The Plugged-In ARCHBISHOP : Roger Mahony Ministers With Computers, a Helicopter and Friends in High Places

IT’S 10 O’CLOCK in the morning at Van Nuys Airport. Roman Catholic Archbishop Roger M. Mahony settles into the cockpit of his blue-and-white Hughes 500D four-passenger jet helicopter, offers a brief silent prayer, then fires up the turbine, eases up on the collective and lifts lightly off the flight line. He rotates right, pours on the power and climbs out to the northwest at maximum torque into a warm, hazy morning. Ten minutes later he’s zipping along 1,000 feet above Interstate 5 on his way to Bakersfield, pointing out landmarks like a Hollywood tour guide.

Mahony says his frequent flights over the 8,300 square miles of his archdiocese reveal a growing gap between those who have jobs and houses and opportunities and those who don’t. “I see this anomaly from the air. The inner city seems more like a war zone. You look at whole burned-out blocks and wonder how anybody can survive in that area. Then you see them rearranging mountains and valleys to put in new houses, and I think, geez, why are we taking all those mountains down and filling up the valleys when we really could do something in our communities? The opportunities for the residents are so different in those two areas. The gap is wide and getting ever wider.”

Four-and-a-half years into his job as head of the largest archdiocese in America, Mahony has grown adept at negotiating that gap between the rich and the poor. Unlike some of his predecessors, he has rejected the ornate trappings that accompany his post and lives downtown at the rectory of St. Vibiana’s Cathedral with five other priests, in the heart of Skid Row. His goal for Los Angeles, he says, is to reawaken an appreciation for God in a society inundated with material goods. “The Church has set out a vision of the responsibilities of society to the poor,” he says, “and we really do fall short of many of those challenges and goals.” He is passionate about what he sees as one of his primary missions: addressing the needs of immigrants and refugees and making them feel welcome.

But he has also chosen to court, not chide, the high-finance power brokers of Los Angeles whom he can call upon when, for instance, he needs food and medicine for an emergency airlift to El Salvador, a $100-million endowment for the parochial schools--or the $395,000 helicopter that critics regard as a galling symbol of how comfortable he’s become with wealth and power.

“I model myself on the example of Christ,” says Mahony. “He moved freely among the lepers and the outcasts on one hand, and had dinner with the Pharisees and leaders of the community on the other, and felt very much at home with all people.”

“He’s a rare mixture of an organization man and a populist,” says attorney and venture capitalist Richard Riordan, who put together the financing for Mahony’s helicopter after Mahony got caught in gridlock one too many times. “He’s very pragmatic. He understands that you don’t help the poor by destroying business. And that you have to create wealth before you redistribute it.” Furthermore, Riordan says, Mahony enjoys wielding his authority. “You have to enjoy power to be in the position he is in.”

It is clear, as Mahony looks out over the city and reflects on his ability to change it, that he does enjoy his job and the direct way in which he can apply his influence. In a governmental system of competing interest groups and overlapping bureaucracies, he asks, “what kind of power do you have in terms of being able to get things done?” By comparison, the archdiocese can act swiftly. “I can cut through red tape very quickly,” he says, “and I don’t think there is any equivalent position like it. I don’t have to deal with the City Council or the county Board of Supervisors. I have the ability to make a phone call, write a letter and get something moving.” When it comes to getting things done, he says, “there is something to be said for a hierarchical system.”

DESPITE THE aplomb with which he functions today, Mahony wasn’t someone who was tagged for greatness early. “He wasn’t real dynamic,” says Gerald Fallon, a former priest and theologian who attended St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo with Mahony. “Roger was just a hard-working guy. He looked like he would do a good job. But I don’t think anyone imagined that he would be the archbishop of Los Angeles.”

Mahony grew up, one of three children, in North Hollywood, where his father worked as an electrician for Universal Studios and then ran a small poultry-processing plant. “Even in grammar school, I remember wanting to be a priest,” says Mahony, who entered the seminary at 14, influenced by his parish’s enthusiastic, newly ordained priests “who were interested in the kids.” He also began to develop his deep connection with the Spanish-speaking community. At his father’s poultry plant, shoveling chicken manure with Mexican workers, Mahony first began to speak Spanish. And as a seminarian, “I used to go with the priests when they went to celebrate Masses in farm labor camps around Camarillo, so there were a lot of hands-on opportunities to learn the language.”

