Mahony Sees Success in Meeting Latinos’ Needs : Catholics: New cardinal estimates 75% of goals are being met. Some say he hasn’t gone far enough, however.

On the day he was named a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church last month, Roger M. Mahony faxed the Pope to thank him for the honor and reiterate that the church in Los Angeles must champion immigrants, refugees and the poor.

Mahony struck the same note in 1985 when he took control of the nation’s most diverse archdiocese, with 96 ethnic groups. The following year, when the North Hollywood-born archbishop spoke in Spanish to 50,000 Latino Catholics filling Dodger Stadium, he expounded on an ambitious five-year plan underlining his commitment to their spiritual and material needs.

And today, as he receives the traditional red biretta of his office during a special consistory in Rome, the new cardinal presides over the largest concentration of Latinos in the United States--which has grown to an estimated 3 million within the archdiocese boundaries of Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.

Although Mahony says there is still much to do, many of his goals for Latinos have been accomplished or are in sight, and he estimates a 75% success rate.

Thousands of refugees have been resettled. Five regional offices for immigration and citizenship assist the homeless and provide job and legal counseling. Masses are now said in Spanish in two-thirds of the 293 parishes. Latino culture and Spanish are taught to seminarians. A weekly Spanish-language newspaper reaches 180,000 homes. Mahony has set up a $100-million scholarship fund to help needy children attend parochial schools, where 45% of the students are Latinos. And he is planning a broad-based meeting on gang violence.

Indeed, interviews with several dozen people active in the Southern California Latino community--both Catholics and non-Catholics--reveal many positive strides.

“My God, the church has made a lot of progress,” said Antonio Rodriguez, an attorney active in immigration law.

Yet there is some lingering dissatisfaction, even bitterness. A few activists see Mahony as “posturing” rather than aggressively attacking Latino problems, and as bending to the conservative agendas of wealthy Anglo church members.

The most repeated accusation is that Mahony alienated Central Americans by not backing Father Luis Olivares, the popular Claretian priest who declared Our Lady Queen of Angels Church a sanctuary from U.S. immigration officials in the 1980s. Thousands of homeless Salvadorans were housed in the church basement until health and safety violations prompted closure of the program early this year. Some accuse Mahony of ending the shelter program and engineering Olivares’ transfer, allegations denied by Mahony.

The church hall “was in an absolute shambles,” Mahony said. “There was drug-dealing, homosexual activity, crime, murders going on. . . . It looked like downtown Kuwait City.”

And Father Albert Vasquez, who succeeded Olivares at the 11,000-member downtown La Placita parish, says he “found this place not so much a sanctuary for refugees as a sanctuary from the police. Very few were actually political refugees. . . . People in the parish feel Mahony has gone to bat for them and never gone back on his word” to help them.

Mahony has earmarked millions to aid recent immigrants and people who do not speak English, saying that they are the ones who need the most help to cope in a society that is largely foreign to them.

But some conservative critics charge that too much of the archdiocese’s none-too-abundant money is spent on immigrants and the Spanish-speaking, and not enough is spent on Catholics who speak English.

Despite a variety of opinions matching the diversity of the archdiocese, there is agreement, however, that the unprecedented growth, costs and personnel needs of the Latino Catholic community severely tax the archdiocese’s resources.

“Accommodating the numbers is one of our biggest challenges,” Mahony noted before departing for Rome this week. In Los Angeles County alone, the Latino community has grown by 62% during the past decade and now accounts for 38% of the total population, according to the 1990 Census.

Louis Velasquez, assistant director of the archdiocese Office of Hispanic Ministry, added: “Nobody likes to use the word crisis, but that could be used to describe the situation. . . . Everything is growth right now--except for money.”

Yet, despite archdiocese operating deficits of $9.2 million last year and $21.6 million in 1989--made up from reserves--no parish church or elementary parochial school has been closed. Nor are any closings contemplated, according to Mahony. In Detroit, Chicago and New York, scores of inner-city Catholic parishes and schools have been shut down because of dwindling attendance and tight budgets.

Almost every parish in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles is at least 3,000 families strong and many facilities are overcrowded. In fact, some churches in Latino neighborhoods must schedule as many as 13 or 14 Masses a weekend. Acquiring additional inner-city property for expansion is too expensive, Mahony says. Already, rich churches must help out those that are poor.

Parishes with excess reserves are asked to donate between $25,000 and $75,000 a year to inner-city churches, bringing in about $1.7 million, Mahony said. He added that an archdiocese-wide “annual appeal” will begin soon.

At least 45 parishes and their schools--the majority of them predominantly Latino--must be subsidized, Velasquez said.

The schools, with a current enrollment of 101,650, form the second-largest school system in the state. Their enrollment is 45% Latino, 12% Asian and 9% black. Enrollments have declined during the past two decades, but the schools would be overflowing if tuition were not a factor, said Sister Barbara Neist, the superintendent of secondary schools.

But because Mahony set up the Archdiocesan Education Foundation, $1.5 million was allotted this year for low-income-family scholarships. Average tuition is $1,090 a year at elementary schools and $2,000 at high schools. Mahony’s goal is for the foundation to create an endowment fund of $100 million from corporate and individual gifts.

