By DEXTER DUGGAN
SAN DIEGO — As publisher of both an orthodox Catholic news website and this city’s major alternative weekly newspaper, Jim Holman makes his mark on religious and secular developments.
He heads both California Catholic Daily and the San Diego Reader.
Holman’s characteristically modest second-floor corner office at 2323 Broadway in San Diego’s Golden Hill neighborhood looks down the hill to downtown high-rises that look over San Diego Bay.
Victorian mansions on the hill recall a millionaire neighborhood’s past. His newspaper office in the former Carpenters Hall, which had a 1947 groundbreaking to be a headquarters for labor-union members, betokens a connection with everyday people, not the elite.
Other tenants in the building when The Wanderer visited on December 11 included the Flying Panther tattoo shop and Ballet Basics studio.
A proudly renovated building, the former laborers hall still has the workingman’s motto in Latin set in the floor tile near the front door, “Labor Omnia Vincit.”
Before moving to this location in March 2013, Holman’s enterprises outgrew tighter quarters in downtown’s touristy Little Italy, on India Street, where he and the staff worked for about 20 years. Bob MacPhail is editor of California Catholic Daily.
Reader operations manager Howie Rosen told The Wanderer that the hard-copy alternative weekly’s website had 579,000 unique visitors in October. The Golden Hill office occupies 8,200 square feet, he said.
Framed front covers of past Readers on the wall include a prescient one from June 10, 2010, headlined, “Looking for work has become the new work.”
As 2014 moved toward an end, The Wanderer asked Holman to look back on developments in both the California pro-life movement and Catholic Church in the Golden State.
In an email Q-and-A interview, with Holman responding to a list of questions, he cited an encouraging growth in “refuges” for orthodox California Catholics.
However, toward the end of the interview questions, The Wanderer mentioned prelates like Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez rubbing shoulders with Culture of Death Democrats. Holman replied that Gomez’s assurances to him didn’t seem to be true that pro-life is a “big priority for bishops.”
Here’s the interview with Holman.
Q. Over the last 30 or so years, what are the most significant changes you’d cite, for the better and the worse, in the California Catholic Church and in the pro-life movement?
A. The most significant change in California Catholic Church is the strong movement of young Catholics to defending the unborn. True here as anywhere in the U.S., probably because of many factors, but especially ultrasound imaging.
Another change in California is the growth of orthodox refuges. The Latin Mass parishes, the Norbertines, the non-diocesan Catholic schools, Thomas Aquinas College, John Paul the Great University, the Carmelites in Alhambra and Oakland, Ignatius Press, the Oratory in San Francisco, 40 Days for Life — all of these are spinning off activities and intentional communities.
Q. What would you like to accomplish with your apostolate as publisher of California Catholic Daily?
A. Print the news the mainstream media, including diocese papers, will not print — ugly truth of abortion and deviant life. Because California is the center of both, we have lots of material.
Q. What stories seem to be most popular and least popular with its readers?
A. Stories on the official Church cooperation with pro-abortion politicians get lots of comments. Plus stories on liturgy.
Q. What size is the readership, and how wide is it geographically? How much does Cal Catholic cost to run?
A. 5,000 to 10,000 unique visitors per day. About half in California and half all over the globe. Some in Vatican City, some in China. Rough estimate is $12,000 a year for Cal Catholic.
Q. You’d said you hoped things in the San Diego Diocese were improving, but its invitation for the September visit by pro-homosexual Fr. Timothy Radcliffe [to speak to the diocesan priests’ convocation] “gives the lie to that.” Does the San Diego Diocese seem more accommodating of a homosexual agenda than most U.S. Catholic dioceses? Or about the same as many other dioceses?
A. Jason Berry’s book on priestly pedophilia has a chapter devoted to San Diego. The worst pedophiles seem to be gone.
But there is a creepy influence left over, as evidenced by the Radcliffe retreat in September.
Q. Is the San Diego Diocese worse than many other U.S. dioceses at standing up for the faith? I just found you quoted in a 2008 [San Diego] Union-Tribune article about a parental-notification initiative, [saying that] “The bishops of California are cowards.”
A. The California bishops have improved since 2008. Archbishop [Salvatore] Cordileone in San Francisco, Bishop [Michael] Barber in Oakland, Bishop [Robert] Vasa in Santa Rosa have made courageous moves. I’m not sure what the new bishop of San Diego will be like.
Q. You’ll recall that last year Archbishop José Gomez, in the presence of [Gov.] Jerry Brown and his Sacramento cultists of death, celebrated the Democratic legislature giving illegal immigrants driver licenses, even though the same Democrats passed bills last year that Brown signed allowing non-physicians to do abortions, and allowing abortions in facilities not equipped for surgery. Gomez didn’t seem to mind that he was conveying an image of Church approval of moral outcasts.
Some Catholics note that Gomez seems to prioritize promoting the Democratic Party for its promoting illegal immigration rather than rebuking Brown and his gang for stomping on Catholic core principles. Earlier this year you wondered how many Hispanic Democrat legislators, presumably Catholics, were rebuked by their bishops for killing a bill in committee against sex-selection abortion. Just what does the California Catholic Church’s leadership really stand for, apart from rote political ultra-liberalism?
A. It could be the California bishops are acting behind the scenes with Jerry Brown and other agents of death to convert them. But I don’t see any evidence of it.
A Long Road
Q. How great a threat do you view Barack Obama to be to people of faith now, when we see a lot of media still in the tank despite his aggressive outrages?
A. Not sure Obama would take anti-religious move with executive order, but because he might not get what he wants with Congress now, he could. That is a danger of the bishops supporting his executive order on immigration — OK for their short-term goals, but not great for balanced government.
Q. Some years ago [columnist] Dan Weintraub noted in The Sacramento Bee that as California grew steadily more left-wing Democratic, the main change in the population was the increase in Hispanics. If this is so, do the bishops, like Archbishop Gomez, think the Culture of Death is really pretty OK as long as their political friends run it?
A. Can’t speak for Archbishop Gomez. He assured me not long after his arrival [in Los Angeles] that pro-life was big priority for bishops. But this has seemed not to be true.
Q. When you got arrested for sitting in at an abortion clinic, did you ever dream the road ahead would be so long?
A. I was just a small actor in the rescue movement; never looked into future much at that time.
[An October 2006 Union-Tribune article recalled that in 1989, Holman was “arrested outside an abortion clinic in La Mesa (Calif.). He was convicted and spent two weeks in jail for trespassing. ‘Under the circumstances, I consider it a great honor to go to jail,’ he said at the time.”]
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