A Final Blessing : Cardinal Mahony Lays His Mother to Rest in Her Longtime Parish

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony buried his mother Friday after a funeral Mass in the parish where she lived for 40 years, raising a son who would become head of the nation’s most populous Catholic diocese.

Loretta Marie Mahony, who was born on Christmas Day in 1906, died in a Santa Ana nursing home on Monday, the cardinal’s 59th birthday. She was 88.

The Mass of Christian Burial was said Friday in St. Charles Borromeo Church and attended by nearly 400 people, including 16 California bishops. The cardinal’s mother was buried in San Fernando Mission Cemetery in Mission Hills near the grave of her husband, Victor, who died in 1959.

The cardinal, whose Los Angeles archdiocese has an estimated 4 million Catholics, celebrated the Mass but left the eulogies to others, who described his Ohio-born mother as energetic and independent-minded.

Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, a longtime friend of Mahony, said afterward that he found her “to be very, very down-to-Earth” when he accompanied the Mahony family to Rome in 1991 for Mahony’s elevation to cardinal.

“She loved to tell stories about how bad he was as a child,” Riordan said.

Msgr. E. James Petersen, executive director of the California Catholic Conference in Sacramento, said in a homily during the Mass: “I know the cardinal will forgive me for saying this, but she was not overly impressed with ecclesiastical pomp.”

Loretta Mahony “was an engaging personality--she did not fade into the background,” added Petersen, who saw her often while he was a priest in Fresno. She moved to Fresno in 1965 to be near her son during his early assignments as a priest.

The cardinal’s mother married Victor J. Mahony in St. Charles Borromeo Church in 1925, when North Hollywood was known as Lankershim. They had three sons: Neil, a resident of Thousand Oaks, and the twins Roger and Louis. The latter lives in the city of Orange.

“She told stories of what a handful the three sons were,” said Michael Mahony, one of her 10 grandchildren.

In the mid-1970s, Loretta Mahony moved back to Southern California, buying a house in Orange.

Mary Jo Kinney of Sierra Madre, whose family was close to the Mahonys when both lived in North Hollywood, recalled how Loretta applied her hobby of painting pictures to the driveway of her house in Orange.

“She painted it gray and used different colors for the numerous cracks,” Kinney said. “Then she hung a big sign in front of her house for all of her neighbors to see: ‘Hand-Painted Driveway. Call Loretta for free estimates.’ ”