Archdiocese of Los Angeles
Homilies and Addresses of Cardinal Mahony

In Search of the Common Good: The Los Angeles Region in the Third Millennium

Cardinal Roger Mahony, Archbishop of Los Angeles

Fifth Annual Public Policy Breakfast sponsored by the Justice and Peace Commission of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
Thursday, October 22, 1998

I. Introduction

Before I begin my formal remarks this morning, I want to thank the Los Angeles Times for making the Harry Chandler Auditorium available to us again this year. It is a fitting venue for this annual event. My thanks also to Dan Garcia for agreeing to be part of today’s forum. His experience and leadership in the Los Angeles region make him uniquely qualified to address this morning's topic. Finally, my thanks to George Crook and the members of the Justice and Peace Commission for their work in organizing the Breakfast and their leadership on many other issues.

Last year, many of you attended this breakfast and heard James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, address the topic of Third World debt. As part of his visit, Mr. Wolfensohn met with parish leaders from South Central Los Angeles to discuss some of the challenges facing our inner-cities. Specifically, the roundtable discussion focused on the lack of access to credit in our inner-cities where check cashing stores, pawn shops, and ATM machines are the dominant sources of finance and credit in many of these neighborhoods. The dialogue initiated with Mr. Wolfensohn is ongoing and provided an impetus for our topic this morning.

II. The Common Good and Solidarity

The dialogue with Mr. Wolfensohn brought home the connection between the international financial crisis abroad and the human development challenges we face in our own backyard. The task of effectively revitalizing abandoned neighborhoods seems to be as perplexing to local business and political leaders, as the challenge of developing a new framework for global financial dealings is for international bankers.

In the aftermath of the civil disturbances in 1992, community development became a cottage industry in Los Angeles. Six years later, we have few sustained accomplishments to show for the dollars pumped into the region by government, private businesses, and philanthropies. In many instances, organizations--both the well-intentioned and the opportunistic--failed to make the long-term change that was promised.

As we stand at the doorstep of a new Millennium, Los Angeles is by no means bordering on the brink of disaster. But those communities most in need become impatient when the potential is unrealized, when expectations are raised and then dashed, and when commitment subsides once the attention of the media turns elsewhere.

The Los Angeles region—by virtue of its size, the diversity of its population, its economic prowess, and its mythological stature as a bellwether for the nation—is a world leader. We are uniquely situated to put forward new paradigms for managing cultural and ethnic diversity, distributing economic wealth more equally, and promoting civic participation among new immigrant groups.

This unparalleled mix of resources demands that we focus not only on the potential of our economic output but on our capacity for human development. At the foundation of this challenge is the task of forging a vision of the common good in which all peoples share in the region's rich resources.

When I speak of the common good I am referring to those conditions in society that enable the protection of human life and the promotion of human dignity. In a democratic society such as ours, we protect human life and promote human dignity by conferring on the person certain rights. In addition to the political rights enumerated in the foundational documents of the nation, Catholic social thought recognizes certain social and economic claims including the right to food, clothing, shelter, education, and health care. In other words, all those things that enable a person to sustain life and allow human dignity to flourish. These rights are coupled with corresponding responsibilities. The obligations on the individual include the responsibility to participate in the social, political, and economic life of the community.

Implied in these rights and responsibilities is an understanding of the person as a social being. We are social by nature, not by choice. We are born into the human family and thereby are obligated to one another by virtue of our birth. The principle of solidarity, one of the most significant contributions of Pope John Paul II to the Catholic social ethic, recognizes the profound interconnectedness of each human life.

The competing political philosophy which guides much of public discourse today assumes that the person is unencumbered by pre-existing obligations to the rest of society. In contrast, the principle of solidarity recognizes the claim that each person has on the other. We are encumbered persons, by virtue of our birth, by a responsibility to those we may not even know.

The future of the Los Angeles region must be guided by a vision and ethic that understands the common good in these terms. It must account as much for the investment banker in Century City as the garment worker in the Pico-Union district. It must consider how policies will impact families that can afford to have one parent stay at home and those families where both parents must work. It must balance the interests of neighborhoods able to fund the development of their own schools, parks, and libraries; and neighborhoods where schools are in disrepair, parks are unsafe, and libraries are rarely open.

Sadly, I have noted that our two largest political parties have abandoned their role of helping to create community and to insure the common good. Instead, the trend is to identify with a whole host of un-related self- interest groups, and to substitute for community and the common good a loose federation of interest groups—each seeking primarily its own interests, needs, and concerns.

This understanding of the common good calls us to resist the social withdrawal which William Fulton calls "cocoon citizenship," that is, the tendency to identify only with those who share the same immediate geographic or economic space.

