“The God Show,” hosted by Pat McMahon for many years on KTAR (92.3FM) on Sunday morning, is a one-of-kind show that I have followed from the beginning.  I, in fact, have been a guest on the show twice.  The hourlong show is aired at 6:30 a.m. Sunday, although night-listeners can get it 6  1/2 hours earlier, or at midnight.  McMahon covers a wide swath of American religion with penetrating and sometimes controversial guests.

If you never heard the Sunday show (July11), I suggest you listen to that podcast . McMahon’s guest was Mary Jo West, a kind of Valley broadcast icon. She was the first female news anchor on a Valley TV station, the old Channel 10 CBS outlet, starting in 1976. She held her own against curmudgeon and male sexist anchor Bill Close.  Mary Jo went briefly to CBS-TV in New York  as a nighttime news anchor and then back to the Valley for a gig at Channel 3 in the mid-1980s, when it was  the ABC-TV outlet.  Later she led the public access Channel 11 for the City of Phoenix.   A special project with Mother Teresa led to her adopting a baby girl from Central America  and becoming a mom. She converted from Baptist to Catholic to raise Molly in her native religion in a kind of promise she made to the little giant woman from Calcutta.

That led to Mary Jo West being hired in the summer of 2003  as the public information officer for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix, arriving after Bishop Thomas O’Brien had been arrested for being involved in a fatal  hit-and-run accident.  She served in that role from  before the arrival of O’Brien’s successor, the Rev. Thomas Olmsted, in the fall of 2003.  She worked there three years, often feeling spiriually out of step with Catholicism. In  June 2006,  she left that post  for the Bashas’ grocery chain, then quit that to look after aging parents back in the Atlanta, Ga., area of her roots.  A year later she returned to the Valley.

In “The God Show,” Mary Jo talks candidly about her coming to the support of Dale Fushek, one-time vicar general of the diocese, former longtime pastor of  St. Timothy’s Catholic Church in Mesa and the founder of the popular Catholic youth program,  Life Teen.  In 2005, Fushek resigned in the face of a string of accusations of improper behavior with teens going back to the 1980s. On his arrest, he faced 10 charges, that were reduced to seven misdemeanor charges and after six years of back-and-forth legal motions and appeals, he pled guilty in April to a single charge,  inappropriate sexual behavior involving a teen.  He was put on 364 days of probation and fined $250, plus a surcharge.

Mary Jo West tells McMahon that he was falsely accused and that the incident for which he pled simply was harmless, that Fushek was playing basketball and when he came down, his hand came against the crotch area of the teen.    Fushek would be defrocked and laicized by the Vatican not because of any of those issues but because he opted to use his on-leave time as priest to start his own non-denominational congregation in Mesa with Mark Dippre, a one-time Tempe priest who was defrocked, as well.   Olmsted repeatedly warned Fushek of his disobedience, and it became more testy as Fushek was able to draw some parishioners from St. Timothy’s and other Catholic churches to that fellowship despite Olmsted’s stern call for Catholics to stay away.

The Praise and Worship Center has benefitted from Mary Jo West’s considerable singing talents that had previously been showcased on Valley theater stages for decades.  She regularly sings songs and hymns of praise at church services.   On “The God Show,” she talks freely about her not having a heart for the Catholic Church to which she had worked and acted as diocesan spokeswoman. She freely calls for married priests, women priests and the full participation of gay people in the life of the church and the right to marry.   She laments the conservative direction that the Phoenix Diocese has gone under Olmsted’s seven years of leadership.   She even says the Pope has been getting bad advice in the way sexual misconduct cases have been handled and said the Vatican spokesman should be fired.

But it is a refreshing show as Mary Jo West calls for Christianity to get away from rules and doctrines and big buildings and get down to modeling what Jesus taught as a way of living, with love at the core.   It took her a lot of courage to return to the airwaves to tell her story — one of being a broadcast pioneer in the Valley, a sought-after events personality and emcee,  and an ever-evolving Christian.   Take a listen.

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