Valley Bishop’s Background Well-Suited to El Paso Flock

It seemed to him he had never left home in the San Fernando Valley, said Bishop Armando X. Ochoa, even though it was his first visit to El Paso.

Named by the Vatican on Monday to head the Catholic diocese in the Texas border city after nine years as a Los Angeles auxiliary bishop based in Mission Hills, Ochoa had flown there Sunday night and in the morning looked out a window at the El Paso smog.

“I saw the foothills nearby, then beyond that I actually saw what I’m going to be breathing--just like the San Fernando Valley!” said Ochoa.

That kind of humor--plus his upbringing by parents who illegally crossed the U.S. border from Mexico and became naturalized, middle-class citizens--is expected to endear the bishop to the 517,000 Catholics in El Paso and west Texas, 85% of them Latinos.

Ochoa joked Monday that the announcement of his appointment on April Fools’ Day might be taken for a hoax.

And he quipped Wednesday, on his return to Mission Hills temporarily, that he showed up in El Paso without written proof of his Vatican appointment--making him, like his parents and much of his new flock, “an undocumented worker.”

Called a kind, gentle church leader by Valley priests, Ochoa said in an interview that he would not emulate the recent controversial announcement by the bishop of Lincoln, Neb., that Catholics there who still belong to any of 12 listed liberal, ultraconservative or Masonic groups on April 15 would be automatically excommunicated.

“I would not feel the need to do that,” Ochoa said. “I think we need to educate Catholics so they really know where the church stands.”

Lincoln Bishop Fabian W. Bruskewitz created a stir when he warned Catholics in the Lincoln Diocese that they would be barred from receiving Communion if they were known members of the liberal Call to Action, Catholics for a Free Choice or Planned Parenthood, or the traditionalist groups Society of St. Pius X and St. Michael the Archangel Chapel. Also banned was membership in Masonic organizations such as Job’s Daughters and DeMolay.

“The bishop in Lincoln certainly has the freedom as [head] of the diocese to do that,” said Ochoa, indicating that he, too, is opposed to doctrinal dissent but without going to the extent of excommunication as an enforcement tool.

In Ochoa’s view, the pro-abortion rights stance of Catholics for a Free Choice places that group out of the Catholic mainstream. “They are trying to tell the universal Church: This is our brand of Catholicism,” he said. Likewise, Ochoa differs with the Chicago-based Call to Action because it advocates ordaining women as priests.

“I think we have to forcefully say: Listen, this is what the Church has consistently taught since Year 1,” said Ochoa.

In his diocese, he said, dissenters will be urged to read the pertinent church documents on an issue, discuss it with clergy or teachers, then look to their conscience for an informed decision.

Like Pope John Paul II and Los Angeles Cardinal Roger M. Mahony--Ochoa’s mentor since 1987--Ochoa is conservative on church doctrine and liberal on many social issues, including the rights of legal and illegal immigrants to be treated with dignity.

Just as Ochoa and other bishops two years ago opposed Proposition 187, the anti-illegal immigration measure, this week he lamented the clubbing Monday of undocumented Mexican immigrants by two Riverside County sheriff’s deputies after a freeway chase.

Especially important for the U.S. Catholic Church, said Father Luis Valbuena of Pacoima, is that the large Latino Catholic population can relate to a bishop of Mexican descent.

“People can see someone who is of the same blood, the same race, who not only can do lamentations with them [over various misfortunes] but also who can go to the roots of injustice and work for change,” Valbuena said.

Ochoa is one of 20 Latino bishops serving in the United States, and will be the ninth to head a diocese when he is installed sometime after June 20. Arrangements still are pending.

Ochoa, born and reared in Oxnard, said his mother and father fled as children with their families in the 1920s when the Mexican government violently persecuted Catholic priests.

“The border with the United States was a lot more open then,” Ochoa said. “They came as illegal immigrants. My mother’s family settled in Santa Monica and my father’s in Oxnard. They met in a church group.”

He was one of three children. His mother, who worked as a health insurance representative at a hospital, died four years ago. An older sister is a school nurse in Camarillo and a younger brother is a physician’s assistant in Danville, Calif.

“We were all in related positions inasmuch as I am a doctor of the soul, so to speak,” said Ochoa, who will turn 53 Tuesday.

Ochoa said he planned to take his 80-year-old father, who was a wholesale meat distributor, to El Paso next week during a break from the Easter season.

The bishop said the San Fernando region he has been responsible for--which includes the San Fernando, Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys as well as Glendale and Eagle Rock--will be administered temporarily by Msgr. Gerald Wilkerson, pastor of Our Lady of Grace Church in Encino.

Wilkerson, 56, an ex-president of the Los Angeles Priests’ Council and current member of the Archdiocesan Finance Council, will be designated an episcopal vicar, a priest serving in a bishop’s job. He will take over June 1, continuing until a new bishop is appointed for the region.

Ochoa said the Vatican probably would appoint a new auxiliary bishop for Los Angeles, the nation’s most populous archdiocese at 3.6 million Catholics, “since the pattern is pretty well established to have five bishops, for each of the five regions.”