Pope Leo, Cardinal Mc, Bishop Pham and beloved bishops: Catholic Homeschooling is a choice NOT a crime..a lifestyle worth pursuing

Newest U.S. cardinal: A San Diego-based ally of Pope Francis - The San ...Revised july 12 26    9/28/24  Angels weekend  st michael’s feast day  10/11/24    Feast of St Callistus I, Oct 14 revision  Revised  10/1/2025

“All good things come from God”  ~Deacon Rick on St Michael’s Feast day/a Sunday

Basic Truth: “EVERY Catholic family homeschools their child from birth. Every parent.”

Pope Leo, Cardinal McElroy, Bishop Michael Pham and other beloved Bishops, Priests and laity:

Here’s my simple offer:

Your excellency, Cardinal McElroy, I offer to help for free should you convene a meeting to get it ALL out on the table.  I’ll bring refreshments, just tell me the expected number. Even though providentially you have been replaced in San Diego, it is important that your presbyterate team and yourself, who decided that homeschooled children are NOT allowed to use parish facilities, be present. At least the current ordinary Bishop Pham and a few disgruntled parish school parents who object to Catholic homeschooled kids touching their kids’ desks.

I recommend you find ground zero, choose the parish where most of the “tension” you mentioned, is centered and give me a chance to refill the hole you are digging.   I have no time for personal arrogance, after 40 years engaged in homeschooling our 11 and cooperating with numerous others. Just humbly offering because unity and peace both need hard work to attain.   Attaining parish, let alone world, peace, is more than a beauty pageant line. 

And It IS attainable and then maybe more time to address other less important issues of declining parish attendance, 150 Catholic hospitals nationally performing satanic rituals on young daughters, spaying them like junkyard dogs and turning them into suicidal eunuchs who can’t nurse the child she will never see born from her womb.  Minor diocesan issues like that.   

 In His service,  Len   40 year homeschooling dad of 11 and now 25 awesome grandkids as of July 9,2026   Apparently, we take God’s multiplication table seriously

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I sent this invite while the Cardinal was still the ordinary of San Diego..  just like the article in the National Catholic Register, no call back or email.

But, the time is now for candid discussions and dialogue as the Church attempts, in this Eucharistic Renaissance, to  follow Christ’s admonition to Giovanni at San Damiano:  “rebuilt My Church”.  In fact, to “build back better” makes sense.  One anecdotal to prove a point.

Some people I know personally approached their Orange County parish school recently about enrolling their kindergartener in the school. In their discussions, they found out the school does not have daily Mass, something that makes sense for a Catholic school attached to a parish church. When queried, the administrator said “they don’t because we don’t want to offend our non-Catholic students and their families.”

Let that sink in: the Catholic Church in the US has built hospitals, schools and other institutions for over two centuries.  Today, thanks in part due to transitioning from religious order teachers, with low to no income, to lay people as ANSWERED vocations have tailed off.  As the oldest of 11 kids educated from the 60s on, we experienced 126 years at St Anthony Claret, Servite High and the diocesan Rosary Academy.    Lay people, ie teachers, often have mortgages, need to eat, and also those fascinating things called kids, ie cost of THEIR living is much higher.  With personnel costs such as teachers’ salaries  exploding over time, economics have set in and schools began to close.  Too many.  It’s not the lay teachers “fault”: just an outgrowth of the times.   In fact, I lost my DRE position when St Anthony Claret was in debt to the Orange Diocese $600,000; since we serve at will of the bishop, my “gift” in 2007 was lay off.  NOT a new story as the Church USA deals with costs skyrocketing, and now, after the explosion of the 60s onward, declining enrollment this decade.

Catholic parish schools in general are known for good discipline in an era, especially here in California, where classroom bullies and undisciplined brats have the upper hand in public schools. So, with declining enrollment and rising costs, Catholic parish based schools (CPBS) had much to deal with.  Part of the response has been to invite in non Catholics to improve the bottom line.  Normally, well to do families who do not like putting their kids at risk in the public schools but not practicing the Catholic faith.

Hidden in Plain Sight Basic Truth: “EVERY Catholic family homeschools their child from birth. Every parent.”

The Cardinal McE did not want “competition” for his parish schools; homeschooling is a different choice but significantly different than a parish based facilities and team, although competition is not an evil thing unless you can’t change with the times.  But not EVERY family is willing to sacrifice much to homeschool their children; this is why I call it a “choice, not a crime”, borrowed from author Michelle Malkin’s need to homeschool her kids.

In fact, those parishes still having parish based schools in the 96 parishes have some very successful and some in need of repair; healthy competition for finite dollars remains a good and inevitable methodology.   But Cardinals and bishops have a solution they should support that would benefit all parental education choices.

The BEST would be some amount, say $10,000 per EVERY K-12 student per year would “equalize” the educational equation.

If some amount was “returned” to California parents, of the dwindling public 6 million students, due to lack of moms and dads having children, many Calif parents would CONTINUE public ed.

Those in private, parochial and domicilic pedagogy, ie home educators/schoolers, the funds would give a significant boost to family budgets and put nary a dent in the total $1/3 of a TRILLION dollars of tax money going to Cal Dept of Education/Indoctrination, depending on your viewpoint.

This LEAVES a huge net of $16,000 per student that the state department of education would have.   Too MUCH money has been held and used by the indoctrinating left leaning few.  Look at the results, don’t ask me!  In fact, NYC spends $36,000 per student and the results unfortunately is dismal.

Today, like the real example above, in some CPBSchools, we open our CATHOLIC schools to other faiths, but don’t want to offend the Shieks or zoroastrians or muslims or jews by being a Catholic institution doing Catholic things.

Needless to say, the mom was not happy and gave words to the administrators they were interviewing.   And kept looking.

The reassigned Cardinal needs some serious fact finding and research before you lose more people.  And continue to offend some of your best families who homeschool.

Still hoping “school choice” can be prodded into place in California, because the billions being spent on transgender operations managers, etc is frankly evil at its core.  The money is the peoples, Catholic and otherwise, and the parents should direct where their funds go.

Even $10,000 of the $26K Calif. tax dollars spent yearly on ANY student claiming to be Californian would do wonders for all schools including Catholic parish, alternatives etc.  In fact, as mentioned, Mayor Dammandi’s NYC spends $36,000 annually on each public student in the five boroughs and the results would embarrass their hero, John Dewey.  And California’s governor Jen Seibel and her slick haired actor (in her gender fluidics docudramas) Gavin have stolen the superintendent role in 2026.

=========new material since first publication+++++++==========================

“Following up on the initial announcements (banning homeschoolers from parish property), Cardinal McElroy issued a statement in October suggesting home schooling is providing “a parallel educational model” with Catholic schools that the diocese can’t and shouldn’t endorse.”   Uh, Cardinal, no one is asking for such.  Read CCC2223 in your spare time.

Wow, would someone take his XLNC’s giant shovel away from him before he hurts himself and more of his deeply Catholic parishioners.  The ancient canon rule applies: “when you are digging the hole way too deep, stop digging.”   Does the San Diego chancery office have any extra CCC, Catholic Catechisms, lying arouund.

“He expressed concern about home-school cooperatives “seeking to establish programs on parish sites” that include “religious formation or sacramental preparation programs within the parish setting that are dedicated specifically for home-school students.” 

Another oops! Oh my! Catholic parents teaching Catholic faith ON THE SACRED grounds of a San Diego parish.  What he is implying is no Catholic families teach faith, sacraments, Bible etc IN THEIR homes whether they attend Our Lady of the Left Leg of the Crib or Perpetual Recreation parishes.  Does he believe only the sacred principals and parish based educators and occasional Directors of religious education have the training and where-with-all to educate our young?

Truth IS told: homeschool families DO teach faith, religion, physics, Latin often, French sometimes, analytic geometry, GOOD science  and other core subjects.

  A LITTLE HISTORY  For the misunderstood Cardinal’s edification, when Donna and I were DRE, FFdirs & youth ministry staff at different parishes in the Orange diocese, though our 11 were domicilic (HOME) schooled in basic Catholic teachings, we registered our kids in the appropriate religious ed levels AT our parish.  We didn’t hide out from the parish because it was simply…OUR parish.  In fact, we worked twice as hard to meld well, and support the other educational alternatives (parish school, Spanish religious ed and our DRE&YM responsibilities at St Anthony Claret, for example).  We looked at the parish as a lot more than education. Most homeschool families today do as well.  In fact, like ALL parents should, they take a practical interest in grooming their children to be LIFE LONG Catholics, not just Baptism to Communion to Confirmation epochs on the way to marriage.

“According to the cardinal, this “has become a source of tension within the diocese.”   Tension for who?

Tension is something capable adults can deal with, especially if they dialogue with the others with different opinions of what defines a parish. 

Tension is not evil necessarily; without tension, a guitar or piano emits noise not succinct harmonious notes. 

Tension, like pain, can signal something else is going on.  When on St Michael’s feast day Sept 29th this year, what I thought was heartburn turned out to be a blessing: I had a rolling mild heart attack.  By 11 o clock Monday, Kaiser’s Dr Ravi Shankar cardiologist and his “cath” lab team spent 30 minutes going up my wrist artery, unblocking (thankfully only one blockage) an artery at the heart, installing a stent and rolling me out for the next angiogram recipient.  I watched the whole thing and Dr Ravi  Shankar (NOT the Beatles’ sitar player) only once said “Len, shut up”.  I did of course.  Technology like tension can be a blessing if USED FOR GOOD.

“But the new policy goes beyond religious education, barring all home-school programs from parish property.

Cardinal McElroy said the diocese’s presbyteral council (which includes the bishops and several priests of the diocese) voted 13-1 in favor of the new policy banning home-schoolers around mid-September and that he approved it.

My uninformed guess is the presbyters did NOT have any dads and moms with 5, 7 or 11 kids to offer wisdom before the Monty Python pronouncement, to hear their joys AND struggles before the gavel resounded “OFF with their heads”. 

 Do THEY have a clue they are stewards, not landlords, of God’s generous previous generations who built most of the school buildings on parish plots.  In Orange, for example and for 501c3 reasons, the RCBO, Roman Catholic Bishop of Orange, owns the 143 properties throughout the outlined Orange County.  Yet, like the Sistine Chapel & Pope Francis, our beloved Bishop Vann can’t take them to heaven to put adjacent to the mansion God will build for him.

“The Diocese supports the decision of a growing number of parents to choose home schooling for their children.    Funny way to show it!

