When he was a youngster attending St....

When he was a youngster attending St. Charles Borromeo Catholic School in North Hollywood in the 1940s, Los Angeles Archbishop Roger M. Mahony recalled, “I learned from my parents that the sisters received only $10 each month as salary.

“My father would always see to it that the sisters had a turkey at the major holidays of the year from our poultry shop, and I always had great joy in being able to deliver the turkeys to their convent.”

However, Mahony wrote in the Friday’s Tidings, the archdiocesan newspaper, that kind of modest charity does not provide the kind of “long-term retirement benefits so desperately needed today.”

The archbishop urged the more than 2.6 million Catholics in the archdiocese to contribute to a special collection this weekend at Saturday and Sunday Masses to benefit retired priests, brothers and nuns.

The appeal is part of a 10-year program of annual collections to supplement administrative improvements in retirement benefits. Many--though not all--religious orders were found in recent years to have inadequate retirement plans. The shortfall is exacerbated by the declining number of salaried priests and sisters and the growing numbers of retirees.

PEOPLE

Most high-visibility preachers declined comment on the grand jury fraud and conspiracy indictments issued Monday against defrocked minister Jim Bakker, but the Rev. E.V. Hill, pastor of Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, pledged to “do anything I can” to support Bakker. “I pray the indictment doesn’t constitute conviction,” Hill said in an interview. “I pray that he’s not guilty. Even so, I’ll still have faith in the Jim Bakker I know and support.” Hill, emphasizing forgiveness, also lent his support to another TV evangelist hit by scandal, Jimmy Swaggart, when the Louisiana preacher returned to the crusade circuit last summer in Los Angeles.

DATES

A free exhibit of art depicting Nativity scenes in the 12th annual Madonna Festival will be on display today through Tuesday at First United Methodist Church of Glendale. The display opens at 11 a.m. each day except Sunday, when it opens at 1:30 p.m.

Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, head of the Sufi Order of the West, will speak on “Bringing Vision into Reality” 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Herrick Chapel on the Occidental College campus in Eagle Rock.