Mahony was ordained in 1962 and sent to Catholic University in Washington, where he got a master’s degree in social work, specializing in administration and community organizing, “because I knew that’s what I was supposed to be doing when I got back.” He returned to become director of Catholic Charities in Fresno. In 1965, Cesar Chavez was organizing workers in the grape fields, and throughout the San Joaquin Valley “there was a great deal of tension between Catholic workers and Catholic growers.” Mahony, who subsequently became the Fresno secretary of the National Catholic Bishops Committee on Farm Labor, quickly discovered the facts of political life.

“In these small towns, the large (church) contributors would be the growers. The grower community had access to the political leadership. The judges were supported strongly by the grower community. It was very difficult to proclaim the rights of the workers and find a way to protect those rights since agriculture was specifically excluded from the National Labor Relations Act. It was essential (to find) a way to deal with this--particularly since there was no state or public agency available. I had to bend over backwards to be impartial. But even that was not always perceived as that.”

In June, 1975, then-Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. signed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, which was designed to resolve disputes between farm workers and growers. Mahony was on a long-scheduled pilgrimage to Rome, and when he returned, “one of the first things I was interested in was who was on the board. I discovered that (Brown) still hadn’t appointed a board. The act was going into effect Aug. 28. Here it was July, and I discovered there was no board, no rules, no regulations. I was a bit alarmed by that. I expressed concern.

“Then all of a sudden, I got a call from the governor’s office. He asked would I come up. He wanted me to serve on the board.”

So in early August, Mahony went to Sacramento. During the next year, the board conducted more than 400 farm-worker elections under the most volatile conditions. “He managed to keep open communication with all sides,” says LeRoy Chatfield, director of the Loaves & Fishes shelter for the homeless in Sacramento, who was, at the time, working for the United Farmworkers. “And I think history will note that he did a good job in bringing something productive and positive out of a very tense and violence-prone situation.”

Mahony’s abilities did not go unnoticed by the Church hierarchy, and in 1980 he was appointed bishop of Stockton. Despite his base in a sleepy backwater of a diocese, Mahony’s voice was one that was heard increasingly throughout the American Church. He took stands on the duty of the country to help the poor, on the teaching authority of the Church and on the need to end nuclear proliferation. He held firm to Church doctrine, mirroring Pope John Paul II with his combination of liberalism on economic issues and conservatism on Church teachings. He was in many ways a perfect candidate for the fast track in a church looking to revitalize itself in America by appealing to immigrants, particularly those from Latin America--and to compete with Protestant evangelical denominations that were luring those immigrants away.

In 1985, the apostolic pro-nuncio , the Vatican’s Washington representative, called Mahony at his cabin in the Sierra to ask if he would accept appointment as the next archbishop of Los Angeles. He was so overwhelmed by the offer, he says, that he went for a three-hour walk in the woods.

FOR SOMEONE WHO wields as much authority as he does, Roger Mahony is not physically imposing. He’s tall, thin and stoop-shouldered, wears oversize eyeglasses and seems to smile more than necessary. In an outdoor religious procession, he has the quaint air of someone on a pilgrimage, walking slowly, leaning forward, using his shepherd’s crosier like a walking stick.

“He doesn’t take himself too seriously or stand on a lot of ego,” says Chatfield. “He’s relatively unflappable. He also chooses his words very carefully. He’s not given to rhetoric, so he doesn’t inflame either side unduly. He doesn’t take abuse. He speaks with respect, but he fully expects you to do the same. And if you don’t, he calls you on it. He doesn’t roll over. He is a very political kind of guy. I’m not using that in a pejorative sense. He is sensitive to what is possible, to what people can or cannot do. He is a church statesman.” Mahony is a man of simple tastes. Except for a crucifix, a thermometer and a cross-country ski machine he uses three times a week, his bedroom is so barren of any personal touches that it has the feel of a business-class hotel room. He earns a salary of $600 a month. In his closet are a neat row of vestments, some jackets, trousers, a pair of running shoes, old loafers and not much else. He makes his own bed and, if he uses the last bit of milk in the upstairs pantry, goes down to the main kitchen and brings up more himself.

“I think he’s an authentic person,” says Fallon. “There’s no guile in him. What you see is what you get.”

Unlike his predecessor, Cardinal Timothy Manning, a quiet, shy, gentle man who gave inspired sermons, being inspirational doesn’t always come easily to Mahony. There’s one point during Mass when the priest looks out over the congregation, spreads his arms and says, “Peace be with you.” But the way Mahony does it, it looks as if he’s trying too hard. He leans forward with a loving smile, says, “PEACE!” and then he stops. You don’t have a clue where he is going with it. Then about half a beat too late, he chimes in with the rest of it--”be with you.”

