5,800 Stories Behind Cathedral Donations

The money to build the new Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels came by way of love, memory, faith and civic pride.

A retired contractor remembered boyhood visits in the 1930s to a doughnut shop across the street from old St. Vibiana’s Cathedral at 2nd and Main streets.

A woman thought of her mother’s ashes interred far away on property overlooking Puget Sound that was once the family home but had since been sold.

Another woman, standing on a pivot of time between the past and the future, looked back to a family history of five generations in the church and then five generations ahead. Her family wants its heirs to worship in the beauty of a cathedral they had helped build.

There are at least 5,800 such stories, one for each donor to the $200-million cathedral and conference center, which will be dedicated Monday. Like those who built the great medieval cathedrals of Europe--the peasants and bourgeois, the noblemen and kings--their stories are as different as their stations in life. Six hundred of them donated more than $10,000 each. Some gave millions. But most gave $50 or $100. What links them is an idea and a building made to stand at least 500 years as a testament to their faith in God or hopes for the city.

In the center of the fund-raising has been Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Los Angeles. It was Mahony, encouraged by an unexpected gift of $25 million from the Dan Murphy Foundation, who embarked upon the historic cathedral-building project first envisioned by bishop Thomas J. Conaty in 1904.

Mahony recalls that he was approached by Sir Daniel Donohue, head of the Dan Murphy Foundation, just before Mahony was to ordain three new auxiliary bishops at St. Vibiana’s Cathedral on March 19, 1994.

The old cathedral had been severely shaken two months earlier by the Northridge earthquake, and jagged fissures ran up the venerable old bell tower like varicose veins on an aging lady.

Mahony wined and dined major donors--from hosting a one-on-one lunch with an individual or couple, to small intimate dinners of half a dozen or so couples at someone’s home to larger gatherings. Meanwhile, Catholic parishioners across the three-county archdiocese were invited to contribute from $50 to $5,000 to buy 15,000 paving stones for the cathedral floor in their names or in memory of loved ones. To date, $1.5 million has been raised this way.

By 1998, nearly 100 contributors had given $110 million. By the end of the campaign, 60% of the money raised came from large and small individual contributions, 3% from corporate contributions, and 37% from corporate and family foundations, the archdiocese said Monday.

Not all were Christians. A Jewish couple in New York agreed to contribute $2.5 million for a water fountain commemorating Catholic-Jewish relations. Just days after their pledge, the husband died. Their names will not be announced until next week, when his widow attends the dedication.

Others, like Philip and Gloria Holcomb of Claremont, who are Catholic converts and retired teachers, spoke of religious conviction. They gave $50 for a paving stone after a tour of the cathedral. “We just looked at each other and said, let’s do it.” The Holcombs will not be at the gala dinner for major donors after the dedication. But they feel no less a part, she said.

“You look at that place and it’s going to be there forever as a monument to God,” Gloria Holcomb said. “It’s not just like you think only in terms of the next generation. It will give people a real sense of peace, a real sense of what we’re all a part of, and, I think, in terms of just being here on Earth, why we’re here.”

Suzanne Tito of Bel-Air remembers her late mother, Jane Bergbower. “You know,” she said, “her faith just got her through so much. It kept her grounded.... She always was concerned about others, a very selfless person. She had a wonderful laugh.”

When her mother died several years ago, her cremated remains were placed in the backyard of her home, with its view of Puget Sound in Washington state. Later, the property was sold. Tito, an art history major, had long admired the portals in cathedrals she had visited around the world. In her mother’s memory, she contributed for a stained glass “Holy Spirit” window in the cathedral mausoleum beneath the floor of the nave and sanctuary.

“She would have loved it if she would be alive to be here today,” Tito said.

“I’m a fallen away Catholic but I feel like a Catholic,” she confessed with a laugh. “Once you’re a Catholic, you’re always a Catholic.”

For Kathleen Hannon Aikenhead, the church has been a thread of continuity woven through the history of her family for five generations. The family helped spread the word of Father Junipero Serra, founder of the California missions. For 20 years the William H. Hannon Foundation has given to the church and the work of its schools and hospitals. And it is donating $1 million to the cathedral for a future mural depicting Father Serra.

“The way we looked at it,” said Aikenhead, president of the foundation, “the next five generations would be able to worship and enjoy the beautiful new cathedral.”

For Mark Foster, president of the Los Angeles Master Chorale and managing director of the Seidler Family Office, which manages investments for wealthy individuals, a cathedral has a role as a patron of music and the arts. That’s in part why he gave $25,000.

“One of the greatest musical performances I’ve ever heard took place in the cathedral in Segovia, Spain. I will always remember that. It wasn’t just the music, but the setting, the space in which it took place.”

The donor who once thought about going to church as a chance to have a doughnut is now 73 years old. His name is Edward M. Illig. He is a retired contractor who lives in La Canada-Flintridge. His parents, Joseph and Katherine Illig, immigrated to the U.S. in 1910 from Alsace-Lorraine. They came to Los Angeles in 1914. Katherine was a short woman with broad shoulders. As long as Edward could remember, his mother had gray hair. They lived on a hill southeast of the Silver Lake reservoir.

When Edward was 3 or 4, his mother would take him by the hand and they would walk down Benton Way to Sunset Boulevard to catch the Red Car to downtown’s old subway terminal building. From there they would walk to St. Vibiana’s Cathedral for Stations of the Cross during Lent, or for novena prayers.

“Afterward we’d go across the street to Cooper’s Doughnuts and she’d buy me a doughnut,” Illig said. “Then we’d walk over to Central Market and she’d buy a few things. She’d pick up fresh oysters and she’d fix oyster soup on Friday nights.”

Illig followed developments closely for eight years as the fate of St. Vibiana’s was decided. When the cardinal asked him to consider a donation, Illig said he and his wife, Marjorie, had already made up their minds. The man appreciated his mother’s devotion in a way the boy could not.

“You support those things that are good, right and proper,” he said.

And that was why the Illigs gave $100,000 to have his parents’ names, and that of his late brother and Paulist priest, Alvin, inscribed on the cathedral’s donor wall.