RELIGION / JOHN DART : Law-Breaking Quakers?

Few people might be surprised that most Quakers believe that there are times when it is morally justifiable to break the law, but a Catholic priest told an interfaith panel Thursday night that many Catholics do not know that Catholic doctrine also approves of law-breaking under some conditions.

Father Patrick Murphy, pastor of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary Church in Sun Valley, said the recently published Catholic Catechism says that Catholics do not need to follow civil laws that are contrary to the moral order, to the rights of people or to the gospel.

“If I put that into our parish bulletin, it would probably shock a lot of people,” Murphy said during a discussion Thursday at the Northridge Seventh-day Adventist Church. The program, attended by two dozen people, was part of a series on religious issues organized by the San Fernando Valley Interfaith Council.

The views of Quakers, who are traditionally pacifists, on civil disobedience were outlined by Margaret Mossman, interim director of the American Friends Service Committee’s regional office in Pasadena.

“Quakers have a long history of not always doing what the state wants us to do,” said Mossman, an attorney who has been arrested but not charged in the past during anti-war and anti-nuclear arms protests.

Yet, she said, Quakers temper their actions by subjecting their views of what God wants them to do to a review process called “group discernment.”

In that vein, Murphy said “informed conscience” is the key in Catholic consideration of whether to violate civil laws, such as those forbidding blocking the entrances to abortion clinic.

Murphy, Mossman and a third panelist, John Hall, a financial analyst who is a Mormon, all expressed opposition to the anti-illegal immigration Proposition 187, passed by California voters last November.

Hall, however, said that, as in most matters, he and other Mormons would prefer to work within a legal framework to change unjust laws rather than engage in civil disobedience.

Hall was a last-minute substitute on the panel when Deputy Chief Martin Pomeroy of the Los Angeles Police Department, also a Mormon, decided that he would not participate for fear that his comments might be misunderstood as representing the views of the department, rather than those of an individual Mormon. Pomeroy is commander of the LAPD’s Valley Bureau.

A fourth announced panelist, the Rev. Dudley Chatman, pastor of Greater Community Baptist Church in Pacoima, did not appear.