Mahony Named Cardinal of L.A. : Vatican: The archbishop, third man to hold the position here, will get his red hat at a consistory June 28.

Archbishop Roger Michael Mahony, an electrician’s son from North Hollywood who preaches social justice and doctrinal firmness to the largest flock of Roman Catholics in the United States, was named cardinal of Los Angeles here this morning.

Pope John Paul II elevated Mahony to become the third cardinal in the history of Los Angeles at his weekly general audience here today, papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro said.

Mahony is among two dozen prelates John Paul promoted today to join the select leadership circle of a church that counts more than 850 million faithful around the world.

Archbishop of Los Angeles since 1985, Mahony becomes the youngest American cardinal, and the only American cardinal west of the Mississippi.

Mahony and the other new cardinals named by the Pope today will receive their red hats from John Paul at a consistory June 28.

In one of their church’s great public spectacles, they will celebrate an outdoor Mass jointly with the Pope in St. Peter’s Square the next day. In the church calendar, June 29 is the feast day of St. Peter, the first Pope, and St. Paul, apostle to the Gentiles.

The new cardinals were personally selected by the Pope, who has met most of them during his travels around the world. He saw Mahony at work on a 1987 visit to Los Angeles.

The Pope’s choices for cardinal included bureaucrats at the Roman Curia and pastors from all corners of the Earth.

In their selection, John Paul paid particular attention to Eastern Europe, where he is systematically filling vacuums created during 40 years of communism; to Latin America, where he will help celebrate the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ voyages next year, and to Africa and Asia, two continents where the church is growing quickly.

In naming new prelates to a College of Cardinals depleted by death and old age since his last consistory in 1988, John Paul chose bishops who mirror his own allegiance to traditional church teachings with social activism.

At 55, the tall, slender Mahony becomes one of the youngest princes of his church. Mahony has the reputation of blending liberal social concerns and conservative religious convictions. In approach, he is more engaging than confrontational.

In Los Angeles, Mahony told The Times: “I am still astonished by the announcement. Realizing my own sinfulness, my many failures, and my lack of so many essential qualities, it is humbling to accept such an appointment.”

There were inevitable curial appointments among today’s new cardinals, but most, like Mahony, are pastors with a strong social commitment and an unshakable loyalty to Vatican teaching.

With good health, Mahony can expect to lead the sprawling Los Angeles archdiocese, the nation’s largest, until 2011, and cast his vote as a papal elector until 2016.

Under a 1975 Apostolic Constitution promulgated by Pope Paul VI, the College of Cardinals may have up to 120 electors. Until new cardinals are formally invested by the Pope next month, though, there are only 100 eligible cardinal-electors. Normally, cardinals retire at 75 but remain eligible to vote in conclave until they are 80.

Los Angeles’ new cardinal was raised in North Hollywood, where his late father, Victor, was a Universal Studios electrician and owned a small poultry-processing plant on Chandler Boulevard. There, young Roger shoveled out chicken coops and learned the rudiments of what would become polished Spanish from Mexican immigrant workers.

The future cardinal entered Los Angeles College, the preparatory seminary for the archdiocese, in 1950 and graduated in the first class at Queen of Angels Seminary in San Fernando when it opened four years later. He completed studies at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, was ordained a priest in Fresno in 1962 and subsequently earned a master’s degree in social work at Catholic University in Washington.

In Fresno in 1967, Mahony was named adviser to then-Bishop Timothy Manning, who later became his predecessor as cardinal. Rising quickly along the ecclesiastical fast track, Mahony served as bishop of Stockton from 1980 until Sept. 5, 1985, when he moved to Los Angeles on Manning’s retirement.

Manning, who died in 1989, had succeeded the late James F. McIntyre, who in 1953 had become the city’s first cardinal.

Mahony pilots himself around a domain that includes Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties in a controversial archdiocesan helicopter. By land, he is known as a relentless hunter of good takeout pollo (chicken) restaurants.

