Mahony Tells Concern for the Problems Parents Face

In a lengthy pastoral letter, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony has urged families to adopt “countercultural” values to combat the “peculiar stresses and strains of Southern California living.”

The 7,700-word letter, released Thursday, is Mahony’s second pastoral since his elevation to cardinal in June, following one last month speaking against abortion. The new paper singles out problems that parents face in raising their children in the faith because of the “low quality of much television programming, glorification of money and sex in films, and ‘false gods’ in sports and entertainment.”

Directed to the 4 million Roman Catholics in the three-county Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the letter also warns of pressures on family life created by street gangs and violence and by the lengthy Acommutes that many parents must make to reach their jobs. And it speaks of the “special strains” that newly arrived immigrant families encounter because of dramatic changes in culture, language and values.

Departing from the traditional definition of a family as mother, father and children, Mahony said that people who are divorced, separated, single or widowed as well as single parents and married couples without children should also be included.

The pastoral, titled “We are a Family Called Home by God,” asks media, business, education and civic leaders to help create a more “wholesome, peaceful and just social environment” for family life.

Mahony urges business executives to review company policies to make sure that wage earners can support their families and suggests that maternity leave become “parenting leave,” available to fathers, mothers and adoptive and foster parents.

Mahony also calls for the abolishment of school-based clinics and sex-education programs that “sanction--sometimes by silence”--premarital and homosexual activity.”

“I ask each Catholic family in the archdiocese . . . to join me in committing itself to . . . make the necessary changes so that the quality of life grows daily, lives, and has an impact on our communities and our world,” Mahony said.