Not a parody

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

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

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

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

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