Really?  Talk seems to be inexpensive these days.  Instead of embracing this successful change paralleling similar changes to our society, we see marginalization as a by-product of ignorance.

“At the same time this support does not include a right for basing integral elements of home-schooling programs in parish settings. Home schooling is not inherently a ministry of the parish,” Cardinal McElroy said his statement. “As a consequence, home-school programs will not be provided designated special access to the parish facilities of the Diocese of San Diego.”     SOMETIMES IGNORANCE IS NOT THAT BLISSFUL

Are homeschooled Catholic families allowed to attend Mass and even put a few coins in the collection basket under this foolish ban?  Does his eminence have a clue how interrelated so many homeschool families already are in parish family life with other parishioners?

Is the Knights of Columbus, or alcoholics anonymous, maybe MOMS programs, scouting (if not banned yet) and other excellent groups allowed usage WHEN available.  Why not young members of the diocese and/or parish THAT ARE NOT ATTENDING PUBLIC SCHOOLS?  DRE public ed kids gain access, but not engaged Catholic families who contribute more than most parochial vicars and pastors understand in too many parishes.

“The new statement from Cardinal McElroy follows on the earlier announcement from the diocese that home-school programs are barred from using parish facilities “both because such usage can undermine the stability of nearby Catholic schools and lead people to think that the Church is approving and advancing particular alternative schools and programs.”   Cardinal and Bishop Michael Pham.  NO one is looking to the Diocese to ‘advance’ alternative programs.  THE so-called ALTERNATIVE PROGRAMS EXIST AND HAVE BEEN FUNCTIONING FOR YEARS. 

Throw back time:  DONNA AND I BEGAN IN 1983, FOR EXAMPLE!! I have seven grandkids and three married kids at three San Diego parishes as well.    How 30-50 Catholic homeschooling families can undermine the stability of 300 parish based students sounds a lot like a “straw man” logic fallacy.   Does the public school religious ed programs undermine the parish school kids?  Other than a misplaced pencil at a borrowed desk…

 I thought this was the public school problem, unable to compete with excellence so they built a moat and fortress to  avoid scrutiny and positive change! They avoid Responsibility or lack the Ability to Respond, change, controlling the public teachers’ union, Tony Thurmond although Newsom just took over the Superintendent of Public Instruction’s functions.  Why?  He fears what Sonja Shaw will discover when she is voted  in on Nov 3, 2026 (give or take 33 days to count) to replace Newsom’s owned Super.

But Sarah Harold said in her letter that using parish facilities for home-schooling cooperatives has been valuable to help her “in connecting with other women, and connecting my children with other children, to form Catholic communities based around our parishes where we can supplement our home-based education with social events and extracurricular classes.”

She told Cardinal McElroy that she offered him her letter in the spirit of what she described as the cardinal’s “many words you have spoken in support of a listening, synodal Church.”

“I know that you are committed to listening to those on the margins, whose voices are not often heard by the leaders of the institutional Church, and that you value the opinions of the women who too often sit silently in the pews,” she wrote. “I feel confident that you will read this message graciously and respond with the loving heart of a good shepherd.”

(Mrs.) Harold told the Register that her letter has gotten about 250 co-signers, most of them women.

Women are people too!!   And I think Jesus would have left the 99 to go find the 100th lost homeschooled lamb barred from the McShepherd’s field and flock

“The NCRegister asked a spokesman for the diocese for comment on the letter Thursday morning, but did not hear back by publication. The Register has also asked for an interview with a diocesan official about the new home-schooling policy but has not yet heard back.”  Sadly, as usual.

 

 

 

Previously:=========================================================

It’s time we had this discussion as a Church, not fiefdoms of special interests and moat surrounded programs.

To use an agricultural analogy, stop digging the hole deeper; the better analogous comparison, comes from tennis: stop these unforced errors no one needs, especially your dioceses’ struggling Catholic families trying to eck out a living during hell’s reign in the Obamanation of Desolators’ DC.…Meanwhile with a hierarchy trying to heal from mortal wounds of a small minority of self-inflicted sinfulness.  IF currently, any clerical abuse is happening, OR any lay illicit divorce, STOP IT NOW!! The cost is too high and climbing.  BUT STOP! As if our ETERNITIES depend on it. 

They do!

This dad thinks the Sunday of Medad and Eldad in Moses/Joshua’s time is perfect to follow the firestorm of ignorance started  Thurs.  Cardinal McElroy, please reflect on these words and look in the same mirror we ALL must look in: 

“It’s NOT about me,” popularized in the youth ministry anagram “Forget about Me, I love You”.  The anagram for FAMiLY

“Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp, “
Joshua, son of Nun, who from his youth had been Moses’ aide, said,
“Moses, my lord, stop them.”
But Moses answered him,
“Are you jealous for my sake?
Would that all the people of the LORD were prophets!
Would that the LORD might bestow his spirit on them all!”   

Jesus in the Gospel echoes this sentiment well; others, when they teach Truth should not be denied.  In English, NOT locked out of our parishes because they are the unwashed homeschoolers not fitting the mold of the 1960s thru today.

THERE IS ROOM FOR ALL OF OUR CHILDREN IN THE 3D PARISH BOUNDARIES; WE JUST NEED ROOM IN THE HEARTS OF THE PRELATES AND PAROCHIAL PARENTS.

At that time, John said to Jesus,
“Teacher, we saw someone driving out demons in your name,
and we tried to prevent him because he does not follow us.”
Jesus replied, “Do not prevent him.
There is no one who performs a mighty deed in my name
who can at the same time speak ill of me.
For whoever is not against us is for us.
Anyone who gives you a cup of water to drink
because you belong to Christ,
amen, I say to you, will surely not lose his reward.

“Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin,
it would be better for him if a great millstone
were put around his neck
and he were thrown into the sea.

Your excellency, I forgive your misunderstanding what the rejuvenated homeschooling movement of the last decades is all about.  I believe you have been steered by others who ARE ignorant.  Homeschooling was blossoming already and just accelerated via Covid, the Lock Outs of the 2020s and the turning away from solid Catholic teaching

Jesus continued to call for a return to purity, precision and truth telling:

“If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off.
It is better for you to enter into life maimed
than with two hands to go into Gehenna,
into the unquenchable fire.
And if your foot causes you to sin, cut if off.
It is better for you to enter into life crippled
than with two feet to be thrown into Gehenna.
And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.
Better for you to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye
than with two eyes to be thrown into Gehenna,
where ‘their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched.'”

Gehenna, just south of Jerusalem, was dedicated to Moloch and had become the trash and sewage valley derided by the Jews in Jesus’ time; and our Savior wasn’t kidding: it would be better, if your hands are dangerous, become like my friend and brother Tony Melendez harmless and armless and have them surgically removed.  You could even cut a deal with those demonic gender affirming changeologist surgeons public schools refer students to,  to remove both limbs, as well as the breasts and vaginas, as a side job.

Time IS short and we have plenty of souls to save by the Body and Blood of the Lamb with the Spirit’s inspiration.  Jesus could “tarry” another millennia or two, should the Father be patient with our declining multiplication of new borns (2/3) and abortions (1/3 the US population dead). Or come back to earth physically in God~human form He left one Ascension Thursday.

After all, the Father did/have build/built a monument to His Beloved Eucharistic Son just a few miles from where the Holy Family was forced to emigrate to, near Cairo, 4600 years ago.  Whether bishops or laity, understand its significance as of yet, I can’t say; but soon maybe as our scholars & researchers focus on the Center of the World.

By the way, fellow Catholic, please pray for my #4 of 11 homeschooled offspring, Larissa who is destined for open heart surgery for valve replacement unless the miracle arrives before the cardiologist opens her up.  I am eternally grateful.

We all should agree this decade has had its share of unforced errors in Church ministry and decisions, not in the least emulating Pentecost 0033’s LOCK IN, like a popular youth ministry activity from the past; this decade’s, involved locking OUT faithful Catholics on Pentecost 2020&2021 under the authority of the godless, pseudoscientific crowd.  Let’s not add “banish the homeschooling unwashed” to the pile, please.   Simple truths make it simpler to solve.  Let’s reason together, ordained and lay, to better understand each other

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My credentials are easily shared:  as a dad of 11 and being PapaLen to 22 grandkids so far, we have also Catholic homeschooled for 40+ years; still helping today at a local homeschooling coop (my #11 just turned 22) and acting as an ambassador to help non homeschoolers, priests and bishops better understand there really is no conflict except that self administered.

Frankly, in my home diocese of Orange, we are blessed with tremendous cooperation with parish and diocesan leadership.  But, like other things in life, that can change on a widow’s mite.

Dr Erin, the Catholic parish based schools super, has seen and is trying to do her best; I have offered to sit down and make suggestions; we will do this when SHE not thee is ready.

Harmony is possible; chaos doesn’t need to reign, beloved bishops and cardinals!! And truth be told, this decade’s explosion of families choosing the LIFESTYLE of home based Catholic ed is a blessing to the greater Church, the Grand Commissioning to spread the Gospel.

AND, once parish schools families understand homeschoolers are not evil, AND VICE VERSA, they are more prone not to complain should an occasional coop or HS family ask to use the chem lab or less used multi purpose room.  God forbid!

By the way, looking at unforced errors, my homeschooling and parish staff credentials, at least, cannot be dismissed like my NEC credentials were on July 19th in Indianapolis’ at the National Eucharistic Congress at high noon.

Things happen as we serve the Church: I was threatened with arrest if I did not let them escort me directly to the streets.  The so-called Hugs N Roses acts of Catholic Kindness scenario. Truth for another time but symptomatic of a Church that has lost some of its moorings; yet, I believe, as enough do, that a Renaissance of Love, Joy and Hope is coming.  There are enough of us in the Church to rededicate ourselves to actually, actively becoming fearless and bold yet again, to help as many people as St Therese wants in heaven.  ALL!

Laws of the Church.

Important, is understanding what Church tradition and the CCCatechism tells us: per CatholicVote article: “The Catechism of the Catholic Church states in paragraph 2223 that “Parents have the first responsibility for the education of their children” and later in 2226 that “Parental catechesis precedes, accompanies, and enriches other forms of instruction in the faith,” adding that the parish is “the heart of the liturgical life of Christian families.” 

