Archdiocese Plans a New $45-Million L.A. Cathedral : Church: Cardinal Mahony announces decision to raze St. Vibiana’s, build larger facility. Preservationists object.

St. Vibiana’s Cathedral will be razed and replaced with a new $45-million cathedral and conference center that will better accommodate the pageantry of the nation’s most populous Roman Catholic archdiocese and help revive its Downtown Los Angeles neighborhood, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony announced Friday.

Mahony contended that it would be too expensive to repair the 119-year-old structure, which suffered damage in last year’s Northridge earthquake and previous temblors. Anticipating a battle with architectural preservationists, he added that the largest gift for the project--$25 million from the Dan Murphy Foundation--requires a totally new cathedral.

“Every great city in the world with a Catholic heritage has a dynamic and functional cathedral at the heart of its central core. Los Angeles will be no exception as the archdiocese plans ahead for a new millennium in the service of the people of God,” the cardinal declared at an outdoor news conference just below the cathedral’s visibly cracked 83-foot-high bell tower at 2nd Street between Main and Los Angeles streets.

Although no architect has been chosen, initial plans call for a new cathedral to be built by 2000 in the California mission style. The new St. Vibiana’s would incorporate the stained glass windows, altar, organ and statuary from the present cathedral. It would double the current 1,200-seat capacity, include an 800-seat conference center, open-air plaza and two levels of underground parking. Side-aisle shrines dedicated to traditions of the many ethnic groups in Southern California are proposed.

Such a complex, boosters said, would greatly improve a neighborhood shunned by many potential visitors because of the presence of the homeless, drugs and crime.

But the demolition would also be a great cultural loss for the city, said Linda Dishman, executive director of the Los Angeles Conservancy, who attended the announcement. She and other preservationists hoped to persuade Mahony to change his mind and to instead add structures around the old one.

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“It’s a very significant building in the city of Los Angeles,” Dishman said of the cathedral, which was modeled after the Church of San Miguel del Mar in Barcelona, Spain, and declared a Los Angeles historic cultural monument in 1963. “I would rank it right up there with Bullocks Wilshire, City Hall and the Central Library as being treasured by the people of Los Angeles. So we are very concerned.”

Dishman stressed that she had not seen the archdiocese’s engineering studies that reportedly found seismic retrofits to be prohibitively expensive. However, she suggested that the fact that the cathedral is still used for daily Mass shows that it can be repaired. The cardinal said such daily use is strictly limited and is allowed “with great hesitation” and against the advice of some engineers.

Under city rules, demolition of a city-designated landmark can be stalled a year but not forbidden. And given the visible political support Friday, city officials said it seemed unlikely that the cardinal would face any such delay.

Attending the news conference were Councilwoman Rita Walters, who represents the area, and Deputy Mayor Michael Keeley, standing in for Mayor Richard Riordan, a close friend of Mahony. Riordan was in Sacramento for Gov. Pete Wilson’s second inaugural.

“The decision to keep the cathedral in the heart of the city’s historic core is one of courage and vision and deserves strong commendation, “ said Walters, who also praised the decision of The Times to remain in its nearby headquarters and the plan by state government to fix up old buildings in the area for offices.

Although past archbishops have long hoped for a new cathedral, the idea gained momentum in March when Daniel Donohue, president of the Dan Murphy Foundation, attended the installation of the new archbishop of St. Louis at St. Louis Cathedral. A few days later, he attended the ordination of three new auxiliary bishops at St. Vibiana’s. Donohue was struck by the contrast between the venerable but cracked and modest St. Vibiana’s and the Missouri edifice with its vaulting central dome and luminous mosaics.

“Why don’t we have something like that?” Donohue--who has been knighted by the Pope--reportedly asked Mahony.

In addition to the Dan Murphy Foundation’s $25 million, the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Foundation is donating $10 million and other Catholic families have pledged a total of another $10 million, the cardinal reported. While thanking those donors and likening them to the Three Wise Men bringing gifts to the Christ child, Mahony also stressed that fund-raising drives would not be held in parishes.

Aware of possible controversy, the cardinal has met with City Hall leaders and preservationists several times over the past few months as the plan began to focus more on possible demolition, officials said. One official close to the talks said the archdiocese’s not-so-secret weapon was the hovering threat of leaving the Civic Center area. “The idea was: ‘If we can’t do this here, the bottom line is it can be put someplace else, like moving it to the Valley,’ ” the official said.

