Friends Recall ‘Father C.J.’ as Colorful, Activist Leader of South-Central Parish

When St. Agnes parish in South-Central Los Angeles needed a new van a few years ago, its pastor, Father Clint J. Farabaugh, decided to drop by a local auto dealership and buy one--on credit.

The late Msgr. Benjamin Hawkes, then the Los Angeles archdiocese’s powerful chief financial officer, heard about the deal and called Farabaugh on the carpet.

“We don’t do business like that,” Hawkes said in reprimanding the priest, and wrote out a check for the purchase price of the van.

Farabaugh--affectionately known as Father C.J. to his friends and parishioners--left Hawkes’ office with a broad grin on his face. He had earlier calculated the odds of the archdiocese buying him a new van as very slim. But he suspected that the credit maneuver might get the monsignor to come up with the money.

A strapping six-footer who weighed more than 200 pounds, Farabaugh looked more like a longshoreman than a priest. And his salty language elevated cursing to an eloquent art, those who knew him said.

But his compassion and vision were as legendary as his earthiness, and stretched far beyond his church at Vermont Avenue and Adams Boulevard.

Last week, Farabaugh’s friends and parishioners remembered Father C.J., who died of heart disease May 13 at 61 and who will be buried today in Carthagena, Ohio, where he was ordained 35 years ago. At last week’s memorial, it was remembered how, as one person put it, “all of us will think and act differently because this great man was part of our lives.”

They remembered him as a man who was uncompromising in his commitment to the people he served.

Against the resistance of his superiors, he organized a produce market that sells bargain-priced fresh fruit and vegetables in the church’s parking lot every Wednesday.

When church authorities asked him why he did it, he said: “Because the people are hungry. They need food.”

Friends also remembered that during fund-raising drives, he would show up with a case of candy at a mortuary, telling the owner: “We bury your dead. Now you bury our debt.”

In the late 1970s, when the United Neighborhoods Organization was shaking up East Los Angeles and rattling corporate cages by putting thousands of people at rallies to demand changes ranging from cleaner supermarkets to fairer auto insurance rates, Farabaugh recognized that a sister organization was needed in South-Central Los Angeles.

So he helped found the South-Central Organizing Committee (now the Southern California Organizing Committee) and was a key strategist in successful campaigns on issues ranging from cracking down on loitering, gambling and drug dealing around liquor stores to increasing the minimum wage in California.

“He always knew the problems, the issues,” said Sister Diane Donoghue, who had known Farabaugh since 1973. “He could feel the pains people were suffering and he could articulate them very well.”

Like UNO, SCOC operates in the tradition of activist Saul Alinsky, who organized the Industrial Areas Foundation--a network some call urban guerrilla armies--to which both groups belong. Their strength lies in mobilizing thousands of people around issues and recruiting the support of key allies.

Farabaugh put up the first $1,000 to open SCOC’s bank account, and he insisted that St. Agnes, with its largely poor, Latino congregation, pay $7,000 in annual dues to the organization as an example to other member churches.

“He had a great vision of what the church should be in the community,” said Donoghue. “It should be an enabler, an empowerer--it should take issue with the things that pain people.”

It was almost too pat that he was a skilled carpenter. He was also a handyman who painted the school at least twice and kept the plumbing in working order.

Once, after painting the outside of the school, he spotted a teen-ager spraying graffiti on a wall. He dashed outside, collared the youngster and dragged him to the church basement where he painted the boy from head to foot.

When the boy’s angry mother called the church to ask Farabaugh if he had painted her son, the priest admitted that he had and said he would do it again if he ever caught the boy spraying graffiti again.

“He used whatever it took to get the job done: a word of praise, a gentle embrace, a kick in the butt,” said Larry McNeil, the Industrial Areas Foundation’s California director.

Hundreds of Farabaugh’s friends packed the church’s sanctuary Wednesday evening for a memorial service. They filled the aisles and spilled outside where hundreds more stood on the sidewalk or in a courtyard.

They had come, as one said, “to praise a famous man” who studiously avoided the limelight, but who had few equals in organizing people to take action to improve their lives.

“He was constantly investing in other people, getting them to do things they didn’t think they could do,” McNeil said. “He had an absolute belief that people knew best what they needed, and if you treated them with respect and demanded something of them, they would rise to the occasion.”

After Farabaugh’s funeral Thursday, the hearse carrying his body led a procession through streets surrounding St. Agnes, where he was pastor from 1968 to 1984. He will be buried at St. Charles Seminary in Ohio.