Mahony’s Religious Suggestion to Jewish Unionist Stirs Anger : Labor: Archbishop says he thought Jack Sheinkman was a Christian. Their letters heat up a feud complicated by the abortion issue.

Catholic Archbishop Roger M. Mahony has insisted that he did not know Jack Sheinkman is Jewish.

If he had, Mahony said recently, he would not have ended a letter to Sheinkman with the admonishment that he was “praying that the spirit of Jesus Christ might take deep root in your own life.”

But Mahony did, and a simmering feud over labor philosophy and abortion stances between the Los Angeles archbishop and Sheinkman, president of the 200,000-member Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, has flared once more.

The New York-based labor leader said he was angered by the religious suggestion in Mahony’s May 21 letter. Sheinkman closed his June 5 response to Mahony by writing: “Perhaps you should . . . let the spirit of our common Judeo-Christian heritage take deep root in your own life.”

Asked about his reference to Jesus Christ after Sheinkman recently made the correspondence public, Mahony said he thought Sheinkman was a German Christian name. “I know some people with that name who are German,” he said.

The exchange of letters between the two mostly concerned a lingering dispute over efforts to organize gravediggers at the Los Angeles Archdiocese’s 10 cemeteries and their differing views on abortion.

The volatile abortion issue has intensified a conflict between organized labor and Mahony--an ongoing clash regretted by both sides because Mahony’s support for farm workers in earlier years had made the prelate a hero to union leaders.

In his May 21 letter, Mahony said he looked forward to knowing the textile union’s position on “the only vital and important issue of the day: the rights of the unborn to their human lives as created by God himself.”

Sheinkman’s June 5 response challenged the archbishop’s contention, referred to the gravediggers dispute and charged that Mahony had mocked past papal encyclicals on worker rights and had violated church teachings on unions.

Mahony shot back in a June 18 letter that he was shocked at Sheinkman’s “pro-abortion stance.” And, if Sheinkman understood church teachings better, Mahony added, he would realize that the cemetery workers had voted at one point for union representation because of “lies, misinformation and threats made by your representatives.”

Mahony said he was ending the correspondence “since your organization and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles share nothing in common.”

The relationship had already deteriorated badly when the textile workers union in February, 1989, narrowly won a vote to represent gravediggers at archdiocese cemeteries. Mahony objected, saying union organizers used intimidating tactics. Late last year an arbitration panel, selected by the archdiocese and the union, ruled 2 to 1 that the union should be the bargaining representative.

But after only a few weeks of bargaining, the archdiocese discontinued negotiations and instead called a second election for cemetery workers on Feb. 9, contending that the one-year agreement from the first vote had expired. That second election went solidly against the union, which refused to participate and sued to force Mahony to resume negotiating. The case is pending in Los Angeles Superior Court.

The abortion issue also added to tensions, at first only subtly.

Last year, Mahony and Patrick Henning, head of the layman-led Catholic Labor Institute, agreed to separate the decades-old Labor Day Mass and Breakfast in Los Angeles into two events on successive days. Both said the main reason was because the breakfast had become a heavily attended platform for politicians and the preceding Mass was lightly attended.

But before that announcement, Mahony had written a scathing letter to Henning saying that neither he nor any auxiliary bishop would attend the breakfast co-sponsored “by the so-called ‘Catholic’ Labor Institute.” Mahony wrote that the institute was a “hostile anti-Catholic union” and that there was “no redeeming value” in the Labor Day breakfast.

In a later statement, the archbishop said that at one breakfast Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) “spoke most favorably for the right to abortion. I was stunned that he would come to a Catholic-sponsored event and support a position which is so morally repugnant to our Catholic beliefs and tradition.” Mahony also objected to what he called the “pro-(Michael) Dukakis, anti-(George) Bush” flavor of the 1988 breakfast.

Labor leaders, who have traditionally been courted by the Democratic Party, said Cranston had referred to abortion rights but the topic was not the subject of his talk.

The recent clash between Mahony and Sheinkman also arose over abortion.

Before its constitutional convention last fall, the AFL-CIO had come under pressure from several of its affiliates, including the textile workers union, to take a stand supporting abortion rights. But fearful of alienating some segments of its 14-million-worker membership, leaders of the labor federation referred the question to further study.

As it turned out, the AFL-CIO’s executive council, made up of most of the presidents of the nation’s large unions, voted overwhelmingly this month to remain neutral on abortion, leaving the question to be decided by individual unions and members.

When the question was still unsettled last spring, Mahony had written letters to all members of the AFL-CIO’s executive council, including Sheinkman, urging them not to adopt a stance favoring abortion rights, the archbishop said.