Its counterpart is what Peter Schrag refers to as the economically and technologically advanced who are "more closely connected to their peers in New York or Tokyo, or Hong Kong or London, than they are to the people on the street below. They are members of a ‘community,’ real or virtual, that has no fixed geographical base and fewer real communitarian loyalties with each passing day, people whose dreams seem, perhaps for the first time in our history, to be connected to no geographical region or place—certainly few that celebrate social diversity."

III. The Los Angeles Region: Its Power and Potential

The five-county Los Angeles metropolitan area is one of the world's most powerful economic regions.

California’s economy is seventh largest in the world in terms of gross production. If the Los Angeles Metropolitan region were a nation, it would rank as the eleventh richest. Los Angeles County alone would rank eighteenth among all industrial and developing countries.

If Los Angeles County were a state (and many of those from Northern California wish that such a separation from the South was possible) it would be the ninth most populous in the nation. According to 1998 forecasts, 48 percent of California's population resides in the Los Angeles Metropolitan region with 29 percent of the population in Los Angeles County alone.

The region's ethnic diversity is startling. Los Angeles is the second largest city for Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Laotians, Cambodians, Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Iranians, and Thais outside their home capitals. A recent Los Angeles Times article reported that in 1997 Los Angeles County had the largest population of Latinos and Asians of any other county in the United States.

Challenges such as charter reform and the proposed neighborhood councils; Valley secession; a growing gap in wealth distribution; issues such as transportation, environmental justice, and community redevelopment all push us to have a greater regional consciousness and a keener sense of the solidarity that is necessary to bring everyone in the region forward.

As we seek to develop a keener regional consciousness, we will also need to focus on developing a fuller sense of community along the lines I alluded to earlier.

IV. Recovering the Culture of Community

"How often have we heard—whether by way of hope or by way of boast—that Los Angeles is the city of the twenty-first century?

There is so much that gives foundation to that claim…

Whichever way you travel, you would move over the gigantic freeway system that connects one section of this city and county with another, some 500 miles of freeways, ribbons of concrete that no city in the world equals, freeways that typify this city as the aqueducts still carry the atmosphere and the character of ancient Rome.

But for those who move through our city in this way, there would remain something they would never see in this brilliant mixture of art, intelligence, business and medical advancements, or concrete structures and the vast conquered space.

They would not see the poor." [September 5, 1985]

These were the opening paragraphs of the homily I delivered at my installation as Archbishop of Los Angeles in 1985. While buildings and freeways have been added, the reality is much the same. How do we change this reality?

Peter Schrag notes that nearly one million Californians live in gated communities and that 90% of new middle--and upper--income housing developments are gated. Among its many distinctions, Schrag writes that the "Los Angeles area is the new archetype of metropolitan segregation."

While the unending urban sprawl of the Los Angeles region would appear to be one large "community" (and I put the word community in quotes) those of us who live here know differently. As Joel Garreau notes in his 1991 book, the Los Angeles metropolitan area is the "edge city" capital with 26 edge cities within the five-county region. In other words, we are an area with no clearly defined center or unifying element.

Community is more than a tract of homes; it is more than a church, congregation, or synagogue; it is more than a center where people can gather. Community is more than spatial vicinity or the ability of people to move efficiently from one part of the region to the other. Community implies relationships and an investment in a common enterprise beyond the economic affinities of work.

Voluntary community takes time and an intentional commitment of its members to cultivate a relational culture that will yield social benefits. The by- product of a relational culture is what Robert Putnam and others refer to as social capital. While physical capital and human capital refer to the "tools and training that enhance individual productivity—‘social capital’ refers to features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit."

To cultivate the common good in an area like Los Angeles requires the development and empowerment of those civic associations capable of organizing people for social change. Our churches, congregations and synagogues traditionally have been the institutions to mediate the public life of its members. These same institutions must serve to organize the power of people to put forward a vision of the common good that is inclusive of all people.

V. Conclusion

The challenges to the Los Angeles region are daunting but our potential is without equal. Our progress, in the end, will be measured by how the poorest and weakest members of society fare.

Los Angeles must become a beacon of hope. Achieving this will require institutions that are preparing their members with the skill and talent to engage effectively in the civic arena to create a renewed vision of the common good for the region. It will require political leadership with the will to turn potential into reality and to make inclusion a non-negotiable operating principle.

Near the turn of the next century, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles will open the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angeles to all people of Los Angeles. The Cathedral will be a spiritual center, a point of light bringing together all peoples of the greater Los Angeles region. It can serve as a reminder of the need for sacred space amidst the political and cultural centers that are linked on adjoining blocks.

All of us here are called to participate in forging a vision of the common good. We must exercise the leadership of the communities and groups we represent and insure that all voices are represented at the decision-making table.

Much is asked of us as a world-class city. Let us hope that as we are well into the Third Millennium we will not only have defined the vision for the region…but we will have given it new and enduring life.

Thank you.

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