But I prefer the original words IN the CCC:

CCC 2223 Parents have the first responsibility for the education of their children. They bear witness to this responsibility first by creating a home where tenderness, forgiveness, respect, fidelity, and disinterested service are the rule. The home is well suited for education in the virtues. This requires an apprenticeship in self-denial, sound judgment, and self-mastery – the preconditions of all true freedom.

Parents should teach their children to subordinate the “material and instinctual dimensions to interior and spiritual ones.”1 Parents have a grave responsibility to give good example to their children. By knowing how to acknowledge their own failings to their children, parents will be better able to guide and correct them:
He who loves his son will not spare the rod. .. He who disciplines his son will profit by him.2
Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.3

Incredibly succinct as to roles of parents and bishops.  Trust me, this 40yr Catholic homeschooling dad of 11 now in decade #8 HAS failed at times; ask any of my kids!  But, as I try and gain some of the fearlessness and boldness a la St Paul, I never give up, I get up and try to do better.  You might be perfect, but I can’t claim that. However, there is a truth few in the Church family grasp and embrace today:

First truths #1:  EVERY Catholic family/parent(s) homeschools from birth

…It must continue no matter what educational choices are made at age 3 or 5. Education is not a K-12 or similar experience.  And homeschooling sees the children as part of a family growth, healthy maturation and learning experience.  In English, a LIFESTYLE worth pursuing that can lead to heaven.

Cardinal McElroy, please understand this never mentioned truism.  Seems obvious, as if it answers “first responsibility”?

Even though the public ed system, while most districts in Calif. are failing, is moving/creeping closer to having a chute from the delivery rooms at public and private hospitals into their brick & mortar buildings, already sucking in 40% off the California general budget for their efforts, it belies the fact: kids are born being homeschooled in secular, atheistic, protestant, Catholic.

What happens post birth, in two, three or ? years is the CHOICE of the parents.  And with the decay the Church is trying to pull herself out of, at least this realistic optimist believes,  it is even more important not to alienate your devoted faithful that are growing in numbers. We’ve done a number on seasoned senior faithful, 80 year old widows adorned with veiled armor and grasping their brass knuckle rosaries from the front pews of emptier churches, by banning Latin as if it is an infection.  I’ve heard the discussions, and the rationale, but no one answers WHY? the intensity to alienate those adherents when those parishes that have it are doing, in the aggregate, better than others.  Especially with the undeniable 3.5 years of hell rained on family financials, with those we employ/elected carpet bombing moms in the kill mills, grooming the rest of the young for breast and vaginal replacement surgeries while we ditter about the fraudulent dysphoric beliefs that God failed in not creating more than male and female.  Silly even.

Cardinal and friends: Homeschooling is NOT competition for parish based Catholic education here in California, parish based schools  compete with themselves, but they too are in a most unfair battleground: the godless axis of Newsom, Bonta & Thurmond triumvirate of monopolied education money that robs private schoolers of their taxes, including home schoolers with little or no benefit.  AND “invests” it in the culture of death’s ideologies.

The good news and tragedy, is I believe we’ve hit rock bottom: it’s the place someone hits when they run out of others to blame.  Time to be honest with ourselves…but still instilling hope for the future.

I know, this “homeschooling begins at birth” isn’t written in the CCC but it, like so much in life, is basic common sense: teaching values and truths starts at the nursing stage before the rug rat becomes a curtain climber then asks for the car keys.

Education doesn’t need concrete and steel to begin in a Domestic Church’s life when Johnny or Faustina comes home after birth.  On the Thursday bombshell of the Sept 1 policy change, calling homeschoolers unwelcome and unwashed, there is/was glimmers of hope.

Same day the Card. McElroy edict hit the airwaves, a beloved pastor shaded by an 149 year old tree blessed and welcomed homeschooling families at his Mass midday (to prevent reprisals from hierarchical peer pressure, I will say somewhere in SoCal)

Mother Church MUST for her very survival, understand the new paradigm YIELDS priests at an alarmingly higher percentage than non homeschooled Catholic families.   I know because I converse and support a healthy number of them.   PLUS we should be praying for ANSWERED vocations not just vocations.  Trust that the Holy Spirit is calling quite a few more than answer with a Marian “Yes”.

My dad grew up in Buffalo NY.  This is something to rejoice over, noting Buffalo diocese is consolidating half its 118 churches for lack of people AND priests. 

Yes, due in part to the LockOuts but the loss of practiced faith MUST be reversed from the ignominious Dr Pfaucinstein medical malpracticed era.

Homeschooling aids two of the three legs of the three legged stool.  Cardinal McElroy, you have been the lightening rod and helped, IF WE SEE with Christ like eyes, to help other bishops realize this is no different than the neocanonical, rise in Marian devotions, the Renaissance of devotion to the Center of the World, the Center of Life, the real and true presence of Christ IN the monstrance and ciboria, no different than other positive and innovative movements in the greater Church.

With current finances and conditions, you have a bonanza in your parishioners practicing the homeschooling/cooperative/etc lifestyle that fits your role AS the chief religious educator overseer of the state’s St James county but are listening to spiteful voices that are not helping the greater mission. Why cause more grief for yourself: you can’t please EVERYONE.

Honestly, having been a parish staffer for decades WHILE homeschooling our brood of diapers over 40 years, I am uniquely poised, humbly, to help you take off your real estate goggles and see the faithful as MORE important that the classrooms you think you are protecting. 

How about a deal, your excellency, leave real estate to me, which I feed my fam with for 38 years and you focus on the homeschool families your ‘team’  just insulted. And the GREATER MISSION of the Church in a dying world.

You want families that choose not public but Catholic education on different platforms to COME to Our Lady of Perpetual Recreation but at the same time, don’t want them turning lights on in classrooms and occupying for short periods, with or without parish schools attached to the churches.

There is ROOM for both, and training the congregation that we need each other, that envy and jealousy for one’s fiefdom is contrary to what Jesus calls us to, that unity IS possible if we don’t look at the homeschooled as the unwashed interlopers.

One Sunday’s amazing timing at the Gospel shows that God calls more than CPBS, parish based schools to Himself.

“Do not prevent him.
There is no one who performs a mighty deed in my name
who can at the same time speak ill of me.
For whoever is not against us is for us.”

The Name above all names, of course is Jesus: the Proud GodFather’s favored Eucharistic Son born just 270 miles to the Northeast from the Center of the World.  The same area soon after birth the Holy Family returned, instantly from Joseph’s visionill return, in flight, to a Jewish enclave near Cairo, Egypt.   (Sorry folks, Len never knows when to quit.)

Just because the society, like Pope Saint John Paul the Great called it, is trending to a culture of death, we MUST stop majoring in the minors (baseball analogy) and focus on what’s important.  It’s NOT easy homeschooling; it’s easier dumping the kids in schools.  Let me be clear bishops: you have excellent parish based school parents AND homeschooling parents as well.

San Diego, you have win-win at your fingertips but you stated 2024-5 pulling defeat out of the jaws of victory.  Now we face 26-27!!!

Bishop Michael Pham, as Reagan once said:  Tear down that wall of separation.  Think of your origins and how you were treated since your arrival in the states.

All need to be following what your conference and pope developed, the CCC definition as if it matters.  Because it does.

Historically, the Beckman ranch has homeschooled from early 1980s, starting at Magnolia Baptist when no Catholic home schooling association (like SCCHE today) existed but Christian Home Educators Assoc…we took on other iterations over four decades.

Today, many dedicated homeschooling Catholics gravitate to the last Baptist Catholic church in the Orange diocese: St. John, the Baptist Catholic Church.  As it says on its north wall, missing the well placed comma.  OK, a little tension defusing humor, but success should not be ignored.  “What gets rewarded, gets repeated”.

EVERY parish can benefit from homeschoolers, as well as the more prominently displayed parish school kids.  EVERY body wins.

I woke early on on Sept 26th morning on the twins feast day, Drs. Cosmos & Damian, and noted that Relevant Radio’s Cale Clark was subbing in for Dr. Patrick Madrid, the eminent Harvard Biotacologist;  the first thing our healthy dose of Canadian Cale and wisdom shared was about a novel idea out of San Diego.  I had just called in to the beautiful Randi ready to dialogue with Cale, just before he lowered this bombshell.   It became a national embarrassment and issue.

“The Diocese of San Diego has banned homeschooling groups from meeting on its properties, according to a September 1 policy in the diocesan handbook.  (I guess it’s so much easier to quietly print it instead of convening sessions at the diocese or parish level.)

The policy states, “The use of parish facilities by charter schools, home school programs, or private school programs is prohibited, both because such usage can undermine the stability of nearby Catholic schools and lead people to think that the Church is approving and advancing particular alternative schools and programs.”   I noticed the yoga and pickle ball sessions would still go on.  WHAT a HORRIBLE unforced error, prelates, priests and peeps.

Frankly, you excellency, homeschoolers don’t undermine the stability of nearby Catholic schoolsand trust me on this, no one thinks you are approving nor advancing particular alternative schools/programs. I’ve yet to see homeschoolers putting pipe bombs in the classrooms, or writing satanic symbols on the walls or even leaving gender dysphoric materials denying God’s simple design of male and female.

Yes, Cardinal McElroy & Bishop Pham, we don’t want homeschoolers to teach error in violation of the Magisterium; we all get that.

But sadly, your birdies in your ears may not have told you, it’s not totally uncommon for Catholic error to be taught in our parish schools. 

Not viciously, not necessarily on purpose, but because you have humans teaching, whether at home or 100 feet away from the sacristy at the school, error occurs.  Thus, continued vigilance is warranted.

This may come as a surprise, but you have the power AND authority to dig holes and pick up the tennis racket, but please reconsider this: we NEED each other IF your goal is unity and EDUCATING the San Diego Catholic kids a priority.

We MUST “improve our serve”.   

The homeschoolers I’ve known for 4 decades are resilient, loving, respectful, giving, involved in parish life; you should get to know some of them before this becomes cast in stone the evil one throws a party over in hell.  Like other Catholic humans, some can be opinionated, overbearing, like maybe one or two parish school parent over decades has been.

National facts #1: priest vocations, and religious vocations are answered more often from homeschooling homes…

…today than generally from private, parochial and  public educational institutions. I’m not saying homeschool families get more vocations than parish based, but stats show accepting the calls are up in those living the lifestyle of good Catholic home based education.   WE PRAY FOR VOCATIONS BUT WE SHOULD PRAY FERVENTLY FOR ANSWERED VOCATIONS.

