A former Mesa Roman Catholic priest is moving forward in his efforts to help build and develop the Reformed Catholic Church in California. A sharp alternative to Roman Catholicism, the new church has been established in Long Beach under the leadership of  the  Rev. Monsignor Chris Carpenter, who had served as pastor of Christ the King Church  in Mesa from 1997 until January 2006.  Carpenter also had been the regular film  reviewer for The Catholic Sun, the biweekly newspaper of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix. He was known as “Father Flick.”

On Monday, the new vicar issued a press release to describe what his church was about:  “Prayer, not politics.  Community, not control. Love, not laws. Same sacraments, new spirit. Consider joining the Reformed Catholic Church, where ALL are welcome!”

Some 3 1/2 years ago, Carpenter would abruptly quit his Mesa parish and move to Long Beach, citing health and a need for change. Later he went public with his marked disagreements with his superior, Bishop Thomas O’Brien, head of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix.  At the heart of it was the church’s rejection of homosexuality.  He had been one of nine diocesean priests who had signed a letter called The Phoenix Affirmation, signed by 160 pastors of many faiths calling for the inclusion of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people in the full life of their faith communities.  The letter was produced by “No Longer Silent - Clergy for Justice.” All except one priest removed their names  by an order of  O’Brien or face disciplinary action. Carpenter complied, but he would later say “The Roman Catholic Church today barely seems like the same church I was ordained to served in 1995. ” Carpenter wrote that the environment of the  diocese had become a shart contrast to his early days as a priest.  “In the wake of the sexual abuse scandal and the death of Pope John Paul II, many of the church’s leaders seem more and more to me like the legalistic Pharisees whom Jesus condemned during his time,” he said.

 Carpenter, who came out public  as gay after moving to California, began ministering to people with HIV/AIDS.

In April, he wrote O’Brien to offer that he was leaving the Roman Catholic Church and embarking on helping expand the more progressive Reformed Catholic Church.  He was subsequently excommunicated by the bishop for being in scism with the  church.

Carpenter is now founder of what is called  the first Reformed Catholic Church congregation   in California.  It has been named the Community of  the Resurrection.  He was appointed Vicar of California and is empowered to grow the church in the state.   He is continuing his full-time ministry as a non-denominational/interfaith hospice chaplain.

“There is a growing number of disillusioned Catholics here and around the world who are eager for what the Reformed Catholic Church has to offer,” Carpenter noted last spring.

The Reformed Catholic Church (www.reformedcatholicchurch.org) will focus on the greater Los Angeles and Orange County area.  His Community of the Resurrectin was dedicated last Easter. He said is is open to “people of all faiths, ages, backgrounds and sexual orientation.”  Reformed Catholicsm descended from the “Old Catholics” who separated from Rome in wake of the 1870 declaration of papal infallibility. It is based in Columbus, Ohio. Said Carpenter’s press release, “It has experienced considerable  international growth in the past 10 years as many Roman Catholics  have become frustrated with the Roman church’s enduring opposition to the ordination of women, the inclusion of openly GLBT people, divorced and remarried people’s reception of the sacraments and optional celibacy for clergy.”  He asserted their clergy are validly ordained and share in apostolic succession dating from the time of St. Peter.

Sunday Mass is 10 a.m.  at McKenzie Mortuary, 3843 Anaheim Street, Long Beach.  Carpenter can be reached at (562) 708-7198 or frcarpenter@reformedcatholicchurch.org.

Dialogue is so sorely needed in all sectors of society where there is mistrust, lack of awareness and old notions.  Imagine the excitement of a Gilbert church to be invited to  the “Peace Dialogs” in Africa.  Jeanne Zahn of Real Life Christian Church, which holds Sunday worship at Williamfield High School, 2076 S. Higley Road, said her pastor, Dan Shields,  she and other members have been invited to take part in dialogue with Muslim leaders “to build bridges of understanding” between Muslims and Christians in an unspecified North African nation in November.

