Retired Sacramento Bishop Francis Quinn was honored June 30 with a “Beacon of Hope” award at the Crest Theatre in Sacramento, serenaded by the Sacramento Gay Men’s Chorus.The appearance of the Gay Men’s Chorus seemed particularly apropos considering comments the 88-year-old bishop emeritus made to the June 2010 issue of the publication Inside East Sacramento.
“Pointing to the dramatic changes made within the Catholic Church by Vatican II, Quinn asserts that it is time for a new council, this one dedicated to looking at human sexuality and its intersection with religion,” said Inside East Sacramento.
“The new council, he says, should involve the entire Catholic community as well as people of other faiths.”
“So many of the issues that Catholics deal with -- divorce, homosexuality, premarital sex -- center around sexuality and affect how they connect with the church,” Bishop Quinn told the publication. “We need to move beyond this circular logic and look at what is really happening in people’s lives.”
Bishop Quinn was the first recipient of the Beacon of Hope award, presented by Cottage Housing Inc., which provides housing for the homeless in the Sacramento area.
One of the organization’s housing complexes is called the Bishop Francis Quinn Cottages, with 60 cottages that offer transitional housing for up to 24-months with a maximum of two residents per cottage.
According to the Quinn Cottages website, residents must maintain sobriety, pursue self-defined personal development goals, and render voluntary community service during their stay.
According to an announcement prior to the event, it served a dual purpose: to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Bishop Quinn joining the Diocese of Sacramento, and to raise money for the expansion of programs at Cottage Housing.
Bishop Quinn, who developed a reputation as somewhat of a maverick, was a priest of the Archdiocese of San Francisco for 33 years before becoming Bishop of Sacramento in 1979.
He retired in 1993, and in 1994 moved to Arizona at the invitation of then-Bishop Manuel Moreno of Tucson.
He returned to Sacramento in 2007 after spending 13 years working with the Yaqui and Tohono O’odham Indian nations in the deserts of southern Arizona.
Quinn spoke about his work with the Indians in a story published in 2005 in Sacramento’s diocesan newspaper The Catholic Herald. While living in a motor home behind the Tucson bishop’s residence for several years, Quinn worked with two Trinitarian priests, visiting seven churches on the Yaqui Reservation -- most of the church buildings being lean-tos. He worked as well on the Papago reservation and said Mass for a group of religious sisters.
The Yaquis, said Quinn, “are Roman Catholic to the core.” Their liturgies have been inculturated, including rope dancing at the offertory, he said, and “doing smoke blessings in the four directions instead of the penitential rite.”
As for giving communion to politicians who are pro-abortion, “in most cases,” he said, “you should not deny Communion publicly to anyone who comes to the Communion rail, because you do not know the present state of their conscience…”
When, in 1989, then-San Diego Bishop Leo Maher refused communion to pro-abortion Assemblywoman Lucy Killea, Quinn welcomed her to communion.
"No priest in this diocese will ever refuse to give you communion," he said at the time.
At a Mass celebrated in December 2007 at the Church of St. Raphael in San Rafael, Quinn apologized to the Coast Miwok Indians for what he called the mistreatment of them by Spanish missionaries two centuries ago, a Catholic News Service story published in Catholic San Francisco reported. ?
The Mass was held to commemorate the 190th anniversary of the founding of Mission San Rafael Arcangel.
The Mass featured the Lord’s Prayer said in Miwok by a Coast Miwok Indian and a reading by a tribal member of the names of the first group of Miwoks baptized at the mission.
When Bishop Quinn made his apology, the Miwok in attendance at the Mass “seemed stunned,” said a story in the Marin Independent Journal.
Though Indians helped the Franciscan priests build and maintain San Rafael Mission in 1817, Quinn “conceded that the Indians were repaid by Church authorities with the destruction of their own spiritual practices and cruel punishment for any disobedience,” said Catholic News Service.
“I felt I should express regret that the Miwok were treated unfairly in many ways, although the missionaries were well-intentioned but mistaken and doing only what they had been taught to do in bringing the faith to the Indians,” said Quinn.
According to the Journal, Quinn said the missionaries “took the Indian out of the Indian” by destroying their traditional spiritual practices and “imposing a European Catholicism” on them – when the Indians had their own “civilization” that valued nature.
In June 2007, Bishop Quinn spoke at a contemplative retreat at Burlingame’s Mercy Center to mark its 25th anniversary.
The Center, says its web site, is “sponsored by the Sisters of Mercy and rooted in the Catholic tradition.”
It “welcomes women and men of diverse faiths and cultural backgrounds.” One of these “diverse” groups has been the San Francisco-based AIDS Health Project, which offers what it calls REACH Workshops for homosexual and bisexual men. The workshops, says the Project’s web site, “offer a good way for individuals to learn more about a topic, get support, and meet other men.”
One workshop, Men Connecting, “provides education and support for individuals seeking to enhance their skills around meeting men, dating, negotiating and communicating about sex in dating situations, and developing relationships.”
Another workshop, “Hot and Healthy Sex,” provides “a forum for sexually active gay men seeking greater fulfillment or pleasure from sex” as well as discussing “issues of preventing HIV and STD.”
SIC: CCD