Although his job is to help prepare people for the next world, Mahony is remarkably down-to-earth about this one. When he sees a traffic jam on the freeway, he reports it to local radio stations. At his cabin in the Sierra, he often walks around with a carpenter’s belt, installing exhaust fans and fixing the drains. When a workman did a sloppy job on a fire alarm for St. Vibiana’s rectory, Mahony pulled out a screwdriver and rewired it himself.

Mahony is not really a sophisticated conversationalist--he’s the kind of person who tells the punch line of a joke twice, laughing all the while--but he’s so warm, good-natured and diffident that it hardly makes any difference.

At the same time, says Terry Sweeney, a former Jesuit priest who found himself in a confrontation with the archbishop for conducting a survey of American bishops on the subject of celibacy, if you challenge Church doctrine, “he becomes direct, factual, unemotional and cold.”

Mahony is more than willing to look people in the eye and tell them that something “is completely unacceptable,” says former archdiocese communications director Joe Battaglia. Unlike Manning, who went out of his way to avoid confrontations, Mahony sometimes seems to thrive on them. “Or at least,” says Battaglia, “when they come, he doesn’t back away.” He makes decisions quickly, and as a result “he sometimes fires from the hip.”

Nor does he always consider the political consequences.

Before Jerry Brown appointed Rose Bird as Chief Justice of California, Mahony, who had worked with Bird when she was state agricultural director, sent a letter to the commissioner of judicial appointments calling her “vindictive” and of “questionable emotional stability.”

More recently, when the publisher of The Times wrote to Mahony asking what he thought of the paper’s new format, he wrote back to praise the paper’s reporting, and then took the occasion to lambaste The Times for “the arrogance” of “its ultra-liberal editorial policy. You do not even credit intelligence to those with a more moderate approach . . . .”

Knowledgeable church insiders say it is practically certain that Mahony will be made a cardinal, though it might not happen immediately. American archbishops don’t generally become cardinals until about age 60; Mahony is only 53. Unless he were appointed to some position in the Vatican bureaucracy, he will most likely serve as head of the archdiocese until he’s 75, in the year 2011. Then, he says, he’ll retire to a small house next to a rectory somewhere in Los Angeles “and go back to being a parish priest.”

BASED ON HIS concern for migrant workers and refugees, the liberal community in Los Angeles had great expectations for Mahony when he first arrived from the San Joaquin Valley. But as soon as he started associating with the wealthy and powerful of Los Angeles, it seemed to some that he had changed. “He has been a consistent disappointment to those of us who expected him to be more progressive,” says activist attorney Gloria Allred.

The litany of Mahony’s supposed affronts to liberals has grown long over the years: He urged Catholics to boycott 7-Eleven stores for selling Playboy magazine. He took what to some former priests looked like a needlessly unyielding stance on married priests, suppressing a survey of American bishops on optional celibacy and banning Sweeney, its author, from Holy Communion. He appeared on “Nightline” to denounce the use of condoms, even for preventing AIDS, a stance that so enraged some gay activists that they splattered four Catholic churchs with red paint early in December and plastered a poster on church doors calling Mahony a “murderer.” Mahony banned Dignity, an organization of gay and lesbian Catholics, from holding Masses in archdiocesan facilities. Then he sent a letter to all the priests in the diocese, ordering them not to say Masses for the organization, a move that longtime gay activist Morris Kight says he finds “uncharitable, unloving, lacking in compassion. I thought he might be a gentle voice, but he has simply followed the rulings of the Vatican in automatic response.”

Mahony took it as a personal affront when an overwhelming majority of the archdiocese’s 142 cemetery workers asked to be represented by the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union in July, 1988. In a move that distressed his labor supporters, he fought the issue, contested jurisdiction and accused the union of anti-Catholic attacks on both himself and the Church. “He has a lot of schooling, but he doesn’t know how to treat workers,” says Jose Aranda, a pro-union cemetery worker fired by Mahony for alleged misconduct.

Taken together, Mahony’s stands on all these issues have made some people start to wonder about the archbishop’s real goals. “He’s a church political animal,” says Bill Kenkelen, West Coast correspondent for the liberal National Catholic Reporter, “and he wants that red hat and he wants it soon. If there’s anything consistent about Mahony, it is that he’s ambitious. He was a liberal in the ‘60s, when it was profitable to be a liberal. And now under this Pope, it’s advantageous to be conservative.”

