Our Lady of the Freeways: is Los Angeles's new Cathedral worth the price?

Commonweal, Feb 28, 2003 by Jack Miles

During the height of the Clinton impeachment ordeal, the president's identity as chief executive of the United States was eclipsed by his identity as Monica's playmate. Matters as large as his treaty with North Korea or his bombing of Al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan came and went from the news like baseball scores for teams not in contention. No one noticed. No one cared. Sex is like that in its impact on perception. I once heard Isaac Bashevis Singer remark that though he passed no moral judgment on writers who filled their pages with vivid depictions of sex, he was wary of doing so himself because this subject, once in view, would make his readers forget everything else he wanted them to notice.

Sex made Clinton's constituency forget his political agenda. He spilt his mandate like seed on the ground. Sex is having the same effect just now on the perception of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, the bishops' recent letter to President Bush about war with Iraq being a case in point. Traditional in its reasoning, meticulously reliant on the moral theology of just war, the letter finally makes quite a devastating case against invasion. But no one could hear it without thinking about messed-up children and multimillion-dollar lawsuits.

For the bishops' letter to the president, substitute a $189-million cathedral, and you may appreciate the eclipse of executive identity afflicting Los Angeles's Cardinal Roger Mahony. At the dedication of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, on September 2, 2002, Mahony made the remarkable announcement that the edifice was paid for in full. Cost overruns, construction delays, and resulting fiscal crises are all but standard in the history of great public buildings. In Los Angeles, this has been spectacularly the case for the new home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Frank Gehry-designed Disney Hall, nearing completion just a block away from the cathedral. But La Catedral de Nuestra Senora de los Angeles arrived, as it were, from heaven--not just paid for but also on time after only five years of construction under the kindly but firm control of the wonderfully named Brother Hilarion O'Connor, the cardinal's director of construction. In theory, this miracle of fundraising and efficiency--never mind that some snickered at the sale of $50,000-berths in the maze-like mausoleum of the crypt--might at least earn the cathedral exemption from any implication in the fiscal crisis that looms over the archdiocese in 2003. In practice, of course, things will not work out quite so cleanly.

This year looms as a year of fiscal peril because California has suspended the statute of limitations for claims of clerical sex abuse for one year, starting on January 1, 2003. Though the legality of this suspension has been challenged, the largest Roman Catholic archdiocese in the United States still faces the prospect of a catastrophic concentration of legal judgments all crowded into a single year. If the state's action could have been foreseen, would the archdiocese have spent so much money on a new cathedral? Should it have spent so much in any case?

On September 19, 2002, just two weeks after the lavish dedication ceremony, Mahony announced that sixty jobs at archdiocesan headquarters would be cut and that many popular ministries would be scaled back or eliminated altogether. Among the programs affected: Ministry with Persons with Disabilities; Detention Ministry (for prisoners); Campus Ministry; Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs; Ethnic Groups Ministry; Ministry with Lesbian and Gay Catholics; Archdiocesan Council of Catholic Women; and the Office of Respect Life. The scale of the cuts may be seen in the fate of campus ministry. The program at UCLA was spared; those at Cal State Long Beach, Cal State Northridge, Cal State Los Angeles, Cal Poly Pomona, Caltech, and the University of La Verne were all eliminated. (Interestingly, perhaps inspiringly, a non-Catholic donor later offered to pay the cost of keeping Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs up and running. The archdiocese accepted the offer.)

According to the Los Angeles Times, the cuts were precipitated when the finance council of the archdiocese refused to approve a $4.3-million deficit in the archdiocese's $43.4-million operating budget. When making the announcement, Mahony blamed the decline of the stock market for the shortfall and said that the cost of the cathedral had nothing to do with the layoffs. This may well be true, but critics of the cathedral had warned much earlier that cutbacks would result from the building of what the critics call "the Taj Mahony." On October 30, 2002, the tradeoff question surged back into view as all five of Mahony's top lieutenants resigned at once. In a joint e-mail to employees at archdiocesan headquarters, the five said: "The announcement is made together. We didn't make the decisions together."

Just why the five left is still something of a mystery. A deeper mystery, in my view, is why the finance council could not have postponed the cuts long enough to avoid the publicity disaster that ensued. In any case, by six weeks into 2003, the budget deficit had tripled to $13.4 million.