Latino community leaders generally give Mahony high marks on the parochial schools and the way the archdiocese has helped aliens and refugees apply for citizenship and “protected status” under immigration laws. Some 37,500 amnesty cases were processed before a 1988 deadline at 17 centers administered through Catholic Charities, the social service arm of the archdiocese. The operation cost $4 million, according to Stephen Voss of the agency’s Immigration and Refugee Division.

Voss added that last year his division helped 6,000 refugees resettle, “more than any other agency in the country, religious or secular.”

Alan Clayton, civil rights director for the California League of United Latin American Citizens, called Mahony’s actions on immigrant rights “very positive.” But he faulted the archdiocese for not doing more to help Latinos get jobs.

“I haven’t seen the church come out and say that Latinos are being locked out of a large sector of employment,” Clayton said.

And Harry Pachon, director of the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, said a major task remaining for the church is to “help integrate into full citizenship at least 1 million Latinos who are here legally but are not citizens.”

Mahony agrees that the “political empowerment and influence” of Latinos “should be far greater . . . (in order to) give them a dignity . . . and a future. That’s an area to work on,” he said.

Many Latinos feel Mahony has taken their needs to heart and worked for safer streets, gang abatement, and better jobs, housing and education.

“His actions are proof of his words,” said Rosalinda Lugo, senior leader of the United Neighborhoods Organization in East Los Angeles--one of four groups that have been active in organizing Southern California Latino neighborhoods. Training lay people to take part in decision-making responsibilities is a key issue for Mahony, she added, a task she thinks he is doing well.

And Sister Carmel Somers, an organizer for Valley Organized in Community Efforts (VOICE), UNO’s counterpart in the San Fernando Valley, added that Mahony has appointed Latinos to key archdiocesan posts. He has “forged an alliance between dominant Anglo members and the Latino segments of the community” through regional groups, she said.

Frank Villalobos, an East Los Angeles landscape architect, is one of about 50 Latino leaders recruited by Mahony this year for a business and professional group that advises him on Latino affairs. Mahony’s approach is “genuine and fresh,” Villalobos said. “Mexicans have never been asked to participate in this way before.”

An archdiocese official said Mahony had appointed “at least several dozen” Latinos who carry responsibility for programs or departments at the chancery level.

But Rudolfo Acuna, Chicano studies professor at Cal State Northridge, said that while Mahony is “suave,” he hasn’t really empowered Latinos within the church.

“He is run or influenced by very rich people . . . and his appointments are always balanced out by Anglos,” Acuna said. “I think his first agenda was to make it as a cardinal, and his social programs went by the wayside. . . . The working and poor people are desperately looking for some sort of hope . . . and I see no vision.”

Thomas A. Chabolla, executive director of the archdiocese Office of Justice and Peace, sees long-range vision, however, in the archdiocese’s plans to help establish worker-owner cooperatives by matching technical assistance with working capital.

“Economic empowerment is a necessary first step in many cases to break the cycle of poverty in a community and change the institutional structures,” Chabolla said. But he conceded that the $350,000 in archdiocese funds available for all such programs is far too meager.

A thin wallet is also the reason the archdiocese has been slow to use its instructional television system, linked to 110 parish schools, for Spanish-language programs for new immigrants and high-school dropouts. But a new televised program of materials in basic education and citizenship will be available this fall for evening classes, according to Tom Mossman, director of telecommunications services.

Meanwhile, night classes in citizenship, basic adult skills and English are already in place at 19 schools, and Spanish literacy is taught at an additional six sites.

In order to increase Latino leadership, Mahony is seeking more Latino priests. This year, six of the 15 ordained for work in the archdiocese are Latino. Two other new priests are Filipino, the second-largest ethnic group within the archdiocese; 50 parishes include at least 200 Filipino families.

Mahony said he’s delighted that several orders of nuns from Mexico have moved here to concentrate on education, hospital work and parish ministry in Latino neighborhoods. The sisters thus free the under-represented Latino priests for sacramental duties.

All seminary graduates in the archdiocese must be bilingual (Spanish and English). The requirement was laid down by Mahony, who, by most appraisals, is fluent in Spanish.

The new cardinal’s identification with Latinos began in his childhood in the San Fernando Valley, he reminded those attending his installation in 1985. “And (it) progressed,” he continued in Spanish, “as a seminarian when I took a census in the barrio of Pacoima and helped minister to los braceros ( Mexican farm workers) working in the orange and lemon groves of Ventura County.”

After his ordination in 1962, Mahony earned a master’s degree in social work, specializing in community organizing, at the Catholic University in Washington. Subsequently in Fresno and Stockton he championed the farm workers, and in 1975 he was named the first chairman of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board.

His sensitivity to Latinos and their concerns has become well-known in the church, particularly in Rome, according to Los Angeles Auxiliary Bishop Armando Ochoa.

Now that he’s a cardinal, his Latino focus won’t diminish, Mahony insists.

Already, he said, he’s planning next year for a Hispanic National Congress to be held in Los Angeles and to unveil a new five-year archdiocese plan.

“We are making progress,” said Auxiliary Bishop Sylvester Ryan, secretariat director for Ethnic Ministry Services. “But it’s going to take time.”