One Of Los Angeles's Two Mexican Immigrant Bishops Resigns Over Heterosexual Scandal
01/05/2012
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One of Los Angeles's two Mexican Archbishops has resigned after admitting to fathering two illegitimate children after he was ordained.

L.A. auxiliary bishop resigns, admits fathering kids

Updated 1h 21m ago

LOS ANGELES (AP) – The resignation of a Los Angeles bishop who fathered two children has shocked the nation's most populous Roman Catholic archdiocese, where Auxiliary Bishop Gabino Zavala grew up and was an outspoken supporter of causes dear to the huge Hispanic population.

That is, he's a supporter of amnesty. A fairly large proportion of LA's Catholic population is actually illegal.

Zavala informed the archbishop early last month that he had fathered two teenage children who live with their mother in another state, Gomez said in a Wednesday letter to the archdiocese's approximately 5 million Catholics. The archbishop said Zavala told him that he had submitted his resignation to the pope. "Since that time, he has not been in ministry and will be living privately," the archbishop said in the letter, which was posted on a Catholic blog. "The archdiocese has reached out to the mother and children to provide spiritual care as well as funding to assist the children with college costs. The family's identity is not known to the public, and I wish to respect their right to privacy," the archbishop wrote.

Both the remaining Archbishop and the Bishop who's just resigned are natives of Mexico:

 

Zavala was born in Guerrero, Mexico, but grew up in Los Angeles. He was ordained in 1977 and was assigned to Our Lady of Guadalupe, a church in the heavily Mexican-American East Los Angeles area. He was appointed an auxiliary bishop in 1994.

There have been so many homosexual sex scandals involving Catholic priests that you tend to forget about the normal sex scandals. The last one that sprang to my mind was Eamon Casey, the Bishop of Galway, who resigned in 1992 when he was found to have fathered a child with an Irish-American divorcee, but AP has found a few other examples:

A handful of other priests have quit their post over sexual relationships, including: Florida priest Alberto Cutie, who resigned in 2009 and married his then-girlfriend; Auxiliary Bishop James McCarthy of New York, who resigned in 2002 after the archdiocese was alerted about his affairs with women; and Archbishop Robert Sanchez of Santa Fe, N.M., who resigned in 1993 after confessing relationships with women. The late Archbishop Eugene Marino of Atlanta resigned in 1990 when his relationship with a parishioner was made public; the woman said she and the archbishop had secretly married.

Secretly married is actually worse in this kind of case.

In any case, Gabino Zavala is not only a sinner—as we all are—he's a serious member of the Treason Lobby,  and was supporting amnesty in 2000,  and still supporting amnesty in 2006, when he wrote an article in the Guardian saying this kind of thing:

Last Monday, US immigration and custom enforcement (ICE) agents swooped down on a manufacturing plant in Laurel, Mississippi, and detained almost 600 workers on suspicion of violations of immigration laws. This raid represents an escalation in Washington's war on the undocumented, surpassing the shock and scale of the recent raid in Postville, Iowa.

The dramatic scale and human cost of the raid strain credulity. Five-hundred ninety-five workers arrested. Four-hundred seventy-five immediately transferred to a holding facility to the infamous town of Jena, Louisiana, proving once again that irony is not dead.

Well, of course, irony is not dead. But that kind of rhetoric, on behalf of the invaders of his adopted country...the OTHER invaders of his adopted country, is worse than fathering a couple of children out of wedlock.

When Eamon Casey resigned in 1992, I joked that that Catholics, dispirited by the residential school homosexual abuse scandals then starting to come out, might be tempted to say "Well done, Your Excellency!" for showing that priests didn't have to have sex with teenage boys.

But Eamon Casey, as a typical left-wing Bishop of his times,  supported the Communists in El Salvador, and the ANC in South Africa. I doubt if he ever felt the need to apologize for either of those stands, and I doubt if anyone asked him to.

In the same way, Gabino Zavala may have apologized for his sexual transgression and resigned, but he's not going to apologize for his treasonous activities, and it wouldn't surprise me if, in retirement, he took a lay position with some immigration charity.

Note: Links in the Guardian passage above are in the  original, we'd have put other links on both the Laurel raid where American workers cheered as the illegals were led away, and on Jena, where it's not the town that's infamous.

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