For almost 118 years, St. Vibiana’s Cathedral...

For almost 118 years, St. Vibiana’s Cathedral has persevered, and even dominated the city’s religious profile, enduring troubles inside the building and outside.

Over the years, the old baroque Spanish-style brick building--the center of the nation’s most populous Roman Catholic archdiocese--has been ravaged by trespassers’ fires and threatened twice with demolition.

It has been a frequent target of derision, even from some who worshiped there. Archbishop John J. Cantwell, in a searing pastoral letter delivered by clergy across the diocese in 1945, equated the cathedral to “worn-out garments.”

More than 40 years later, the church at 2nd and Main streets, built in 1876 for $80,000, still stands, left behind in the decay of Downtown--an island of civility amid the squalor of Skid Row.

Against all odds, the cathedral has survived, although its pews, seating 1,200, are rarely filled except on such special occasions as when Pope John Paul II said Mass there in 1987.

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In the 1860s, Los Angeles was a little town with fewer than 5,700 residents, but 3,000 of them were Catholic, and they had big aspirations. The church offered to build them a cathedral.

The present building is not what was originally planned, nor is it on the site that church officials had first wanted. It was at 6th and Main, then the city’s southern boundary, that the church hierarchy first decided to place a cathedral. But worshipers thought it was too far out of town and too near the public chapel at St. Vincent’s College, two blocks away.

The cornerstone was laid in 1869 in ceremonies attended by nearly 3,000 people. Plans were for a vast church, 262 feet long, crossed by a 168-foot transept.

But for years the cornerstone was the only sign that a cathedral was to rise on the site. Hard economic times stalled construction, and finally, a more modest proposal called for a building at 2nd and Main, on property with a stream running through it and walnut trees on its banks, and a gun store next door. It would be considerably less grand than originally planned, and half as expensive.

The new church was modeled after the Church of Puerto de San Miguel in Barcelona, Spain. Construction began in 1872, but soon came to a halt when the diocese again ran out of money. After a few more fund-raisers, new builders, Louis Mesmer and his son Joseph, were brought in. “Employing every bricklayer that can be found in the city,” according to an account at the time, they completed the work in January, 1876.

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There was never a doubt what name the cathedral would bear. In 1853, when Los Angeles Bishop Thaddeus Amat was in Rome, a skeleton was unearthed amid the catacombs. It was the remains of St. Vibiana, an obscure 3rd-Century maiden martyr, and Pope Pius IX asked Amat to take her relics to California and build a cathedral in her name.

Ten years after the cathedral was dedicated and St. Vibiana’s relics were in place, a new bishop, Francis Mora, built a three-story brick schoolhouse behind the cathedral. The elementary school was run by the Immaculate Heart Sisters.

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 depression, but four decades later “St. Vib’s,” as the church is often called, seemed doomed again. Archbishop Cantwell unveiled plans for a block-long, $1.5-million mother church on Wilshire Boulevard.

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But Cantwell’s health failed before his dream could be realized. The new diocesan leader, Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, scrubbed the plans in order to devote the church’s money to elementary schools.

McIntyre began in 1948 by knocking down the old red brick schoolhouse, where many naughty youths had carved their initials in windowsills. Left behind by the wrecking ball were scraps of paper. On one was a writing lesson by a boy named Ernest: “School will be fun. School will be fun.” And there was the inconsistent arithmetic of a girl named Marie: “5 plus 4 equals 9; 4 plus 5 equals 8.” An unsigned note, on stationery decorated with hearts and Xs, read: “Will you meet me at recess?”

A more modern school was built on the site, but shut down in the early 1980s because of dwindling attendance. At the same time, the homeless were becoming a problem and the church’s doors were locked. Indeed, much of the scenery around St. Vibiana’s was declining--and had been for a while.

Through the years, the cathedral has stood as a silent witness to joy and pain: thousands of baptisms and weddings, many funerals and a few tragedies. In 1921, the distraught editor of a journal called Reason, published by her father, the Rev. B.F. Austin, shot and killed herself in the cathedral’s vestibule.

A burglar bled to death in the courtyard in 1948 after he cut his arm on the window he had broken trying to get into the church.

Later, trespassers set fire to its interior and rifled the poor boxes.

Today, the cathedral sits on the edge of Skid Row, fenced off from its next-door neighbor, the Union Rescue Mission.

In 1962, the body of Bishop Amat was moved to a church cemetery vault on the Eastside after being entombed in the cathedral for 84 years. The relics of St. Vibiana remain, clothed in silk garments in a sarcophagus, alone in the cathedral bearing her name.