The problem isn’t that Mahony is inconsistent, says Father Thomas Reese, a Jesuit and a fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center in Washington and the author of “Archbishop,” a new book on American archbishops. Rather, he says, people make assumptions about bishops that aren’t warranted: “There is that fallacy that if a person is against nuclear weapons, for civil rights and in favor of a nuclear freeze, then he is going to be a so-called liberal on abortion and pornography and other issues. But bishops are not liberal Democrats--they are coming out of a Christian perspective.”

The moral issue Mahony deals with most forcefully is that of abortion. There certainly is no doubt about his commitment to the issue. He speaks on the subject as often as four times a day. He has attended rallies for Operation Rescue, an anti-abortion protest organization, and has urged police to show the greatest restraint when arresting the protesters. Of increasing concern to many, he has stepped into the political arena, sending a letter to state legislators in June that declared that all Catholic officeholders “have a positive moral obligation to work for the repeal of pro-choice legislation. . . . There is no other legitimate position. There is no such thing as a Catholic pro-choice public official.” In November, after San Diego Bishop Leo T. Mahler banned Assemblywoman Lucy Killea from Holy Communion for her pro-choice views, Mahony kept open the possibility that he might take similar action, saying: “If a Catholic legislator comes out and says, ‘I consider myself a good Catholic, but I strongly support abortion,’ I would say this can’t be. Those are mutually exclusive. We use sanctions in a very limited way, but this (taking a vocal pro-choice stand) might be an exception.”

It’s too simple to say Catholics must submit to every teaching statement of Church authorities, Mahony has said, but they are “expected to give . . . internal and external, private and public assent to magisterial teaching that is clearly within the time-honored tradition.” And abortion, he says, definitely falls into that category. “Talk about constant teaching of the Church,” he says, “that goes back to the 1st Century. You’ve got all those people talking about abortion in AD 106. If there has ever been an issue on which we never had a different position, it is this one.”

Mahony is disturbed by the nature of some of the criticism directed toward him. “People don’t think you are acting in good faith,” says Mahony. “It even isn’t that they discount what you say--they write you off entirely.”

To women faced with unwanted pregnancies, “I say, ‘Don’t compound the problems by making a new problem for yourself: the guilt, the anguish that you will never get over.” The Church will be happy to place the baby for adoption, help to raise the child and to help feed it, he says. “But more than just taking care of the baby is the underlying moral issue. Once you say that it’s all right to take any human life, then all human life is in danger. At first, the Nazis said we are only interested in getting rid of the top Jewish leaders; then they said just those who own shops; then before long, every human being was at risk.”

On the issue of homosexuality, Mahony says he never had any vendetta against gays. The Dignity organization, he says, forced him to take a stand by adopting a new policy in 1987, that suggested that one could be both a sexually active homosexual and a good Catholic. That stance, he says “offered us no choice.” Homosexual relationships are “an issue that was never debated seriously in the church, ever.”

Mahony’s critics don’t deny that a lot of what he’s done is commendable. He’s built homeless shelters and opened three residential care facilities for people with AIDS. He spoke out strongly against evictions of illegal aliens from public housing, against a prison in East Los Angeles and against employer sanctions for hiring undocumented workers.

He mobilized the Church to help thousands of applicants fill out their paper work under the amnesty program. After six Jesuits were killed in El Salvador, he personally organized a relief effort to send a plane with 40,000 pounds of food and medical supplies and in late November flew to El Salvador, both to appeal for peace and to be sure that the supplies actually got to the Salvadoran church.

Although some claim to see an element of calculation in everything Mahony does, others say that what critics see as calculation is really the centered calm of a deep faith. “He has a very prayerful nature,” says Mahony’s secretary, Father Kevin Kostelnik. “He prays from 6 to 7 in the chapel every morning. It’s the only time I can’t disturb him. He draws a lot of strength from that.”

What does he pray about? “Oftentimes,” says Mahony, “my prayer is just a prayer of emptiness: ‘So many things are swirling about that I haven’t a clue what to do next. Lord, just be with me. Just guide me. Show me the way.’ Cardinal Basil Hume of London has a marvelous prayer, and he calls it his prayer of incompetence. And I really feel that’s my best prayer: ‘Lord, I don’t know what to make of all this. Or what to do. Lord, be with me and give me strength.’ Many times I just sit in the chapel and say, ‘Come, Lord Jesus. Come, Lord Jesus.’ Nothing more than that.”

