Downhill From Temple and Grand

In the squalor of skid row lies a tree-shaded oasis, and at a table sits a man whose T-shirt spells out the odds against him.

“All men are great in their dreams. Reality just narrows the competition.”

He eats his black-eyed peas and green salad in the company of hundreds too hungry to speak. Some, when they’re finished, return to the end of the line that snakes onto 6th Street near Gladys and wait for seconds.

Catherine Morris, a former nun who has worked the kitchen at the L.A. Catholic Worker for 22 years, has agreed to escort me on a trek from this world she knows so well to the one she can’t comprehend.

She is going to walk me from this flatland universe of failure and desperation, past overcrowded tenements that house some of the poorest souls in California, and up to the $75-million cathedral high on the hill.

“We don’t like to use the ‘C’ word,” she says, referring to the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. “Our position is that the mission of the church is to help the poor,” and not to raise monuments to itself when so many social needs go unmet. “The money that goes into the cathedral can’t be spent twice.”

In the ghostly landscape around the soup kitchen, bodies are scattered on the street like rags. Not half a block do we get before Morris stoops down to check on a toothless man in a sleeping bag. When we proceed, she says, “That’s Ike Turner’s son. We get people from all backgrounds here.”

Beyond the landscape of this human wrecking yard, the silvery high-rises jut up before us like columns on a profit chart. Every half-block, someone in this Calcutta-fied community of might-have-beens calls to Morris.

“What’s for lunch, Cathy?”

“Black-eyed peas,” she says. “I’ll see you back there.”

We come upon two men who tell her with unabashed pride that they’ve moved off skid row. “I’m just visiting,” says one. “I’m up in Hollywood now.”

“Well, don’t stay here long,” Morris warns.

At 3rd and Los Angeles, we catch our first glimpse of the crane that elbows over the new cathedral, which will replace quake-damaged St. Vibiana Cathedral as headquarters for the Los Angeles Archdiocese.

Last month, a year away from the anticipated opening, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony stood on that hill and called the 11-story structure “a sign of the universal call to holiness that extends to each one of us.”

It symbolizes something else to Morris and her husband, Jeff Dietrich, who has gone to jail in the past for protesting the new cathedral.

“It’s scandalous,” Dietrich said by phone from the Kern County Detention Center, where he’s doing time for protesting President Bush’s proposed missile defense shield.

“It has nothing to do with the project of Jesus Christ, who came to liberate the poor, feed the hungry and heal the wounds of society. . . . Parishioners are being encouraged to buy a paving brick for $50 to $5,000, with the most expensive ones being closer to the altar.”

Tod Tamberg, a spokesman for the archdiocese, considers Morris and Dietrich friends. When he was a high school teacher, he used to take his students to their soup kitchen. But he disputes the notion that the cathedral is being raised up at the expense of the poor.

“Our Catholic Charities agency is the largest nongovernmental social service agency in Southern California, with $30 million budgeted annually,” he says.

That same figure, by coincidence, is the amount Tamberg says will be spent on “art and adornment” in the new cathedral. That puts the total cathedral and diocesan headquarters project, without overruns, at $193 million.

Up the mount Morris and I march, the sheer, imposing cathedral rising over us like the fist of the pope.

“It’s not about church, or religion, or spirituality,” says Morris, who for 14 years was in the order of the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus. “It’s about empire.”

Morris knows it’s a done deal, but she and others will still protest here once a week or so the rest of the way, hollering objections and raising a sign that says:

“Let the cathedral stand unfinished until all are housed in dignity.”

How perfectly regal, she says, that the church sits at this particular intersection.

Temple and Grand.

And then she starts off back down the hill to feed the hungry.

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Steve Lopez can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com.