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William DuBay

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Father William DuBay about 1968, Los Angeles
This article is about the priest and author. For the comic book editor, see Bill DuBay (comics).

William DuBay was a U.S. Catholic priest and social activist whose reform activities and suspension from the priesthood created controversy in the mid-1960s.

Biography

Born in 1034 in Long Beach, California, DuBay attended public and Catholic schools before entering the junior seminary in Los Angeles at the age of 13. After attending St. John's Major Seminary in Camarillo, California, he was ordained for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles in May 1960.

DuBay he became very interested in the civil rights movement while stationed in a segregated white section of San Fernando Valley. After publishing a Sunday newsletter calling on Catholics to support integration, he was sent to a racially-mixed parish in Compton, CA. While there, he attempted to organize other priests to protest the Cardinal's racial policies. There, in June, 1964, he sent a cable to Pope Paul VI asking him to remove Cardinal James McIntyre from office as Archbishop of LosAngeles for "conducting a vicious campaign of intimidation against priests, nuns, and lay Catholics." 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.[1]

DuBay was again disciplined by being re-assigned, first to St. Boniface Church in Anaheim and then to serve as chaplain at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica.

There, in February 1966, DuBay was suspended from the priesthood on the occasion of publishing The Human Church, a book calling for democratizing the Catholic Church. It recommended that the people elect [[bishops] for limited terms. It called for abandoning the parochial school system in favor of programs that teach Catholics the principles of Christian action. The book argued that the Catholic Church should abandon its tax exemptions and let individual congregations create their own liturgies and creeds. Citing DuBay's "public expressions of insubordination" and a lack of the bishop's imprimatur, the Vatican ordered DuBay to cease selling and distributing his book. DuBay protested that "prior censorship is a ghost that has been hovering around the Catholic Church since the Spanish Inquisition" and refused to stop distributing The Human Church.[2]

In 1968, DuBay married Mary Ellen Wall of Seattle.[3] They had a child, Alfred Zarubica.

In 1971, DuBay moved to Seattle, where he worked two years in a residential treatment center for sexual minorities and another two years managing a health-food store. In 1975, he moved to [Ninilchik], Alaska, where he lived on a homestead for two years.

From 1977 to 1985, while working for the mayor's office of the North Slope Borough, he published the Arctic Coastal Zone Management Newsletter and the The Arctic Policy Review, both monthly publications that covered arctic resource conflicts between the multinational oil firms and local Inupiat Eskimos.

Beginning in 1985, DuBay worked for the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association.

In 1987, he returned to southern California, where he worked as a technical writer, first for Ashton-Tate and then for Phoenix Technologies.

During that time, he published Gay Identity: The Self Under Ban, a sociological study of the homosexual role.

In 2001, he retired from technical writing to become a plain-language consultant. In 2003, he began publishingThe Plain Language at Work Newsletter He has since authored three books on plain language (readability): The Principles of Readability, Smart Language: Readers, Readability, and the Grading of Text and Unlocking Language: The Classic Readability Studies

DuBay also is the author of a blog, Civic Language: Comments on Current Events and Building social Capital. On that page,is his three-part essay, The Roots of the Holocaust, about the youth of Adolf Hitler in Austria. Cite error: There are <ref> tags on this page without content in them (see the help page).

Many of DuBay's papers can be found Special Collections of the Doheny Library of the University of Southern California.

Bibliography

  • The Human Church (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966)
  • Gay Identity: The Self Under Ban (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., Inc, 1987)
  • The Principles of Readability (Costa Mesa, CA: Impact Information, 2004)
  • Smart Language: Readers, Readability, and the Grading of Text (Costa Mesa, CA; Impact Information. 2007)
  • Unlocking Language: The Classic Readability Studies (Costa Mesa, CA: Impact Information, 2007)

References

  1. ^ Cogley, John (August 22, 1965) "Religion: Churchmen on Riots." New York Times. p. E5.
  2. ^ Editors (August 19, 1966) "The Issue of Imprimatur." Time.
  3. ^ Editors (August 11, 1968) "Suspended Priest Marries Divorcee." New York Times. p. 38.

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