MAHONY WAS MADE archbishop of Los Angeles in September, 1985. For someone whose last assignment was Stockton, it was a bit of a leap--the archdiocese stretches from Lompoc to Pomona. “I was just not prepared for the size of Los Angeles,” he says. The first time he met with the 39 members of the priest senate (representing the archdiocese’s 1,340 priests), Mahony observed that “there are as many priests on the senate here as there are in my entire archdiocese in Stockton.”

Nine months later, as a way of showing his commitment to the Church’s enormous Latino community, Mahony held a convocation and Mass for 50,000 Latino Catholics in Dodger Stadium. “It was an occasion of extraordinary reverence,” says Battaglia. There was a long procession of priests, deacons and acolytes, and bringing up the rear, in a borrowed miter and vestments, was Roger Mahony. The only problem was that his miter was too big. “It looked like if he turned his head too fast, it might not come with him,” says Battaglia. Down on the infield, Mahony was dwarfed in the huge stadium. “You could see him close up on Diamond Vision (scoreboard TV),” Battaglia recalls, and “it was like he was thinking, ‘This isn’t Stockton anymore.’ ”

If Mahony was surprised by the Los Angeles archdiocese, the archdiocese in turn was astonished by Mahony. The chancery staff had been used to Manning’s laid-back management style, and here came the new man with his personal computer, pumping out memos, letters and documents in a paper tornado. Whenever he made a trip to Washington or New York, he carried a Federal Express envelope. He would answer mail on the plane. And when he landed, he would send the envelope back to his office. Although the archdiocese has 12,000 employees, a $295-million annual budget and $3 billion in assets, the chancery essentially had no personnel office, no computers and no modern accounting system when Mahony took over. Suddenly, the new archbishop was laser-printing his own letters and making his own telephone calls.

Moving decisively to take control of the archdiocese, Mahony brought in a board of financial experts to advise him. He took priests out of administrative positions and replaced them with lay professionals, hired management consultants, appointed women to high positions on his staff and introduced computers, salary surveys and a dozen other changes.

But for some of his problems, he could see no quick administrative solutions. For one thing, he can’t simply hire a headhunting firm to find replacements for the dwindling number of priests who serve Los Angeles’ burgeoning Catholic population. The shortage is a serious one: In 1940, the ratio of priests to Catholics in the archdiocese was 1 to 500. Now it’s closer to 1 to 2,500.

While some former priests suggest that the Church’s insistence on celibacy is at the root of what’s called the vocation crisis, Mahony believes that the fundamental cause is that our society discourages lifelong commitment and sacrifice.

Even so, he says he has managed to turn things around in his archdiocese, and right now “we how have 140 students in the theology department--the highest number in the history of (St. John’s) seminary.” In two years, he says, the problem won’t be a shortage of priests, but a lack of new facilities to house all the students. Besides, he adds, numbers alone are misleading. “Parishes now have large full-time staffs. The priest once was the choir director, director of religious education--he did everything. He was it. Now we have professionally trained lay people who handle many of these things, so we really don’t need the same number of priests.”

An equally thorny personnel problem is Mahony’s stormy relationship with the archdiocese’s cemetery workers. People in organized labor who had viewed Mahony as an ally because of his experience with the farm workers are highly distressed that he did not support the cemetery workers’ attempt to organize.

Why didn’t he?

“I talked to Mahony,” says William Robertson, executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO. “He said, well, if it were a union that had conducted a clean organizing campaign, he wouldn’t have any problem. But it was the way this union went about it. They took on the Catholic Church. He was angry. He said some people said the Church was hypocritical. He didn’t want to have anything to do with this union.”

Everyone, including Mahony, agreed that the workers had just grievances. They were poorly paid. After 11 years, one man was making only $5.75 per hour. They had to pay $45 every two weeks for family health insurance. Then, just before Christmas, 1987, the workers discovered that Mahony had eliminated their annual $300 bonus. The union put out a flier suggesting that Mahony used the bonuses to pay for the Pope’s visit. Mahony says he didn’t object to the workers having a union if that was what they chose of their own free will. But in this election, he says, the pro-union side was out of control, smashing windshields, threatening co-workers. It was true, says Mahony, that he took away the Christmas bonus but that was only because, when he took over, he discovered that the archdiocese had a policy of paying the cemetery workers sub-standard wages and then trying to make it up to them with the bonus.

