Cathedral Donation

According to Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, Rupert Murdoch’s $10-million donation to the new cathedral’s coffers is an example to others in the corporate world of “a responsibility to make wonderful things happen” (Sept. 3).

Whatever happened to the church’s responsibility to serve the most poor and needy? A lot of wonderful things could happen if the $163.2 million to be spent on this building were directed to human beings instead. “From the poorest of the poor to the most wealthy . . . everybody is always welcome and feels at home at a cathedral,” says Mahony.

I feel most welcome and at home in a place where I am truly cared for. And if I were homeless or living in poverty, with a multimillion-dollar church being built in my neighborhood by a church that is supposed to serve the least fortunate, I wouldn’t feel very cared for.

KAREN LINDELL

Sierra Madre

* If Cardinal Mahony put as much effort into fund-raising for Catholic schools as he has on this monument to himself, maybe the personnel in these schools could get paid the “living wage” he so earnestly desires for the rest of society.

Wake up, Roger, the days of the Renaissance popes are over. It’s time to lose your “edifice complex.” I teach in a Catholic school and the vast majority of the faculty here agree!

STEPHEN McCARTHY

Monrovia

* The sheer hypocrisy of Murdoch’s $10-million gift to the L.A. Roman Catholic Archdiocese takes my breath away.

Surely Mahony is aware that local watchdogs denounced Murdoch’s television network, Fox, as broadcasting the most violent, sexually explicit programming of any network. I can’t imagine the church condones such content. Either Mahony is dumber than he looks or he is simply shameless.

ALAN D. BUCKLEY

Newbury Park