Check out the stats, yourself: this is helping repair one leg of the 3 legged stool: the other two legs, bringing people back INTO the altar and Eucharist room (parish churches) since the lockouts (#2) and leg #3 we will save for the end.

The(your) policy also states that part of the purpose of parish facilities is to serve the Church’s teaching mission, adding, “Parish run schools and religious education programs are the primary means by which the Church accomplishes its teaching mission for children and young people.”   So, like the planned parenthoodlums and LSD party BELIEVE, parents role is to get the wife pregnant, go 9 months and pop out the kid and enroll in PrePrePreTK parish school classes.   We parents don’t own the kids but we are the FIRST and primary stewards of  their lives.  And yes, we honor the role of the ordinary in his responsibility for the religious education of the diocese’s children, but unless he is omniscient and omnipresent, he should rely on others.   And as the Catechism states plainly, parents are the primary educators of their children.

Just bypass the roles of the Domestic Church parents, in other words, your excellency, you just need moms and dads to get pregnant, in or out of wedlock, deliver junior or a beautiful little girl, and drop them off for education at your divinely anointed real estate locations that have schools.  Cardinal and Bishop Pham, we CAN work together on this.

And the ed landscape beyond public is more than just the homeschool movement. Ever heard of Chesterton Academies? Do you realize the incredible growth in hybrid, alternative curricula, opportunities of recent decades that Catholics who continue to homeschool after rug rat, curtain climber, toddler etc stages?

Please understand, desperate non Catholic parents seek out Catholic education institutions, especially high schools due to discipline and higher academics than in the public ed arena.

A good thing, but instead of 100% Catholic, the mixed bag necessary for financial survival means when they become freshmen and freshwomen in most colleges (excluding examples like bicoastal Thomas Aquinas College, Benedictine, UofMary, John Paul U, Steubenville, Ave Maria, Christendom and others), our Catholic kids become fodder for everything hell and the lefty loons unleash.

I recall a homily at a summer Life Teen mass on the beach; the priest talks of a young lady going off to college and looking forward to seeing him at Christmas when she has winter break. The priest looked her in the eyes and said:  “I hope you are still Catholic by Thanksgiving…”

Let’s parse this using real world examples and analysis.  

Happy to copy you on my curriculum vitae, Latin for “course of life”. Basically, my beloved Donna and I were the youth ministers, directors of religious ed, Faith Formation directors, RCIA and sometimes janitors from 1981 thru early 2012 at three Orange diocese parishes.  Since her death and my going off staff from Holy Family Cathedral when my pastor oddly flinched after the real estate acquisition of Reverend Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral, we continued to homeschool the kids apparently with success.

Our family has 12 degrees so far today, an Ohio son headmaster at one of those alternative Catholic institutions you worry about instead of embracing;  springing up known as Chesterton Academy in Dayton, one of 60 so far. As of 2026, 20 more academies are set to open,   Also, a few master’s degrees among our kids.

The blessing is ALL (I pray dearly they stay Catholic) the 11 kids remain faithful to the Church now in dioceses of Houston-Galveston, Ohio, Orange, LA and I almost forgot, diocese of San Diego.  I’m no Pollyanna; i’ve been a son of the Church since 1952, member of the Diocese of Orange 16 years BEFORE it separated from LA,  and continue on despite the occasional mysteries and bumps like NEC’s threats and banishment, program/job endings (two due to parish based school costs) etc.   Time IS short and hell is busy..

I don’t know about you, Cardinal McElroy, with whatever respect IS due, this Church is the only Church I got! Point is, you believe in error the absolute blessings your, yes your homeschool charges, tho unwashed, are to your diocese AND the greater Church and world.

With mics turned off, “candid” the cue card, you can get most Catholic leaders, including myself if you must, to admit that the Church has undergone decay over recent decades but being a realistic optimist, I truly believe the Eucharistic Jesus revival (NEC1941 and NEC2024) is maturing into a much needed Renaissance of Love, Truth and more.

I beg all of you:  let’s not lose the momentum with good alternatives already in existence for using parish real estate… homeschooling is exploding, relatively so, in the Diocese of St Didacus and believe it or not, they, homeschooling families (all your families at birth) are your sheep and will be friendly if Church leadership wakes up and smells the dirty diapers, good coffee and the generosity of their existence.  

The Father’s pride in His Eucharistic Son, as most bishops agree, is something He has pointed to for millennia (or at least can be shown) with a little exposition.  Jesus remains the Center of Worship, Source and Summit of our Faith, Focus of the Constellations and Stars (ever see OLGuadalupe’s Mantle Star Chart?), Center of Faith, and even geographically, represented at the exact Center of the World.

The last thing we need is to torpedo this healthy explosion of dedication to true Catholic doctrine, due to jealousy, misunderstandings, envy or more empire building, including moats around the parish boundaries of SoCal parishes.  My dad Paul’s family are from Buffalo and the recent news about lack of people and priests, leading to less funds is leading to consolidation of 118 parishes; I hope this is rumor but on different scales, it is  happening in all too many Church ordinaries.

In Orange, thanks in part to the Vietnam War, St Michael’s Abbey and homeschooling answered vocations, we have a healthy number of priests in our geographic boundaries.  The Abbey serves at 60 parishes in Orange and LA counties on most weekends. I have a little bias, since two of my children are married to two siblings of a Norbertine/Premonstratensian priest at the Abbey.  It is easy for me to be honest, not hold grudges, speak the truth in joy, surprise by joy the world around us, since I am overly blessed.

And yes, we have good Orange parish schools, those remaining open, like St Norbert’s.

Schools superintendent  Dr Erin is trying to answer this change, open to better understandings of this homeschool lifestyle movement that is having good impact:  the closings are not the well to do parishes in the main, but less wealthy (exceptions should be studied) ones.  For example, she is trying to consolidate 5 empty parish schools into one for a hybrid educational scope and sequence platform.

Cardinal McElroy: we are IN THIS TOGETHER!   

I support parish schools believe it or not, in different ways, trying for two years even with roses to sit down with Dr Erin; I am NOT the enemy.

I do an annual scholarship program honoring my dead wife, who was sent off from Holy Family Cathedral (proto) with 1400 funeral  attendees after 900 prayed the rosary days before at St Anthony Claret.   Your excellency, Bishop Pham, you have the resources in your diocese to accomplish peace but it will take diplomacy and love to repair this unforced error.

And we can’t ignore the golden rule: he who has the gold, rules.  Look at our gender fluids cinematic sillies producing Newsom Twosome: Jan 15, 2024:  Prop 98 K-12 per-pupil funding. The governor’s state budget states that 2024-25 funding per student in attendance will be $17,653 Proposition 98 General Fund and $23,519 per pupil when the contribution of all sources including property taxes are included

Cardinal, I don’t believe your preferred CAtholic students’ parents get $23,519 per year per kid, nor your schools see a $million per classroom. Why not FIGHT for it!!

Some states are “allowing”, as if they own the kids and budgets, some funds (school choice, something too many fight off due to fear) for parents to direct for education.  So kind of those state wide bureaucrats!  Another day?

First, we must agree that every Catholic student between 6-18 needs to be catechized and educated, NOT indoctrinated in each ordinary (diocese).  This is in keeping with each bishop’s charge by the Pontiff to provide solid religious education by the most appropriate means possible for EVERY child and teen to “build up the greater Church”.  Innovation is okay too!  When we shuttered schools and Churches this decade, unlike the Spanish Flu, the Black Plague etc, it left a mortal (though curable) wound that will take years maybe a generation to recover from.   So, why alienate YOUR students while success is occurring.

Yes, I’m one of those never jabbed Dr Pfaucinstein detractors since basic research showed the godless Mao Tse Xi’s (pronounced Say Cheese) incubated the escaped lab virus in his 11 millionWuhan human incubators before unleashing to the world.

I can’t force my Church to practice good science and research via Covid Chronicles, much less end this silly “Man can overheat the planet climate change heresy.  Some day someone will rise to the occasion and shout “the Algorean heresy is dangerous and evil.”  Just watch.

By Godincidence, I knew one of the first Covid California vics who died on Feb 16, 2020; he was a professor who taught Wuhan students here in SoCal.  And confession, at 27, I am still on a solid regimen of Hydroxychloroquine/Ivermectin/D3/Quercetin/Zinc and other supplements with much success.  We see no myocardia induced by Pfaucinstein’s potions.

  I know, I know, I will die from that fish tank cleaning horse parasite tubed medicines that your medical suppressionist government mRNA pushers foisted on a world of “Sunday Sunday” taking African and C/Sinai Dr Wallace HCQ users impervious to the SARS/Covid disease.

Off my soap box.

I know financial times are tough, in the wake of sexual abuse settlements and Covid reaction.  But San Diego parishes apparently welcome non homeschooling outside groups, a line item profit center issue, to supersede CAtholic student needs.  i am hoping, when cooler heads convene to discuss, this will be shown as a typo.

2nd Truths: understand the problem has been decades in the making. we have gone from low parish teachers’ salaries in the 60s -80s & last century, due to teaching sisters at most elementary and high schools; as this changed to lay humans filling the teaching rolls, and since they need higher income than squat sisterhood stipends to buy luxuries like food, shelter and gas, the cost of education at parish based schools rose. With 17.8% hyperinflation with a fallen away Catholic puppet in the white house, PRECIPITOUSLY.   As well as at parochial high schools.

Quick Aside:  How can ANY Catholic vote for the most rabid prebirth baby killers (the Kill Mill Jill & Obamanational Kamaleon and Timmy Tampon).  If it wasn’t for 501c3, maybe the pulpit could explain this dilemma as if we were black AME churches. 

Costs ARE up!  My ten siblings and I had 126 years of Catholic elementary and high school education (StAnthony Claret, Servite and Rosary) at nominal cost: I started, as the oldest, at $200/yr which doubled by graduation in 1970 (put the calculators down, smarties!) to $400.  Now, it is much higher.

The evil during this time is we in the Church are second class financial citizens to the property tax/40% of the general fund confiscation for California Ed Dept controlled by the UTLA and Calif Teachers Union.  And Catholic schools have a much better “product/service” to offer year in year out EG: A governor was paid a million to go Hollywood for Mrs. Gender Fluidics Newsom’s documentaries.

Currently, $25,000 allocated to each child and teen; a 40 desk room means one million dollars is available per classroom; using LA as example, the results for all this cash, is 78 teens graduate per 100 seniors and at a math and English core subject proficiency of 35%.   The second largest public school district in America; and they want MORE without improvement  This is OUTRAGEOUS.  Catholics pay property taxes too, governor!

