Diego city high schools to protest a proposed school-based health clinic that would distribute contraceptives to students.

In a letter dated May 19 but released Thursday, Maher endorsed the intention of parents in a Mira Mesa parish to keep students home from high schools Tuesday to show opposition to a proposed health clinic. The letter is to be read or distributed in Catholic churches in the diocese on Sunday.

“If parents desire to protest by keeping their children home that day, we also support this means of awakening the consciences of the members of the Board (of Education),” Maher wrote.

Maher called for “a day of prayer and reflection” Tuesday, when “young and old, especially parents,” should write letters to the five school board members describing their “strong opposition to this evil.”

He also asked his parishioners to support “all God-fearing parents” who are fighting the clinics, which would “promote promiscuity among our teen-agers” and destroy “our family values and traditions.”

A 29-member task force is studying a proposal by the San Diego Unified School District for a comprehensive health clinic, which would provide physical examinations, immunizations and laboratory tests as well as contraceptives and pregnancy counseling for students. The panel is scheduled to report to the school board July 1.

Father Roger Lechner, dean of the Escondido Deanery, which consists of 18 Catholic parishes in the northeastern part of the county, said Maher declined to call for the boycott himself, but agreed to voice support for it.

Members of the Church of the Good Shepherd parish whose children attend San Diego city schools sent letters Wednesday to religious organizations throughout the county, asking them to keep their high school-age children home from school Tuesday, Lechner said. Instead of attending school, the children would go to church or stay home and pray, he said. The parish is part of Lechner’s deanery.

“I am very much aware of political leverage and I would like the school board to be cognizant of the values that are in the minds and hearts of my people,” Lechner said.

“Basically, I don’t want the nurse to pass out a condom to the kid who’s going to have a date tomorrow night.”

Lechner said that there is a fine line between Maher supporting the effort and calling for it himself, although the effect on parishioners would be the same.

It is difficult to determine how many of the diocese’s 360,000 Catholics attend city schools. Lechner said he has received two phone calls from parents who intend to keep their children home from school.

Maher could not be reached for comment Thursday evening, but Father Douglas Regin, a Catholic priest serving on the health clinic task force, said he interpreted the letter as a call for a one-day boycott of the public schools.

“I read it as an invitation for people to express their disapproval and that that’s one option,” he said.

The letter is Maher’s second public statement against the proposed health clinic. On April 14, a letter that he wrote condemning the clinics as “an apparently legitimized means of providing pregnancy counseling, contraceptives and abortion counseling for teen-age students” was read in churches throughout the diocese.

School board President Susan Davis said that a boycott is “premature” because the task force has not yet offered any recommendation to the trustees. She suggested that it would only cost the school system state reimbursement money and hurt students.

“I really don’t see that as effective in terms of what (Maher) is trying to accomplish,” Davis said. “The board hasn’t even had any recommendations yet. We haven’t even started to look at it in any kind of depth.

“I don’t know who’s going to be helped by (a boycott),” Davis said. “A student missing a day of school, of course they can make it up, but . . . that could be a detriment.”

The school board established the task force by a 3-2 vote March 11 after the clinic proposal grew into the school system’s most controversial issue this year. Since that vote, dozens of letters--most of them opposing the clinic--have poured into school district offices.