RELIGION / JOHN DART : 2 Have Key Roles in Pope's Visit : Pontiff: A Chatsworth parishioner is chosen to worship in special service with John Paul II. A young Reseda man is a selected speaker.

By JOHN DART

Aug. 7, 1993 12 AM PT

She was only 12 when Pope John Paul II visited Los Angeles in 1987, and Adrianna (Adri) Espinosa of West Hills only vaguely remembers seeing him on television then.

But now, at 18, amid her active involvement in a Chatsworth parish, Espinosa is “very excited” about being chosen to worship with the Pope inside a Denver cathedral.

She is in a select group of young Catholics chosen to attend a semi-private Mass next Saturday morning with the Pope presiding and preaching. Only two young people from the large Los Angeles archdiocese will be part of that service.

In all, nearly 2,000 youth and young adults from the archdiocese will join more than 165,000 other delegates from 72 countries between the ages of 13 and 39 at the Colorado city for World Youth Day 1993, actually a five-day event that begins Wednesday. An outdoor Mass during the conference is expected to draw as many as 500,000 people.

“If we’re not the biggest diocesan delegation, we’re one of the largest three or four going,” said Tom East, archdiocesan director of youth ministries.

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles is riding one of 20 chartered buses leaving from Arcadia on Monday. About 850 delegates, including chaperons, will be on the bus caravan, including 181 pilgrims from the archdiocese’s San Fernando Valley Pastoral Region. Another 1,150 emissaries from the archdiocese will travel by other means.

Espinosa’s name was plucked from a hat at Chatsworth’s St. John Eudes parish, which in turn had been picked that same morning as one of two archdiocesan churches to select a participant in the Mass with the Pontiff. Espinosa, who will enter Cal Poly San Luis Obispo this fall, is part of the 11-member group of youth and young adults from the Chatsworth parish who will join the bus caravan next week.

Another young adult in the Valley tapped for a special role is Mike Brown. He and three others from the Los Angeles archdiocese will give five-minute talks interspersed within a discourse by Cardinal Mahony before some 70,000 young adults Friday at a downtown Denver park.

A senior at USC and the youth director for St. Catherine of Siena parish in Reseda, Brown said, “We’re supposed to talk about God and the church in our own lives, so I’ll talk about how, in times of trouble, I might question why certain things happen to me when I’m trying to help other people.”

Twelve people, including nine teen-agers, are going to Denver from the Reseda parish.

They, like delegates in many other parishes, held a variety of fund-raising events to gather $500 each for the trip. Brown, 22, said that some well-to-do parishes and parents provided most of the travel money, “but I think the kids here got more out of it by earning the money themselves.”

To back its 25-member delegation, for instance, St. Clare Church in Canyon Country raised $5,000 from a 13-mile walkathon and collected more funds through a Christmas-in-July sale and other fund-raisers.

St. Didacus parish in Sylmar raised the final $2,000 of its goal last weekend to support its 22-member delegation, which includes 17 youths. Sales of everything from corsages to doughnuts, yardwork and pancake breakfasts helped, but it was an unforeseen drop in air fares close to their deadline that really helped, said youth director Vickie Vadao.

The largest delegation from the Valley--47 people--is from Our Lady Queen of Angels High School Seminary in Mission Hills, an entourage important to the archdiocese’s hopes for future priests.

Typically, nearly half of each year’s graduating class at the archdiocesan-run high school goes to the archdiocese’s seminary college in Camarillo. Through the generosity of the Cabrini Literary Fund and other private donations, all but two of the school’s 30 seniors will be able to experience the Denver gathering. Eight juniors were selected to join them.

“Our boys here are asking themselves the question: ‘Does God want me to be a priest?”’ said Father Lawrence Signey, vice rector of the school. “This is a great opportunity for these kids, who are walking into something huge,” Signey said. “I wouldn’t doubt that some boys will be emotionally turned toward the priesthood.”

Auxilary Bishop Armando X. Ochoa, who heads the San Fernando Pastoral Region of the archdiocese, said he was pleased that the seminarians will be able to “see first-hand the charisma of the Holy Father.”

Many high school seminary graduates who drop the idea of studying for the priesthood nevertheless stay active in the church in some way.

One example is Martin Hicks, 25, who was selected to be the first young person to extend formal greetings to John Paul II on behalf of the assembled young people at Denver’s Mile High Stadium Thursday evening. (The Pope will begin his four-day visit to Denver that afternoon and will meet with President Clinton before going to the stadium.)

A 1985 graduate of the high school seminary, Hicks has worked for five years in the archdiocese’s personnel department. He is an active member of an inner-city parish, St. Cecilia, where his pastor, Father Thomas Peacha, praised him. “Martin and his family are always helping in distributing food to the needy,” Peacha told The Tidings, the archdiocesan weekly.

“This is a great honor for the black community,” said Father Fisher Robinson, director of African-American Ministry for the archdiocese. Besides his welcoming remarks to the Pope, Hicks will discuss problems of gangs, drug abuse and homelessness in a Friday panel with bishops and youth.