Last November, an imam invited the Pastor Shields  “to speak alongside their imams from the capital city,” she said. “Walls fell, along with centuries of misunderstanding, prejudice and suspicion, as our two sides simply looked into each other’s eyes and talked.”  Participants exchange looks at pictures of each others’ children ” as we spoke of our common desire for following the ways of Jesus and Messiah, better known to them as Isa al Masih.  We often felt a common bond.”  Afterwards, the president of the Saharawi people invited both sides  for a joint dinner at a special diplomatic visitors center,  she said.

Conversations have continued over the year.  Now a team of seven will go next month for the dialogues on the topic, “Women and Suffering/Injustice.” Zahn’s group will spend a week living with the Saharawi refugees in the Sahara Desert “learning from them and of the injustice done to group of 160,000 people driven out and stranded in a country next to their own.”

Zahn said she hopes to tell the story of their work on their return. She had hoped to share her story in  the East Valley Tribune, in its  Spiritual Life Section, but that part of the newspaper was eliminated in January. Perhaps there are other avenues for the story being told.   “I can encourage Americans to reach out in understanding to thousands of Muslim refugees who are resettling in the Phoenix area,” she said.  Zahn estimates there have been 53,000 who have moved to the Valley since 1975, some 900 last year   from Iraq alone. “Real Life also works with over 100 of these Iraqi refugees, helping to resettle them in our community,”  she said. “It can break down stereotypes and fears that are typical of our two religions,” she said.

Her goal of conveying her story, she said, is to be able to “enlighten Americans and Arizonans to move beyond the comfort and security of their life of freedom and opportunity to reach out in compassion and justice.”

While Zahn, who heads the church’s Life With Purpose program, and her team are in Africa, members back at Real Life Christian Church will be participating in their own ”Global Challenge.”  For five days, they will eat only the rations that refugees like the Saharawi eat through the United Nations’  food provisions. That’s typically a cup of rice, a cup of oatmeal and some sugar and oil to last a day.   “They will pray for the Sararawi and the Peace Dialogs whenever they are hungry,” Zahn said.  “And at the end, we will ask them to give what they would have spent on food to Gardens in the Desert Project,” an effort that allowsthe Saharawi to have a family garden outside their camp tents.  For more information, call Zahn at the church (480) 861-5630 or jeanne@reallife.cc.  The church’s Web site is www.reallife.cc.

It’s amazing how often government stands in the way of helping others.  Today, while I was returning from the Tempe Post Office, with my 19-month-old grandson in his car seat, I drove past a license plate in the middle of a neighborhood street about two blocks from my house.  I turned around and went back and retrieved it.  The two screws that had fastened it to the plate holder were on the pavement along with broken plastic particles  from the bracket for the screws to engage.

“Ah, I will do a good deed,” I thought. “I will take it home, call the Arizona Motor Vehicle Divsion, tell them I found a plate, give them the plate numbers. They’d contact the owner to come and get it. Probably a car owner in the neighborhood. ”   Over the years I have found probably a half-dozen wallets plus ATM cards left behind — and returning things to their grateful owners is a great feeling.  The Golden Rule at work.

Of course, it works best when government and law enforcement are not  there to gum up the works.  Government long ago lost common sense.

Well, the DOT employee quickly told me I could take it to an MVD office.  She would not contact the owner of Arizona plate 527-DTV (expiration Aug. 09 ) to come get it from me.  “But wouldn’t that owner like to have a plate back? It probably just fell off this morning. It would save that person a lot of trouble. That’s how I would like things handled. I have no mischievous motives.”

“Nah, it doesn’t work that way,” she said. Of course, the government that is always trying to protect us would never think about letting me know the owner.  So much like the  extremeness and silliness in the enforcement of the medical law known as HIPPA (the Health Insurance and Portability Act) that wouldn’t allow you know Grandma is being treated for bed sores or a hangnail.  Privacy laws gone amuck.

