Missionaries at Seminary Pursue Their Own Callings

It was 7:30 a.m. and six priests gathered around a wooden breakfast table at the Dominguez Seminary east of Carson.

Each had fetched his own eggs and toast and, had the newspaper arrived on time, would have reached quickly for it.

“It’s a serious group, so they all go for the front page,” Father Patrick McPolin quipped. “I never have to fight for the sports.”

Indeed, the seven priests and one brother who make their home at the peaceful 17-acre seminary and rancho on the eastern brow of Dominguez Hill are passionate activists whose work reaches into many Southland communities.

As members of the Roman Catholic Church’s order of Claretian missionaries, they say they have been granted unusual freedom to pursue their individual callings as fund-raiser, healer, AIDS counselor, youth mentor and, in one case, minister to Hollywood stars.

‘All Individuals’

“Regimentation ended in the seminary. We’re all individuals here,” said McPolin, one of the eight who live in spare comfort at the old seminary, now a museum and weekend retreat for teen-agers.

They are often too busy even to share meals. At the recent breakfast, two of the group were already out on business.

Brother Modesto Leon, 40, an anti-gang organizer dubbed “the celebrity” by his colleagues, had left early for one of the three schools he runs for teen-age dropouts. A morning meeting also had been set to firm up a Christmastime peace treaty among warring youth gangs in Pomona.

And Father Bernard Stacy, 66, called “the poor man’s preacher” by the others for his work with immigrants in Long Beach and the South Bay, was in the San Joaquin Valley to conduct services among Mexican farm laborers.

Dominguez’s small priestly community mixes mysticism with missionary zeal, said Father John Raab, who is in charge at Dominguez.

150 Members in U.S.

“We emphasize more action than contemplation. Our work is not to go to the chapel and chant (prayers) all day,” Raab said of the order, founded in Spain in 1849 and brought to this country in 1902 to serve a growing Latino population. The order has 150 members nationwide and 3,000 throughout the world.

Leon, whose success in reducing gang violence in East Los Angeles has been featured on the CBS television program “60 Minutes,” said the Claretians’ mandate is nothing less than to change the world.

“I think we are making history. I think the church is making history. . . . I see a need and I say, ‘Let’s do it!’ ” he said.

In the poor Latino community where Leon works most often, gang-on-gang killings dropped from 24 in 1978 to four in 1986 and then two in 1987, said Sheriff’s Lt. Al Scaduto. He said the inter-agency program Leon helped found more than a decade ago is a model for cities with gang problems.

In it, youngsters identified by parents, police, schools, churches and the courts as gang members are routed to agencies and businesses that provide jobs, education and counseling.

‘They Listen to Him’

“Leon has been instrumental,” Scaduto said. “He knows how to talk to these (gang) guys. They listen to him.”

Although six of the priests are more than 60, they remain what TV preacher and healer Father John Hampsch, 62, calls “smoldering firebrands” who are doing some of their best work.

A severe stutterer before a sudden cure in 1970 that he calls a miracle, Hampsch himself travels the region and the world, holding healing services about three times a week.

“I work in the miracle business,” he said the day before an eight-hour session of counseling and anointing the sick at St. Paul the Apostle Church in Westwood.

As his fame as a charismatic minister has grown through a nationwide weekly program on religious television, Hampsch has sold hundreds of thousands of audio and video tapes of his services, with the profits supporting a Claretian mission in West Africa, he said.

‘My Secret Work’

Father Juan Corominas, a 67-year-old veteran of the Spanish Civil War, has followed a lifetime of scholarship and university instruction with a special ministry at the rancho that he calls “my secret work.”

Corominas, a Spanish language professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills and a Compton College instructor, also teaches about 50 Latino teen-agers through private lessons and club-like activities to take pride in their culture. Then he helps them get into college.

“This has changed my life. I am feeling like a father,” Corominas said. “These people were to have been nothing, but now they’re thinking another way.”

He spent a recent evening in the rancho’s library, teaching three students the dialogues of Plato in Spanish. “This is my idea of Socrates,” he said.

Raab, 43, who ran a seminary in Nigeria for six years before coming to Dominguez, frequently visits patients with acquired immune deficiency syndrome in Long Beach’s large homosexual community.

“I help them reconcile death,” he said. “I help them know the church has not rejected them. . . .”

The church does not condone homosexuality, but AIDS victims should not be lectured about that as they are nearing death, Raab said.

Fathers Donald Lavelle, 66, and Al Connors, 68, are newcomers to Dominguez, both arriving since September.

Lavelle, raised in San Pedro but most recently a priest in Puerto Rican parishes in New Jersey, is a temporary pastor at St. Cornelius Church in Long Beach.

“I really haven’t found my niche here yet. I’m looking around,” he said. “But, you know, it’s really not important how many years I’ve spent in an area on any one thing. It just all blends into one big sea of work. And it’s work I love.”

Connors was a teacher and administrator for the Christian Brothers, a Catholic teaching order, until 1972, when he became a priest as “kind of a second career.”

Now, after six years as an associate pastor at the San Gabriel Mission, he is the fund-raiser for the Claretians’ western province, which is based in South Pasadena.

“If Modesto (Leon) is to start a program in East Los Angeles, he has to get start money and that’s my job. Or if guys are going to Africa and there’s no money, that’s my job,” said Connors, who is devising a sophisticated direct-mail campaign so the order will not need to rely so much on gifts and endowments.

