Valley Catholics, Interim Leader Await Naming of Area Bishop

For the past decade, Catholics in the San Fernando Valley area of the Los Angeles Archdiocese have had their own regional bishop to oversee 50 parishes with hundreds of thousands of parishioners.

But the seat became vacant in June when Auxiliary Bishop Armando Ochoa left to serve as bishop in El Paso, Texas.

If the usual Vatican pattern for filling vacancies holds, a new bishop may be named by Easter for the San Fernando Pastoral Region, which stretches from Palmdale to Woodland Hills to Highland Park and has its headquarters in Mission Hills.

“At least I hope it doesn’t take six more months,” said Msgr. Gerald Wilkerson, who has served as the region’s episcopal vicar--or “caretaker” in his words--while still pastor of the 2,400-family Our Lady of Grace Church in Encino.

“It has been very, very difficult for me, and time-consuming,” said Wilkerson, interviewed at his church on Ventura Boulevard.

Recognizing that, the archdiocese shortly before Christmas assigned a second associate priest to Wilkerson’s parish for six months.

Wilkerson, 57, has credentials enough to be considered a candidate for bishop. In addition to filling in as episcopal vicar, he sits on two important archdiocesan councils--one on finance and the other overseeing the Tidings newspaper.

Would he like to be a bishop?

Only if the Deity calls, he said. “A long time ago, I told the Lord, ‘You know, I don’t think it’s really what I’d like to do, but if you want me to do it, then I’m willing.’ ”

Wilkerson said that being a temporary replacement for a bishop this year has shown him one discomforting difference between serving as a pastor and as a bishop.

“What energizes me is the daily contact with the same people in this community [parish] of people that I work with,” the priest said. “A bishop doesn’t belong to anyone, in a sense. After he celebrates a Mass at a parish, he goes back to his own home.”

The Los Angeles Archdiocese presently has two vacancies for auxiliary, or assistant, bishops since Ochoa’s departure and the retirement this year of Bishop John Ward.

In the selection of replacements, the process begins with Cardinal Roger Mahony, the archbishop of the Los Angeles Archdiocese. The Vatican’s apostolic nuncio, or ambassador, to Washington also plays a key role.

“Every few years the cardinal solicits from priests of the archdiocese as well as from leading lay members the names of priests they think would be suitable for the office of bishop,” Wilkerson said.

Those candidates are checked out by the nuncio, who “sends letters out saying a man has been nominated, asking priests to fill out a questionnaire and return it” with comments on the nominees, Wilkerson said.

The name of the chosen candidate is kept secret until the Vatican announces that the pope has made the appointment.

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The auxiliary bishops have become more important to the 3.6-million-member archdiocese, the nation’s most populous, as Mahony has delegated more work to its five pastoral regions, Wilkerson said.

For instance, Wilkerson recently reviewed property-purchasing proposals by two parishes so he could make recommendations to the archdiocese’s headquarters.

“It’s one more hoop to jump through--one more step in the bureaucracy--but it makes a lot of sense because the regional bishop knows the whole situation a lot better than ‘downtown,’ ” he said.

Wilkerson came to Our Lady of Grace parish in 1982 after assignments in Manhattan Beach, central Los Angeles and Orange County. He was named senior pastor of Our Lady of Grace Church in 1985.

“When I came to Encino, this was a white, Anglo, bedroom community,” he said. But the parish began a Spanish-language Mass in 1991, now attended by about 500 people weekly.

“Nearly every parish in the Valley has a Mass in Spanish and some parishes’ Masses are purely in Spanish,” Wilkerson said. “There is a concerted effort by churches in the Valley to respond to these needs; some parishes offer Masses in English, Spanish, Korean and Tagalog, the Filipino language.”

Over the next three years, according to the Jubilee 2000 Committee of the Los Angeles Archdiocese, Catholic parishes are to “forgive, restore, reach out [and] welcome the stranger, the one in need.”

Wilkerson said that each parish will be expected to implement the sentiments with its own ideas. “The cardinal doesn’t want to come up with another program that everybody has to do,” the priest said.

“Maybe for us in Encino, the stranger among us is the homeless person wandering down Ventura Boulevard, whereas in another parish the response is more to the immigrant,” he said.