Panel to Study Archdiocese Financial Operation

Archbishop Roger Mahony has named a 13-member task force, including several prominent business executives, to review the financial operation and administration of the three-county Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

Mahony scheduled the first meeting for today at the archdiocesan headquarters, telling committee members in a letter that the unexpected death of the vicar general for finance on Sept. 20 presented the committee with “pressing needs.”

Msgr. Benjamin Hawkes, 66, died 16 days after Mahony announced that he had accepted the resignation of the archdiocesan financial officer. Hawkes was to have stayed on the job until January during the transition period.

“It will be considerably more difficult for the committee now because Msgr. Hawkes was there so long,” said Father Donald R. Merrifield, chancellor of Loyola Marymount University, who helped Mahony form the task force.

“He (Hawkes) took a lot of that knowledge with him, or at least that is what everybody has presumed,” Merrifield said.

Merrifield said that everyone invited to be on the committee agreed to do so. “There hasn’t been this kind of involvement before and I think it’s kind of exciting for these professional people to be involved this way,” he said.

The members are: Joseph Dunn, president, Charles Dunn Co.; Robert F. Erburu, president, the Times Mirror Corp.; Stafford R. Grady, board chairman, Lloyds Bank of California; Michael Granfield, chairman, UCLA Graduate School of Management; James P. Miscoll, executive vice president, Bank of America; Kenneth Olsen, vice president, Household Merchandising; Neil Pings, executive vice president for academic affairs, USC; Roland Seidler Jr., board chairman/chief executive officer, Seidler Amdec Securities; Guy B. Wilson, managing partner, Ernst & Whitney; Bonita G. Wrather, Wrather Corp.; Msgr. Donal Mulcahy, Our Lady of the Assumption Church, Ventura; Father Martin Slaught, St. Elizabeth Church, Altadena, and Merrifield.

C ROMAN CATHOLIC ARCHDIOCESE OF LOS ANGELES