THE PREACHING BISHOP : Recently Appointed Carl A. Fisher Brings a Bit of Revised Southern Evangelism : to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles

THE BISHOP IS one smooth talker. Here he is at 8:30 on a Wednesday morning facing a classroom of sleepy seniors at Pius X High School in Downey. He has come to teach a religion class and, even for a bishop, it’s a tough audience.

Why, the bishop asks, do people have sex before they are married? Because it feels good, one student blurts out. Everyone else is doing it, another says. Because they are curious, says yet another.

Finally, a girl in the back of the room timidly raises her hand. “What about love?” she asks softly. “What if you love someone and want to share something with him?”

The bishop doesn’t skip a beat. He launches into a line or two from the chorus of Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” As the class erupts in laughter, he delivers a prayer that stresses conventional themes of maturity, responsibility and Christian values. But it comes from a rather unconventional source--Soap Opera Digest magazine, which paid Fisher $78 for it 12 years ago:

“Almighty and Eternal God, help us to realize that we are no longer ‘The Young and the Restless.’ But help us remember that we have ‘One Life to Live.’ Let us remain, always close to You, walking not in ‘Ryan’s Hope’ but in Christian hope, for us destination is heaven, not J.R.’s ‘Dallas.’ ”

Clearly, Carl A. Fisher is a different sort of bishop.

When he was installed last February, Fisher became the first black auxiliary bishop in the huge Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese and only the 12th black in the history of the church to reach that rank in this country. As one of five assistants to Archbishop Roger Mahony, he brings to the archdiocese a rhetoric and fervor more reminiscent of Southern evangelism than of the Latin church, and a proselytizing zeal that is making a mark in an archdiocese that, with 2.65 million Catholics, is the largest in the country.

Yet in an age when the U.S. church is torn by such divisive issues as whether priests should remain celibate and whether homosexuals should be welcomed to the faith, when black Catholics are debating whether they should have a separate role in the church, Fisher also stands out for his theological conservatism.

“Doctrinally, I’m a conservative,” Fisher says, “but when it comes to the implementation of that doctrine, I tend to be a liberal, if there is such a creature.”

HE HAS A booming voice and a broad smile. The second helped earned him the nickname “Angelface” as a young boy in his hometown of Pascagoula, Miss. He is now 41 years old, and you could still call him Angelface.

But it is the voice that you remember. It is strong, resonant. And if God--as his friends and family are fond of saying--gave Carl Fisher a powerful set of lungs, and if God gave Carl Fisher a way with words to go with the lungs, give a little credit to his Aunt Wilma Mayfield, who belted it out for her own Baptist congregation back in Mississippi and has taught her nephew a thing or two in the process.

“She has a little country church in a place called Ocean Springs, and she preached fire and brimstone,” Fisher says. “I used to imitate her style, and I am told today that this is a style I have. My exposure to her had a profound impact on my life.”

Fisher says he gets emotional when he speaks. He prefers to leave the pulpit and, microphone in hand, walk the center aisle, confronting the congregation. Sometimes he asks them questions, puts them on the spot.

Bessie Roberts remembers Fisher’s five years as pastor of St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church in Baltimore: “If you were sitting in the front row, you were in trouble. You never knew what he was going to do. We used to joke that you had to be careful what you said on Saturday night because you might hear about it Sunday morning.”

The bishop admits his style sometimes rubs people the wrong way. He says he has been called a demagogue, an opportunist, a hot-dogger. Fisher shrugs it off. “I prefer to call it preaching with enthusiasm.”

If the Catholic Church wants new members, it must go out and find them, he says. Not “steal sheep from other folds,” but convince those who do not have a church to become Catholic. You pound the pavement and knock on doors, he says.

And once you get them to church, you deliver a message that the Holy Father himself would feel comfortable hearing. No, couples should not have sex before they are married. No, priests should not be allowed to marry. Surrogate parenthood is not OK. Women should not be allowed to become priests.

“I guess I’m old fashioned in that respect,” Fisher says of the debate over celibacy, for instance. “I really feel there are different roles for men and women. And when it comes to this issue, I’m committed to the thinking of the Holy Father and to the practice and tradition of the church.”

CARL FISHER,the son of a shipyard worker, says he wanted to be a priest for as long as he can remember. Like his brothers and sisters, he was raised a Catholic and attended an all-black parochial school in Pascagoula run by white nuns and priests. The priests belonged to the St. Josephite Order, which was founded nearly a century ago to spread the gospel to black Americans. “It was amazing that I never thought of them as being white because they so closely identified with us as a people,” Fisher says.

Because the church was near his family’s home, Fisher says they were somewhat protected from the racial prejudice surrounding them. Strict segregation laws were in effect at the time. One of his brothers, Lester, 34, recalls that blacks had to enter the local dentist’s office through a rear door, and a nearby restaurant would not allow blacks to sit close to the front window.

