Church Leaders in O.C. Grapple With Prop. 187 : Religion: They oppose the measure, but pastors delivering message may alienate some in congregations.

Just a few days shy of a Sunday Mass at St. Mary’s, the pastor is seething with a quiet indignation more often reserved for mortal sin than a ballot measure.

“I won’t be mincin’ words on this one,” vowed Father Richard C. Kennedy in the lilting accent of his native Ireland. “I haven’t worked out what I’ll say, but I’m going to make it clear. Proposition 187 is immoral. . . . This thing is completely Godless.”

But by the weekend, Kennedy was not ready to deliver his message. He needed more time to reflect and consult with other priests on the perils of staking out a position on the initiative, which would ban most public benefits for illegal immigrants, including education and basic health care.

From pulpits across California, clergy members are suddenly wrestling with political strategy instead of conventional demons. The top leadership of all the state’s major religious denominations has attacked Proposition 187, calling for compassion while invoking the Bible: “Welcome strangers, for by doing this, some people have entertained angels without knowing it.”

Yet it is the foot soldiers--the priests, ministers, rabbis, and nuns--who are delicately trying to deliver the anti-187 message in a fashion that will persuade rather than alienate. The political reality is that members of their congregations feel like most of the state’s voters: rightly or wrongly they blame immigrants for many of the state’s problems and support the initiative.

Using the Bible to prick the consciences of church members, a broad coalition of 60 religious organizations has launched a frantic campaign to woo them with homilies and house parties, candlelight vigils and forums, Sunday sermons and appeals for compassion from top religious leaders.

The appeals have grown even more passionate as the leaders have warily noted the popularity of the measure in recent polls.

“The church needs to be heard on this in public more often. We’ve got to define the issue,” said the Rev. Chester Talton, the suffragan bishop of the six-county Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. Talton is especially concerned about provisions that cut health and education services to children. “Jesus calls on us to care for the child and as we care for the child we care for Jesus himself,” Talton said.

Shunning this broad coalition are fundamentalist ministers like the Rev. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition based in Orange County. He said ministers supporting the initiative do not need to organize because “it’s not considered part of the core doctrine.”

Sheldon publicly supports the crackdown on illegal immigrants, remaining resolutely unmoved by religious appeals to “welcome the stranger.”

“Illegal strangers are different than a passing-through stranger who needs a night’s lodging, food and clothing,” explained Sheldon.

Noted the preacher: Biblical teachings do not address “illegal strangers.”

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With the sweet strains of the children’s Angelic Choir in the background, Gardena pastor Jose Luis Torres nervously prepared to face the church leadership at a business meeting of the Pacific Presbytery last month.

While the children swayed in white robes to a chorus of “Somebody Bigger Than You and I,” Torres was gathering strength from the Bible.

He had been privately warned by some church leaders about the potential for backlash within his own religious community if he forced his fellow pastors to take a position against the controversial immigration measure before they were ready.

Just a week earlier, smaller sub-groups of the San Gabriel Valley Presbyterian ministers took a bold stand against the measure, but Orange County’s pastors considered the issue too politically hot to handle and refused to allow discussion.

Torres, a native of Puerto Rico, insisted on forging ahead. He reminded the church leaders that the Bible bars Christians from oppressing “strangers in our midst.” He warned that the ballot measure will invite discrimination against Latinos. Wearily, he confessed, “I am tired. I’m tired of fighting and fighting and fighting.”

Then Torres waited, watching in amazement as most of the church leaders--representing 52 congregations from Malibu to San Pedro--bolted to their feet from the pews to signal their opposition to the ballot measure.

The voting at the Westminster Presbyterian Church in central Los Angeles that September afternoon also reflected the schism facing many churches. Rev. Mark Nazarian, the pastor at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Redondo Beach, stood to oppose the measure, while his two church elders didn’t budge.

“The church should not be debating political issues,” St. Andrew’s elder Dick Olson, 61, said matter-of-factly.

Nazarian was mindful of the complaint; his vote that day was his first public expression against the measure and probably his last. He will deliver no sermon railing against Proposition 187.

By longstanding custom, Nazarian said, he tries to “stay away” from politics.

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As the Nov. 8 election approaches, major religious denominations have been scrambling to develop a grass-roots strategy opposing the initiative.

