Naming of Cardinals Expected by Easter : Vatican: Sources say Pope will want Mahony, others at April meeting.

Archbishop Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles was reported in early January to be on a list of new cardinals soon to be named by the Vatican. After a month of waiting, Catholic observers believe that the announcement from Rome will come sometime before Easter.

Four days after the holiday, which falls on March 31 this year, Pope John Paul II will convene the College of Cardinals for only the fourth assembly of its kind in his 12-year pontificate. The Pope, Vatican sources have said, is likely to want the participation of the 18 or so new cardinals said to be on the list.

In the meantime, if Mahony knows anything, he isn’t saying.

The archbishop was in Rome early last week for a meeting of the Pontifical Council on Justice and Peace--one of three such Vatican panels on which he serves. Mahony is also a member of the communications council and was recently reappointed to the council on migrants.

He is scheduled to meet today in Hollywood with the archdiocese’s pornography commission and to celebrate a Mass Sunday at St. Vibiana’s Cathedral for World Marriage Day.

“Everybody’s guessing (about the announcement’s timing); nobody really knows,” said Bill Rivera, public affairs director for the Los Angeles Catholic Archdiocese.

Jesuit Father Thomas J. Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University, agrees. “The only people who know what’s going on are in Rome,” said Reese, author of “Archbishop: Inside the Power Structure of the American Catholic Church.”

Nevertheless, Reese said the announcement could be made by the Pope well before the College of Cardinals meeting April 4-6 at the Vatican.

“With people worried that the reforms in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union might be rolled back, I think the Vatican would want to get those new cardinals in place while there is still time,” he said, referring to past attempts by those governments to restrict church activities.

Another matter with some urgency, Reese said, concerns the Pope’s new secretary of state, Angelo Sodano, who does not have the rank of cardinal. “They can’t have the foreign policy spokesman for the Pope lacking the prestige of that post,” he said.

Some Los Angeles Catholics have speculated that the Pope would not announce new cardinal candidates during Lent, which begins next week on Ash Wednesday. However, the Vatican named new groups of cardinals during the Lenten periods of 1960 and 1962.

Times Rome correspondent William D. Montalbano reported Jan. 5 that many of the new red hats will go to bishops in Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia, and that Mahony headed a short list of U.S. candidates.

Cardinals are the Pope’s principal advisers. The plenary assembly of cardinals in early April has two topics: “The church and its reaction to threats against life” and “the problems posed by the aggressive nature of religious sects.”

Cardinals also administer large archdioceses or fill posts in the Vatican bureaucracy. They have another privilege, among the most crucial: Those under 80 years old are eligible to cast ballots for a new Pope. Up to 120 electors can participate in the balloting, but because only 102 cardinals are currently eligible, Pope John Paul II could appoint as many as 18 new cardinals.

Besides Mahony, who will turn 55 on Feb. 27, the prime American candidates are Archbishops Anthony J. Bevilacqua, 67, of Philadelphia; John L. May, 68, of St. Louis, and Adam J. Maida, 60, of Detroit. All four serve archdioceses that have had cardinals in the past.

Months earlier, Mahony fended off questions about his inevitable elevation to cardinal by saying that he was too young to be named to the higher rank. However, other American archbishops have been promoted at a comparable age--Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago at 54, Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston at 53 and Cardinal William Baum, now at the Vatican, appointed when he was 49.

Reese said that more relevant than Mahony’s age are the facts that he has headed for more than five years the most populous archdiocese in the country, and that his predecessor, Cardinal Timothy Manning, is no longer living.

“Those are very important factors that put him, in my opinion, at the top of the list,” Reese said.