At age 14, Fisher left home and went to Newburgh, N.Y., to enroll in the Epiphany Apostolic College High School and, later, Epiphany Apostolic College. Josephites ran the schools. He returned home during the summers to earn money for his education. The civil rights movement was under way, and he recalls the tension in town created by the Freedom Riders, the civil rights activists who were attempting to integrate bus and train stations.

In 1968, Fisher was a student at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Washington when rioting broke out in the city following the assassination in Memphis of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Fisher was whisked away by police to a ghetto to run emergency food shelters. At one point, he encountered black-power activist Stokely Carmichael. Fisher recalls that Carmichael looked at him and, referring to the rioting, said: “Isn’t this great?” Fisher does not recall responding. “I think I just gave him one of my famous stares.”

During the same period, Fisher remembers, some black students were dropping out of the seminary because they felt they could not be “authentically” black and be a priest. Fisher himself, says one priest who knew him at the time, was challenged by some black students “for not being black enough for the black-power people.” He did not, for instance, favor the church’s forming separate seminaries for blacks, as some black Catholic priests still advocate.

For instance, Father Albert J. McKnight, 60-year-old pastor of the Holy Ghost Catholic Faith Community in Opelousas, La., with 10,000 members the largest black Catholic church in the country, argues that the seminaries “do not adjust culturally to blacks” and that the church wants black priests to “act white.” There are about 300 black priests in the United States and 1.2 million black Catholics.

“The Catholic Church is still primarily a white institution concerned primarily with middle-class whites,” McKnight says. “The needs of the blacks have not been addressed.”

Fisher denies that any rift existed between him and black seminary students. But he has never believed there should be separate seminaries for blacks. “Separate seminaries allow the white students to escape,” he says. “If blacks are going to separate themselves in their own seminaries, then the white student doesn’t have to deal with black issues.”

Fisher does believe that black Catholics face “elements of racism within the church because the church is a culture carrier” and racism exists within society. “But I think we have to consider that we have only come out of slavery a little over a hundred years ago, and the idea of priesthood for blacks is still relatively new. In the past a black who had the opportunity to get a college education had so many other opportunities in the civilian world for advancement. And if you are somewhat concerned about materialism, you are not going to go into the priesthood.”

FISHER WAS ordained a priest in 1973 and a year later earned a master’s in public relations from American University in Washington. The idea to get the degree came from his superiors, who felt he could “further the mission of the church” with it.

Before becoming pastor at St. Francis Xavier, Fisher spent eight years as associate pastor at another Baltimore church, St. Veronica. The church is in an area of the city known as Cherry Hill, a community made up of low-income housing built following World War II and one faced with crime and drug problems. Bishop John Ricard, a close friend of Fisher’s and also black, says Fisher earned a reputation as a social activist and an advocate of the poor. He helped establish food programs for the needy, shelters for the homeless and a Cherry Hill drug rehabilitation program for heroin addicts.

When he arrived at St. Francis Xavier, Fisher became the first black pastor of the nation’s oldest black Catholic parish. An inner-city church in a working-class neighborhood, the 194-year-old St. Francis Xavier was down on its luck. Many of its parishioners simply had stopped attending services; others opted for churches in the suburbs. Some of the buildings were in need of repair; the parish was in debt.

“The congregation was small, morale was down, there was nothing to look forward to,” says Napoleon Sykes, a 47-year-old subway engineer who serves as the church’s parish council president. “People weren’t anxious to get back to church. When the bishop arrived, it (seemed) like a whole new church.”

Fisher is credited with increasing the number of families attending the church from 300 to about 900 during his five years there. They came to hear him speak. “He was much more direct than other priests,” Bishop Ricard says. “His preaching style relates the gospel message to issues of the day, to the everyday concerns of people.”

“He lived his sermon during the day and then would come in and deliver it,” Sykes says. “And he never stood on the pulpit. He would come right down on the floor. You knew you had been to church.”

Parishioners remember Fisher taking them to task for driving their new Mercedeses and Cadillacs to church and then being miserly when the collection plate came around. Once he handed out “gossip stones”--rocks painted red--during a sermon, telling people to put them by their telephones. And he made it a point to visit parishioner’s homes, sometimes uninvited.

One person who says he converted to the Catholic faith because of Fisher is 66-year-old James Bridgeforth, who was an Episcopalian and a deacon in his church. “He was almost like a cross between a priest and a Baptist preacher,” Bridgeforth says of Fisher.

It was at St. Francis that Fisher took on a local country club in federal court after it first agreed to allow the congregation to hold a picnic on its premises, and then backed down when it learned the congregation was black. The lawsuit was eventually settled out of court, and the church was allowed to use the club free of charge for its picnic.

