2 Campaigns--and 2 Larger Quests

He muses about reincarnation and laughs at himself for delighting in Hindu women strewing rose petals at his feet. He recites the Lord’s Prayer on the run or takes time out to meditate. Though he is the city’s most prominent lay Catholic, his speeches quote Hillel, the revered rabbi.

Perhaps no mayor in modern Los Angeles history has worn his faith on his sleeve more conspicuously than Richard Riordan.

From his 1993 inauguration to last year’s mayor’s prayer breakfast, he quotes the Bible like a Baptist preacher, wields temporal power in the service of the sacred--cutting red tape for a new cathedral--and exhorts the City of Angels not to despair, sounding almost like a prophet of old.

“The Scripture says to us, ‘Do not lose heart and the city shall be renewed,’ ” Riordan told a riot-torn Los Angeles at his inaugural. “Spiritual values are something we have to restore to the city.”

Now Riordan--a longtime confidant of Cardinal Roger M. Mahony--is in a reelection campaign where the line separating religion and politics at times seems as fine as the lace on a priest’s surplice. Opponent Tom Hayden has called for “spiritually grounded” politics and written a book linking religious belief and environmentalism.

To be sure, there is nothing new about Bible-quoting politicians. But Riordan’s allusions to values often are not the pat statements that work most easily in politics. Rather, they reflect a lifelong pilgrimage for meaning by a 66-year-old who privately probes his faith and challenges its teachings--and sometimes finds himself rebuked by other Catholics.

An amalgamation of piety and pragmatism, of personal generosity and official austerity, Riordan the Catholic has spent millions of his own money on programs for children in the best tradition of the church’s “preferential option” for the poor. But Riordan the Republican businessman refused his cardinal’s plea to oppose a 1994 proposition denying services to illegal immigrants and their children.

And while he has been a behind-the-scenes advisor to the Catholic hierarchy on matters of money, he hardly heeds its counsel on two issues important to the church: abortion and divorce.

In the process of divorcing his second wife, the mayor has made no secret of his love for a third woman, creating a potential crisis for him should they choose to wed. “I’ll let God judge me,” he says.

Yet, if he is questioning and at times defiant, his actions also point to a deeply ingrained Catholic piety, a core of simple faith that stands against the winds of inquiry.

That faith helped him through the death of two children, a 21-year-old son in a scuba diving accident, and a daughter, 18, of an eating disorder. “The beliefs I had,” he says, “had a lot to do with me keeping my sanity.”

*

It is early evening in Brentwood, and the mayor is alone in his mansion except for his Yorkshire terriers, which he has locked in a room while he escorts a guest outdoors to his chapel, nestled in the manicured grounds of his $6-million estate.

What moved Riordan to build it?

“It was just a nice thing to do,” he answers. “Not a spiritual thing.”

Not spiritual? The answer may not surprise his pastor, Msgr. Lloyd A. Torgerson of St. Monica Catholic Church in Santa Monica.

For all the mayor’s displays of piety, there is an uneasiness in him, says Torgerson, who recalls bicycling through France with him in 1991 and how, even there, Riordan engaged him in issues of faith such as the distinction between “dogma” and lesser “teachings” of the church. “He’s always asking questions,” Torgerson says. “I’d say that’s part of his journey. There’s a simplicity but also an unsettledness.”

The mayor was moved to tears last September while leading a city delegation to Israel by a reading of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-8:1) from a hilltop overlooking the Sea of Galilee, where tradition says Jesus spoke.

Yet Riordan is not one to pick up the Bible on a regular basis. He prefers novels and biographies with “spiritual connotations.”

Leading a book club at his home, he last year suggested it discuss a favorite novel, “The End of the Affair” by Graham Greene--the story of a World War II affair between an American writer and the wife of a British official.

The lovers are caught in a bombing raid while in a hotel. After the man goes out to investigate, another bomb explodes. The woman rushes out, finds him buried in rubble and makes a pact with God: If God will spare him, she will never see her lover again.

He does survive and she spends the rest of her life trying to convince herself there is no deity--so she can resume the affair.

Riordan sums it up: “God is like the hound of heaven who follows you down the labyrinthian ways of life. You may act as if you don’t believe in him, but he’s there.”

*

The son of a department store executive, Riordan grew up in New Rochelle, N.Y., in a family that went to Mass but wasn’t overly devout. Yet, like many Catholic males, he was an altar boy and attended parochial schools with “nuns who could hit you from 50 feet.” Majoring in philosophy at Princeton, he was inspired by Jacques Maritain, a scholar of St. Thomas Aquinas. To exist, Maritain argued, was to act.

Today, Riordan says two overarching principles inform everything he does, whether marching in a gay rights parade, battling Police Chief Willie L. Williams or mingling with constituents.

The first is that God gave humans a will and an intellect. We thus are never permitted to “cop out” by leaving decisions to others, including the Almighty. Second, “everybody’s important. Everybody has an equal right to the good things in life . . . education, good health care, good nutrition.”

Riordan insists that’s more than a pol’s bromide.

With a fortune estimated at $100 million, he has become a benefactor--often quietly--for causes such as school literacy programs.

“One time he said to me that . . . it was almost a call from God for him to use [his wealth] to help children,” says Sister Cecilia Louise Moore, vice chancellor of the Los Angeles archdiocese.

Some think the loss of two children, in 1978 and 1982, helped inspire that calling. In moments when memories of them rush in, Riordan grows quiet, as if standing alone in a forest listening for someone.