Almost weekly, various church organizations representing thousands of members are releasing detailed opposition statements. The groups include the Episcopalian General Conference, California’s Catholic bishops, the Presbyterian Synod of Southern California and the bishops of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.

In the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the Office of Justice and Peace is directing an anti-Proposition 187 speakers bureau, distributing voter registration information and offering to train clergy members as they prepare to campaign against Proposition 187. Cardinal Roger Mahony, who last fall spoke out against immigrant bashing with the call “in the stranger we encounter Christ,” also denounced the initiative in a July conference of Latino Catholics.

In Orange County--the birthplace of the Proposition 187 movement--the diocese is leaving it up to individual churches to develop their own tactics in the battle for parishioners’ hearts and souls.

“Everybody has their own niche and is trying to share information,” said Msgr. Jaime Soto, the Hispanic Vicar for the Diocese of Orange. “So for example, the diocese of Oakland (developed excerpts to be used in sermons) and we’re distributing that to our churches for suggested readings and bulletin hints.”

Much of the statewide religious organizing is being coordinated by the Interfaith Coalition for Immigrant Rights, a newly formed collection of some 60 religious organizations that met in Oceanside in July to plot strategy to defeat Proposition 187.

Setting aside traditional fund-raising efforts for the campaign, the group has focused instead on their religious networks to distribute information and provide speakers, according to Ed Dunn, a Franciscan brother. He and Terry Salkowitz, the executive director of the Northern Pacific region of the American Jewish Congress, are helping lead the coalition.

From their San Francisco offices, the coalition’s leaders have also been organizing small living room parties to encourage people to ponder the issue with their friends. At least one house party has grown so large that its host, T.J. Anthony, has moved it to a San Francisco restaurant.

Anthony, a new board member for the American Jewish Congress, said he has invited a guest speaker who is a Holocaust survivor. As a young boy, the man and hundreds of other Jewish immigrants were aboard the ship St. Louis when it was turned away from the Florida shores of the United States and forced back to Germany.

“In the Jewish community, there is a very, very strong memory, a long, long memory. A lot of people remember the St. Louis and the people who were sent back to their deaths in Nazi Germany. You can’t forget that,” Anthony said.

The Interfaith coalition is planning its most public display of opposition for Oct. 25, with candlelight vigils in all major California cities, according to coalition leader Dunn. The little money that the coalition has raised has been targeted for advertisements that will run in religious and ethnic newspapers.

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The delicacy of the immigration issue has forced many clergy members to choose words with the caution of diplomats. They know it is easier to take on the devil than a volatile issue that could divide congregations.

“A lot of churches are still wrestling with this, especially ones feeling the economic crisis in terms of lost jobs and lower incomes,” Dunn said. “The temptation for some is to say there’s not enough to go around. What we try to do is engage people in larger reasons for problems in the state. The largest corporations and wealthiest families have not paid their fair taxes, and therefore, the immigrant didn’t create this crisis.”

Churches have faced contentious debates within their denominations on sensitive issues such as abortion rights, birth control and gays in the clergy, but their role in the argument over illegal immigrants seems even less clear-cut.

Last weekend, the Presbyterian Synod of Southern California and Hawaii--which represents 300 Southern California churches--voted to oppose Proposition 187 in a resolution offered by the church’s Hispanic Commission. But the vote came after a decision by a sub-group--the presbytery representing Orange County and East Los Angeles churches--to quash their own discussion on procedural grounds.

The synod’s vote does not require the churches to sermonize on the issue because, generally, most ministers do not discuss public policy issues from the pulpit. But it encourages them to inform their congregations of their opposition and to help raise funds for the campaign.

“I believe we should provide education and care for some of those in our midst, but at the same time, we have to stem the flow (of illegal immigrants) so that we don’t end up with no money to provide care to those who are here. There is a limit,” said the Rev. John Huffman, whose Newport Beach church, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian, is considered the largest and wealthiest Presbyterian church in Southern California.

Similar tensions were also evident at an anti-Proposition 187 training session organized by the Diocese of San Bernardino for a small group of Catholic priests. One of the older priests vowed that he would not speak up because of concerns about the separation of church and state.

The group’s awkward silence was broken by a younger priest.