School choice SHOULD be pushed by our Church, even if only $10,000 per student to choose with, leaving $15,000 more in spoils for the Axis of Education Newsoms, Bonta and Tony Thurmond to spread around.  Why?  It’s just!  Reasonable! and Fair!  At least think about it.

Cardinals, bishops, priests and laity: everyone can win IF we come humbly with the facts.  And you want to compete with homeschooling?  $10k per student infusion will push the marginally budgeted parish schools into the blackest black.  Think about that one! Inner city excuses no more.  Families would choose their parishes knowing their vouchers can be cashed at ST. xxx’s offices. 

What IS critical, is the public sector government schools are NOT improving despite ample cash; with abortion at higher than pandemic Covid levels, public schools have enrollments declining as well…in some forced immigrant/alien infusion cities, you have 20year old non English speakers registering for freshmen high school  And it is easier to squeeze a buck out of a mango than from the UTLA/CTA owned California Teachers Association.  But it MUST happen.

Cardinal McE. et al: have you seen why encouraging both parish based and home based CAtholic education is critical mass and a win-win? Go to a public school board and open your eyes why we must RETHINK how we see our catechetical responsibilities and fight over real estate usage, with or without empty classrooms.

Leg#3: IF we want to be Catholic parish educators, teach Catholic.  At least, Catholic homeschooling schools are usually 100% Catholic and focused on teaching the Magisterium and solid Catholic values.

Parishes are thriving across America that teach Catholicism instead of the latest ideological pablum.

If only you understood the righteous power the laity AND hierarchy have in advancing the Gospel IN the marketplace of ideas and real world…

Cardinal McElroy, I bet you don’t even know the percentage of Catholic/non Catholic students ratio in your former diocese’s schools.  In God’s eyes, you have actual Catholic families trying to break the parish glass ceilings and UP the percentage of Catholic kids educated using parish facilities.

I know the source of this Sept 1 policy edict came, not from homeschoolers but a Catholic parish parent or a misinformed priest.

Your excellency, you’ve had at least one well healed, wealthy Catholic parish school parent complain, as well as teachers, about the unwashed Catholic homeschool element.

This is no different than Donna and I’s decades as DREs: in the last century, Donna and I put up and joyfully solved the complaints of Catholic school teachers and parents that those “unwashed” CCD/Religious Ed/Catechism kids who move our desks and pencils around on Tuesday nights or over the weekend.

Smart DREs today, photograph (films a lot cheaper these days with iPhones)and make sure the desks and pencils are all aligned, out of respect for the parents’ kids coming Monday or Wed morn. It really is basic boy scout “leave the place better or same than when you first came.” But, desks don’t mind being shared: it’s the human race that has difficulty.

But as chief catechist of the Diocese of St James, Cardinal McElroy, you might have to be bold and tell the current Catholic parents who complained, that they don’t “own” the classrooms (they were paid for by previous alums and families), any more than selling the Sistine chapel will satisfy the critics the Catholic Church is too wealthy.   Complainers will complain; take the wisdom and implement but don’t spite your nose to do cosmetic facials: be the Leader God has called you too.  The Holy Spirit imparts wisdom, like Solomon’s first gifts last Testament were wisdom NOT wealth.

We ALL know, in our heart of hearts, where the real Church treasure is.  Ask St Lawrence!  When he produced the “wealth of the church” to the emperor, it wasn’t golden Ciboria but the poor, the lame, the disabled and on Cosmos and Damien day, for your edification your excellency, I present the unwashed homeschoolers who want to be treated as equals.  No more, certainly not less.

It took courage for St Lawrence to show the truth, show the real Catholic treasures and all he got was the BBQ.  Like other Church heroes, his comments live on:  “Turn me over, I’m done on this side!”

In retrospect, I think helping the wheelchaired, walker and blind folks in the 4 hour Registration line, a volunteer as needed, got me in trouble, on the watch list for the NEC security team; especially when I tossed roses to Lila Rose and got permission and hugged an old armless grieving friend on stage (Tony Melendez) central that Friday July 19th.

As happens in my Church experience, I’ve heard back from Bishop Cozzens, CEO Jason Shanks, Sarah Houde but NOT the Lucas Oil general manager or ANY NEC Catholic leadership why I was threatened with arrest if I did not go willingly at high noon on a St Joseph day (the 19th).  It’s only been two years…but then, no good deed goes unpunished. I will continue to spread by joy the Gospel, today refined, of the Proud GodFather’s love for His Eucharistic Eternal Son…someday you will hear about Giza’s role, in the Father’s Birth Reveal and Holy Family’s night time flight toward Cairo and its established Jewish settlement, but let’s settle these family issues first.   

All, it is a time where boldness and respectful fearlessness is critical transformative values of our Church.  We must readopt them to turn our decaying world around.

I’ve never seen a priest or bishop at a local school board during the public comments 3 minute segments.  Do you have any idea, while we are fighting over real estate usage (there are plenty of empty school bldgs) instead of pushing for a reasonable cut of the ed pie or accommodating some of the Cardinal’s unwashed homeschoolers?  Go to your local board and see what I and others, like Sonja Shaw, president of Chino Valley SB, see. She is now running for the Calif superintendent of public instruction role.

Gather facts before publishing edicts.  What has this to do with homeschoolers and parish classes? You read and tell me.

Here’s my script this year:  “with all due respect, xx school board leaders, why are you so focused on spaying our daughters like they are 3 legged junk yard dogs? We hire you to educate not indoctrinate with silly ideologies.  Are you willing to risk our girls being groomed by dysphoric teachers’ aides and see further lawsuits over the latest suicide when a few years hence, Suzy wakes up and realizes she will never nurse the little girl she will NEVER have/bear?   Must I repeat, I have just a minute: when you, without our parental permission, help end Suzy’s confusion over being a boy by chainsawing off her breasts and shredding her vagina and other internals, do you realize just maybe it’s time to be the adults in the classroom?  You are just NOT satisfied with kill milling prebirth children, you go after them after they are born”.   

Less than 180 seconds but our civic duty is Catholic.

Yes, I use clinical words because, well, our Catholic teachings are stumbling over the clinical “gender dysphoria”(there’s nothing euphoric about this crisis of lies) just as bad as the public ie government schools system.  Confusion. God created them, male and female.  Heal thyself needs to occur on so many levels. We MUST stop serving the godless and get our fearless and bold juices back.  Time is short, maybe too short.

This is too long already; stop digging the hole Len.

I’ll donate $99 (it honors the beloved homeschooling mom who died on Sept 9th, 2011) as stipend rental Bishop Pham and Cardinal McElroy, for the first parish that realizes, in your diocese, that having Catholic homeschoolers on campus (like they are AA, Knights of Columbus, bingo if they must) is a blessing not a curse.  Especially since most of them, parents and kids, are involved directly and have their kids participate in sacramental programs.

In fact, so many of your priests, your excellency, already know this basic fact.  But someone in the Chancery, in the department of “coddle the noisy Catholic parish school parent so they don’t leave as well” is a threat best served cold.

God owns the buildings but He doesn’t pay for the electricity; I know.  Although He supplies some of the wind and solar to generate it.  The Twins feast day was interesting for me: I helped at a homeschooling coop at a public park and then attended mid day Mass back in the OC where the pastor had a special blessing for the homeschooling families in attendance.  Odd world sometimes.  Competition may not be the best word but it IS okay to teach your diocese the obvious:

“Homeschooling is a choice, NOT a crime.  It is a lifestyle worth pursuing”.  If you decide on private, the parish (or consolidated parishes) has a school for you. Public, as the school board commentary shows, is NOT the best option.

Yes, let’s stop these shovel ready unforced errors NOW. Cardinal McElroy, listen to your people.   Homeschoolers take showers and supply a higher percentage of the priestly ANSWERED vocations but don’t change your unwashed opinion just to get more consecrated hands in your rectories.  Do it because:

The world is dying for us to do the right thing.

Len Beckman  “It IS a great day to be alive AND Lord use me as You Will, not mine.” ~ my daily starter

Len is dad of 11, PapaLen to 22 grandkids and still homeschooling after 40+ years.  He served as youth minister for 15 years at St Callistus/now Christ Cathedral, DRE/YM at St Anthony Claret for 10 and Holy Family, first Cathedral of the Orange diocese until 2012. Scoutmaster emeritus for T#1123.  Married a never married beauty, Mary at Nativity church on an 8th of the month; not many stepmoms start out with 12 kids (including her hubby).  He continues as a real estate broker after 33 years helping folks make housing choices.  Involved in theater, from producing to clapping for his and others’ kids.  Long time rose supplier to vulnerable moms at Planned Parenthoodlums OC HQ and other proLife activities.  After all, EVERY life is worth living and souls like Kamala and Tim need saving.
Len sees half full glasses, tries to be a diplomat as needed, ‘ambassador to the ailing’ at NEC who STILL awaits first contact from an NEC official re the promised interrogation report sans arrest, that resulted in his banishment to witness to seven Events staffer and Thomas Payne at his car.  Miracles DO happen when we focus on doing good for others.

Thank you for your prayer for Larissa.  Include, if reading this on St Vincent de Paul day, my Rosie’s birthday.  As the commercial says, “results are not guaranteed..” but in our 40 something homeschooling adventure, we have 12 college degrees, a summa cum laude, 3 masters, 20 chickens, no horse but one malformed beak duck and her two drakes; and 4 families homeschooling their kids our grandkids so far.  Construction workers, communications director, comp science guru, home based moms, veterinary tech, smart sculptor, homeschooled Faustina marrying another homeschooled oldest son of 10, Elijah on Holy Innocents…we are related to a Premonstratensian Norbertine priest Fr Louis.

Thank you for your prayers; we will pray for you too!

Comments welcome below! After all IF you are a Catholic parent, you homeschooled for at least 3 year after birth.

———————————–Historical—Sara Harolds effort to get the Cardinal and Bishop Pham to change policy—————————————————

NCR article by Matthew McDonald

A home-schooling mom in the Diocese of San Diego is asking Cardinal Robert McElroy to reconsider his decision to ban home-schoolers from parish facilities, saying Catholic schools are too expensive and that using a parish building has helped her family connect with other Catholic families in a similar situation.

