Gay Today: World

Fire Death & Murder Strike
Cathedral of Promise MCC

By Jack Nichols

Sacramento, California—In less than a month's time tragedy has twice struck the Cathedral of Promise Metropolitan Community Church here. The former pastor of the church, Jodi Grace Safier, 61, died Wednesday night of smoke inhalation in a fire that damaged her duplex and killed her four cats.

The Reverend Safier's long-time companion, Paulette Warren, told reporters how the tireless MCC pastor—who had also been a teacher-- had led an indefatigable life of service to those communities where she'd lived.

Of the homeless and the needy the Reverend Safier had said: '"You can't ignore people who are hungry because we could all be hungry."

She'd organized, said Ms. Warren, a San Francisco AIDS support group shortly after the virus had first begun wreaking a path of destruction in that city during the early 1980s.

A stroke suffered when she was fifty-three necessitated her 1991 retirement from teaching and although she'd continued to serve as an active member of the UFMCC clergy, she'd stepped down from the pulpit to perform pastoral duties in 1995.

''This is half of the pastoral staff that we've now lost in a month's time,'' said the Cathedral's senior pastor, the Reverend Freda Smith. ''It's going to be very, very, difficult for us. But we are going to do the best we can.''

Related Stories from the GayToday Archive:
Sacramento Gay MCC Pastor's Murder is Shock

With the Author of How We Die

Religious Right Renews Attacks on Gay Churches

Related Sites:
Cathedral of Promise

GayToday does not endorse related sites.

Twenty-seven days before the Reverend Safier's death, the Sacramento gay and lesbian congregation had already felt itself engulfed by grief following the robbery and the stabbing death of its popular associate pastor, the Reverend Edward Sherriff.

See GayToday: gaytoday.badpuppy.com/garchive/world/102299wo.htm

Reverend Sherriff's three accused killers, including two nineteen-year-olds, are said by police to have been apprehended