Mahony is a big man in the church: L.A. cardinal makes friends and enemies with equal energy in most varied diocese on earth - Cardinal Roger Mahony - Cover Story - Interview

LOS ANGELES -- The Fresno pastor leaned forward and said with a conspiratorial smile,"The official biography of Cardinal Roger Mahony will state that when be was called to L.A. he was kneeling at his prie-dieu saying his office."

In fact, went on the priest-friend, "at the time the phone rang, Roger was installing a new exhaust fan in the bathroom of the cabin at the lake."

What else might an official biography miss about Mahony? Perhaps the comment from the woman who said, "Don't you just want to go up and muss up his hair? He's always so picture perfect?"

Picture perfect. Unless he becomes pope, Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Michael Mahony, 57, has likely already been seen center stage by his largest ever audience: the entire U.S. television-news audience plus global pickups through CNN and other television-news transfer agreements. The occasion was the funeral Mass for United Farm Workers President Cesar Chavez on April 23. That day also gathered in the old organizing Left, plus progressive priests and ex-priests, women religious and brothers from the farm worker, civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements.

As they walked, these Catholics coalesced, talked. Occasionally, the topic was Mahony and his increasing identification with Los Angeles financial community bigwigs, not least Richard Riordan (the later successful mayoral candidate who in 1989 gave Mahony a $400,000 helicopter, now sold).

There were comments on Mahony's ambition,

It is joked that Mahony arrived in Los Angeles as archbishop in 1985 suffering two cases of fever: Scarlet fever (for the cardinal's red hat) and white fever (for the papacy). He got the one, in 1991. Will he get the other? As marchers chatted, the talk sometimes turned to the cardinal's rigid and willing toeing of the Vatican line on every issue and his drift from liberal stances on social issues to a growing conservatism.

And yet has the perception of a liberal Roger Mahony always been slightly off focus? A wish in the eye of the beholder? To some who know him, Mahony's involvement with the Mexican-American and Latino community was originally more the romantic and caring commitment of a young man become priest than a political statement.

Said one, "Roger seems to get most of his enjoyment out of being with the Spanish people. You know, using amateur psychology, you'd say the most obvious thing about him is his own rigid personality mixing with the very effusive and free-flowing spontaneity of the Hispanic culture."

Is it not more accurate to cast Mahony as a more-or-less constant conservative and corporate churchman who, through personality and chance, was drawn into one of the nation's major social dramas, the farm workers movement?

If there is a darker side to the Los Angeles archbishop, probably it is not his anticipatable conservatism or perceived ambition and their corollary, the Vatican and papal allegiance, but what some see as his personalizing of criticism, his sarcastic and, others say, wounding letters (known variously as "snot-grams" and "midnight epistles") to those who catch his displeasure.

Or again, some in Los Angeles question whether, for a man concerned about the rights of the Latino community, there is not some variance when Mahony or his deputies oust pastors or parish teams with what is depicted as scant regard for due process.

When Mahony is the topic, there seems to be little middle ground, though none deny his "incredible energy," as one female chancery official described it.

Does Mahony matter? Yes.

He matters because under normal circumstances he will be a power in the Los Angeles archdiocese, the largest in the country, and in the National Conference of Catholic Bishops until his mandatory retirement in 2011. He will be a power in church circles until he loses his right to vote in papal elections in 2016.

Influence counts

His influence counts, too, because he is a bishop-maker -- not only of his auxiliaries, but in a wider circle including Sylvester D. Ryan, installed in Monterey, and G. Patrick Ziemann in Santa Rosa. (His classmate bishops include Portland's Archbishop William Levada, and Boise's Todd Brown; California Catholic Conference executive director Msgr. James Petersen, Mahony's choice for the job, is also a classmate.) Mahony also matters in his own right. He's gutsy and highly industrious, and he plays a canny if not always predictable insider's game in church politics.

Yet if any L.A. archbishop matters, the archdiocese matters more. Nearly 10 million and growing, Day-Glo and pastel Los Angeles, home of 4.5 million Catholics, is the Kodacolor version of those 19th century sepia prints of immigrant New York.

In L.A.'s streets it's Spanish instead of Russian, Tagalog not Yiddish, Vietnamese not Polish, Korean not Italian, even though the old European languages are here, too.

This is the archetypal foundation for the third millennium church in the United States.

Side by side, Los Angeles is filthy rich in secure, suburban, gated communities and filthy poor in insecure communities on cast-out couches under the overpasses where cars overhead go swish-swishing by. In Swish City, cars compete with people.