Starting this year, a Catholic couple who...

Starting this year, a Catholic couple who want a church wedding in the three-county Los Angeles Archdiocese will have to notify their parish six months in advance. Previously, couples were required to give three months’ notice.

The new archdiocesan guidelines--three years in the making--say the longer time is needed “to assist the engaged couple in evaluating their readiness to live married life,” including taking a marriage-preparation course.

The trend toward a longer preparation time for Catholic weddings is nationwide. The San Diego Diocese lengthened its waiting period to nine months, as of last September, and the San Bernardino Diocese requires six months’ notice. The Orange Diocese has kept the period at three months, according to a spokesman.

Last year, 13,647 weddings were performed in the Los Angeles Archdiocese, which embraces Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.

Under the archdiocese’s new guidelines, “the priest, for serious reasons, may reduce the preparation period, but not the preparation process itself.”

Barbara Regnier of the Office of Family Life also said that some flexibility will be allowed in the first few months while Catholics are informed of the change.

The archdiocesan guidelines do not take a hard line on engaged couples who already live together. A few U.S. dioceses in past years have insisted that no couples living together would be granted a church wedding.

The guidelines advise the priest to discuss the church’s teaching against sexual intercourse outside of marriage “and to invite them to consider living separately before the wedding. This is not only a gesture which accommodates the church’s understanding of the way Jesus has called us to live our lives, but also gives the couple an opportunity to spend some time apart.”

The recommendation to separate does not apply, the guidelines added, to couples who already have been married in a civil ceremony, to couples caring for a child or to those living in a common-law marriage.

PEOPLE

People For the American Way, the civil libertarian lobby that frequently challenges the Religious Right on textbook controversies and other issues, has named Michael Hudson its Western regional director with offices in Marina del Rey. Hudson, a graduate of West Point and the University of Texas Law School, previously had worked out of the Dallas office of the Washington-based organization. About 50,000 of the 285,000 members of People For the American Way live in California, a spokesman said.

Father Paul Ojibway, a Chipewa Indian, has been named the first priest-chaplain for Catholic Native Americans in the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese. Ojibway, who belongs to the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement, also was given added duties as director of the archdiocese’s maritime ministry in San Pedro. Ojibway formerly directed the archdiocese’s young adult ministry.

DATES

Saying the organized Jewish world has become increasingly conservative in outlook, the Oakland-based journal Tikkun is sponsoring the two-day Conference of Liberal and Progressive Jewish Intellectuals opening next Saturday at the UCLA Student Center. Speakers include author Neal Gabler (“How the Jews Invented Hollywood”), Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, Rabbi Laura Geller of Los Angeles and Tikkun Editor Michael Lerner.

The Rev. Tony Wolfe, director of USC’s Peace Center and a vocal advocate of human rights for Palestinians, will speak at noon Sunday at the Islamic Center of Southern California in Los Angeles on “Parallels between Israel and South Africa.”