God’s New Home

Every Wednesday, come smog or come shine, a handful of devout Roman Catholics gathers on Grand Avenue to picket what they regard as “Mahony’s Palace.”

One is a former nun, one is an ex-seminarian and two are under court order to stay 50 feet away from the site. They were arrested in an earlier protest and have to picket across the street.

All are part of a group of activists called the Catholic Workers Community. They feel that the money being spent to build a new, $163-million cathedral for the Los Angeles archdiocese would be better spent feeding the poor than feeding the ego of Cardinal Roger Mahony. They regard him as a kind of ecclesiastical Donald Trump building a monument to himself. Not the Donald, but the Roger.

So once a week they go to Grand Avenue, just across the street from the County Administration Building, and, like ants shouting at an elephant, shake their fists at the cathedral.

The building is in its early stages of construction. Cranes rise over a sprawl of wood and steel on 5 1/2 acres of land bordering the Hollywood Freeway. “Perfect,” as a passerby remarked, “for a football stadium.”

While sports arenas, to those who worship athletics, do possess a certain spirituality, the new cathedral is intended not for games but for God, a notion that particularly irks Catherine Morris, the ex-nun on the picket line.

“God already has a house,” she says. “He doesn’t need this.”

Amen.

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I was drawn to the site one bright and smoggy day not only by the pickets but also by the fact that the family foundation of media-slash-sports tycoon Rupert Murdoch had just donated $10 million toward construction of the cathedral.

Even though Murdoch, who owns the Dodgers, isn’t Catholic, he was awarded a papal knighthood last year. It was Mahony who nominated him to the Pontifical Order of St. Gregory the Great. Maybe the 10 big ones in the collection tray were just old Rupe’s way of saying thanks.

Despite the grand flow of Murdoch’s new title, by the way, it doesn’t allow for any special dispensations in the eyes of God. One need no more proof of that than to consider the current condition of the Dodgers.

When I asked Catherine Morris if she felt that Murdoch was trying to buy his way into heaven, she replied: “He’s trying to buy heaven itself!”

At any rate, I went out to Grand Avenue to explore the possibility of causing problems. That’s what ex-Catholics do. I left the Mother Church when I was 12 after a priest told me I was going to hell. I ended up in L.A. instead.

“This building has nothing to do with God, the worship of God or the priorities of God,” Morris declared.

She was holding a sign that said: “Let the Cathedral stand unfinished until all are housed in dignity.”

To Mahony she adds firmly: “This is way out of line!”

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I telephoned Father Gregory Coiro, who is the publicist, I mean the media representative, for the 4.5-million-member, three-county archdiocese. He wrote me a scathing letter once when I referred to Mahony as the Pope of Hollywood but couldn’t remember it when we talked the other day. That’s God’s way, I suppose, of helping publicists maintain their composure.

He argued that donors didn’t want to give money to fix up the old, quake-damaged St. Vibiana’s Cathedral but big money was offered if the archdiocese would build a new cathedral. Thirty-five million came hurrying up the altar like a pregnant bride after they decided on the new one.

Coiro flatly denies that it’s any kind of a Mahony ego trip. “This is the largest archdiocese in the nation and it has no cathedral,” he said. “A new one was authorized in 1904 and we’re just now building it.”

He went on to say that the Catholic Church has a tradition of helping the poor, that no charity is going to suffer because of the cost of construction, and that the Catholic Workers pickets are a bunch of misguided souls. I’m paraphrasing.

It looks like L.A. is not about to get a new football stadium, so I guess a cathedral is the next best thing. The pickets have about as much chance of stopping it as an angel at an orgy.

Anyhow, something that looks a little like a doge’s palace is a tourist attraction if nothing else. It would probably work better for us if it were both a cathedral and an NFL stadium, but I guess you can’t have everything. Right, God?

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(In my Sept. 15 column, I misspelled the name of Peter Davison. It irritates me almost as much as it rankles him. I apologize.)

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com