Archdiocese 1, Time Warner 0

It isn't often that an archdiocese is pitted against a Time Warner entertainment company, but in San Antonio, Texas, Archbishop Patrick Flores has rescued the city's Catholic television station from an untimely demise at the hands of one of the giant's subsidiaries.

In April, San Antonio's cable system, Paragon, informed the archdiocese that they were planning to move Catholic Television San Antonio from a channel accessible to all basic television subscribers, to one available only to those who pay extra.

Archbishop Flores vigorously opposed the move, claiming that the change would mean abandoning most of its viewers—many of whom rely on the channel, but who are often poor. He said the move would cause the ministry's demise. The city council and religious leaders in the city agreed.

Faced with a quickly growing number of critics and no allies, Paragon gave in May 26, reaching an agreement that allows the archdiocese to stay on the basic services—and granting them $50,000 to announce the resolution of the issue. The cable company claims the move will cost them $1 million a year by supplanting a money-generating preview channel.

The San Antonio Express-News of May 27 quoted reactions to the decision. “We had not given up praying and I think the hearts of everyone involved have been moved,” Archbishop Flores said at City Hall minutes after reaching the agreement with Paragon Cable.

Paragon, said, “It feels great that the whole thing worked out for the archbishop and Catholic television.”

Bishop Opposes Homosexual Parade

When homosexual activists in the Gay Pride Alliance announced their intention earlier this spring to parade through the streets of Corpus Christi, Texas, on Trinity Sunday (June 14), Bishop Roberto Gonzalez quickly registered his opposition.

He wrote a letter to city officials pointing out that a city-sanctioned parade of homosexuals would “send the wrong message to the children and young people” by promoting a homosexual lifestyle and fostering a hostile climate in the city, the San Antonio Express-News reported May 28.

Local evangelical Christians also reacted, scheduling a March for Jesus the same weekend, in hopes of drawing a larger crowd.

Critics in the city council were satisfied when the homosexual activist group issued rules barring revealing clothing, nudity, real or acted-out public sex acts, and requiring that drag costumes be “in good taste.”

Critics say that the very need for such rules demonstrates the dangers inherent in a parade that celebrates preference for particular sexual acts.

Candidate Jeb Bush Changed by Conversion

Time magazine's June 8 profile of Jeb Bush, the former president's son and leading candidate for governor of Florida, calls him “the most unusual of the Bush kids.” The reason? For one, he is Catholic.

The report explains that Bush left his family's Maine-Washington-Houston orbit while still in high school to study in Mexico. He returned in love with a Colombian-Mexican girl whom he later married. It was largely for her sake that he settled in Miami—a place where the Bush name had fewer connections than in Texas, where his brother George W. now resides in the governor's mansion.

The article says that “Bush recently made perhaps the ultimate leap for the son of the ultimate Wasp: he converted to Catholicism. It wasn't entirely an alien experience. Bush has been accompanying his wife to church off and on since their 1974 marriage, and many observers had erroneously concluded that he had already adopted her religion. But it happened only three years ago.…”

Bush told the magazine, “I vowed to myself after the election that I would convert. It turned out to be a pretty therapeutic thing.… Had I won, I would have been

up in a cocoon in Tallahassee and protected.… I'm convinced that I'm better off for not having won.”

After his defeat, Bush began to attend RCIA courses at his local parish. He enjoyed his classmates, saying, “[T]hese were real people, and it was so much fun to talk about normal things and to be treated as just a normal, ordinary person.” The experience brought him closer to his family as well, he is quoted saying.

Observers see a marked difference in Bush even in his campaigning, said the article. He now campaigns in black neighborhoods and other places that formerly were neglected by many Republican campaigns.

The issues he is promoting? Economic growth in poor neighborhoods, adoption, privatization of government, and compassion.

“Compassion must mean suffering with others and acting on the consciousness of your suffering with the people who are really in need,” he told Time.