Passionate Roman Catholic Activists : Claretian Order Priests Carry Out Community Work as Individuals

It was 7:30 a.m. and six priests gathered around a wooden breakfast table at the Dominguez Seminary east of Carson.

Each had fetched his own eggs and toast and, had the newspaper arrived on time, would have reached quickly for it.

“It’s a serious group, so they all go for the front page,” Father Patrick McPolin said. “I never have to fight for the sports.”

Indeed, the seven priests and one brother who make their home at the peaceful, 17-acre seminary and rancho on the eastern brow of Dominguez Hill are passionate activists whose work reaches into many Southland communities.

Given Unusual Freedom

As members of the Roman Catholic Church’s order of Claretian missionaries, they say they have been granted unusual freedom to pursue their individual callings as fund-raiser, healer, AIDS counselor, youth mentor and, in one case, minister to Hollywood stars.

“Regimentation ended in the seminary. We’re all individuals here,” said McPolin, one of the eight who live in spare comfort at the old seminary, now a museum and weekend retreat for teen-agers.

They are often too busy even to share meals. At the recent breakfast, two of the group were already out on business.

Brother Modesto Leon, 40, an anti-gang organizer dubbed “the celebrity” by his colleagues, had left early for one of the three schools he runs for teen-age dropouts.

And Father Bernard Stacy, 66, called “the poor man’s preacher” by the others for his work with immigrants in Long Beach and the South Bay, was in the San Joaquin Valley to conduct services among Mexican farm laborers.

Mysticism and Missionary Zeal

As Claretians, an order with 150 members nationwide and 3,000 throughout the world, Dominguez’s small priestly community mixes mysticism with missionary zeal, said Father John Raab, the priest in charge at Dominguez.

“We emphasize more action than contemplation. Our work is not to go to the chapel and chant (prayers) all day,” Raab said of the order, founded in Spain in 1849 and brought to this country in 1902 to serve a growing Latino population.

Leon, whose success in reducing gang violence in East Los Angeles has been featured on the CBS television program “60 Minutes,” said the Claretians’ mandate is nothing less than to change the world.

In the poor Latino community where Leon works most often, gang-on-gang killings dropped from 24 in 1978 to four last year and then two this year, Sheriff’s Department Lt. Al Scaduto said. He said the interagency program Leon helped found more than a decade ago is a model for cities with gang problems.

In it, youngsters identified by parents, police, schools, churches and the courts as gang members are routed to agencies and businesses that provide jobs, education and counseling.

‘Smoldering Firebrands’

“Leon has been instrumental,” Scaduto said. “He knows how to talk to these (gang) guys. They listen to him.”

Although six of the priests are over 60, they remain what TV preacher and healer Father John Hampsch, 62, calls “smoldering firebrands” who are doing some of their best work.

A severe stutterer before a sudden cure in 1970 that he calls a miracle, Hampsch himself travels the region and the world, holding healing services about three times a week.

“I work in the miracle business,” he said recently, the day before an eight-hour session of counseling and anointing the sick at St. Paul the Apostle Church in Westwood.

As his fame as a charismatic minister has grown through a nationwide weekly program on religious television, Hampsch has sold hundreds of thousands of audio and video tapes of his services, with the profits supporting a Claretian mission in West Africa, he said.

Father Juan Corominas, 67, is a Spanish-language professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and a Compton College instructor. He also teaches about 50 Latino teen-agers through private lessons and club-like activities to take pride in their culture. Then he helps them get into college.

“This has changed my life. I am feeling like a father,” Corominas said. “These people were to have been nothing, but now they’re thinking another way.”

‘I Help Them Reconcile Death’

Raab, 43, who ran a seminary in Nigeria for six years before coming to Dominguez, frequently visits patients with acquired immune deficiency syndrome in Long Beach’s large homosexual community.

“I help them reconcile death,” he said. “I help them know the church has not rejected them.”

The church does not condone homosexuality, but AIDS victims should not be lectured about that as they are nearing death, Raab said.

Father Donald Lavelle, 66, and Father Al Connors, 68, are newcomers to Dominguez, both arriving since September.

Lavelle, raised in San Pedro but most recently a priest in Puerto Rican parishes in New Jersey, is a temporary pastor at St. Cornelius Church in Long Beach.

‘A Second Career’

Connors was a teacher and administrator for the Christian Brothers, a Catholic teaching order, until 1972, when he became a priest as “kind of a second career.”

Now, after six years as an associate pastor at the San Gabriel Mission, he is the fund-raiser for the Claretians’ western province, which is based in South Pasadena.

At 71, McPolin is the senior member of the Dominguez community and its strongest link with the past.

He is the restorer and curator of the Dominguez Adobe museum, now a national landmark, built in 1826. He is the priest who closed the old Spanish-style seminary in 1977, converting it into a retreat visited by thousands of youngsters each year.

And he is the rancho’s contact with the Carson, Del Amo and Watson families, descendants of the original grant holder, Juan Jose Dominguez. The families gave the rancho, which by then had shrunk from 75,000 acres to 17, to the church in 1922 and have contributed $200,000 to the museum.

Chaplain for Celebrities

McPolin is also “a kind of chaplain for the rich and famous,” Raab said, because he regularly conducts weddings and funerals for Hollywood celebrities, many of whom he first met during two decades of high-profile work as Police Department chaplain in Chicago.

Danny Thomas, a longtime friend, did a Claretian promotional film in 1958 as a favor to McPolin. Ricardo Montalban and Lorne Greene were hosts at a McPolin-produced bicentennial party for the rancho in 1984 that raised $100,000.

The Claretians acknowledge that there are many philosophical differences among them but say they try to show respect for the others’ opinions.

Corominas said: “I like very much this community. It’s quiet and we have this freedom to do our own work. It’s the best way.”