Bishops

The first Filipino American bishop in the United States was ordained Tuesday at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles. The ordination of Oscar Azarcon Solis, 50, was attended by about 3,600 people, including about 400 priests and 40 bishops from the U.S. and the Philippines. Solis is now one of five auxiliary bishops for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, which represents Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.

The Rev. Hamel Hartford Brookins, an influential bishop and former pastor of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles who became a political power broker, civil rights leader and mentor to former Mayor Tom Bradley, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and many others, has died. He was 86. The son of Mississippi sharecroppers, Brookins rose to prominence in the 1960s and '70s as an articulate, self-assured champion of black political empowerment. He died Tuesday at a Los Angeles retirement center where he had been receiving hospice care, a church spokesman said.

Southern Californians who were sexually abused by priests left in ministry by Bishop Michael P. Driscoll want him to resign or be fired. But in Idaho, where Driscoll now serves as bishop of Boise, Roman Catholic opinion appears far more divided after the release last week of internal church documents that detailed his past handling of clergy sexual abuse allegations in Orange County.

Garry Marshall's touchstones: Joey Bishop The comedic member of the Rat Pack and host of "The Joey Bishop Show" was Marshall's mentor "Happy Days" The nostalgic ABC comedy series that made Henry Winkler a superstar aired from 1974 to 1984. "Pretty Woman" This iconic 1990 romantic comedy resurrected the career of Richard Gere and earned Julia Roberts an Oscar nomination.

The Rev. George F. Regas, rector of a large Pasadena parish and a well-known peace activist, has been named as one of five candidates to succeed the bishop of the Episcopal Church's New York diocese. Regas, 57, was a nominee nine years ago as the San Francisco-based bishop of California, but since then he said he had consistently turned down requests to be considered in other elections to the episcopacy, including the recent one in Los Angeles.

Cotton swabs tucked between their jaws and cheeks, bishops from the nation's largest Lutheran denomination sat in silence for three minutes Thursday as they underwent testing for HIV. Those few minutes of silence would serve to break another kind of silence, one that the bishops say has kept the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America from compassionately addressing the global AIDS crisis and welcoming AIDS victims into the pews. "We in the U.S.

The Episcopal Church gave final approval Wednesday to the ordination of an openly gay bishop in Los Angeles, putting a face behind a policy that has divided the church and caused some of its more conservative members to break away. Mary Glasspool is the first openly gay bishop approved since 2003, when the election of a gay man as bishop of New Hampshire caused such an uproar that the U.S. church, under pressure from other members of the global Anglican Communion, imposed a moratorium on such elevations.

What those critics of the bishops and many others fail to realize is that the bishops, as Christians, tend to view things in what appears to be a rather narrow and unrealistic perspective. It's not a question of being a socialist, communist, liberal, conservative, or belief in free enterprise; but rather of having a Christian outlook and a Christian mentality concerning social issues. Christian teachings have always seemed impractical to the vast majority, and indeed they are if one considers politics, economics and material goods more important.

Pope Benedict XVI has rejected the resignations of two Irish bishops who came under heavy pressure to step down in the wake of a damning report on clerical sex abuse in Dublin, Irish media reports said Wednesday. Auxiliary bishops Raymond Field and Eamonn Walsh tendered their resignations in December after a government-backed investigation found evidence of widespread cover-ups involving cases of priestly abuse in the Dublin Archdiocese from the 1970s through the 1990s. The report caused an uproar in Ireland and deepened public disillusionment with the once-dominant Roman Catholic Church.

The Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles on Saturday elected the first openly gay bishop since the national church lifted a ban that kept gays out of its highest ordained ministry, a move that deepened divisions between liberals and conservatives in the faith. Clergy and lay leaders, meeting in Riverside for their annual convention, chose the Rev. Canon Mary D. Glasspool, 55, who has been in a committed relationship with another woman since 1988, from a field of six candidates. She is a canon, or senior assistant, to the Diocese of Maryland bishops.

Episcopal Bishop J. Jon Bruno, head of the six-county Los Angeles diocese, has been diagnosed with leukemia and is undergoing aggressive treatment to fight the disease. The 65-year-old bishop said in an open letter that he had been suffering from what he thought was a bout of pneumonia since March. He underwent further tests after treatment failed to cure the "nagging problem. " Doctors at Good Samaritan Hospital discovered that Bruno had acute monocytic leukemia, a form of blood cancer.

Here's a great spring deal that would work for Memorial Day too: Kick back in a two-bedroom villa at Bishop's Lodge Ranch Resort & Spa in Santa Fe. The resort in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains offers spring sale prices on villas starting at $339 a night -- more than half off the usual rates. Split the room with three friends and stay in style without breaking the bank. The deal: There's a lot to do -- mountain biking, yoga, hiking, tours -- at this series of lodges and villas that date to the early 20th century.

  The biggest enhancement to the fan experience at Pauley Pavilion will cost UCLA only a scholarship. Top high school prospect Shabazz Muhammad announced Wednesday he would become a Bruin, immeasurably boosting the $136-million makeover of the team's home court that will be unveiled next season. The 6-foot-6 swingman from Bishop Gorman High in Las Vegas, widely considered one of the top two seniors in the country, made his announcement during a nationally televised recruiting special on the first day of the spring signing period.

When groups of ethnic Polish, Slovene, Slovak and Hungarian Catholics in Cleveland began protesting orders by their local bishop that closed their churches, they were given little chance of reversing the decision. The churches were shuttered in a massive retrenchment of Cleveland's urban core in 2010, striking at the Slavic and other ethnic European congregations that were founded by waves of immigrants from the wars and humanitarian catastrophes over the last century. The parishes said that Bishop Richard Lennon, head of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Cleveland, had begun an attack on the ethnic churches.

You'll be hard-pressed to find a more complimentary pairing this weekend than the mysterious guitar explorations of Sir Richard Bishop and the equally confounding confines of the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Surrounded by exhibits that blur the line between fact and fiction, the co-founder of the surrealistically psychedelic band Sun City Girls should fill the air with a similarly bewitching atmosphere as heard on the Middle Eastern-tinged mix of surf rock and ragas on his 2009 album, "The Freak of Araby.

It's the high school soccer game that produced so much drama and excitement that it couldn't all be contained in one day. On Tuesday in La Jolla, San Diego Crawford and Bishop's of La Jolla played a boys' playoff game that was tied, 3-3, after regulation. That's when the real fun started: 21 rounds of penalty kicks -- and still no winner. Each side had scored 18 times and failed three. Finally, the game was halted because of darkness. Officials feared a goalkeeper might be injured because he couldn't see the ball.

More competitive divisions and all-out battles brewing between private schools are the highlights from the Southern Section-Ford boys' basketball playoff brackets released Sunday. Usually, the strongest divisions rank from 1 to 6, but that can be ignored because 4AA has been labeled the "Super Division," with its cast of ambitious private schools, all of whom have enrollments of no more than 1,250 students. It's going to be a demolition derby before a champion is crowned. 1AA Top-seeded teams: 1. Santa Ana Mater Dei (24-2)

Loyola Marymount University is a proudly Roman Catholic institution that might be expected to take a special interest in the bitter debate over federal rules requiring contraceptives to be covered by health care plans at religiously affiliated organizations. No doubt, many members of the LMU community did follow the issue closely. But they had no practical stake in the outcome. Like many large Catholic employers in California and elsewhere, Loyola Marymount already provided birth control coverage to its employees, as required for the past 12 years under state law. It is too early to tell whether President Obama ended the debate over the contraceptive mandate Friday by announcing that the federal department of Health and Human Services would require insurance companies, not employers, to pay for the disputed coverage.