Manager Tommy Lasorda of the Los Angeles...

Manager Tommy Lasorda of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who has already been seen promoting pasta, indigestion-relief tablets and diet food on television, is now the national spokesman for a credit card benefiting Catholic Charities, the social welfare arm of the church.

One-half of 1% of purchases charged by users of Caritas MasterCard will support national and local Catholic Charities programs--a fund-raising strategy used already by many alumni organizations and other groups.

The charity deliberated whether they would encourage further debt by promoting a credit card, said Msgr. R. David Cousineau, executive director for Catholic Charities in the Los Angeles archdiocese. But he said officials hope people who obtain the Caritas (Latin for “generous love”) card will use it instead of a bank-sponsored credit card.

“We live in an age of plastic,” said Lasorda, appearing at a day-care center in a Los Feliz parish, one beneficiary of Catholic Charities. “If someone is going to get a credit card, why not get one that helps charity?”

Lasorda, a lifelong Catholic who often speaks publicly of his faith, donated his services to Catholic Charities, which will feature him in brochures, advertising and commercials.

His much-noted diet this season, in which he dropped from 218 pounds to his current 180, has a Catholic connection, too.

Last spring, Dodgers Orel Hershiser and Kirk Gibson offered a combined $20,000 to Lasorda if he could lose at least 20 pounds by the All-Star Game on July 11. Hershiser had pledged another $10,000 if he got down to 190 pounds.

Lasorda said he decided months ago to use that money toward a new convent for a group of elderly nuns in Nashville. Along with getting another $20,000 for his diet-food commercials, he said celebrity events in November in Las Vegas and Nashville will enable him to raise much more toward a $1-million goal.

PEOPLE

Cardinal Jaime Sin of Manila will give the keynote address today at Loyola Marymount University for the first Filipino-American Catechetical Conference. The conference was designed to help Filipino Catholics adjust to American culture, to review how Catholic teachings have changed since the Second Vatican Council and to expose non-Filipinos to the spirituality of the heavily Catholic Philippines, said Sister Marilena Narvaez of the Los Angeles archdiocese’s Office of Religious Education. The cardinal will be principal celebrant of the closing liturgy and dinner guest tonight of the Filipino Rosary Federation.

CHAPEL

Wayfarers Chapel, a Palos Verdes Peninsula attraction for tourists and wedding parties, has had to curtail some of its auxiliary programs since a landslide badly damaged and closed its visitors center in 1981. But the Rev. Harvey Tafel, senior minister, said that will change with the purchase of a former convenience store a quarter-mile west of the glass-roofed chapel. The building will be renovated by Oct. 1 to provide larger offices, a gift shop and a meeting room with windows overlooking the Pacific, he said.