The mother, Sara Harold, 40, who lives in Escondido, California, shared with the Register a letter she wrote to the cardinal, responding to an announcement last month from the diocese. She told the Register she has eight children ages 2 to 17. She home-schools the oldest six.

As she lives in one of the most expensive areas of the country, she said, her family cannot afford to send their children to Catholic school, even if with a significant discount.

One example: The nearest Catholic secondary, she said, is Cathedral Catholic High School in San Diego, where tuition for the 2024-2024 school year is $20,910 if paid in a lump sum. (The school also offers tuition assistance based on financial need and 10 full scholarships a year, according to its website.)

Another factor: She noted that many Catholic schools have “consistently struggled with providing accommodations for students with special needs, learning disabilities, and unconventional or challenging learning styles.”

“In-classroom education is a beautiful thing and works very well for many students — but not for all,” Harold wrote. “It is incredibly important that parents feel supported when they decide that a classroom-based education is not best for their children, and so they switch to home-based education. Whatever the reasons, parents ought to be able to decide what is best for their children, and we ought to have the support of our faith communities in making those decisions.”

In mid-September, the diocese announced that, going forward, home-schoolers will not be allowed to use parish property for cooperatives of home-schooling families and other gatherings.

Religious education appears to be one flashpoint.

Following up on the initial mid-September announcement of the ban, Cardinal McElroy issued a statement last week suggesting home schooling is providing “a parallel educational model” with Catholic schools that the diocese can’t and shouldn’t endorse. He expressed concern about home-school cooperatives “seeking to establish programs on parish sites” that include “religious formation or sacramental preparation programs within the parish setting that are dedicated specifically for home-school students.” According to the cardinal, this “has become a source of tension within the diocese.”

But the new policy goes beyond religious education, barring all home-school programs from parish property.

Cardinal McElroy said the diocese’s presbyteral council (which includes the bishops and several priests of the diocese) voted 13-1 in favor of the new policy banning home-schoolers around mid-September and that he approved it.

“The Diocese supports the decision of a growing number of parents to choose home schooling for their children. At the same time this support does not include a right for basing integral elements of home-schooling programs in parish settings. Home schooling is not inherently a ministry of the parish,” Cardinal McElroy said his statement. “As a consequence, home-school programs will not be provided designated special access to the parish facilities of the Diocese of San Diego.”

The new statement from Cardinal McElroy follows on the earlier announcement from the diocese that home-school programs are barred from using parish facilities “both because such usage can undermine the stability of nearby Catholic schools and lead people to think that the Church is approving and advancing particular alternative schools and programs.”

But Harold said in her letter that using parish facilities for home-schooling cooperatives has been valuable to help her “in connecting with other women, and connecting my children with other children, to form Catholic communities based around our parishes where we can supplement our home-based education with social events and extracurricular classes.”

She told Cardinal McElroy that she offered him her letter in the spirit of what she described as the cardinal’s “many words you have spoken in support of a listening, synodal Church.”

“I know that you are committed to listening to those on the margins, whose voices are not often heard by the leaders of the institutional Church, and that you value the opinions of the women who too often sit silently in the pews,” she wrote. “I feel confident that you will read this message graciously and respond with the loving heart of a good shepherd.”

Harold told the Register that her letter has gotten about 250 co-signers, most of them women.

The Register asked a spokesman for the diocese for comment on the letter Thursday morning, but did not hear back by publication. The Register has also asked for an interview with a diocesan official about the new home-schooling policy but has not yet heard back.

 

Other Home-Schoolers React

The Diocese of San Diego’s new policy has gotten the attention of home-schoolers elsewhere.

“It’s heartbreaking to read this. These are parents who want to raise their children in the faith,” said Maureen Wittman, a Michigan resident who home-schooled her children and is co-founder and co-director of Homeschool Connections, a family-owned business that provides curriculums and specialized courses for elementary and secondary students.

Wittmann said that even though she is a longtime home-schooler, she served a few years on the Diocese of Lansing’s school board for Catholic schools.

“It doesn’t have to be adversarial. We can work together,” Wittman told the Register.

One parish near where she lives, St. Joseph’s in Howell, Michigan, offers as a parish ministry a home-schooling study group for grades 6 through 12, including meeting space in a former parish preschool building “to complete the course materials, have discussions, do science labs, and attend art classes,” according to the parish’s website.

The founder of that ministry, Lindsay Carpenter, a former public-school teacher in early elementary grades, told the Register she was “kind of a reluctant home-schooler,” but she came to see the benefits of it when she was asked by home-schooling moms some years ago to teach English language arts one day a week in their homes.

Nowadays, she home-schools her four daughters, ages 16, 15, 12 and 8, and also leads the parish’s home-schooling study group, which is now in its second year. Participants — 30 kids from 19 families — often attend the church’s 8:15 a.m. Mass and then head to the former preschool building from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. to work with other kids.

She said the Diocese of Lansing and St. Joseph’s parish have welcomed the home-schoolers. She also said the home-schooling group is respectful of the parish’s kindergarten-through-eighth-grade Catholic school and gets along with it, adding that the home-schooling group has a different mission.

She said her family could never afford Catholic school. She also noted that many Catholic home-schoolers want to offer intensely individualized learning in a Catholic atmosphere while spending most or all of the day with their kids.

“This idea that home-schoolers are competing with Catholic schools, it’s nonsensical to me,” Carpenter said. “They’re just choosing another way to educate their kids.”

She said she sympathizes with home-schoolers in the Diocese of San Diego.

“I can’t imagine what California home-schoolers are going through,” Carpenter said. “If this happened to us tomorrow, we would have no group.”

 

Home Schooling on the Rise

Home schooling was a fringe activity a couple of generations ago, but nowadays it has become much more common.

story published by The Washington Post in October 2023 described what it called “a dramatic rise in home schooling” when many public schools closed during the coronavirus shutdowns of 2020 that “largely sustained itself” afterward, suggesting what it called home schooling’s “arrival as a mainstay of the American educational system.”

About 5.2% of students in the United States ages 5 to 17 received instruction at home during the 2022-2023 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, which is part of the U.S. Department of Education. (Most of those were home-schooled, though the figure from the report also includes receiving virtual instruction online at home.)

Home schooling is popular in California. A study published by Johns Hopkins School of Education reported that the home-schooling rate in California was twice as high as the national average during the coronavirus shutdowns in 2020, citing data compiled by The Washington Post. Some 46,814 students were home-schooled in California during the 2022-2023 school year, according to the study.

Local Bishop’s Authority 

Cardinal McElroy is within his rights under the Church’s canon law to prohibit home-schoolers from using parish property because he has followed the Church’s process, a canon law expert told the Register.

The pastor is the administrator of parish property. But a bishop working with the priests of the diocese’s presbyteral council has some authority over it.

“The diocesan bishop, in conjunction with the presbyteral council, can moderate how parish property is used in exercising pastoral ministry,” said David Long, a canon lawyer and dean of the School of Professional Studies at The Catholic University of America, by email, adding that a bishop “cannot take over the administration of that property” unless following guidelines set out in canon law.

Under canon law, Long said, a diocesan bishop “is best understood as the moderator of Catholic education in his diocese” — he can establish Catholic schools and determine whether schools in his diocese are Catholic, among other things. But he can’t order parents to send their kids to Catholic schools because the Church teaches that parents are the primary educators of their children and “must possess true freedom of choice in educating their children” (Canon 797).

Cardinal McElroy specifically acknowledged this parental authority in his statement explaining the new policy, stating, “Catholic teaching makes clear that parents are the first teachers of their children in faith and in choosing the educational setting for their children.”

“I believe Cardinal McElroy is within his rights canonically as the moderator of Catholic education within the Diocese of San Diego to define what home schooling means. By approving the policy passed by the diocesan presbyteral council, the cardinal is setting the parameters of where home schooling is appropriate (in the home) and inappropriate (in the parish or the parish school), and does not remove any choice from parents as to whether they should home school their children,” Long told the Register.

“He is also exercising his spiritual and sacramental authority as diocesan bishop to remove what he saw as sources of tension between parish and home-school settings in religious formation and sacramental preparation, which is again provided within canon law,” Long said.

Harold, in her letter to Cardinal McElroy, did not dispute his authority, but made an appeal based on her experience as one part of a multifaceted Church.

“Please don’t look at home-school programs as a competition for the Church’s scarce resources, but see them instead as an expression of God’s abundance, and an opportunity to accompany those who choose to approach God via a different path [from] the ones we’re used to,” Harold wrote.

She noted that Pope Francis during a talk Sept. 5 at a mosque in Indonesia encouraged listeners from various faiths to help each other “walk in search of God and contribute to building open societies, founded on reciprocal respect in mutual love.”

“Diversity in our approaches to God is one of the most striking aspects of our global faith,” Harold wrote. “… Home schooling in a Catholic context and with Catholic parish support is simply another manifestation of the beauty of Catholic education, moving toward decentralization and the empowerment of laypeople in the Church.”

 

Matthew McDonald

Matthew McDonald is a staff reporter for The National Catholic Register and the editor of New Boston Post. He lives in Massachusetts.

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Dear Cardinal McElroy,

It’s difficult for me to compose a letter to a person of power such as yourself, but I am encouraged by the many words you have spoken in support of a listening, synodal Church.  I know that you are committed to listening to those on the margins, whose voices are not often heard by the leaders of the institutional Church, and that you value the opinions of the women who too often sit silently in the pews.  I feel confident that you will read this message graciously and respond with the loving heart of a good shepherd.

I was distressed to read that the Diocese has issued a new policy prohibiting the use of parish buildings by home school programs. I currently homeschool my children, and in the past we have used parish facilities as a meeting place and to hold collective classes and social events. The diocese’s new policy states that “the purpose of parish facilities is to celebrate the good news of Jesus Christ and to serve the needs of the Catholic community.”  By allowing homeschoolers to use parish facilities, you are doing precisely that—serving the needs of a particularly marginalized community.

The new policy has been crafted out of concern for preserving the stability of Catholic schools, which are, of course, beautiful and valuable places to protect.  Catholic education, especially in America, has long served to close gaps of structural inequality by educating those on the margins of society and those trapped in poverty.  Certain schools in our diocese still try hard to pursue that goal of serving the least fortunate in our communities.  But the reality of Catholic education today is its elite status, catering to the wealthy in affluent communities, and remaining out of reach for the poor and middle-class.  Pope Francis began his papacy by calling for “a poor church, for the poor,” and has reiterated that call consistently, but I think we need to ask ourselves if Catholic education in our diocese today truly reflects Pope Francis’s vision?

