Clergy

Thousands of followers, nationally known preachers, government figures and relatives bade farewell Saturday to the late Rev. E.V. Hill at a marathon service steeped in tributes, tears and joyous proclamations of Gospel hope. The outpouring for the 69-year-old preacher and confidant of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. came during an hours-long service at West Angeles Cathedral on Crenshaw Boulevard. Hill was also remembered Friday night at Mt.

Raleigh, N.C. - The Rev. Deborah Cayer arrived at the state Legislature building here Monday night wearing a protest button and toting an umbrella. She had tucked her driver's license into her skirt waistband. That was all she carried. She had come prepared to spend the night in jail. Along with 83 other opponents of the Republican-led legislature, Cayer and several fellow clergy members were arrested at a rainy "Moral Monday" protest. Their civil disobedience - they ignored police orders to disperse - was the latest in a growing series of protests over the conservative agenda of North Carolina's Republican-run state government.

Orange County pastor Ralph A. Wilkerson has agreed to answer questions about a former associate accused of raising more than $160 million from evangelical Christians in an elaborate international investment fraud, Wilkerson's attorney said. Wilkerson, 77, was criticized last month by a court-appointed receiver who said the pastor had failed to help recover assets that would benefit people left destitute by the alleged scam run by Gregory E. Setser, an Inland Empire-based entrepreneur.

Ray Boucher walked out of a downtown Los Angeles courthouse six years ago the envy of the legal field. As the lead attorney in the landmark $660-million sexual-abuse settlement with the Catholic archdiocese, he had won long-denied justice for hundreds of victims and made himself and other attorneys very rich. Flanked by grateful clients, he faced a crush of cameras with the confidence of a man who had achieved a new level of professional acclaim and personal wealth. These days Boucher returns frequently to that same courthouse.

Raleigh, N.C. - The Rev. Deborah Cayer arrived at the state Legislature building here Monday night wearing a protest button and toting an umbrella. She had tucked her driver's license into her skirt waistband. That was all she carried. She had come prepared to spend the night in jail. Along with 83 other opponents of the Republican-led legislature, Cayer and several fellow clergy members were arrested at a rainy "Moral Monday" protest. Their civil disobedience - they ignored police orders to disperse - was the latest in a growing series of protests over the conservative agenda of North Carolina's Republican-run state government.

From his pulpit in Santa Ana, Chuck Smith's voice thunders with certainty. He denounces homosexuality as a "perverted lifestyle," finds divine wrath in earthquakes and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and promises imminent Armageddon in a deep, sure voice. If his message is grim, the founder of the Jesus People and the Calvary Chapel movement bears the ruddy good cheer of a 79-year-old believer who insists he has never known a day's doubt or despair.

After flat-lining twice on the operating table, Pastor Joe Sabolick figured the worst chapter of his life was over. But when he returned to his office at Calvary Chapel of Laguna Beach a few weeks later, the locks had been changed -- and his handpicked church board, including his older brother, had fired him amid allegations that he embezzled money and was "fixated" on the wife and daughter of an assistant pastor.

Televangelist Paul Crouch, founder of the world's largest Christian broadcasting network, has waged a fierce legal battle to prevent a former employee from publicizing allegations that he and Crouch had a sexual encounter eight years ago. Crouch, 70, is the president of Trinity Broadcasting Network, based in Orange County, whose Christian programming reaches millions of viewers around the world via satellite, cable and broadcast stations.

Encircling the Gothic church where Inquisition trials were held in Rome four centuries ago is the Catholic clergy's very own garment district. Here popes get their button-down cassocks, cardinals their crimson birettas and nuns their gray habits. Items, costing a few dozen to a few thousand euros, hang in windows decked with chalices and candlesticks. But Christmas sales aren't what they used to be. The ranks of the priesthood are diminishing.

The Rev. Robert H. Schuller removed his son Saturday as preacher on the syndicated "Hour of Power" television show less than three years after handing over to him the ministry he began more than 50 years ago. Schuller announced the removal of his son, Robert A. Schuller, in a statement read to some 450 Crystal Cathedral congregants by Jim Coleman, the church's president.

