How the Mayoral Rivals Keep the Faith

For Antonio Villaraigosa, Catholicism is not so much a set of rules and rituals as it is a culture and tradition. It is how he grew up--”I was an altar boy for four years,” he mentioned recently--as well as a source of some conflict for him today.

About religion, he said: “You don’t pick them. I was born a Catholic.”

Villaraigosa calls himself a practicing Catholic even though he goes to Mass no more than about a dozen times a year (as opposed to the prescribed 52 Sundays plus Holy Days) and disagrees with some of the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church.

In fact, he said, he finds himself more at home with Judaism’s tenets. “It’s a very accepting religion,” he said. And in those cases where Villaraigosa’s convictions clash with those of his faith, he unfailingly picks personal belief over church doctrine.

Church officials realize many Catholics have problems with some of the church’s teachings, but they frown upon so-called cafeteria Catholics who follow one rule and ignore another.

This is a church rooted in centuries-old traditions and rules. Priests and nuns must never marry, and only men are admitted into the priesthood. The church considers abortion murder in most cases and does not recognize divorce.

Villaraigosa, who fully participates in Mass and receives Communion, is open about his problems with the church in which he was raised.

“I’m strongly, strongly pro-choice,” he said in one of several recent conversations about the role that religion plays in his life. The former Democratic Assembly speaker also said he believes women should be allowed into the priesthood and that priests should not be forbidden to marry.

“Asking our priests to be celibate, we’re missing a whole opportunity to bring into the flock of our priesthood people who want to be married,” Villaraigosa said. He is also troubled by “some of the church’s teachings on sexuality with respect to gays and lesbians.”

Former Altar Boy Acknowledges Failings

The former altar boy was no altar boy when it came to some aspects of his life. As a teenager, he got kicked out of Cathedral High School. As a single man, he fathered two children, each with a different woman. As a married man, he has committed adultery.

However, when confronted with his transgressions--or sins, as some would be called--he has confessed, at least to the public.

“I think what the Catholic Church recognizes is that all of us are human beings, and human beings come with their foibles and their failings and their shortcomings,” Villaraigosa said. “What my responsibility is is to acknowledge those failings when they occur and to work to overcome them.”

Villaraigosa, who mines his personal experience to considerable effect on the campaign trail--setting himself as an example of the triumph of affirmative action, for instance--nevertheless shies from the notion that his faith is a legitimate topic for political debate.

“I believe in the separation of church and state,” he said. “I don’t believe that people need to subscribe to a particular God or any one God. That’s an individual choice that people make.”

He believes in God but is not a particularly religious man. He agreed to talk about religion and faith because The Times asked him.

“My religion is more about my spirituality and faith than adherence to rigid theological concepts,” he said.

Once talking, however, he did so at length, describing religion as a backdrop of his youth. It also played a part in the most important formative relationship of his life: his bond with his mother.

Natalia Delgado, who died in 1991, was a devout Catholic who as a young child attended a boarding school run by nuns. Years later, she put her son in parochial schools when she could afford it, then pulled him out and sent him to public schools when money was tight.

“It was parochial school that gave me the foundation both academically and religiously,” he said. “My mother gave me the faith, though.”

But the faith she gave her son was more in himself and humanity than in religion.

“I’m a positive person,” he said. “My mother used to wake up in the morning when we were little kids and say, ‘It’s a beautiful day.’ ” The night he won a spot in the mayoral runoff, Villaraigosa walked onto the stage of his party at Union Station to the sound of U2’s “Beautiful Day” ringing through the hall.

“That’s why I played that song,” he said.

During the campaign, Villaraigosa has been a fixture in churches of all denominations. One recent Sunday at the Baptist Church of the New Covenant in Norwalk, Villaraigosa stood in the front row as Bishop L. Daniel Williams, the church pastor, presided.

From his seat, Villaraigosa reveled in the music and crowd, clapping and swaying along in time. Occasionally, distracted by the scene around him, he fell off the beat but he quickly recaptured it.

Williams introduced him as “one of the few out there who reach across ethnic barriers,” and Villaraigosa happily took the microphone.

As he began to talk, he moved from behind the lectern that functions as a pulpit, the congregation urging him on.

“I was blessed by a strong mother, a woman of indomitable spirit,” he said.

“Uh-huh . . . “

“But I was an angry man . . . “

“Mm-hmm . . . “

Sharing the Joys of Black Churches

For Villaraigosa, black Protestant churches are not, at first glance, natural terrain, either politically or religiously. His mayoral rival, City Atty. James K. Hahn, was raised in the Crenshaw area, the son of an elected official revered by African Americans, and he is a Protestant, a member of the Church of Christ.

Still, Villaraigosa shows no discomfort in moving outside what some would consider his natural base.

“When my children first went to First AME, I’ll never forget my son said, ‘Dad, I like these churches. They have fun here!’ ” Villaraigosa said. “You feel like you’re really celebrating your faith.”

Norman Johnson, pastor of First New Christian Fellowship Baptist Church in Los Angeles, said the candidate has visited his church twice in recent months.

“He spoke about his own maturing and growth,” recalled Johnson. “He’s not a tremendously practicing Catholic. From his mother, he inherited a sense of his own worth, the worth of other people, the need to care about people and not to look at the differences in people as a way of judging them; all of those are very religious values.”

By his own admission, Villaraigosa has occasionally failed to live

up to some of the church’s expectations--for instance, fathering two children out of wedlock.

But, he said, “I paid child support for my kids. I’ve had joint custody of my children since before ‘Kramer vs. Kramer,’ ” referring to the popular 1979 movie in which a father sues for custody of his son. “I took care of both those girls. . . . Both of them moved in with me when they were 16 years old.”

Today Marisela is 26 and married and living in Ontario. His other daughter, Prisila, 23, joined his younger children on stage the night of the Union Station party.

After a marital infidelity led to a two-year separation from his wife, he was quoted as saying of their eventual reconciliation, “It’s too easy to give up.”

Reflecting on that period, Villaraigosa and others have described his motivation to repair his marriage and care for his children in secular, not religious, terms. But some theologians say Villaraigosa’s steps to make amends embody a religious morality anyway.

“From a Catholic point of view, that speaks wonderful volumes for him,” said Father Felix Just, assistant professor of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University.

“We’ve all made mistakes. But do we stand up and take responsibility for them? . . . [He] is a good example of someone who admits his mistakes, can find forgiveness, deal with the consequences and try to do better. I would say that is an even better example of true morality than someone who tries to pretend they’ve never made any mistakes.”

Villaraigosa and his wife, Corina, who were married in a Catholic church, are raising their children as Catholics. They go to Mass at Holy Family Church in Pasadena.

Msgr. Clement Connolly, the pastor of Holy Family, called the Villaraigosas “spiritual people, good people.” Connolly acknowledged that Villaraigosa is not there every week, but said he does not monitor parishioners’ attendance.

The children attend Mayfield, an elite Pasadena Catholic school, a far cry from Villaraigosa’s humble Catholic grammar schools.

Antonio Jr. 11, and Natalia Fe, 7, have both made a First Holy Communion, the rite that allows a Catholic to partake of the most important part of the Mass.

Over the years, the Villaraigosas have had their faith tested in many ways, but Villaraigosa himself cites one moment in which he confronted his soul. In 1993 his wife was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, and Villaraigosa found himself praying for her recovery.

“I kept on telling her throughout the cancer that I believed everything was going to be OK,” he said. “I think that was faith.”