It was also at St. Francis that Fisher successfully put into practice an evangelization program that he had created while an associate pastor in Washington, prior to going to Cherry Hill. It was called “Come Home for Christmas.” The idea was to take advantage of the holiday season, when religious spirits are high and the church looks its best, by having parishioners invite their neighbors to attend services. “He found a good packaging deal,” says Father Peter Hogan, archivist for the Josephite Society in Baltimore and a former teacher of Fisher’s.

Fisher didn’t stop there. He expanded the program by having parishioners fan out into the community. “We organized teams of people to literally go out like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and go knock on doors, proselytizing. The Catholic Church has always attracted large numbers of people and somehow we’ve had the notion that we were to maintain (churches) as opposed to going out and actively bringing others to the faith. Catholics think they are supposed to go to Mass, make their offerings, and then they think, ‘Don’t bother me anymore.’ ”

Los Angeles Archbishop Mahony says he hopes to implement Fisher’s evangelization techniques in Los Angeles, perhaps after the Pope’s visit in September. One group that could be targeted would be blacks. Mahony notes that half of the more than 1 million blacks living in the Los Angeles area are not affiliated with a church.

“One of the great myths about our pluralistic society is that everyone belongs to a church,” Fisher says, “and that’s just not true.”

FISHER WAS ordained last February by Archbishop Mahony in a ceremony at the Los Angeles Sports Arena. In the audience sat 10 of Fisher’s 11 brothers and sisters and 75 of his former St. Francis Xavier parishioners. His widowed mother, Evelyn Fisher, 58, also was there. “If heaven is greater than this,” she recalls thinking, “it must be a very beautiful place.”

Mahony had specifically requested a black bishop for the Los Angeles archdiocese. There are an estimated 55,000 black Catholics in the archdiocese--the third largest concentration of black Catholics in the country--and some of those blacks have complained that until Mahony became archbishop in 1985, little was done for them.

Andrew Knox, president of the Black Lay Catholic Ministry in Los Angeles and a member of the board of directors of the National Office for Black Catholics, says Fisher’s appointment will give black Catholics a voice in the archdiocese’s hierarchy. Fisher himself views his ordination as an auxiliary bishop as important because it “tells the blacks and other minorities that the church is serious about truly being universal.”

But he sees his role as more expansive. “Black people have a tendency to think that because you’re black, you are only going to concentrate on the blacks, and that is not the case. I am sure Hispanics think the same way about a Hispanic bishop.”

As an auxiliary bishop, Fisher is in charge of the so-called San Pedro Pastoral Region within the archdiocese. The area is consists of 70 parishes, 53 elementary schools and 10 high schools and stretches south from the fringes of South Central Los Angeles to include all of the South Bay and Southeast Los Angeles. Fisher says he believes the area may be a “sleeping giant” in terms of the number of Catholics who live in the area but who do not regularly attend church. “Maybe it can be compared to a health spa. If everyone who showed up who belonged, we wouldn’t have room for them.”

Fisher says he will work to involve the laity more in church affairs and to make sure the church is responsive to its younger members. He mentions one parish within his region where young Latinos have complained to him that they cannot talk easily to their elderly priest. The problem, he says, is the same at other parishes.

“I think we have a situation where we have a lot of older priests who obviously are not accustomed to relating to young people,” Fisher says. “We are going to have to encourage some priests to devote themselves to some other ministries. It is going to come to that because if they are ineffective in relating to their people, some adjustments are in order.”

FISHER AWAKENS at 6 a.m. and goes to a health club near his rectory at St. Pancratius Church in Lakewood. And he keeps long days. One recent Sunday, he left the rectory shortly after 8 a.m., tossing his vestments into the trunk of his new green Oldsmobile. He delivered three sermons at three different churches within his region. He also met with a group of young Catholics who grilled him on church issues ranging from artificial insemination to Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen of Seattle, who had some of his powers temporarily stripped by the Vatican for his alleged doctrinal laxity. Fisher returned to the rectory at 11 p.m.

At one of the churches, St. Cyprian in Long Beach, parishioners crowded around him as he entered the church, and many knelt before him to kiss his gold bishop’s ring. He was ill at ease. “I am not comfortable with old people kneeling down on the concrete to kiss my hand,” he said afterward. “I hope I never become comfortable with that.”

In Compton, at predominantly black St. Albert the Great, Fisher got up from the altar and, leaving the church’s priests behind, delivered a 40-minute sermon standing directly in front of the congregation. He started with a joke that had them all laughing. When he finished, he was given a standing ovation.

Afterward, he dropped in at the church gymnasium where a get-together in his honor had been organized. Banners reading “Welcome Bishop Fisher” hung from the walls. He chatted with parishioners and posed for pictures.

“There was no one falling asleep or gazing around when he spoke,” George Scretchings, an usher at the church, said as he poured punch. “You listen to every word.”

“He’s a young one, isn’t he?” said Martha Ocegueda as she stood in a doorway watching the bishop. “And that voice. If it doesn’t wake us up, nothing will.”