By global standards my family is well off, secure with enough food to eat and a safe place to live, and for that I am extremely grateful.  But by the standards of San Diego County – one of the most expensive places to live in our nation, and therefore in the entire world – we are certainly not “wealthy” and could never afford a Catholic education.

I currently have six school-aged children; if I were to send them all to the closest Catholic schools, the sticker price for that education would be over $65,000 per year.  I know that Catholic schools offer financial aid as much as they can, and if we were actually to attend we would probably not end up paying that much – but even half or a quarter of that amount is a prohibitively large price, when we already live in an area notorious for its extremely high cost of living.  Catholic schools are simply out of reach for us and for many Catholics in the diocese.

In addition, Catholic education has consistently struggled with providing accommodations for students with special needs, learning disabilities, and unconventional or challenging learning styles.  In-classroom education is a beautiful thing and works very well for many students—but not for all.  It is incredibly important that parents feel supported when they decide that a classroom-based education is not best for their children, and so they switch to home-based education.  Whatever the reasons, parents ought to be able to decide what is best for their children, and we ought to have the support of our faith communities in making those decisions.

As a woman and as a mother, I know my children and their needs, and I am thankful that I have the ability and the privilege to choose what is best for their education.  I feel called to accompany other women who also decide that home-based education is best for their children’s academic, social, and emotional needs.  My identity as a Catholic is also deeply important to me, and I believe that the Church as a body should likewise accompany those who choose alternative forms of education for their children.  The use of parish facilities can be crucial to providing a setting for this accompaniment.  I have found great value in connecting with other women, and connecting my children with other children, to form Catholic communities based around our parishes where we can supplement our home-based education with social events and extra-curricular classes. In this, we have used parish facilities “to celebrate the good news of Jesus Christ and to serve the needs of the Catholic community” by claiming our right to participate, as lay women, in “the teaching mission of the Church.”  You have tirelessly advocated for the rights of women in the church—to me, homeschool ministry has been the most concrete expression of women’s participation in Church life.  Every homeschool group that meets at a Catholic parish is headed by women, led by women, supported by women, and serves the needs of women and children.  This is an area in which the Catholic Church has empowered women to participate deeply and meaningfully.  I beg you not to dismantle this carelessly.

Please don’t look at homeschool programs as a competition for the Church’s scarce resources, but see them instead as an expression of God’s abundance, and an opportunity to accompany those who choose to approach God via a different path than the ones we’re used to.  Pope Francis recently spoke movingly of the many paths that lead to God.  He encouraged us to accompany those on different paths so that each “may walk in search of God and contribute to building open societies, founded on reciprocal respect and mutual love, capable of protecting against rigidity, fundamentalism and extremism.”  Diversity in our approaches to God is one of the most striking aspects of our global faith.  Please, Cardinal McElroy, do not approach Catholic education with a harmful rigidity that insists on “Catholic education” taking only one form of in-classroom education.  Catholics have often been at the forefront of educational progress and innovation.  Homeschooling in a Catholic context and with Catholic parish support is simply another manifestation of the beauty of Catholic education, moving toward decentralization and the empowerment of lay people in the church.

Thank you for taking the time to read my letter and hear my heartfelt concerns.  I truly appreciate your commitment to building an inclusive, listening church, and I urge you to consider the voices of those encouraging you to reconsider this new policy.

