No. 7: Public Discord in Catholic Church Continues

By Gaynor Dumat-ol Daleno
Pacific Daily News
December 31, 2015

http://www.guampdn.com/story/entertainment/2015/12/31/no-7-public-discord-catholic-church-continues/77349770/

The public discord between two sides in Guam’s Catholic community spilled over into 2015 from the previous year.

In January last year, while a Vatican delegation visited Guam, dozens of island Catholics held prayer protests. In one of their prayer protests, they held statues and rosaries as they walked along the stretch of busy Farenholt Avenue to a monastery compound, where the Vatican delegation had been holding private meetings.

The delegation met separately with people who follow the Neocatechumenal Way and separate meetings for those who hold on to the old traditions of the island’s Catholic church.

Months earlier, Concerned Catholics of Guam demanded, in part, for Archbishop Anthony Apuron to be fiscally transparent, and questioned Apuron’s association with the Neocatechumenal Way.

The group also questioned the archbishop’s move on one of the local Catholic church’s largest pieces of real estate: The former Accion Hotel-turned seminary. Concerned Catholics questioned whether Apuron had signed away control of the former hotel property to an organization whose officials are also leaders of the Neocatechumenal Way.

The Archdiocese of Agana has denied having given up control of the property and released the property’s title.

While the title remains with the archdiocese, Concerned Catholics argued that the archbishop authorized for the property to be used “in perpetuity” by the Redemptoris Mater Seminary, which is being run by members of the Neocatechumenal Way.

“We, Catholics, are being bedazzled with semantics,” wrote Teri Untalan, a parishioner with the Archdiocese of Agana.

Zoltan Szekely, a Neocatecumenal Way supporter, recently wrote to critics of the Neocatechumenal Way movement, and called out members of the Concerned Catholics, in a letter to the Pacific Daily News for their “grumbling and hatred against everything new.”

Still, many Catholics united for annual traditions, such as Lent, Easter, the Dec. 8 Santa Marian Kamalen procession and Christmas.

The protests have gone away.

At a recent 70th birthday for the archbishop in November, protesters stood outside the $200-a-plate dinner venue at the Hyatt Regency Guam.

Apuron told the Pacific Daily News he didn’t understand why the protesters were outside his birthday event.

He said his birthday fund-raiser would help seminarians, and alluded to the church’s debts, which, in part, paid for the remodel of the Dulce Nombre de Maria Cathedral-Basilica.

“As for the Cathedral, we have a $3 million debt that we have to pay. And so I said to use my name, use my popularity — if you can call it that — and people are happy, it seems,” Apuron said, adding later: "whatever the net proceeds are ... I get nothing.”