May 3, 2008
Lobby Day participants put their faith into action
By Denise MacLachlan
Herald staff
Coadjutor Bishop Jaime Soto tells Lobby Day participants at a Capitol rally that legislative advocacy by Catholics is about “reasoned, responsible, respectful dialogue.” Cathy Joyce/Herald photo
With Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the United States still fresh in their minds, more than 700 California Catholics and several of the state’s bishops who came to Sacramento for Catholic Lobby Day carried with them the Holy Father’s message of activism and hope.
Speakers in the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament and at a rally on the state Capitol steps referred to the pope’s call to live the Catholic faith in action.
In a homily during Mass in the cathedral, Bishop Gerald Barnes of San Bernardino echoed Pope Paul VI when he said that “we can live Jesus’ peace by working for justice.” Then he observed of Pope Benedict’s visit that “the Holy Father reminded us of who we are and what we are called to do.”
Coadjutor Bishop Jaime Soto of Sacramento quoted Pope Benedict’s remarks on faith and the American political process in noting the 10th anniversary of Catholic Lobby Day: “As the nation faces the increasingly complex political and ethical issues of our time, (the Holy Father is confident that) the American people will find in their religious beliefs a precious source of insight and an inspiration to pursue reasoned, responsible and respectful dialogue in the effort to build a more humane and free society.”
Speaking to the crowd poised to make visits to legislators in the Capitol, Bishop Soto said, “That is what Lobby Day is all about — reasoned, responsible, respectful dialogue.”
The event which draws Catholics from throughout the state is sponsored each year by the California Catholic Conference, the public policy office of the state’s Catholic bishops.
Participants attended Mass, with Bishop William K. Weigand of Sacramento presiding, marched to the Capitol steps for a noontime rally, observed legislative hearings, and lobbied their state legislators on specific bills.
“We hope to influence the Legislature and empower people to take part in the legislative process,” said Elizabeth White, associate director of social service ministry for the Sacramento Diocese and one of the coordinators of Catholic Lobby Day.
This year the Catholic Conference asked participants to focus on four bills
in the Legislature and the issue of drastic budget cuts facing the state
because of an estimated $20 billion shortfall.
At the rally, Auxiliary Bishop Dominic Luong of Orange urged participants to insist on budget cuts across the board, not merely budget cuts that target the poor. “Love and the word of God,” he said, “empower us to be a voice for the voiceless, for the poorest people…Budget cuts are always aimed at those who cannot speak for themselves — the poor, children, the elderly, the dying.”
The four bills garnering the focus of participants targeted the voiceless: newborns up to a week old, poor families who need food stamps, elderly prisoners in the California correctional system, and people who are dying.
The proposed state budget cuts include attempts to remove children from state assistance, reduce funding for the Naturalization Services Program, eliminate cost-of-living adjustments for the aged and disabled, and reduce funding to education.
In meetings with legislators who represent some of the 20 counties of the Sacramento Diocese, Catholics lobbied for the poor and vulnerable, and pressed hard against AB 2747, termed the End-of-Life Care bill.
Sponsored by Assemblymember Patty Berg (D-Eureka), AB 2747 creates a protocol to offer a terminally ill patient receiving a prognosis of one year or less to live information and counseling regarding legal end-of-life options. Among the options available would be voluntary stopping of eating and drinking and palliative sedation (making a patient unconscious while withholding artificial food and hydration).
Berg has introduced three previous bills that would have legalized physician-assisted suicide. Those bills were unsuccessful.
AB 2747 is “a back-door effort to assisted suicide,” contended William May, chairman of Catholics for the Common Good.
“When it becomes normal to offer suicide to dying people, we switch from ‘the right to die’ to ‘the responsibility to die,’” he told The Herald in an interview. Dying family members would feel pressured to die sooner to relieve the burden on their families and poor people would feel pressured to choose death as the least expensive option, May said.
AB 2747 passed out of the Assembly Judiciary Committee April 29 with seven Democrats in favor and three Republicans opposed. The bill may be voted on by the Assembly in the next few weeks. It is the only Lobby Day bill listed as having no fiscal impact.
Of the remaining three Lobby Day bills, two have been put “on suspense,” meaning any further action on them is suspended until their source of funding is clear:
- SB 1555 would require an elder identification badge for older
prisoners in the California prison system and allow those prisoners some
priority in prison routines.
- AB 2262 would allow a parent seven days, rather than 72 hours, to voluntarily surrender a newborn at a designated safe location.
The third bill, AB 2844, is also expected to be held on suspense, according to updates from the Catholic Conference.
AB 2844 would extend to six months the recertification interval for food stamp recipients. All but four states in then nation have taken this option because many of the working poor cannot take a day off work every three months to get recertified, according to information provided by the Catholic Conference.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that two million Californians eligible for federal food stamps do not receive them.
