Roger Mahony : A Cardinal Intent on Putting the Human Face on Contemporary Issues

The cardinal’s red rose, the tiny lapel designation of his exalted rank in the church hierarchy, an elector of the Pope, seems out of place as he makes his way through downtown Los Angeles, dropping off shoes at one store and chatting with the proprietor of another.

To one who knew him when he was the bishop of Stockton and an advocate for farm workers, the man seems unchanged by place or position. On television he can appear the stern mentor, but in person he exudes a youthful enthusiasm, belying his 57 years, on subjects as varied as the North American Free Trade Agreement, the homeless problem and the operation of his ham radio setup.

“Being a cardinal, how does it feel?” he is asked during an interview at the Times. “I still haven’t gotten over it yet . . . it still feels unreal,” the cardinal replies with a chuckle, adding, “I feel I’m the same Roger Mahony I was in the seminary as a young priest and I don’t feel differently.” He grew up in the San Fernando Valley and served as a seminarian with his predecessor, Cardinal James F. McIntyre in the St. Charles Parish. “The cardinal was somebody so distant from me,” he says. Now he has lunch with the Pope--as recently as two weeks ago.

“Here I am sitting across the table from the Pope having a wonderful discussion about all kinds of world issues and church issues, and on the way out of there I just kind of stopped and looked out the window of the Vatican, and I said, what am I doing here? Was that you that just had lunch with the Pope? How did you get in here?”

The humility seems real, but the cardinal is not reticent to assert his authority to challenge the mood of the moment on such controversial issues as immigration and welfare reform. He has critics, in his own flock and out, but he holds fast: “I think it is precisely in public policy debate that religious leaders need to bring the ethical, moral dimension. That this (immigration) is not simply an issue about borders or National Guard or identity cards--this is an issue about human beings. About people with real names and real lives and real families, with real hopes and dreams for the future. It is part of my responsibility to put the human face on the contemporary issues.”

Question: You have attempted to provide leadership on issues ranging from pornography and abortion to immigration and urban violence. You have taken a lot of heat for this.

Answer: Most of the contemporary problems are as old as the Bible itself. As a person of faith, I always like to make sure I am grounded and deeply rooted in what God’s revelation is, as I understand it, from the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Scriptures. The immigration issue is a good example.

Look at Exodus. It goes out of its way to speak about how foreigners, aliens, people wandering--immigrants in our own terminology--are to be treated. Jesus Christ takes up the same issue. So these are not peripheral issues to the faith tenets, certainly in the Jewish and Christian traditions.

Q: What has the reaction been and what does it suggest?

A: On immigration I’ve gotten heated letters. The meanness is really scary. There is obviously a lot of misplaced anger too--the recession, the economy--and it’s easy to find a scapegoat and blame those people for our problems.

What makes our immigrant issue more difficult in this state is many of our immigrants are people of color. The largest undocumented group in New York are Italians. The largest undocumented groups in Chicago are Polish and Irish, and you don’t have the same kind of reaction. I hope that we see our elected leadership giving more visionary kind of direction in this, not sound bites that inflame and don’t solve anything.

Q: What do you say to those people who say we can’t just let all these people flood in here?

A: I agree. I am not one who says we just open the borders and let everybody in. But at the same time I cannot use simplistic answers, or simplistic proposals to deal with a very complex problem, and we have to help people understand that. As we have tried to do with crime. Locking up people and filling prisons, building dozens of new prisons unfortunately hasn’t done much to the crime rate. And so maybe we have to ask ourselves, are there other factors or causes that we are not dealing with?

With immigration, the big one for me is what are we helping to do in the sending countries to provide opportunity, employment and a future for people there? I talk to very few immigrants in this country, legal and illegal, who would not have preferred to stay home, if they could have had better opportunities for education and employment.

Q: Some people are angry with you because you are against what they say is a woman’s choice on the abortion issue ; and others are angry with you because you oppose the death penalty. What is the coherent center of your view?

A: If someone is going to be “pro-life,” then that covers the whole circle of life issues. Respect for the dignity of each created human being is at the heart and soul of what I am about. As I speak in defense of the unborn fetus or the newly arrived immigrant or the person on death row, whatever it might be, I just sense and feel all of those connected. Today, in terms of our overall respect-life agenda, there are three issues that are more prominent than 10 years ago and that is the question of euthanasia, immigration and violence.

Q: What happens when you walk from your residence the few blocks to The Times and you see this deranged person in the street, another person dying in the doorway, someone robbing someone, does your faith get challenged?

A: No, it probably gets deepened more because again I see God’s creation and handiwork there. Mother Teresa of Calcutta is the one who many years ago helped me to really understand this because when she was picking up all these dying people around Calcutta, the same question was asked of her. And they said to her, but these are miserable, dying people with all kinds of sores and stenches, and on and on, and how can you do this? And she said, because each of these faces is really the face of Jesus in disguise. And I see through the sores and the foul smell and the language and all of that, I see a creation of God.

I talk to a lot of these people and most of them are very nice people and they have tragic stories. The reason they are in the streets is because we as a community have failed them. But mainly the people in the streets in downtown Los Angeles used to be in group residence homes that were all shut down by the state and federal government in the 1980s. The government didn’t transition them to another program, they just shut the door and threw them out on the sidewalk. Well, they are still on the sidewalk.

