Front-Row Seats in a Church of the Future : Updated Design of Chatsworth Building Reflects Features Mahony Envisions for New Cathedral

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, arrayed Saturday in full priestly vestments, his bishop’s staff planted firmly in his hand, may have envisioned himself standing at the altar of the new cathedral he is planning.

In fact, he was rededicating a parish church in Chatsworth--St. John Eudes--after a $5.3-million rebuilding and redesign following the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

But there was no mistaking the connections between St. John Eudes and the new $50-million Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels that Mahony wants to build and dedicate in 2000 to replace earthquake-damaged St. Vibiana’s Cathedral in downtown Los Angeles.

St. John Eudes is everything that Mahony said old St. Vibiana’s can never be--liturgically correct.

To his left--symbolically located near the church entrance--was a new polished granite baptismal pool with a miniature flowing stream and waterfall where converts and infants are to be initiated into the church--the body of Christ--through the sacrament of baptism. In front of him was the altar, embraced by a semicircle of pews to seat parishioners closer to the central act of Catholic worship--the celebration of the Eucharist, or Holy Communion--so that they are not mere spectators to a liturgical spectacle, but active participants.

This is why the archbishop of Los Angeles has been playing political hardball in his determination to tear down St. Vibiana’s. The fight, Mahony said, has never been about brick and mortar or historic preservation. It is about worship.

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St. John Eudes, Mahony said, is “absolutely” a model for the kind of things he plans to incorporate into the new cathedral--a design intended to bridge the gap between the temporal and the eternal by reflecting reforms in the Catholic liturgy approved 30 years ago at the Second Vatican Council.

“The major elements of Catholic worship are harmonized quite beautifully in this church,” Mahony said after the service.

That fact was not lost on Father Robert McNamara, pastor of St. John Eudes. During a lighter moment in the service, the pastor, a native of Ireland, looked at Mahony and said: “We have become expert in the ways of construction. So, Your Eminence, if you need any help with the cathedral you can call upon me or anyone here!”

Moments later, Mahony had a rejoinder. “I will add one bit of advice, Father. You have about five months to do whatever you want to do with this church, but after that it’s ‘historical.’ ”

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In moving ceremonies rich in sacred symbolism and imagery, St. John Eudes was filled with incense and the strains of a chanting choir and new organ as hundreds of the parish’s 2,750 families celebrated the rebirth of their church. They have been worshiping in a round tent for two years while repairs were made on the main building.

“The earthquake was our crucifixion,” McNamara told the packed congregation. “Today is our resurrection!”’

What they found was a church transformed in layout and design.

They listened to a miniature stream that flows through cut granite and spills like living water into the baptistery. Some recalled their own baptisms. Others thought of the Jordan River and the New Testament story of John the Baptist’s humble and obedient baptism of Jesus.

At the foot of the baptistery was a glass display case, or ambry, in which are kept three kinds of holy oils--the oil of chrism used for those being baptized, confirmed or ordained as priests and bishops, the oil of catechumens for those preparing to become Catholics, and the oil of the sick for those who are ill or dying. Into niches in the altar top were placed relics of St. John Eudes, the parish’s patron saint, and Blessed Mother Paula Montal.

“The goal of liturgical renewal was to make our prayer more expressive of what we believe and thereby deepening what we believe so that we can go out and live what we believe,” said Kathy Lindell, associate director of the Los Angeles archdiocese’s office of worship. “That’s why it’s so important to us that the space be right in every way to help make that happen,” she said.

But why should the layout of a cathedral--or a parish church for that matter--make any difference?

In her book “Worship,” Anglican mystic Evelyn Underhill, who died in 1941 and who was attracted by Roman Catholic piety, wrote: “The demand and action of religion are and must be on man as he is: a social, sensuous and emotional creature keenly aware of his visible environment, but only half aware of the unseen.

“Therefore that revelation, that awakening disclosure of the spaceless God which is the cause of worship, must come to us in space. The reality and attraction of His eternity must be experienced in time, if they are indeed to enter and transform our experience.”

Reforms in the Catholic liturgy would be difficult to carry out at St. Vibiana’s, according to Father Richard Albarano, director of the office of worship. Form follows function, he said, and St. Vibiana’s was designed in a different era to accommodate a different liturgy--one in which the altar was placed in front in an area called a sanctuary, set apart and elevated from the nave where the people sat. Pews faced forward, as in a theater.

“The ancient liturgy was not that way,” Albarano said. “The ancient liturgy was a full celebration in which people and priests celebrated word and sacrament together. The people were by no means an audience. Our problem today is that most of our churches are set up for that other kind of liturgy where the people were more an audience rather than full participants,” Albarano said.

Although there are Catholics who resist the changes, most, like Bert and Fran Flower, both 74, have become accustomed to them. Parishioners since the parish started in 1963, they were particularly pleased with the new baptismal pool in which candidates can kneel. It reminded them of Jordan River baptisms they witnessed in the Holy Land.

“There’s just a feeling that you’re really more into it. This washes away the old completely and immerses yourself into a new life with the church,” Bert Flower said. “I think it’s very meaningful.”

Richard Zeisel, a parishioner for 18 years, said he was optimistic that changes such as a centrally positioned altar would be accepted by most over time. “Just like some of the other moves that people didn’t like from Vatican II, like English and singing some of the Mass and not having to fast for more than an hour [before Communion], have brought people closer to religion. Religion is there to serve the people, not vice versa.”