October 19, 2012

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SOUTH SUDAN:

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Copper thieves hit area churches

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Nation’s harassed church forced to close seminary

Post-V2 Catholics engage Bible as “food for the soul”

VP candidates outline abortion views

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Area food bank loses support

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CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO Newspaper of the Archdiocese of San Francisco

SERVING SAN FRANCISCO, MARIN & SAN MATEO COUNTIES

www.catholic-sf.org

OCTOBER 19, 2012

$1.00 | VOL. 14 NO. 32

Rosary rally draws 1,700 to prayer VALERIE SCHMALZ CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO

The lilting sounds of “Ave Maria” competed against the sounds of traffic on Van Ness Avenue as hundreds of Catholics singing and praying the rosary in Spanish walked from St. Mary’s Cathedral, past San Francisco’s City Hall to the 2012 Rosary Rally. “Pray the rosary. Not just for yourself. We need to give that faith away,” said speaker Father Mark Mary, a Franciscan Missionary of the Eternal Word and host of EWTN’s “Life on the Rock.” “We don’t live alone; we don’t believe alone,” the priest said, “We need the faith of others.” The Oct. 13 rosary rally at United Nations Plaza, in sight of City Hall, drew about 1,700 people, many coming from a special 9:30 a.m. Spanish Mass at the cathedral. Last year’s rally (PHOTO BY DENNIS CALLAHAN/CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO)

SEE ROSARY, PAGE 23

A rosary rally at U.N. Plaza in San Francisco drew about 1,700 people Oct. 13. The event followed a Spanish Mass celebrated at St. Mary’s Cathedral.

San Francisco lawyer pursues justice in Jesuit massacre Local Catholic leads international fight to prosecute Jesuits’ killers – and to challenge impunity in El Salvador GEORGE RAINE CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO

Nov. 16 is the 23rd anniversary of the assassination of six Jesuit priests, their cook and her 16-year-old daughter by a military hit squad during the civil war in El Salvador. And just as in previous years, it will be an emotional time for Almudena Bernabeu, an international lawyer seeking justice for the massacre. She always tries to get together with people who were close to the victims, and in the past year there have been major legal victories to celebrate, albeit amid a tragedy. Most notably

there is the 2011 indictment and arrest order against 20 former military officials in El Salvador issued by the Spanish National Court, with jurisdiction over international crimes. The anniversary is always “very grounding,” said Bernabeu, who is prosecuting Almudena the massacre case Bernabeu from here at the San Francisco-based The Center for Justice and Accountability, an international human rights organization. “It

is helping people, listening to people and understanding their needs.” Bernabeu, 40, a parishioner at St. Dominic Parish in San Francisco, has worked the case for nine years, and in many ways it is a slog and a struggle against impunity in El Salvador. But the goal, justice, for her won’t dim. In the pre-dawn hours of Nov. 16, 1989, a group of military officers of the Salvadoran government, which was backed by the United States in the nation’s civil war, entered the residence of the Jesuit-run University of Central America in San Salvador and herded the six priests – advocates for social justice and spokesmen for the

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poor and marginalized – into the back garden and killed them. They killed the women who were holding each other in a bedroom. “This particular sector of the military wanted to keep the status quo,” said Bernabeu, a Spaniard who directs the human rights group’s Transitional Justice Program. “They wanted chaos. These people in the military were getting a lot of money from the U.S. as military aid. They had, since 1980, established channels of corruption and knew exactly how to enrich themselves. They had established situations that

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SEE JESUITS, PAGE 23

INDEX On the Street . . . . . . . . .4 National . . . . . . . . . . . . .6 World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8 Vocations . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Opinion. . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Faith. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20


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