Q: Are you concerned about the future of the church? It seems to be under attack, there are various scandals.

A: We go through periods of this in the history of the church. The church is, in our understanding, a divine institution filled with human beings. There are times when the sinfulness of members can become very overpowering to us; but it is then that the church is purified again and again because then we have to pause and ask ourselves: what led to this, how come this evil has come upon us, what do we do about it? It causes us to return to Christ and hear again Jesus’ words and Paul’s words, where sin has abounded, grace can abound even stronger.

Q: Maybe the church has to change and to challenge the policy of celibacy and recognize that we live in different times?

A: We have to look at what are the core faith dimensions of our Catholic tradition, what is changeable and negotiable and what is not. Certainly celibacy is not the lifelong tradition of the church at all. In fact just the opposite. Not only in the first 12 centuries did we have married clergy, the whole Eastern Catholic church has had married clergy down to the present time. So the discipline of celibacy is not something that has to be retained at all.

Q: Is any change actively being discussed?

A: No, it is not being actively discussed in that same way. But we have the provision already to bring Lutheran priests and Episcopal priests into the church, and depending on the situation we ordain them, or validate their orders and they are married and they function. We have to be clear about the fact that, as others who are in the situation have told us--and especially my Protestant friends and brother bishops--you are simply going to change one set of challenges and difficulties for another set. For me, that is not a high priority issue. The thing that keeps me awake more than anything else as archbishop is we have probably 4.5 million Catholics, how do we nourish and feed them spiritually?

Q: At least half those Catholics are women and they are in a world now where women are treated differently. They are respected more for their work, expected to support families very often. Is the church sufficiently open to the changing role of women playing a leadership role in the church?

A: I think so. There is an awful lot of catching up to do in a short period of time. Because we have gone after the Second Vatican Council, which was only 25 years ago, from very much clerical leadership model in our parishes, to a multiple person involvement.

We have priests, obviously, but most of the full-time people in parishes are women. That is exciting and is long overdue and they bring a new dimension to the church.

Q: But why can’t women be priests; is it something theological?

A: That is precisely the question. For us it isn’t a question of the sociology of the time of Jesus . . . . The crucial issue that we are having to look at in terms of ordination of women as priests is this: Has the church received the authority from Christ to make that kind of dramatic change? Not, “Is it a good idea?” It has nothing to do with the value of women--that isn’t the issue. The question that we’re having to wrestle with is: Has Christ given the church the authority to make that kind of change? And so far, the response and reflection in prayer is no. That it isn’t a question of whether we should or shouldn’t, it is that we don’t have the authority to do it.

Q: How would this be manifested?

A: Well, unfortunately God doesn’t send us fax messages. I think we just have to continue to reflect on the writings of the early church. As we come to know better what happened in the early days of the church, as we explore those writings and find out how these communities acted, we get a lot more information. For example, there were women deacons at least mentioned in the church’s early writings. The problem is all the questions we want to ask about them, the answers aren’t there. What did they do? Were they the same as men deacons? We are doing a lot research on that that we have never done before. I think that through a lot of this we will find our way, and through the Holy Spirit and prayer.

Q: In Russia we hear echoes of anti-Semitism from people who profess to believe in another version of Christianity, so it’s unfortunately not a dead issue.

A: Our own church is having to deal with it there. But they (Eastern European Catholics) weren’t a part of the Second Vatican Council. They don’t even know that any of this happened. So there is a lot of catching up to do. There was Pope John XXIII who first started dealing with the question: “Where is salvation?” We used to say unless you were a Catholic there was no salvation. We don’t say that anymore. We say salvation is from God.

Q: You can be a Jew or a Muslim or an agnostic and have salvation?

A: Sure, we aren’t the ones that provide the salvation; fortunately it is God that provides the salvation.

Q: Islam seems to be used now as a scapegoat--you hear a lot about Islamic fanaticism, of course there were historic tensions between the Catholic Church and Islam. What is your appraisal of the current situation of Islam?

A: We work very closely with the Muslim community here and in Islam and we work beautifully together. But there are areas where some of the fundamentalism is rampant. A lot of it is diametrically opposed to the fundamentals of Islam, just as there are Christian sects that parade behind the name of Christianity but what they promote and advocate is not Christian. They flourish by offering simple solutions to people with complex problems. That is happening in our own country when you get some extreme people to the right and Christian groups trying to take over school boards in small towns. It is the same thing.

Q: You’re opposed to that?

A: Yes, because it says there are set, simple, simplistic solutions to complex issues.

Q: Do you see a coming together of religions as a cohesive force in the world, or divisive?

A: I see some positive signs. If we really get agreement between the Palestinians and the Jewish people in Israel. The South Africa situation is another example. If some of the problems in Northern Ireland finally get on a track for solution. All of us are energized when we see some sense of peacefulness happening and conflict being ended. That is why, here in Los Angeles, if we can get crime and violence and gang activity to lessen, that gives hope to people. There are the ingredients now for some good breakthroughs in 1994.