“Losing a child is literally like having somebody take a sledgehammer over your head,” he says finally. “But you have . . . to say there are other people, other children out there that need me. I don’t have a right to”--he takes a breath--”wallow in my sorrow forever. Let the sorrow go, but then get on with it.”

He gets on with it through the Riordan Foundation, which gives $4 million annually to reading and computer programs in schools and provides grants for girls’ and boys’ clubs and an East L.A. agency.

Sometimes Riordan needs to be reminded of what he has done. As he escorts a guest through his mansion, he is at a loss to explain why his parish gave him two small marble mementos on a bookshelf.

When the guest reads the inscription referring to the Northridge earthquake, which damaged the church, Riordan remembers.

“Oh. I gave them a quarter-million,” he says matter of factly.

He is almost apologetic, as if his giving failed the test of Jesus’ parable (Mark 12:41-44) about the poor widow who gave her last penny to the temple. “It doesn’t affect my standard of living at all, so I shouldn’t brag,” he says.

He once joked that his next fund-raising drive would be to convince the pope to delete a nettlesome New Testament passage--the one about it being harder for a rich man to get to heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.

But Riordan’s history of giving has not insulated him from critics scrutinizing how his professed beliefs match his public policy.

Despite pleas from Mahony and others, he declined to take a stand in 1994 against Proposition 187, which sought to cut services to illegal immigrants and bar their children from public schools. The measure passed, but is held up by lawsuits.

On KCET-TV Channel 28’s “Life & Times,” Riordan was contrite about his neutrality on the measure. “Certainly 187 has had a major detrimental spiritual effect,” he said, “particularly on Latinos . . . and to that extent I regret it.”

Last fall, the mayor joined Mahony in opposing Proposition 209, the anti-affirmative action initiative that eventually passed. But he opposes a campaign by many clerics--not including Mahony--to enact a “living wage” law requiring city contractors to pay workers at least $7.25 an hour.

For liberals like the Rev. James Lawson of Holman United Methodist Church, the mayor’s stance doesn’t square with his faith.

“The biblical faith requirement of community life is measuring your success by what’s going on with the poor and the marginalized,” Lawson says. “That’s clearly the test of the prophets. . . . The king must be just.”

Nowhere is Riordan more ambiguous about where faith ends and public policy begins than on the issue of abortion.

Before his election, he contributed to both pro-abortion rights and antiabortion groups. That drew heat, forcing him to repeatedly say he favors abortion rights.

But even today, he says abortion is wrong and he might contribute to an antiabortion group--if it didn’t badger pregnant women.

Riordan in this sense is little different from most Catholics, who polls have found do not agree with the church’s opposition to birth control or abortion choice.

“I accept all the dogma, but this is not a dogma,” he says. “If it’s not dogma . . . I listen to the teachings of the pope and things, but I make my own mind up.”

For doctrinaire Catholics like James Hanink, a professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University, Riordan’s antiabortion but pro-choice stance is galling.

“The guy might be in heaven way before me, but . . . with respect to what the bishops have identified as the central human rights issue of the time, he’s on the wrong side. He doesn’t bring to bear his Catholicism at all.”

*

The church, indeed, would not likely pick Riordan to teach catechism. For he is at home with Hindu ideas about reincarnation (quipping that he might like to come back as a terrier) or attending what he calls a “holy roller” church filled with ecstatic Pentecostals.

He is, in that sense, the modern man--one with a “mania for trying to find the truth,” but finding the search leads him on a solitary road, groping with ambiguity.

As with many, it’s hardly an abstract exercise. Take his two failed marriages.

His first lasted 23 years, producing five children. After the divorce in 1980, he remarried outside the church. Because it had not granted an annulment of the first marriage, he was considered to be living in adultery and was forbidden to receive Holy Communion.

At the time, Riordan considered having his second marriage blessed by the Episcopal Church, whose beliefs are similar to the Catholic Church’s but which is tolerant of divorce. In the end, “I was too much a Catholic,” he says.

Seven years after his divorce--and just before Pope John Paul II’s visit to Los Angeles--the church granted an annulment. That cleared the way for Mahony to “convalidate” Riordan’s second marriage. Conducted in the cardinal’s chapel, the ceremony enabled Riordan to again receive Communion.

Now Riordan is going through a sensitive situation again. Following a four-year legal separation, he filed for divorce from his second wife last year--while professing his love for another woman, children’s advocate Nancy Daly, who is the city’s unofficial first lady.

The mayor has not disclosed if he will ask the church to annul his second marriage, enabling him to remarry without risking his right to Communion. But it seems unlikely that Riordan will allow the church to stand between him and Daly.

“A very vexing issue,” he calls it, one he has discussed with Torgerson, his parish priest. Mahony says he has not spoken to the mayor about it. “I would never inquire, and haven’t.”

Some Catholics worry about the example being set.

After the mayor received Communion on inauguration day, critical letters were sent to The Tidings, the archdiocesan newspaper. “It seems that there is a double standard, one for prominent wealthy Catholics and another for ordinary divorced Catholics like me,” said one writer.

“I think, you know, God will forgive all of us, so we should forgive ourselves, if there is forgiveness necessary,” Riordan says. “But nothing is that clear-cut to know who should be forgiven. . . . So let’s let God decide.”

Such introspection may be at odds with the no-nonsense persona of a mayor known for business acumen and a robust lifestyle that has him rise early to bicycle in the hills. And it would be wrong to think of him as a man with his head in the spiritual clouds.

Take the Bible’s call to turn the other cheek--hardly a credo for a politician. “God expects us to forgive people who trespass against us. But I don’t think he wants us to forget about their trespasses, because that would be stupid,” Riordan says. “I mean, somebody may do it again. . . .”