Cathedral reflects a new vision of church

Roman Catholic cathedral joins other churches in trying to bridge sectarian divides and unite sprawling cities.

LOS ANGELES – After eight years of construction, the first major American cathedral to be built in three decades Monday begins to address the question marks hanging over its $189 million creation. Like a number of newer Protestant mega-churches, the massive Roman Catholic structure – positioned atop the highest hill of downtown Los Angeles and next to one of the nation's busiest freeways – is trying to appeal more broadly than ever across religious, cultural, and ethnic lines.

"American churches of all kinds are trying to do everything they can to enlarge their tent, be seen, be accessible," says Jeanne Kilde, an expert on religious architecture at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. "There is more of a push in recent years to reach out, create a reputation that is as nonsectarian as possible and create somewhat of a neutral reputation to expand their usefulness as house of prayer for all people."

With its first public mass Sunday and ecumenical prayer services this Wednesday to commemorate the tragedy and heroes of Sept. 11, the edifice will begin to test this wider role in Los Angeles. Positioned by builders and many government officials as a sacred space for the entire city, the 12-story Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels will also stand as the mother church for the nation's largest (5 million members) and most ethnically diverse Roman Catholic diocese.

In addition to the cathedral, two large, primarily black churches in Los Angeles have recently christened major new spaces in attempts to appeal beyond their own neighborhoods. Faithful Central Bible Church recently purchased the Los Angeles Forum basketball arena, and West Angeles Church of God and Christ opened a $60 million edifice.

The Catholic cathedral was built because St. Vibiana's, the 117-year-old cathedral it replaces, was severely damaged in a 1994 earthquake. Moreover, Catholic leaders and city officials had long lamented that the 1,200-seat structure was too small to accommodate major gatherings to mark celebrations or solemn moments.

City leaders recommended the new site, which is near a ring of government buildings, the Los Angeles Music Center, the new Staples Arena, and a soon-to-open Disney Concert Hall. The idea, say observers, was modeled on New York City, where two great cathedrals – the Catholic St. Patrick's Cathedral and the Episcopal St. John the Divine – have prominent civic roles.

The attempt to appeal across religions, ethnic lines, and age groups comes out of an even broader nationwide architectural movement, from symphony halls to sports arenas to museums, to provide a sense of communal place – a way to bring people together and out of isolation.

"All of the various American institutions are trying to create a sense of space and place where a transgenerational world can come together under one roof and contemplate together what too often they experience in boxes of isolation," says Paul Holdengraber, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Institute for Art and Culture. The institute is currently razing its museum space for such a design.

With the Catholic Church mired in a sex scandal in which more than 250 priests nationwide have resigned or been dismissed, the archdiocese here has not escaped criticism for sinking so much money into its building.

Even though the scandal broke years after the cathedral was planned, effigies of Cardinal Roger Mahony have been paraded outside the new edifice, and even some conservative Catholics have dismissed it as "a monolith to ... conspicuous consumption" and the "Taj Mahony."

Despite the use of relatively inexpensive concrete for the structure and its overall spareness inside and out, some critics have called the 3,000-seat, 333-foot-long cathedral ostentatious. It is designed to be one foot larger than St. Patrick's in New York.

"There has been intense debate by a number of Catholics over whether we should spend this money on the poor or some other project," says Leonard Swidler, a religion expert at Temple University in Philadelphia. "In the end, the same ideas won out that won out when the relatively poor populations of Europe built the great Gothic cathedrals. They ended up pouring their souls into something of beauty which they felt also feeds the human psyche."

There are also questions whether any edifice can unite a city as sprawling as this one.

"The type of culture in which old church structures defined a particular culture doesn't exist anymore," says John King, urban design writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. He says the building's modern materials and modern design are successful in creating – or re-creating – the mysteries of shadow and light that characterize the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe. "The challenge I see is whether or not any building can pull together a city of this many million people spread over many hundreds of square miles."

Thanks for the education. I looked up Mr. Barzun's most recent book "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life," and came across the following quote by Andy Warhol: "Art is what you can get away with" - which seems appropriate for this discussion.

I put Mr. Barzun's book in my Amazon basket, it looks wonderful and I think it would make a good discussion topic here on FR... following is an excerpt from a review on "From Dawn to Decadence":

"For example, Luther’s challenge to Catholic orthodoxy can be seen as an expression of primitivism—a desire to recapture the essentials of Christian faith—together with strong elements of individualism (“the priesthood of all believers”) and emancipation. We forget that Luther started not as a revolutionary but as a reformer; in the beginning, Mr. Barzun points out, he “only wanted to elicit the truth about the sacrament of penance.” But events acquire a momentum of their own. Had it not been for the new technology of printing, which spread ideas with unprecedented speed, Luther’s ninety-five theses might never have ignited the soul of Europe. In the event, Luther’s reformation became a revolution: what Mr. Barzun calls “The West Torn Apart.” Among much else, the Reformation illustrates the conundrum of contingency: the fact that a quantum of unpredictable novelty can always be counted on to baffle human complacency. Why here? Why now? Speculation is always confident, always inconclusive. As Mr. Barzun observes, “How a revolution erupts from a commonplace event—tidal wave from a ripple—is cause for endless astonishment.”

And what a tidal wave:

Manners are flouted and customs broken. Foul language and direct insult become normal, in keeping with the rest of the excitement—buildings defaced, images destroyed, shops looted. Printed sheets pass from hand to hand and are read with delight or outrage—Listen to this! Angry debates multiply about things long since settled: talk of free love, of priests marrying and monks breaking their vows, of property and wives in common, of sweeping out all evils, all corruption, all at once—all things for a new and blissful life on earth.
Voices grow shrill, parties form and adopt names or are tagged with them in derision and contempt. Again and again comes the shock of broken friendships, broken families. As time goes on, “betraying the cause” is an incessant charge, and there are indeed turncoats. Authorities are bewildered, heads of institutions try threats and concessions by turns, hoping the surge of subversion will collapse like previous ones. But none of this holds back that transfer of power and property which is the mark of revolution and which in the end establishes the Idea.

"The fact that this evocation describes many revolutionary periods besides Luther’s is of course part of Mr. Barzun’s point. It is one of his tasks in From Dawn to Decadence to remind readers of “the persistence of meanings within altered expressions of life’s mysteries.” History is not, as one wag put it, simply “one damn thing after another.” There are patterns to be observed and docketed even if they can never be entirely plumbed. At the same time, Mr. Barzun is right that “likeness is not sameness. In history everything wears its own dress and raises images peculiar to itself.” A prime test of an historian’s skill is the extent to which he does justice to these complementary forces, repetition and novelty. It is a further testimony to Mr. Barzun’s nimbleness that he reserves a place for the action of whim and unpredictability in human affairs. Movements in art or thought, he observes, gain influence at the cost of variety: “Victory brings on imitation and ultimately Boredom,” surely one of the most underrated catalysts of historical change. It is part of an historian’s task to discern continuities in what had hitherto appeared random; it is also part of his task to recognize the limits of those continuities. “Age of …” is a favorite historian’s shorthand: the Age of Reason, the Age of Faith, the Age of Science, the Age of Anxiety. Such phrases are probably indispensable; they are also, Mr. Barzun observes, “always a misnomer, except perhaps ‘An Age of Troubles,’ which fits every age in varying degrees.”

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