View Comments      Email Article       Printable Version

Published: November 28, 2007

“Just go find another parish”

Controversial poster promoting parish carnival leads to discord at Hollywood church

A poster promoting a 2006 parish carnival at Hollywood’s Blessed Sacrament Church has provoked a series of escalating problems – to the point that some parishioners have asked the Archdiocese of Los Angeles to rein in their pastor.

Parishioner Larry Bugbee, spokesman for the “Committee of Hundreds of Parishioners and Friends” of Blessed Sacrament parish, says that their pastor, Fr. Michael Mandala, S.J., has promoted indecent entertainment at the last two parish carnivals, which included scantily-clad dancers making sexually suggestive movements in front of an audience of all ages.

The committee’s foremost complaint is over a poster promoting the 2006 carnival, which prominently displayed photographs of scantily clad women in suggestive poses. When a similar poster was circulated for the 2007 carnival, Fr. Mandala told one parishioner, “It’s not as bad as last year’s.”

According to the Los Angeles archdiocese’s document Respecting the Boundaries, “sexual abuse can include… showing sexually suggestive objects or pornography." Bugbee says the carnival poster fits that description. “All the children of Blessed Sacrament Parish were able to see this poster inside and outside the Church and school buildings,” he said. “Any child and any adult anywhere in the world was able to look at this poster for most of a year on the Blessed Sacrament website.”

Copies of the 2006 poster have been hand-delivered to Cardinal Roger Mahony, as well as his Vicar for Clergy, the Clergy Misconduct Oversight Board and the director of Safeguard the Children for the Archdiocese. In March 2007, a detailed letter was delivered to the same people, as well as to the Jesuit provincial. One of the signers of the letter was a former prioress of the Monastery of the Angels, a cloistered Dominican nun who lives near the parish. Neither Cardinal Mahony nor anyone else from the Archdiocese has responded to the letter, Bugbee said.

During the 2006 carnival, parishioner Russell Brown came out of church after Mass to find several men whistling. He witnessed a female performer shaking her breasts, then her buttocks onstage.

Before the 2007 carnival, the committee persuaded associate pastor Fr. Wayne Negrete to ask Fr. Mandala to do three things: (1) Throw away the posters or cut the offensive photo from them; (2)
Write a letter to the entertainers giving them a clear code of conduct for the event; and (3) Appoint monitors from within the parish to ask entertainers to stop any sexually explicit behavior onstage if it should occur.

Instead, says Bugbee, Fr. Mandala ignored their requests. With 2,900 families registered at the parish, Bugbee says thousands of children and teens were exposed to the posters and entertainment.

Bugbee says he has incurred Fr. Mandala’s wrath for taking a stand. On Oct. 23, 2006, Fr. Mandala, flanked by security guards, snatched posters from Bugbee’s hands when Bugbee was cleaning up after the carnival, he said. One guard, Isabel Avina, shouted, “Get the hell out of here!” according to Bugbee. Bugbee says he responded by asking Fr. Mandala if he thought any employee should talk to any parishioner that way. One week later, Mandala arranged for and supervised the towing of Bugbee’s car from the Church parking lot after Mass. The pastor also threatened to take out a restraining order against Bugbee, Bugbee said.

For his part, Fr. Mandala says there is no committee of hundreds. “It’s just Larry Bugbee, and he’s a one-man show,” said Fr. Mandala, who also says the posters were not inappropriate. “His read on the posters is very far off,” said Fr. Mandala. “We’ve shown them to legal counsel for the archdiocese, the provincial for the [Jesuit] order. He’s trying to tell the church, social services and every other administration how they should be running things. Even [Auxiliary] Bishop [Edward] Clark wrote him a letter saying to just go find another parish.”

Fr. Mandala also has a different take on the allegations of assault and illegal towing. “He (Bugbee) was in front of the church, waving these posters, saying something like, ‘Look what they do around here’ to this terrified woman,” said Fr. Mandala. “We told him to get out of here and the security guard reinforced that. Sure we had his car towed away. He was selling things here – pamphlets -- out of the back of his car. We told him that this was absolutely forbidden. He left his car here on private property and took off. At some point I was told we had a car in the lot that didn’t belong and I had it towed just like I would anybody else.”

Bugbee laughed when asked to respond to Fr. Mandala’s explanations. “There was a lady on the church porch and I was showing her the poster, but that was before he came,” said Bugbee. “She wasn’t terrorized. The only thing that’s true is that years ago, I offered subscriptions to Magnificat to a few -- very few --interested people in the parish. He keeps dragging that up and it was years ago. This is beyond belief. It’s downright pitiful. When we sent that ten page letter to the diocese, we had literally dozens of signatures on it. We would have had hundreds, but that takes a lot of time and we needed to get the letter off.”

© California Catholic Daily 2007. All Rights Reserved.