In fact, twice in the last 90 years, plans were proposed for a new and bigger cathedral elsewhere to follow the growing Catholic population of the city. In 1904, Pope Pius X granted permission for such a move. Referring to that papal decision, Mahony lightheartedly remarked: “It’s just taken us 90 years to get to the project.”

Responding to reporters’ questions about the decision to demolish rather than renovate the cathedral, Mahony said the archdiocese is not eligible for the federal aid that financed repairs at such quake-damaged landmarks as the Coliseum. “The public realm has that kind of money; we simply do not,” Mahony said.

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Also to be demolished are an adjacent 1949 building that used to house an archdiocese school and the two nearby buildings left vacant by the Union Rescue Mission. The homeless shelter recently moved to another part of Downtown and took with it many of the homeless who used to camp on the church steps. The archdiocese is buying the shelter property for $2.75 million.

The Northridge earthquake hastened recent developments. In August, the archdiocese received its consulting engineers’ report on the earthquake damage. On Oct. 20, Mahony met with his auxiliary bishops, the 30-member Council of Priests, the Sisters Council, the Archdiocesan Finance Advisory Council and others to lay out the options. They agreed that a new cathedral made the most sense.

Within days, Mahony formally accepted Donohue’s offer of $25 million. Based on a 1994 report by The Foundation Directory, a publication that tracks foundation spending, it is the largest contribution by any charitable foundation to a church in the United States. The major gifts also meant that the cathedral project would not harm planned spending on schools and aid to the poor.

The Murphy Foundation, established in 1957, has assets of $176 million, according to the directory, and has contributed millions of dollars to Catholic causes. It is named for the late founder of California Portland Cement, Daniel Murphy, who was also one of the early oil men in California. The Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Foundation, incorporated in 1952 by the founders of Farmers Insurance Group Inc., has assets of $151 million and contributes primarily to hospitals, medical research, education and the Catholic Church.

On Friday, Donohue said “building a new St. Vibiana’s Cathedral would demonstrate more responsible stewardship than expending a similar amount on repair and remodeling the present edifice.” Similarly, Louis Castruccio, representing the Leavey Foundation, said, “St. Vibiana’s should be a cathedral commensurate with the size and vitality of the archdiocese of Los Angeles.”

Completed in January, 1876, when Los Angeles was a town of about 9,000 residents, St. Vibiana’s was named after and contains the relics of a 3rd Century maiden martyr, whose remains were unearthed in Italy in 1853 and brought to Los Angeles. In 1922, the church was remodeled and its brick exterior was clad with Indiana limestone. Its interior, with a marble and onyx altar, white columns and 12 large stained glass windows, reminds many visitors of a handsome parish church rather than a powerful cathedral.

Yet despite any debate over its aesthetic values, the building should be preserved for its historic significance, said Portia Lee, a board member of the Los Angeles Historical Society. “I would say it’s one of the 10 most important buildings in Los Angeles,” she said. “It’s simply unthinkable to take it down.”

Lynn Bryant, president of the Society of Architectural Historians’ Southern California Chapter, called the cardinal’s announcement disheartening. “It’s a wonderful, gracious old structure in a very shabby part of town,” she said. “I’m afraid that whatever it is they put in its place would not have the architectural quality of the building.”

The cathedral’s proposed demolition has some precedents in Los Angeles. In 1979, the Episcopal diocese sold its Spanish-style Cathedral of St. Paul at Figueroa Street and Wilshire Boulevard, where the Sanwa Bank tower now stands. The diocese recently built a new headquarters in the Echo Park district, and a tour of that building reportedly had some influence on Mahony’s thinking.

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Updating History

Roman Catholic Cardinal Roger M. Mahony announced Friday that St. Vibiana’s Cathedral at 2nd and Main streets will be razed and replaced over the next five years by a much larger complex on the same location.

* The project: A new cathedral complex would double seating capacity to about 2,400, and would have an 800-seat conference center and an outdoor plaza. Stained glass windows, statues and the altar from the old church would be retained. Funding includes a $25-million gift from the Dan Murphy Foundation, $10 million from the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Foundation and another $10 million in pledges.

* The neighborhood: The church was completed in 1876. Homelessness and drug use in the area have soared in recent years, but the move of the adjacent Union Rescue Mission has eased some of those problems.

* Next step: Approval by the city’s Cultural Heritage Commission and an environmental impact statement for demolition will be required, and city landmark laws can delay razing by a year.

Compiled by Times researcher CECILIA RASMUSSEN