In Christ,

Sara Harold

We, the undersigned, join our voices in asking Cardinal McElroy to allow the use of diocesan and parish facilities as gathering spaces for Catholic lay ministries, including home-based educational groups.
Please add your name & city to sign the letter.
~~~~~end of Sara Harold’s efforts~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Bishop Michael Pham, tear down this outrageous wall of separation.  You have the power but do you have the nerve? thank you for considering!

Len
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Len’s resume~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Len’s resume follows:

Len Beckman                                  June, 2026 revision                                               

514  N Cherry Tree Lane  Anaheim CA 92806  Cell:  714-267-1413    Email: Lenbeckman@gmail.com      Lenbeckman@M3Real.com  (Real estate brokerage email)

Quick Exec Summary:   Donna who art in heaven and I, Catholic homeschooled for 40+years and our 11th is now 22 and graduated; a good time to branch out a bit.  Stepmom Mary for 7 years is a solid Catholic blessing.

Objective

Interview regarding speaker/presenter to various environments, consultant reflecting years of experience in/as youth director, confirmation coordinator/director, youth and young adult ministry, faith formation director or related Catholic ministries

Current Catholic Involvements

Daily Mass, as schedule permits, at St Norberts (Lector), St Martin de Poores, Holy Family, St Anthony Claret, Christ Cathedral.  Often lead Acapella and/or sing Eucharist Song except where not desired (temporarily St Norbert’s, Christ Cathedral)

At St Norbert’s until his relocation to another parish, was available for YM Abraham and now Patty,  to help with confirmation and youth ministry when called upon.   Lector at St Norbert’s 6 times monthly, some weekdays and Saturday. We continue the Donna Beckman Memorial Scholarship at St Norbert School scholarship but with less involvement and exhortations per staff request.

Active Rose ministry to moms leaving hell central PP,  and supply our sidewalk ‘warriors’ at PP’s kill mill on Tustin @ 22.  Routinely arrive at PP 6:45am Wed to pray for the white bucket prebirth human remains that unlicensed mortuary science planned parenthoodharvest.  Routinely meet the Veolia medical waste/ human remains disposal whenever possible.   Promoting to Pope Leo and US bishops a low hanging fruit program (aka Holy Innocents Burial Program) to secure/even buy back the Catholic and other dead bucket babies for proper burial/interment (pray for the Veolia driver and security guy James).

Assist at homeschooling cooperatives 10 months of the year once a week. Continue to speak at different ministries and parishes on a variety of subjects and provide music as requested.  Provide positive exhortationist services, such as monthly happy birthday guitar work with seasoned St Norberts parishioners, Surprise&Celebrate events as requested. Currently and occasionally provide PLO or permanent latrine orderly services for St Michael’s Abbey for the men’s restrooms when needed. Men can be sooooo sloppy.

For ten years, post pieces on my life issues site called lifeoutloudest.com on various subjects; support many of Relevant Radio’s ministries, prolife efforts of  Life Centers of OC, LiveACTION, Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust, Operation Rescue and others as needs occur..

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Defacto volunteering for the National Eucharistic Congress (NEC)  July 2024

Stepmom Mary and I traveled to Indianapolis, INDiana to attend the NEC.

Wednesday, July 17th, When we arrived, we noticed the Registration Line was hours.  Outside, I engaged in concierge activities with the line, the homeschooling families, sisters of different orders etc; I was approached and engaged for ten minutes by Noah from the protestant church Aleita gently discussing why we are here and why Catholic. Noah, father of 4 kids under five (No, he is NOT Catholic, although I mentioned he’d make a good one.  He was surprised I had 11 offspring).

Inside the exhibit hall and registration hall, I noticed numerous elderly and disabled, including wheelchair, walkers and even a blind man waiting IN LINE for hours;  volunteered by action and moved the disabled/challenged to the front registration tables since as Catholics, spiritual and corporal works of mercy are plain: do not abandon the needy and vulnerable. About 25 were helped including 90 yr old Ann from Minnesota who had been to the 1941 NEC in Chicago.  She plans on making it to the 2033 or 2029, God willing!

That  evening was filled with the arriving pilgrims and Adoration.

Thursday, July 18th   Enjoyed the family rosary, Mass, speakers; visited friends and ministries we support, like Relevant Radio, Franciscan Steuby, and others.  Afternoon, food run to Krogers and picked up roses for the sister orders we loved and some extras for a toss to Lila Rose before her presentation on her conversion that evening.   Love those Sisters of Charity, Sacred Heart sisters, LiveAction etc.

Friday, July 19, 2024  “No good deed goes unpunished segment”

Got  permission to give a quick 20 second long hug to a great friend Tony Melendez who lost his only son.10 minutes later,the Keystone Lucas Oil police ushered me to their interrogation room to demand answers to questions like “what were you thinking partner (police chief Billy X)” and as if from the book 1984: “IF we hadn’t given you permission (to hug Tony), we would have tackled you on stage.”  17 minutes interrogation for 20 second corporal act of mercy.   Given two choices: leave immediately for good(noon day two, mind you of the 5 day event) or we will arrest you for ‘trespassing’ and cart you away.  I took the high road by not demanding a Matt18:15 face to face with the event directors as a paying customer, no suicide vest and peaceful Catholic for 70+years, but to this day even the director Bishop Andrew Cozzens (he called me) had any idea why I was banned.

Next step is Bishop Thomas, the ordinary of Indianapolis for help getting the promised audio/visual recording and answers since it was in his diocese.  Plus, contact the Indianapolis city attorney regarding FOIA response.

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Qualifications

Involved in Catholic church ministries for the majority of my adult life, and have extensive work in youth related Catholic formation and ministry.  Past roles include Youth and Young Adults Dir., Confirmation Dir., RCIA Coordinator for adults/children, DRE/DFF, on-site Basic Certification classes coordinator/host/presenter, music minister/director in large segments beginning in 1968 through 2012, presenters at youth events over three decades including speaking, mentoring, lead group  praise and worship, music, youth choir training.  Over 100 Retreats: written, led and participated over three decades one day, weekend, Confirmation and weeklong retreats, scouting venturing for youth ministry

Staff/Work History

7/1/08 – 3/18/12    Youth & Young Adults Ministry Director, Holy Family Cathedral, Orange

Responsibilities and efforts included three weekly youth ministry evenings, weekly support for Confirmation teens and coordinator, weekly Wed morning Mass pre-youth ministry music ministry, praise and worship, retreats, jr. hi support when requested, middle school/ jr. high retreats including NET; Eucharistic Minister, hiking & athletic events, youth lector training, young adults/leadership team development including LifeTeen & IPM, inclusive support for other parish ministries,  Teens4Life and other small group youth groupings, wrote & used YM eBlasts, developed web presence and computer systems despite challenging intraparish network platforms, including Facebook and other social media, appropriate text messaging, text/FB teachings,  iPad, smart phone utilization, YouthAssist, MSPublisher, newsletters, parent ed modules, multi-image presentations, CrossWalk for Christ, FaithOlympics, PrayItForward parish outreach/evangelization, innovative Stations, LifeTeen, various service opportunities, like PrayIt4ward, Hike2theCross. Have been using Excel, Word, Powerpoint, Pub and Office suite since first beta test copies at Digital Equipment Corp.

Attempted to be collaborative (new Catechetical guidelines) and inclusive, but not intrusive, with other parish ministries, mentor the teens, help their parents, and young adults, to be formed and energized members of the Church; and other parish youth leaders in the Southern California dioceses.   References from other ministry leaders available upon request.

Latest stats: 85 YM youth peer ministers, 190 Confirmation teens under my Conf Dir guidance, young adults, well-received NET 7th/8th grade one-day retreat for 120, packed Cathedral for Stations presentation, Wed/Fri/Sun youth nights, assisted Carmela occasionally with FF classes, Becky with Embrace by Love, music for Wed morning Mass, leading music and training 2nd/4th or 3rd/5th parish school kids; 60+ participants on Winter Retreat to Pine Summit, assisted in helping missing HFC teens and followup, youth lectors & Eucharistic ministers,weekly praise and worship at youth events, video/media, incessant photographic work via iPad, Canon, video and extensive Facebook opportunity teachings and teen encouragements, Parent Ed/Team, including Pam Hurwitz presentation in Feb, parents nights out, etc.   Reason for change/leaving:  Parish ‘forced’ to cut costs and consolidate, position ended midyear when the Diocese of Orange purchased the Crystal Cathedral

 

7/1//06 – 6/30/07     Dir. of Religious Education (Faith Formation) St. Anthony Claret, Anaheim  We hired a youth minister!

7/1/95 – 6/30/06     Dir. of Religious Education, Confirmation and Youth Ministry   St. Anthony Claret, Anaheim, CA

Responsible for preschool through young adults, Eucharist and Confirmation, RCIA (now OCIA) and other programs

Reason for change/leaving: position modified 2006 and eliminated 2007 due in part to$600,000 school debt and Spanish as first language CRE.  We are hired at will by the bishop

7/1/1980 – 6/30/95  Youth Ministry and Confirmation Coordinator  St. Callistus  Garden Grove

Only parish I left voluntarily;  income was $600/mo over 15 years…             The St. Anthony Claret pastor worked with me at St. Callistus, and recruited Donna & I to Anaheim.

Education/Mentoring

1970- 1975                    BA & Master’s Degree Business Admin, Cal State University @ Fullerton

1975                             Youth Ministry Certification ed program

1980 – present             Beginnings and Beyond, Diocesan formation/IPM classes (including two full years @SAC with Dr. George re: Basic Cert),  UofDayton online class, decades of annual Religious Ed congresses, monthly Youth Ministry in-services over three decades, Group YM conf., Youth Day, Steubenville Ariz/San Diego, 3 times World Youth Day catechesis in Rome, Toronto and Kolon Germany (2000,2002, 2005

Volunteer Experience

1994 – 2012                   Scoutmaster 1123 and committee member BSA pack, troop and venturing YM.      Plan to resign leadership role to free up Monday evenings Aug 2012

1984 -2014                    Board member, Life Centers of Orange County, President and other roles.  Still support via promotion and alternative to Planned Parenthood kill mill on Tustin at 22 fwy in Orange

 

1978-1980                     Volunteer youth leader, St. John the Baptist, St. Joachim, St. Boniface

76-79; 68-71                  Sunday morning and/or Sun night youth liturgy music leader, St. Anthony

Additional involvements inside and outside of parish roles:

Served in leadership roles, including various youth ministry committees, World Youth Day leadership on Tony Melendez/Steve Angrisano trips in 2000,2002,2005;

Diocesan events including ROCfest, Feast of Fools, annual Yosemite youth ministry outings, Ski Utah retreat and ski events in 80s, six annual Summer Joy events, multiple Winter Joys, annual Steubenville youth conferences in Arizona and San Diego, in-home young adult outreaches.  Developed and led retreats from 1979 through 2012 Winter Retreat. Led and/or participated in music ministry at Mass, on retreats and conferences (guitar and vocals) spanning three decades, led prayer meetings and provided music leadership, training for youth leadership teams.  Produced at personal cost multi-image multiple screen presentations (as Camfel does) in 80s.  Helped develop safety education programming and implementation, beginning with Adam Walsh/and subsequent, including parish wide abuse awareness efforts at SAC, To Save a Life and similar at Holy Family, member Focus 2020 team for the diocese, and ongoing continuing ed.

References  (Phone numbers upon request)

@ Holy Family

Carmela Treanor—Dir Faith Formation           Jen, Greg & Becky Davis-Dir Pastoral Ministry    Chris Hanna-exec asst to Msgr Doug        Lisa, Andrew (y) and Sara (y) Rezner                        Dr. Steve and Sylvia Van Wye      Margaret Harlow-HFPS Principal   Marie Ubl-asst.

Jeff, Tina and Hannah (y) Vore

various teachers at HFPS    John & Athena Galasso   Jill Muckenthaler       Dave, Grace and Vinnie Morris    Theresa Morris   Felipe Mationg  Chris Sherrick   Gary Salazar   Pat and Brittany (Swanek) Morrison      David & Stephanie, David (y) Hernandez                               Guy, Anne and Hannah (y) Spangenberg     Kathy Woodling      CJ Woodling                                  Kevin Wohler/Mrs. Wohler   Bob, Felicia, Aidan Hamm  Jason & Ana Borboa                                 Jonathan & Megan Velte      Debbie Salas  Steve Cruikshank                                                              Newlyweds Mr. and Mrs. Steve and Julianne (Dailey) Flathers                                                       Jerry, Linda, David (y) and Scott (y) Flathers     Sean Gibson (y)  Charlie, Carolyn & Katherine Topf     Jim, Becky, Matt Wiencek    Robert & Joseph (y) Solano  Ryan and Richard Rogers                        Tim, Jan, Anna(y) and Alex(y) Hirota   Chad and Chase(y)  Keller   (Bishop’s next door neighbors)           The Phelans    Wally & Harriet Drazba  Oralie Enos   Fred Mountcastle      Mr. and Mrs. Matsumiya,            Cori Matsumiya (y)   Jessica Paolucci White   Michael White

Jacob-4th grade prayer partner on Wed through 3/18/12     He must be married by now!

Additional upon request

Outside HFC

Armando Cervantes~Dir of Youth & Young Adults Dio of Orange    Mike Donaldson-National Evangelization Team Regional leader  Pam Hurwitz~counsultant     Maureen Ross—DFF St. Callistus    Mike McHenry (RIP)—DFF St. Juliana   Fred Whitaker—OC councilman      Tita Smith –Catholic Charities          Ruth Rozak—Life Center and HFC parishioner   Tony Melendez  Catholic musician and speaker (first met Sept 1987 and traveled with Tony and  Steve Angrisano at three World Youth Days as volunteer leader

Bishops  Most excellent Jaime Soto, Dio of Sacramento  Bishop Tim Freyer Kevin Vann

Bishop Cozzens NEC director 

Priests/Religious    Fathers Will Goldin,Fr. Rockey Hoffman CEO of Relevant Radio, Fr. Bao rector of Christ Cathedral, Fr. Tim, Fr. Mike Hanifin, Fr. Kerry Beaulieu, Fr. Joe Knerr, Fr. John Bradley, Msgr. Don, Fr. Bill Cao, Fr. Quan, Fr. Martin Bui, Sister John Ellen,  Fr. Miguel, Fr. Matt, Fr. Steve Sallot  (from 1980s Ski Utah  trips),  Fr. Joe Justice.  Among others… My life long friend, now retired, Fr Hanifin who was a fellow youth minister in 1980-1981 before he entered seminary.  I married Donna (now in heaven if not purgatory) who bore the 11 amazing kids.  Never-married Mary said “Yes” to 12 kids  in 2019, the 11 original and you can guess the 12th.   God IS Good! Actually GREAT!   After all it IS a great day to be alive!

Zoom or in person interviews welcome.  How can I help YOU!?

Len Beckman

 

Personal information:  11 kids, youngest is 22 yrs old. 22   24 grandkids

Current employment     Broker/Owner of Millennium 3 Real Estate since founding in 2000 to honor the Trinity as we moved past Y2K and into the newest, the third millennium. Experienced in trust, probate, corporate

as well as residential, commercial, investors, buyers and of course sellers.   With the rise in techno-fraud and corruption, doing a lot in real property forensics to protect my clients and the innocent in general

Coming in late 2026, a book focused on Real Property Crimes, including actual cases; the book’s working title is TRUE (real property) CRIMES; I know it needs work.

Byline will be “Bizarre Ways People Rob other Humans of their wealth”

 

Errata

Song writing. The Ballad to the Pope of Hope…and Peace Leo XiV the Lover   2025 /2026.  The Ballad will continue as long as I and/or Pope Leo are alive

Catholic and general writer   Continue to write:  Published a novel loosely based on Chesterton’s Fr Brown series titled “The Confessions of Father Pio Vianney”, thematically two excellent examples of parish priests and his involvement in SoCal parish life.  Numerous articles on varied subjects of faith, theology, science and politics.

1980s  Donnel Imagineering youth productions.  Created multi-screen youth presentations in the 1980s titled “Now is the Time” and other titles using computer controlled imagery with mixed sound and music long before today’s technology simplified the process. Presented at churches, schools, the Pasadena Convention Center and other venues.  Company was named “Donnel Imagineering” and did shorts and full lengths through 80s.

Musical Theatre Producer.  The Christian musical “The Witness” for the youth of the Orange Diocese; hat tip to Jimmy & Carol Owens, the writers. 1980thru1983

Created a ministry corporation. We were incorporated it as “Miracle Production Ministry” so the Summer Joy (annual Dio of Orange program) teens could continue to perform. We traveled to southern California churches, various sites like Vandenberg AFBase, Palm Springs and various OC & LA, inland empire Diocese parishes.

Kids Musicals for our 11 and other families 

We were involved in about 15 different youth musicals over the years

Safe Environment Continuing Ed Training. 

In the 90s, we originated one of the earliest youth safety training for our religious ed students and the parish program based on the Adam Walsh protocols.  I have taken at least six “follow up” sessions with organizations like Virtu and now the latest “A Safe Haven~Its Up to You~Orange” August 13, 2025   Good thru 2028

I follow Pope St John Paul the Great’s advice

“It is assigned to every man the dignity of every woman”

Questions are welcome

Len 714 267 1413 <>  Lenbeckman@gmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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