THE MVD lady said the owner would probably contact them and get issued new plates — for which the state would reap revenue. If the owner got his/her own plate back, that owner might be spared the fee.  So I have a nice slab of aluminum and two sturdy screws.  If you know your neighbor lost a license plate in Tempe near Broadway Road and McClintock Drive Thursday or Friday and hasn’t contacted the state folks yet, maybe I can help.   Again it is plate 527-DTV, expiration August 2009.  I am considering taking it back to the spot where I found it and lean it agains a light pole, as people often do with snappy hubcaps.

Circumcision is a perverse practice — long a cruel procedure in search of a justification for doing it.   Now comes a hideous plan called Operation Abraham that would export mass circumcisions from Israel to the U.S., presumably with the blessing of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention based in Atlanta.

Friday’s Forward, the national Jewish newspaper, carries a story called “Operation Coming to America?”  Not if caring, thoughtful people stop such brutal madness.  “Our doctors had circumcised over 80,000 men (in Israel) in a very short time,” boasted Dr. Inon Schenker, who represents the Israeli doctors plotting to rip foreskins from American males on the pretext they’ll be safe from HIV/AIDS.   He thinks he and his doctors can save thousands of lives by helping prevent heterosexual transmissions of the disease.  How much of this is simply these Jews wanting simply more millions of males to look sexually like them to try to reduce the stigma and objection to circumcision?

These misguided medical people would try to convince men to get in line for assembly-line circumcisions and lose the most sensitive, protective structure of their penises on some guarantee they’ll be innoculated from HIV/AIDS. Why not step up the real ways to avoid AIDS — condoms, appropriate and safe sexual behavior and personal hygiene.   These doctors think they can take advantage of America’s sheer ignorance and myths about the foreskin — such mindless notions like the foreskin is needless and disposable, notions like they make it hard to stay clean, notions like women prefer  that folding skin gone (talk about shallowness) or notions and nonsense that it should be amputated earlier than later.

Expect a huge outcry if the CDC really give serious consideration to Operation Abraham in what ever secularized name it might take if offered as a procedure in this country.  The literature is full of research that has discredited the African mass circumcisions. Some trials were halted early because they could not  show the results that were sought.   Fortunately, circumcision rates in the U.S. have been falling dramatically in recent decades through education, social justice efforts, common sense and recognition that circumcision is simply culturally driven cosmetic surgery typically visited on the helpless and tied down — infants.

Intact adult males should not fall for this tripe.  Circumcision means less penis, removal of a missing part, the loss of about 15 square inches of nerve- and blood-rich tissue that has many roles.

 The CDC must not be caught up in the screwy “medicine” that allowed circumcision to get started in the U.S. in large numbers in the late 1800s — ideas that an exposed penis glans was somehow good.  Circumcision has no  value.  We know Jews working hard to get Judaism to move forward in dropping one more of the harsh requirements of the Hebrew Bible that could not continue as the human race moved forward in a more caring way.  One can readily see that HIV/AIDS fighters are going after the wrong thing to stem the disease.  It’s not the foreskin, a  normal, natural structure God put on males and all male mammals.   We don’t pull teeth to prevent tooth decay or remove tonsils in the event they might have problems.  We don’t encourage women to get masectomies to prevent breast cancer later.

An Aug. 29 New York Times article by Roni Caryn Rabin (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/weekinreview/30rabin.html?_r=3) does an excellent job at pointing out the sordid historical scenario of the relentless effort of circumcisionists to gain traction for a repulsive procedure.

Circumcision is a tribal barbaric practice allowed to continue because thinking parents don’t recognize it for what it is:  a violation of the human rights of their son, a violation of their genital integrity, a violation of every person’s sovereignty of his own body.  It should be a decision each male is allowed to decide as an adult — and a tiny percentage of males allowed to choose as adults choose it.