Archbishop Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles...

Archbishop Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles will celebrate the 43rd annual Catholic observance of Labor Day in a Mass Sunday at St. Vibiana’s Cathedral, but he will skip the annual Southern California Labor Institute breakfast co-sponsored by the archdiocese the next day at the Biltmore Hotel.

The two events were separated this year in the midst of a bitter fight between organized labor and the archdiocese as Mahony challenged union organizing of workers at the church’s 10 cemeteries.

Mahony, in a recent statement, asserted that he wants to maintain “a close relationship . . . with organized labor” but added that recent breakfasts have put him in difficult positions.

At the 1986 breakfast, Mahony said Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) spoke “most favorably” for the right to abortion. “I was stunned,” Mahony said. Last year’s breakfast “could accurately be described as a ‘pro-Dukakis, anti-Bush’ political event,” he said. While the archbishop said he understood that labor leaders support candidates with similar views, Mahony said his presence could have wrongly signaled that he backed particular candidates.

It was reported earlier that Mahony privately blasted the 1988 Labor Day event as “a travesty” and the sponsoring institute as “hostile” and “anti-Catholic” in a letter to Patrick W. Henning, the institute’s executive director.

The Catholic Labor Day Mass once was the highlight of the yearly observance, followed by informal coffee and doughnuts, according to a church spokesman. But in recent years the breakfast has attracted as many as 1,500 people while the Mass preceding it drew no more than 50 people. Mahony said not only labor leaders but also union members and their families have been invited to the 10:30 a.m. Sunday Mass.

CONFERENCE

The first U.S. committee meeting for the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women (1989-1999) will be held Friday and Saturday by the First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles. After a Thursday evening worship service at the University Hilton, the planning sessions will feature seminars and an ecumenical service 7:30 p.m. Friday with a sermon by Joan SalmonCampbell, moderator of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

DATE

Gayraud Stephen Wilmore, who teaches church history at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, will speak on “Radicalization and Resistance in Contemporary African-American Religion,” at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday at the School of Theology at Claremont. The Earl Cranston Memorial Lecture, free to the public, will be in the Mudd Theater.

MEDIA

Not long before she died on June 26, Trude Weiss-Rosmarin, founder of the 53-year-old Jewish Spectator magazine, turned over the editorship to Robert Bleiweiss and his Calabasas-based American Friends of the Center for Jewish Living and Values. “He is a remarkably knowledgeable trans-sectarian Jew totally committed to the sustenance of Jewish values for this and subsequent generations,” wrote Weiss-Rosmarin in the recent combined Spring-Summer issue. The eclectic, intellectual quarterly has a national circulation of fewer than 1,500, but its contributors include well-known figures. Deborah Lipstadt, professor of modern Jewish history at Occidental College, chairs the new editorial board.

The Jewish Television Network, carried by five Los Angeles cable systems, has “struggled and suffered from a lack of funds” for the eight years of its existence, according to Jay Sanderson, executive director. But now, with newly developed financial support, Sanderson said, the Los Angeles-based, nonprofit network will launch a new format on Sept. 17. The added programs will include a 19-part documentary from Israel Broadcasting on the founding of the Jewish state.