Cathedrals Old and New – The Catholic Thing

On a trip back home to Southern California, I had the opportunity to visit the church of my baptism, my “mother church,” as they say. When I became Catholic at the age of twelve, in April 1976, Holy Family, in the city of Orange, had just the previous month become the cathedral for the new diocese south of Los Angeles. Not much seemed different with the passing of nearly half a century, yet the evolution of the cathedral for the Diocese of Orange in the intervening years is itself an interesting story.

There was nothing spectacular about Holy Family, which was built in the late 1950s, and I don’t know why it was selected as the first cathedral for the diocese. In the early 2000s, there was a move by the bishop at that time to build a new, larger cathedral in Santa Ana. His ambition for a seat worthy of his see had a price tag of $200 million, but the timing was bad, with the Church’s sex-abuse scandal hitting the diocese hard in those days.

Another opportunity presented itself in 2010 when Crystal Cathedral Ministries, founded by televangelist Robert Schuller, declared bankruptcy. The Orange Diocese acquired the modern Philip Johnson-designed Crystal Cathedral complex the following year, and extensive renovations led to the 2019 opening of the newly christened Christ Cathedral.

Sitting in a pew at Holy Family, now just a humble parish church again, I was grateful for it, and what it meant and still means to me. Married and with a growing family, I moved out of Orange County to Sacramento in October 1990. I won’t forget Holy Family, even though I had not been there in decades.

During the 1990s, I worked in downtown Sacramento, where the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, built in 1889, sits a stone’s throw from the State Capitol, City Hall, and the heart of the city. It was a frequent refuge for me, with weekday Masses at noon drawing a large group of office workers.

In those days, Bishop Francis Quinn lived in the rectory next to the cathedral, and I’ve always thought this to be a far better arrangement than, say, a suburban home. A bishop should have a strong presence at his cathedral, as Quinn showed admirably when, in April 1993, a gunman killed two workers at the downtown library, a few blocks away from the cathedral, before being killed himself by police.

Quinn was on hand quickly to administer last rites himself and comfort those on the scene, and an image of him doing so was spread across several columns of the next day’s front page of the Sacramento Bee. This is the sort of pastoral visibility that is important for the Church, and which we rarely see in our prelates.

Under Quinn’s successor, William Weigand, a top-to-bottom renovation of Blessed Sacrament was completed in 2005 at a cost of $34 million. Just from an aesthetic point of view -and discounting needed repair – it was sorely needed; the interior could be dark and dreary. This project opened it up and created a beautiful, light-filled space and a sanctuary worthy of a cathedral, especially one in a capital city.

When one first sees the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, it is easy to be awed by its Romanesque enormousness, with a dome one hundred and fifty feet high, worthily attesting to the significance of a city that was once the fourth largest in the nation. What’s hard to believe is that it is half its originally intended size.

In the late nineteenth century, St. Louis Archbishop John Kain acquired land for the cathedral, but efforts were stalled by a tornado in 1896 that killed more than 250. Money that was intended for the cathedral was reallocated to tornado relief, and construction plans were delayed and downsized.

After the success of the 1904 World’s Fair, the project began anew, with construction completed in 1914. The cathedral’s interior mosaics, one of the largest collections in the world, were not completed until 1988.

Our cathedral basilica may be over a century old, but in St. Louis we refer to it as the “New Cathedral.” The “Old Cathedral” is now the Basilica of St. Louis, King of France, which stands near the Gateway Arch. It was the first cathedral built  (1834) west of the Mississippi.

I have come to love both these churches over a quarter century living in St. Louis. Our cathedrals, old or new, aren’t meant just for a community’s Catholics, but for all the people, as a place to come together, whether it is in grief or to celebrate, as our New Cathedral does with a popular concert series. Our cathedrals need to remain open and welcoming for the community, drawing people into their embrace and giving everyone the opportunity to enjoy the beauty and inspiration only they can offer.

As the seat of the local religious authority and a church that aspires to be excellent, there is – or at least ought to be – something special about a cathedral. The Catholic Encyclopedia puts it thus: “Canonists compare to a spiritual marriage the union of a bishop with his church, and although this expression may be truer with respect to the church as understood in the moral sense than to the cathedral, it is nevertheless not inappropriate. They say that the bishop should love his cathedral, adorn and embellish it, and never neglect it.”

You might, therefore, expect cathedrals, as symbols-in-stone of ecclesial authority and permanence, to be stable and never-changing. Yet in my cross-country experience as a Catholic, I’ve discovered something different. Cathedrals remain earthly things and, therefore, in a necessary state of flux. Fortunately, at a time when so many churches have undergone reprehensible “wreckovations,” it’s also the case that, not infrequently, change can also be for the better.