To Mahony, this seemed patronizing. “In justice we had to give people a living wage (all year),” he says. So starting in 1987, Mahony increased cemetery workers’ wages and eliminated the bonus. Unfortunately, says Mahony, the archdiocese didn’t have a personnel department at the time. No one explained the new policy to the cemetery workers in Spanish. Then when Christmas came, the word spread that Mahony had used their bonus money to pay for the Pope’s visit.

“It was so outrageous,” says Mahony. “We made money on the Pope’s visit”--$70,000 to $80,000 profit.

In the end, Mahony vowed never to work with the union. Though the union won the election, Mahony says he will set up a three-person panel to handle all negotiations. Furthermore, Mahony told the cemetery workers in a videotaped message: “If you tell me, through words or any other way, that you no longer want to be represented by the union, I am available to listen and also to work with you to resolve this situation.”

The ideal archbishop, Mahony says, quoting “Archbishop” author Reese, “should be involved in national and international affairs of the church and society--but never be gone more than two days a year.” Mahony scores well on the involvement front, serving on a bewildering variety of boards and commissions, and forever flying off to New York, the Middle East or Southeast Asia, drafting papers for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. Among other American bishops, Mahony is well regarded, according to Reese. “They see him as very bright, articulate and hard-working,” he says, which is why they gave him the difficult and delicate task of drafting papers for their national conferences on AIDS and the Middle East (the AIDS paper rejected the use of condoms for preventing AIDS; the Middle East paper recommended the establishment of a Palestinian state).

But at the end of every trip, he returns to St. Vibiana’s and the unavoidable reminders of the increasing demands on his resources in Los Angeles. “In the area where the chancery is, there are people sleeping in refrigerator cartons. Fires on the streets. We can’t keep up with it, no matter how many single-room-occupancy hotels get refurbished, no matter how many shelters. The social problems are becoming more difficult. And the despair rate is becoming more pronounced.” Those concerns are always with him, says Mahony, as is a steady stream of paper work. When his administrative tasks threaten to overwhelm, he says, he takes comfort in a prayer Pope John XXIII used to say before retiring: “There are sure a lot of problems in your Church, Lord. But they are Your problems. You can handle it. I’m going to bed.” “When you think about it,” he says, “that’s a very profound prayer.”

IN A CROSS-COUNTRY flight aboard a commercial airliner, Mahony reflected recently on his progress as archbishop. Although he is sometimes portrayed as cracking down on deviations from Church teaching with unreserved glee, no archbishop enjoys this part of his job, says Mahony. “It would be far easier to pretend there isn’t any problem.” But that is what’s wrong with our society, he says. “Nobody is willing to say that something is right and something is wrong,” and anyone who does is immediately attacked.

What Mahony sees as a major wrong in Los Angeles is its materialistic culture. “Where I am most alarmed,” he says, “is with new immigrants. They come here with very close family ties--and within no time, you see this family get caught up in the search for the material goods. It tends to break up the family. Each of us has to stop from time to time and ask, ‘What am I spending money on? What consumes me? What is important to me?’

“In the Third World countries or in rural parts of this country,” he says, “there is a bond between creation, earth, cycles of crops and planting that keeps people much more in touch with creation and automatically keeps us linked to God. But in our society, people haven’t got a clue where the water comes from that is coming out of their faucets. They have no idea where the food comes from. The idea of a cow is so remote.

“We live in an instant information society. A disaster somewhere will be on the 6 o’clock news in living color. The world has shrunk in so many dimensions that we see ourselves really as the cause of what happens. We look at technology and we say how brilliant we are: We are gods with a small g . And the temptation is that you, too, can become the beginning and ending of your own existence. You think that you really created your life and everything that happened to you: ‘I am self-sufficient. I don’t need to be sustained by a creator.’

“What I would say is that we have to take a look at the family--what’s happening to children, parents. I see this in family counseling. An eminently successful businessman was in counseling because he was never at home. He says, ‘What I was trying to do was to work around the clock to buy them everything. And what they wanted from me was my time.’ ” When asked if he has thus far made a dent in the materialistic culture of Southern California, Mahony thinks for a second and softly says, “Not really.” Still, he says, he does believe that it is possible to “redo, reshape and re-create the human community.

“If I didn’t have hope,” he says, “I’d probably write to the Pope and ask him to send me back to the Valley.”