Some Preserve, Others Look to the Future

Underlying the very public and bitter struggle between Cardinal Roger Mahony and the Los Angeles Conservancy over the fate of an architecturally undistinguished, tottery and abandoned church off skid row in downtown Los Angeles is the larger question of how Los Angeles will imagine its future.

Beneath the battle lines being drawn by the archdiocese, which wants to tear down its 120-year-old earthquake-damaged cathedral and build a new one, and conservationists who want to preserve a historical landmark, lies the clash between the vastly divergent trajectories of the region’s two largest ethnic groups. While many of the city’s long-standing Anglo residents are increasingly concerned with preserving a familiar past, the largely immigrant Latino population is eager to see the city rebuilt in its image.

Linda Dishman, the conservancy’s executive director, says her 5,000-member organization feels strongly that the building should be saved because it “embodies the spirit of Los Angeles” and its roots as a Catholic community. The irony, of course, is that Los Angeles has never been more Catholic than it is today. The quintessential Protestant city after Anglo-Americans became the region’s predominant ethnic group in the 1880s, L.A. now has the largest Catholic congregation in the United States.

While most of the nation’s larger dioceses were losing numbers and closing schools in the 1970s and 1980s, large scale immigration from Latin America was re-energizing churches here. There are more Catholics than there are members of any other religious group in Los Angeles County. The archdiocese has more congregants than there are Episcopalians nationally and as many as there are Presbyterians. Although Mass is celebrated in 37 languages each week in Los Angeles, about three-quarters of the archdiocese’s parishes have at least one Mass in Spanish.

With two-thirds of his congregants Latino, the cardinal has become one of the most eloquent advocates for Latinos. Indeed, no single Latino politician can claim to have been more publicly outspoken in defense of immigrants during the recent anti-immigrant campaigns. Certainly no other American social institution can claim as high a level of Latino participation as can the Roman Catholic Church. “Cardinal Mahony has shown a willingness to identify the church with Hispanics,” said Allan Figueroa Deck, a Jesuit theologian at Loyola Marymount University. To build a monumental downtown cathedral in the “Spanish-inspired” design the cardinal has requested would be to reimagine Los Angeles as a Latino city.

Although St. Vibiana’s had never been a particularly important venue for the city’s Latino Catholics--La Placita Church opposite Olvera Street Plaza, the city’s historic core, has long been at the heart of local Latino Catholicism--a new cathedral on the old site would stamp the city’s physical landscape with a reflection of the Latinization occurring in the private and business lives of most Angelenos.

The cardinal’s preference for the downtown site is consistent with tradition in Catholic countries, where symbols of spiritual power balance civic power in urban centers. Father Pedro Villaroya, director of the archdiocese’s Office of Hispanic Ministry, believes that if the new cathedral is built downtown as an open, informal and restful place--an architectural style appealing to Latinos--it could eventually replace La Placita as the center of local Latino Catholic life.

If the cardinal makes good on his threat to quit downtown unless preservationists back off their demands that the old cathedral be restored and incorporated into the new complex, Los Angeles will have missed another chance to identify its future with those who are showing the greatest faith in the city’s promise.

“A cathedral is the symbol of a community’s conviction and commitment to their faith and to one another,” said Figueroa Deck. “It behooves Hispanics to see this [cathedral] as a development that can contribute to their emergence as an influential presence in L.A.”

The ambitious $45-million downtown cathedral project provides the perfect opportunity to make a bold, positive, forward-looking statement about the spirit of the new Los Angeles.