William DuBay

William Henry DuBay was a Catholic priest and activist whose activities and suspension from the priesthood created controversy in the mid-1960s. He has since published widely on Church reform, gay rights, and plain language.

Born in 1934 in Long Beach, California, William H. DuBay attended public and Catholic schools before entering Los Angeles College Junior Seminary at the age of 13. After graduating and attending St. John's Major Seminary in Camarillo, California, he was ordained for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles in May 1960.

While stationed in a segregated white section of San Fernando Valley, DuBay became very interested in the civil rights movement . After publishing a Sunday newsletter calling on Catholics to support integration, he was disciplined and sent to a racially mixed parish in Compton, CA. While there, he attempted to organize other priests who also had been disciplined to protest the Cardinal's racial policies.

In June, 1964, he sent a cable to Pope Paul VI asking him to remove Cardinal McIntyre from office as Archbishop of Los Angeles for "conducting a vicious campaign of intimidation against priests, nuns, and lay Catholics" supporting the civil-rights movement.

DuBay wrote, "His Eminence has condemned direct action demonstrations on the grounds that they incite violence. But as a matter of fact he has contributed to the possibility of serious racial violence by depriving civil rights groups of responsible Catholic and clerical leadership necessary to encourage Christian forms of nonviolent protest. His inaction has promoted the prolongation of Negro grievances by failing to mobilize the Catholic population against the social evils of segregation.

There was massive attention to the incident in the secular and religious press. Daniel Callaghan wrote in the June 26 Commonweal: "While it is open to doubt whether ‘removal’ of a Cardinal is the way to solve such problems, it is a shame that a priest should feel compelled to castigate his Ordinary in public. Only on the rarest of occasions should he actually do so. I think Los Angeles, 1964, is one of those occasions."

On July 10, Commonweal devoted a whole issue to Catholicism in Los Angeles. The editors wrote: "It is as if the Los Angeles hierarchy constituted a Church unto itself, free to chart its own course, free to abuse the rights and duties of its clergy, free to make light of the social teachings of the Church and free to leave its laity in ignorance of the teachings of the Church universal and the Holy See."

...
Wikipedia