Strong on Social and Economic Issues : New Archbishop Often Outspoken

Roman Catholic Bishop Roger M. Mahony, appointed Tuesday as archbishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, has often been outspoken on social and economic issues in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley, where he has been spiritual leader of the 135,000-member Stockton Diocese for the last five years.

Tall, lanky and affable, Mahony, a native of Hollywood, has encouraged experimentation in his sprawling, six-county diocese with comunidades de base, the small, grass-roots family gatherings and Bible-study groups popular in Central America. And he has taken strong stands on the rights of undocumented workers, gaining the support of Latino activists in the church.

But there are limits to Mahony’s tolerance of dissent, which may be tested in his new post as head of the nation’s largest--and predominantly Latino--diocese.

Set New Teaching Rules

In February, Mahony set new rules for teaching in the Stockton diocese, ordering parishes and diocesan agencies not to invite outsiders to speak on Catholic teaching without his express permission.

“The letter was a reaffirmation of what we’ve always taught and preached in the church,” Mahony said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “Dissent--even legitimate dissent--needs a particular forum for its expression. . . . I was particularly concerned that dissenting views not be taught on a par with the official teaching of the church and that people teaching the faith be . . . properly qualified.”

Mahony, 49, said his leadership style is “the way you live out what you believe in and how you function with people. . . . I am interested in a cooperative style to form a kind of consensus within the local church as to where we’re going.”

Since his appointment to the Stockton post, Mahony has written and lectured extensively in support of the U.S. bishops’ pastoral letter on nuclear arms, which opposes nuclear deterrence as a means of peacekeeping. The bishops have called instead for a halt to the production and deployment of any nuclear weapons.

Even before the bishops’ collective letter was issued in May, 1983, Mahony had issued his own peace pastoral on Jan. 1, 1982, in which he called U.S. and Soviet nuclear deterrence policies immoral.

And in addition to being a chief supporter of the bishops’ current controversial letter-in-the-making on the U.S. economy, Mahony has written his own document on economics for parishioners of the diocese.

In recent years, Mahony has protested the drownings of illegal immigrants fleeing U.S. Border Patrol agents. In February, he organized a candlelight march in Stockton after the body of a Guatemalan farm worker was found in a river in which agents had seen him struggling after a raid on a nearby field.

The bishop flew to Washington to complain to Immigration and Naturalization Service officials, asked for an investigation into Border Patrol tactics surrounding a series of similar drownings and proposed that agents be equipped with ropes and life preservers for use in such incidents.

Mahony said the Latino presence in the church--40% of the Catholic population in the Stockton diocese--”is a tremendous gift to the life of the church. It can bring us tremendous vitality . . . and energy.”

In another immigration issue, Mahony volunteered his diocese as a resettlement site for thousands of Laotians, Cambodians and Hmong tribal members, who now account for about 10% of the area’s population.

Ordained in 1962 at St. John’s Cathedral in Fresno, Mahony studied for the priesthood at Los Angeles Preparatory Seminary, Our Lady Queen of Angels Seminary in San Fernando and St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo.

After ordination, he studied for two years at Catholic University of America in Washington, where he received a master’s degree in social work.

Auxiliary Bishop in 1975

A former director of Catholic Charities and Social Service in the Diocese of Fresno, Mahony was named auxiliary bishop there in 1975. Cardinal Timothy Manning, retiring archbishop of Los Angeles, was bishop of the Fresno diocese from 1967 to 1969.

During the 1960s and ‘70s, at the peak of organizing efforts by Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers in the San Joaquin Valley, Mahony was secretary to the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee on Farm Labor. In 1975, Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. appointed Mahony chairman of the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, a job he held for a year until he returned to his post in Fresno.

Mahony, whose mother and brother live in Orange County, noted that he “already knows about 300 of the priests” in Southern California. Speaking of his anticipated move from Stockton to Los Angeles in early September, he said:

“These have been the five happiest years of my life. . . . But it’s good to be coming back home, to return to the city of my birth.”