Mahony, whose archbishop’s salary was less than $200 a week, will continue to live at St. Vibiana’s in downtown Los Angeles. He is an avid ham radio operator and enjoys the solitude of the Sierra Nevada, where he and two other priests bought a small cabin near Yosemite National Park.

“My leadership style is to involve as many people as possible,” Mahony told a meeting of the archdiocese education board in 1986 as he asked the policy-making body to expand its authority and recommend pay raises for parochial teachers.

Later that year, at a prayer vigil for AIDS victims, Mahony announced creation of a hospice to care for those dying of the disease and said he would establish workshops for priests to better understand the needs of homosexual Catholics.

As chairman of the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board in 1975-76, Mahony was identified with efforts to improve the lot of California farm workers.

In the 1980s, he helped formulate a pastoral letter by American bishops condemning the nuclear arms race.

Last year, as head of the International Policy Committee of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, and thereby the American church’s spokesman on foreign policy issues, Mahony cautioned President Bush to exercise “utmost care” in actions against Iraq, saying it would be immoral to deprive Iraqi civilians of food and medicine.

“We understand that Saddam Hussein, by his words and actions, makes this complex and difficult, but the moral justification for our intervention requires that we maintain the distinction between the Iraqi regime and ordinary and vulnerable Iraqi citizens,” Mahony said on behalf of his fellow bishops in a letter to Secretary of State James A. Baker III before the Gulf War.

Mahony is a familiar defender of illegal aliens, the homeless and victims of AIDS. He reorganized his archdiocese administratively to encourage greater participation by women and lay Catholics in general.

At the same time, he has spoken strongly against abortion, the idea of birth control clinics at public schools and the sale of erotic magazines at convenience stores.

Notwithstanding his unabashed social activism, on doctrinal matters, Mahony is foursquare the Pope’s man. Official church teachings, he believes, are not negotiable.

“I am strongly committed to the accurate and complete teaching of the church. I take my role as teacher very seriously,” he told The Times.

Once, to a radio reporter who wondered if his uncompromising stand against abortion took into account a woman’s rights, Mahony replied stiffly: “The policy isn’t mine, it’s God’s. . . . Life is either valuable and precious, or it isn’t.”

Mahony’s anti-abortion position comes in the context of what American bishops know as the “consistent life ethic.”

“We are totally committed to the protection of each and every human life from the moment of its conception through natural death.” That includes the hungry and homeless, the elderly, victims of racial discrimination and the physically and mentally handicapped, Mahony insists.

Such concerns though, he believes, must be addressed in the framework of church teaching. It was Mahony’s suggestion to translate and publish in English for American seminarians a nine-volume series on theology, co-edited by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican’s chief enforcer of doctrinal conformity.

Mahony once told a Times interviewer that he brought to Los Angeles with him views he had derived in his first bishopric in Stockton.

“Dissent--even legitimate dissent--needs a particular forum for its expression. . . . I was particularly concerned that dissenting views not be taught on a par with the official teaching of the church and that people teaching the faith be . . . properly qualified,” he said.

Mahony’s appointment is part of a drive by the Pope to rejuvenate the cupola of a church that counts 850 million Catholics worldwide. Cardinals, the Pope’s principal advisers, administer departments in the Vatican Curia and large archdioceses.

In a reign approaching 13 years, John Paul has by now named the overwhelming majority of the cardinals who will elect the next Pope, thereby leaving his stamp on the future of the church.

Reflecting church growth in Asia and Africa and religious rebirth in Eastern Europe, today’s new appointments swing the majority in the College of Cardinals away from Europe for the first time.

As the new leaders of the church were announced, there were 140 known cardinals in the world--40 of them over age 80. A 141st cardinal “in pectore” is known only to the Pope, meaning that he lives in a country where religion is--or was--suppressed.

Of the known cardinals, there were 73 Europeans, 32 of them Italians. There were 16 Africans and 13 Asians, both numbers up sharply under John Paul, and 22 Latin Americans. There were eight American cardinals, five from Canada and three from Oceania.