“I just got irritated,” said Father Miguel Urrea, the pastor of Christ the King Church in San Bernardino. “I just said that it’s very clearly stated as a church that we should not be concerned if people are documented or undocumented. If we do, we’re losing our whole perspective of why we are priests. This is a humanitarian issue. Are we supposed to say, ‘Sorry, we can’t take care of you because you don’t have papers. Stand there and bleed to death.’?” Last month, a small support group of Catholic priests in Orange County indulged in a painful discussion about political tactics. Many preside over rapidly evolving congregations that are shifting away from mostly white populations.

The question, according to participant Msgr. Bill McLaughlin, was how best to preach without alienating members. McLaughlin formed a committee among his affluent Newport Beach congregation at Our Lady Queen of Angels to fight the initiative, but even the committee members were apprehensive.

At their information table outside the church last Sunday, parishioners Juan and Patty Carreras distributed a copy of the initiative and nine flyers listing arguments against it, but carefully insisted that they were only encouraging people to become informed. But that did not prevent a debate at the table after one of the Masses.

“I’m not going to hesitate to say something about this in a homily,” said McLaughlin. “I know it will alienate some people, though. This is a Republican stronghold. . . . When we do preach what we consider Gospel values, some of the community would like to see shortcuts taken. We all know what turns people off.”

Even the president of the Hispanic Commission for the Presbyterian Synod senses divisions within his own predominantly Latino congregation in South Gate.

“In every single congregation, no matter what the pastor preaches, two (opposing) groups will arise,” said Rev. Nick Aguilar, the pastor of Bethel Presbyterian. “It depends on how life has treated you in the U.S. If you have a good job and a good car and savings in the bank, it’s hard for you to remember when you came to this country. Time and situations change our way of thinking.”

The level of church unity and the passion of sermons are often a reflection of the class and ethnic makeup of the congregation itself.

When Episcopal Bishop Talton took his soft-spoken message of opposition to All Saints Church in Los Angeles last month, he received only support. The struggling congregation in the city’s Highland Park area--90% Latino and so poor that the minister moonlights as a Los Angeles public school teacher--listened silently to a Spanish translation of his words.

A thundering endorsement for the church’s position came from one of the older men in the parish, Luis Guillermo, an immigrant from Guatemala, who stood up after the bishop finished his message.

“We have listened,” Guillermo shouted in Spanish. “All of us know how we have suffered here in California. I hope that all of us will vote to survive. . . . We are human. We are Christians. We have a heart!”

At St. Irenaeus Catholic Church in Cypress--where white parishioners make up 45% of the congregation--no opposition has surfaced yet toward the church opposition to Proposition 187, and the church has sent parishioners to training sessions on how to register voters.

So aggressive is the pastor, Father Michael Heher, that he decided to make his pulpit a bully one--taking his sermon to the Cypress City Council, which is considering a resolution supporting the proposition.

Wearing his clerical collar, the priest stood at the council podium and, in the manner of television “Late Show” host David Letterman, delivered a “Top Ten” list of reasons why the council should not back the measure.

But there was little humor in this list, a somber message appealing to the moral values of the council, which includes one of Heher’s parishioners.

Reason No. 10: “You don’t have to take a position.” His No. 1 reason: “It’s wrong.”

“Having known you as I have,” Heher told the council members, “I simply can’t imagine you being a party to this.”

To those passionately opposed to the measure, it sometimes seems as though they are walking into the lion’s den.

The ecclesiastical and political forces collided one recent Sunday evening in a debate sponsored by St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, considered one of Orange County’s more progressive congregations.

Tension filled the room as the 150-member audience listened to both sides of the issue. It appeared that the crowd was evenly split. When one side stated a position, the other side groaned.

Just that morning, the church’s pastor, the Rev. Gary Collins, had delivered a sermon based upon the Gospel of the day: a parable in which Jesus heard his disciples arguing over who among them should be greatest. Jesus placed a child in their midst and told them that whoever welcomes the children welcomes him.

Mindful of his sermon, Collins asked one panelist, former Border Patrol agent Bill King, a question that went to the core of his concern: How does one reconcile the Bible with the initiative?

“I don’t want to talk about the Bible. This is politics,” Collins recalled King answering--a response that bothered Collins for days.

“While Proposition 187 is surely a political issue,” the minister said, “it is surely a moral issue.”