St. Vibiana’s: Where John Paul Will Stay

It has been one insult atop another for stately old St. Vibiana’s, the cathedral as obscure as its namesake, maligned since its conception.

While other major houses of worship--St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, the National Cathedral in Washington--exude magnificence amid their upscale surroundings, St. Vibiana’s is stuck in the squalor of downtown Los Angeles, pressed on one side by the Union Rescue Mission and on another by a parking lot.

Its location was sneered at before it was built, and its original graceful lines were shorn in an early renovation. One burglar bled to death in the courtyard, and others set fire to its interior and rifled its poor boxes.

Like ‘Worn-Out Garments’

Twice in its 111 years, the faithful who built it sought to demolish it. In a searing pastoral letter delivered in 1945, then-Archbishop John J. Cantwell equated the cathedral with “worn-out garments” unseemly for the archdiocese’s mother church.

Where once it drew parishioners from much of the city, its 1,200 seats are filled now only on special occasions. Its fate has been that of many of Los Angeles’ inner-city landmarks, shunted aside in the march to suburbia.

“The city began at the center and expanded out and the cathedral was more or less left behind,” said retired Cardinal Timothy Manning, who led the Los Angeles archdiocese from St. Vibiana’s for 15 years.

But this week, St. Vibiana’s exacts a certain revenge. Its garments only slightly mended, the cathedral will be the focus of events for the first visit of a reigning pontiff to Los Angeles.

The Tuesday parade welcoming Pope John Paul II will deposit him on the steps of St. Vibiana’s, where he will conduct a prayer service before spending two nights in the cathedral’s five-story, simply furnished rectory.

Msgr. Royale M. Vadakin, who oversees the cathedral and its small parish, said that no other church was considered as the Pope’s temporary home. Its tattered surroundings notwithstanding, St. Vibiana’s remains the spiritual home of the archdiocese.

“It provides a sense of history,” Vadakin said. “It’s a reminder, really, of the tremendous vision that people had, what it took for a small village to build it.”

Los Angeles was, indeed, a mere village when church officials first gathered to build a cathedral in the 1860s. Fewer than 5,700 people lived here, concentrated around the historic plaza north of the Civic Center. Los Angeles was a dirt-road, horse-trodden little town with big aspirations.

Vast Church Planned

But some aspirations were too much. When the church hierarchy decided to place the cathedral near 6th and Main streets on a donated plot of land, locals hooted that it was “too far out of town,” wrote the archdiocese’s archivist, Msgr. Francis J. Weber, in his 1976 centennial history of St. Vibiana’s.

Nevertheless, the cornerstone was laid in 1869 in ceremonies marked by “the largest assemblage drawn together here”--nearly 3,000 people, a newspaper wrote. Plans were for a vast church 262 feet in length, crossed by a 168-foot transept, Weber’s history recounted.

The church never got past the cornerstone. Hard economic times interfered and when church officials next raised the issue, their proposal called for a northern site at 2nd and Main streets and a structure considerably less grand than the original.

Construction of the new church, designed by E. F. Kysor, began in 1872 and faltered a short time later, when the archdiocese again ran out of money. A new builder was brought in and, employing “every bricklayer that can be found in the city,” according to an account at the time, completed the work in January, 1876.

There was never a doubt what title the cathedral would bear--Pope Pius IX asked that it be named in honor of St. Vibiana, a little-known maiden martyr whose relics were found in 1853 amid catacombs near Rome’s Appian Way. In the generations since her death in the 3rd Century, no account of her life has surfaced, Weber said.

For a time, the history of St. Vibiana’s Cathedral was written in pomp--celebration rang out when Popes ascended, somber ceremonies took place with the funerals of senators and governors, famed actresses and generals.

A Practical Side

The building was surrounded by the mansions of the wealthy--and there was a touch of the practical as well. Old photographs show a gun shop next door; at one point the cathedral’s neighbors included a brewery and beer garden.

By the turn of the century, however, the diocese thought it had outgrown St. Vibiana’s. In 1904, Bishop Thomas J. Conaty proposed an immense domed cathedral on 9th Street and received papal permission to tear down St. Vibiana’s.

That effort failed because of a local economic depression, but less than 40 years later Conaty’s successor, Archbishop Cantwell, unveiled architectural plans for a new, block-long, $1.5-million mother church, to be built on Wilshire Boulevard in honor of Our Lady of the Angels. Again, the move posed the death of St. Vibiana’s.

But Cantwell’s health failed before his dream could be realized, archivist Weber wrote. The new diocesan leader, Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, scrubbed the plans so he could devote the church’s money to elementary schools. And during the succeeding tenures of Manning and Roger M. Mahony, there has been no talk of scrapping St. Vibiana’s.

For Manning, who was ordained in St. Vibiana’s in 1934, the thought was unimaginable. When he was a young priest, he recalled recently, hundreds of weekend shoppers used to arrive downtown on the old “red car” lines and make side trips to St. Vibiana’s for confession.

“That’s how popular it was. But all that has gone,” Manning said. “By and large, suburban people don’t go downtown. Now, especially.”

Between attempts to demolish St. Vibiana’s, church officials have launched large-scale renovations that kept the cathedral in working order. In 1922, construction workers simplified the exterior, lopping off statues that had decorated the entrance and roof line. They lengthened the church, adding pews and a choir loft inside. More than 50 years later, in commemoration of the cathedral’s centennial, church officials spent $500,000 in fixing it up.

For the Pope’s visit, a new coat of bone paint was applied to the cathedral’s exterior, some peeling sections of the interior were repaired and the oak flooring was refinished, Vadakin said. Banners marking the Pope’s colors of yellow and white were hung from the building’s Main Street entrance. Gardeners tended to the immaculately kept floral gardens inside the compound. There was little hoopla, in keeping with the building’s low-key presence.

Transients Lounge on Steps

As its neighborhood has deteriorated, St. Vibiana’s functions, too, have declined. Its jurisdiction is largely government buildings, businesses, high-rises and Skid Row hotels. Transients lounge on the cathedral steps by day and sleep against its stone-and-iron fence by night.

“It was a very active, full parish, probably into the ‘40s,” Vadakin said. “It drew large numbers. But people no longer use public transportation. There’s the problem of parking, the difficulty coming into the city, the disintegrated area. . . . “

It still holds weddings and funerals, and an occasional baptism. The cathedral’s offices now house a Head Start program and an immigration amnesty center, and the rectory where Pope John Paul II will stay is the permanent home of Archbishop Roger M. Mahony and five priests.

Tourists, searching for the church their grandparents attended, sometimes stop by. Schoolchildren occasionally troop through the peaceful gardens. But most people, Vadakin acknowledged, probably do not know that the starkly proud building is the seat of the Roman Catholic archdiocese.

Bier Contains Relics

Inside, the cathedral’s simple lines seem graceful and ageless. Columns support a barrel-vaulted roof and delicate, 85-year-old stained-glass windows send beams of colored light onto wooden pews. A carved marble bier holds the relics of the young St. Vibiana, the few proofs of her life sent from Rome by a Pope grateful to have a cathedral named after a little-known martyr.

The other day, as the afternoon sun ebbed and the cathedral’s interior fell dim, Vadakin walked through the foyer to the massive brass doors that guard the cathedral’s entrance.

“The Pope will come right in those doors,” he said proudly.

The vestibule’s tile floor, newly scrubbed, shone brightly. The smell of antiseptic cleanser very nearly masked the stench of Skid Row.