Link With Past

At 71, McPolin is the senior member of the Dominguez community and its strongest link with the past.

He is the restorer and curator of the Dominguez Adobe museum, now a national landmark, built in 1826. He is the priest who closed the old Spanish-style seminary in 1977, converting it into a retreat visited by thousands of youngsters each year.

And he is the rancho’s contact with the Carson, Del Amo and Watson families, descendants of the original grant holder, Juan Jose Dominguez. The families gave the rancho, which by then had shrunk from 75,000 acres to 17, to the church in 1922 and have contributed $200,000 to the museum.

McPolin, a gregarious man who calls himself “Father Pat” and sometimes runs to his tasks around the rancho, claims to have heard the adobe’s walls speaking to him 50 years ago while in the seminary. He personally dug the grave for Dominguez descendant Gregorio del Amo in a crypt beneath the seminary building’s lofty chapel in 1941.

“This is my labor of love, my compliance with the (Dominguez) family. The family gave us this rancho to preserve its name,” he said.

Police Chaplain

Raab said McPolin is also “a kind of chaplain for the rich and famous” because he regularly conducts weddings and funerals for Hollywood celebrities, many of whom he first met during two decades of high-profile work as Chicago Police Department chaplain.

Danny Thomas, a longtime friend, did a Claretian promotional film in 1958 as a favor to McPolin. Ricardo Montalban and Lorne Greene were hosts at a McPolin-produced bicentennial party for the rancho in 1984 that raised $100,000.

His most enduring satisfaction, McPolin said, comes from his work in Chicago as police chaplain and a parish priest and adviser to the Mexican community there. Last year, more than two decades after he left, 1,100 people turned out in that city to honor the priest on his 70th birthday.

Age and the possibility of retirement are topics of some concern at the rancho. The older clerics--who themselves entered the priesthood when many Catholic families expected at least one son to be ordained--joke about never being able to retire because there are no recruits to replace them.

Several years ago, the Claretians attacked that problem with a pair of advertising campaigns aimed at dissatisfied men in other professions. In Time magazine, the ad said: “We’ll even take an archeologist.” And on billboards, the Claretians asked: “What are you doing with the rest of your life?”

‘Didn’t Pay Off’

But the campaigns were scrapped. “It didn’t pay off as much as we thought,” said McPolin, a former provincial director.

A heart condition recently forced Stacy to retire from regular 12-hour night shifts as chaplain at Long Beach Veterans Hospital. But he will continue to conduct a dozen monthly prayer sessions, counsel a battered-women’s group in Carson and preach regularly to Mexican immigrants in Long Beach, Wilmington, San Pedro and Carson, he said. Last summer, he spent a month in four Mexican villages filling in for an ailing priest.

“I qualify for medical retirement,” he said. “But everybody wants you and needs you. If we retire, there is no one to do our job.”

The Dominguez missionaries, six of whom were seminary students there, have come to the old rancho with varying degrees of nostalgia and affection.

Nearly all say the rancho’s park-like setting--its rose and cactus gardens, its towering forest of rare trees, its sprawling playing fields--is a refuge for which they are thankful. And they are mindful of its history.

Use As Resource

But, while some see it as a place to work, retire and perhaps die, others consider it a resource to be used only as long as it fits into a greater scheme of things.

“I live in the old adobe in the same room I had 43 years ago when I was ordained,” said Lavelle, who knew McPolin at the seminary and was a classmate of Stacy.

“It’s a tremendous feeling of nostalgia and happiness. I just walk around and relive many of the things of 40 years ago,” he said.

However, Leon, the financial director at Dominguez, says the rancho does not pay for itself and, with weekend retreats already fully booked, probably never will.

That could mean that one day, the church, which by deed restriction cannot sell the property, might return it to the Dominguez heirs.

‘Needs Elsewhere’

“If we thought that the ministry we were doing here was not the ministry we need today, I would give it back. We have needs elsewhere,” Leon said.

“We don’t mind pumping in an extra $100,000 or $200,000 because it’s for the greater good. But someday we might say, ‘It’s our history, but history has to be new, too.’ . . . Some of the older guys have problems with that.”

This difference of opinion reflects the variety of political and religious thought among those assigned by provincial officials to the seminary. And the missionaries say it has been a challenge to fit it all together.

“We get along, but we grate on each others’ nerves once in awhile,” McPolin said. “We’re not in heaven yet.”

Raab, the Dominguez superior, observed that the group is made up of “more eccentric types of individuals who probably wouldn’t have chosen to live together. . . . Tensions build.”

‘Diverse Ministries’

Although many Claretians in the United States are parish priests, the missionaries at Dominguez “are all working in diverse ministries, so we don’t all have a common task to hold us together,” he said. “But the community is very strong in spite of the difficulties. They are very committed, and I think we’ve grown in being able to communicate with each other and live together.”

Common meals, Masses, a monthly daylong retreat, gatherings on birthdays and other special occasions have helped reinforce this spirit of community, Raab said.

The Claretians acknowledge that there are many philosophical differences among them, but say they try to show respect for the others’ opinions.

“The church is in ferment, liberal and conservative. But this is a very democratic atmosphere,” Lavelle said.

And Corominas said, “I like very much this community. It’s quiet and we have this freedom to do our own work. It’s the best way.”