A "relatively unflappable" Cardinal Roger Mahony answered questions under oath for more than 3 1/2 hours Saturday about his handling of clergy sex abuse cases, according to the lawyer who questioned the former archbishop. "He remained calm and seemingly collected at all times," said attorney Anthony De Marco, who represents a man suing the Los Angeles Archdiocese over abuse he alleges he suffered at the hands of a priest who visited his parish in 1987. Mahony has been deposed many times in the past, but Saturday's session was the first time he had been asked about recently released internal church records that show he shielded abusers from law enforcement.

Cardinal Roger Mahony has been relieved of his public duties by Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez. Auxiliary Bishop Thomas J. Curry has quit his job as regional bishop in Santa Barbara. And the website of the Catholic archdiocese of L.A. is displaying tens of thousands of pages of formerly secret files detailing accusations of child molestation against 122 priests -- all the church's dirty laundry that Mahony and Curry did their best to hide for many years. For a decade now, the sex abuse scandal has rocked the Roman Catholic Church in city after city.

For years, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles fought to keep secret its confidential files concerning pedophile priests. Hundreds of sex abuse victims hoping for a full accounting of what church leaders knew about the growing scandal and what they did to stop it were rebuffed time and again. But the cover-up is finally coming to an end. On Monday, a series of memos and letters filed in a civil case confirmed that Cardinal Roger M. Mahony and other church leaders plotted to shield pedophile priests rather than turn them over to police and prosecutors.

Pasadena-area community leaders staged a peace and unity rally Sunday afternoon to denounce recent violence that claimed the life of longtime youth sports leader and community activist Victor McClinton, among others. About 250 people gathered on the steps of All Saints Episcopal Church near City Hall to hear city leaders, clergy members and law enforcement officials discuss ways to stem the violence. "It was a call for peace and for the community to come together in light of some of the recent gang violence and shootings that have occurred," said William Boyer, a Pasadena public information officer.

Robert Van Handel remembered the boy as about 9 years old, tan, effeminate. "Now that I think back on it, he was probably the most beautiful child that I molested," Van Handel wrote to a therapist. Van Handel, a priest who ran a boys choir in Santa Barbara, said he coaxed the boy into posing for nude photographs. He described the experience as "stimulating" in a graphic account of improprieties he said he carried out at a Franciscan boarding school there. For decades, the now-shuttered St. Anthony's Seminary was awash in dark secrets.

Manuel Vega was in the courtroom when the Los Angeles Archdiocese agreed to pay clergy abuse victims a landmark $660-million settlement. The bailiff had to whisk some of the victims out to make room for all the high-fiving lawyers filing in for their payday, he says. "Some were even chest-bumping," recalls the retired police officer. "To me, it looked like a frat party. " Vega, who says he was molested as a boy by a priest in Oxnard, went along with the settlement only because his attorneys assured him the church would turn over confidential personnel files that would reveal the truth about priest abusers, and those who shielded them, including Cardinal Roger M. Mahony.

Is it OK for ministers to hug their parishioners? It depends on the kind of hugs, a counselor told some 170 clergy who attended a sexual-abuse awareness workshop here recently. It was sponsored by the St. Paul Area Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

It was a question that many were thinking, but no one dared ask. When Christopher Laurie, son of Harvest Christian Fellowship leader Greg Laurie, was killed in a car crash July 24, the first order of business was tending to the family -- particularly Christopher's wife, Brittany, who is due to give birth later this year, and their young daughter, Stella. Sooner or later, though, someone would have to raise the issue: What about the Harvest Crusade?

It's the economy, brethren. That's the basic idea behind a new campaign launched Wednesday by a progressive faith-based organization to influence the 2012 election. The PICO National Network said it is enlisting clergy nationwide to register voters, get out the vote and spread a message of economic equality. Calling the campaign "Land of Opportunity," PICO said its goal is to sign up 75,000 new voters and reach a total of 1 million people who will support its message and vote for … well, there's the rub. Presumably restricted by IRS rules that prohibit churches and nonprofit organizations from supporting political candidates, PICO isn't supporting anyone in particular, its director of policy, Gordon Whitman, said in a conference call.

A Los Angeles County commission investigating jail abuse heard tearful testimony Monday from clergy and civilian monitors who worked in the lockups and said they witnessed deputies assaulting inmates and bullying witnesses to keep quiet. One jail monitor broke down as she recounted being intimidated by a deputy whom she said saw beat an unconscious inmate. A weeping jail chaplain described deputies calling him a rat after he reported another beating. In one case, a clergy member said he was told by gang member inmates that jailers had targeted them in retribution for the slaying of a deputy by members of their gang on the outside.