On the day he turned 44, Father Michael Mahoney was expecting Latino parishioners to gather early in the morning at the rectory of St. Francis of Assisi Roman Catholic Church to serenade him with the traditional "las mananitas."
But instead of hearing the lilting music of the happy birthday song, he was jarred awake on that recent May morning by loud pounding on the door and the gruff voice of a fellow Franciscan priest. "Get up!" shouted Father Lawrence Caruso. "The church has been destroyed again!"
What Caruso had just discovered at the brick church in the Silver Lake district was fresh splotches of red, green and black paint streaked across the large image of Jesus on the cross above the main entrance.
The paint and graffiti was the fifth incident against the church in four months. The vandalism belongs to a growing number of "crimes of hate" perpetrated against religious, ethnic, racial and minority groups in the state.
State Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp on Friday said hate crimes "may be up by at least 20% in the last couple of years" and are increasing in every region of California.
Van de Kamp, receiving the final report of the state Commission on Racial, Ethnic, Religious and Minority Violence at a meeting in the Venice Hongwanji Buddhist Temple, pressed for $2 million to fund a human relations commission in every county and underwrite local and statewide collection of data on hate crimes.
In Los Angeles County, the Human Relations Commission--in existence since 1944--reported 378 hate crimes motivated by race, religion or sexual orientation in 1989--the highest total in 10 years.
Crimes against religious groups escalated from 111 in 1988 to 125 in 1989--also a record high, the commission reported. Graffiti was the most common form of religious hate crime in the county, it said.
Jews were the targets of the vast majority of religiously motivated hate crimes during the 1980s. The first non-Jewish religious hate crime did not occur until 1985. But in 1989, the commission continued, seven different religious groups were victimized, including seven attacks on Catholic organizations.
The priests and parishioners at the 1,800-family St. Francis Church have been put on notice that vandalism at their church will continue as long as parishioners continue their weekly praying and marching in front of a neighboring medical clinic that performs abortions.
