Cathedral to Open for Challenged Church

After years of lavishing his attention on the new Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony recently put the matter into blunt perspective. Asked if the cathedral marked the most significant achievement of his 17-year tenure as archbishop of Los Angeles, the cardinal dismissed it as no more than a “footnote.”

“It is,” Mahony said, “just a building.”

For him and many others, Monday’s cathedral dedication will be a celebration of the living church and the 5 million Roman Catholics who constitute Southern California’s largest religious group.

From the strawberry fields of Santa Maria to the fishing docks of San Pedro, across a rainbow of ethnic groups and every conceivable economic class, the archdiocese of Los Angeles is a study of dynamic growth, dazzling diversity and daunting challenges.

It is a church revived and enriched by immigrants and challenged by the need to accommodate more than 50 cultures and languages. On any given Sunday, a cacophony of prayers is being raised in the archdiocese’s 287 parishes--in Nigeria’s Ebo, in Pacific islands’ Samoan and Tongan and in near-ubiquitous Spanish.

More than 80% of the archdiocese’s Catholics are Latino and Asian--and Asian Catholics now outnumber whites, according to archdiocesan projections based on census data.

It’s a church squeezed between an exploding population and a shrinking priesthood. That disparity has raised to a critical level the question of empowering the laity to take on broader ministerial roles--a sharp change in a parish culture traditionally ruled exclusively by priests.

It’s a church soiled by sex scandals and sanctified by service to society’s forsaken--one of the few institutions in Southern California working to tie together rich and poor.

In the last decade or two, many say, the church has refocused on its historic social mission as unprecedented immigration has brought another great wave of newcomers--many of them poor and dispossessed--to its doors.

It is also a church whose booming growth from immigration masks the presence of great masses of merely nominal Catholics and a significant generational ebbing. Though 74% of Latino immigrants are Catholics, only 59% of their grandchildren belong, according to preliminary findings from a national study on Latinos and religion by Pew Charitable Trusts.

Near Pico Boulevard in central Los Angeles, St. Thomas the Apostle Church is packed with 8,000 parishioners, prompting the church to double its capacity in its current building renovation. But far more potential members never show up, according to St. Thomas’ pastor, Father Jarlath Cunnane. He says census data suggest that as many as 39,000 Catholics live within his parish boundaries.

Similar challenges confront other U.S. dioceses: Some are facing more dire priest shortages, others are experiencing less turbulent demographic changes and a handful are experimenting with reforms to empower the laity. But many Catholics look to the Los Angeles church to provide national leadership on these issues, as the largest and most diverse American diocese rooted not in the traditional East, but in the innovative West.

A demographic snapshot of the three-county Los Angeles archdiocese underscores the challenges. In the last two decades, the Catholic population in Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties has nearly doubled from 2.2 million in 1981 to 4.1 million in 2001, according to the Official Catholic Directory. (The archdiocese has estimated its total population at 5 million.) With high levels of immigration from heavily Catholic nations in Latin America and the Philippines, the church claims 37.5% of this region, up from 28% two decades ago.

At the same time, however, the number of active diocesan priests has steadily declined. There were 418 last year, 77 fewer than in 1981, essentially doubling the ratio of Catholics to priests.

In addition, many priests are ministering to far more complex congregations than before. At St. Elizabeth Ann Seton in Rowland Heights, for instance, Msgr. Michael F. Killeen has seen his church grow from 1,700 families when he arrived two decades ago to 5,000 families today, and a predominantly Anglo congregation transformed into one dominated by Filipinos, Latinos and Chinese. There are Masses in Spanish and Mandarin, and festivities surrounding Our Lady of Guadalupe, Chinese New Year and such Filipino traditions as Sambang Gabi: nine Masses leading up to Christmas.

The new diversity “is a beautiful gift to the church,” said Killeen, an Irish immigrant. “It gives us a sense of the universality of church, which is what the word ‘catholic’ means.”

But the diversity is not without its challenges. Some grumble about the clumsiness of multilingual liturgies and the complexity of dealing with numerous groups’ respective leaderships, special feast days and worship styles. Korean immigrants have compelled the church to reshape its administrative structures because they bring a strong tradition of lay leadership stemming from the scarcity of clergy in the Korean church until recent years. All of the archdiocese’s 13 Korean centers have elected lay leaders who help the pastor run the parish, according to Father Alex Chung of St. Gregory Nazianzen in Los Angeles.

In Altadena, repeated attempts to blend Spanish, Vietnamese and English speakers into one midnight Christmas liturgy ultimately fell apart when the Vietnamese community decided it preferred its own tradition of an earlier Mass to leave room for gift-giving customs, according to St. Thomas the Apostle’s Cunnane, who was previously the Altadena church’s pastor.

“The rest of the parish felt that we should all be together at Christmas, but we let it go,” Cunnane said. “It’s always a challenge to balance the desires for unity and diversity.”

People like Father Michael Kennedy of Dolores Mission in Boyle Heights welcome the way immigrants have helped the church refocus on the poor as a central ministry. Two decades ago, Kennedy, a bearded Jesuit, was one of the first in town to offer sanctuary for Salvadoran refugees--a controversial move at a time when U.S. foreign policy supported a rightist government in El Salvador’s civil war. Today, many more parishes have embraced the cause of exploited immigrants, low-wage workers and other dispossessed.

Mahony, asked to name his proudest achievement, cited efforts to help immigrants, including a program that he says registered more people for amnesty than any other agency in the nation.

Although the church played a pioneering role in fighting for the poor and oppressed during waves of immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries, many say that mission receded as Catholics became accepted in the middle-class mainstream after World War II. According to Auxiliary Bishop Edward Clark, who presides over the central Los Angeles region, the church subsequently began focusing mostly on religious and educational programs.

Mahony is credited with helping to revitalize the Los Angeles church’s social mission with several initiatives: an educational foundation to provide grants for needy children to attend Catholic schools, an annual fund-raising appeal to share the wealth among rich and poor churches, and critical interventions that helped resolve bitter labor disputes involving janitors and workers at Catholic hospitals. His demonstrated commitment to the poor is one reason many were startled by the $200-million price tag for the new cathedral complex.

At the parish level, several affluent congregations are forming sister relationships with less wealthy ones in what church members call “a holy exchange of gifts.” The nomenclature reflects broad changes in the last few decades, from a more paternalistic view of helping the poor to today’s spirit of being transformed by them.

A few years ago, for instance, St. Mel Church in Woodland Hills offered $45,000 in extra fund-raising to Our Lady of Victory Church in Compton; the inner-city church reciprocated by sending its youths to preach. And Clark, the auxiliary bishop, said churches in his region--which ranges from struggling downtown neighborhoods to posh Pacific Palisades--recently agreed to join forces to rebuild St. Patrick parish in South-Central Los Angeles, which had crumbled in an earthquake.

“This consciousness would never have been in the church 10 years ago,” said Kennedy of Dolores Mission. “We are really becoming a church that is ... a lot more aware that we don’t have all the answers.”

The church has yet to find an answer to what Msgr. Clement Connolly of Holy Family Church in South Pasadena calls an impending “Eucharistic famine”--a lack of priests to administer the church’s central act of worship. Although few clerics call for an end to bans on women and married priests, few seem to believe that the answer to the shortage of priests can be solved in traditional ways.

Last year, only seven diocesan priests were ordained for Los Angeles. The archdiocese regularly receives priests from South Korea and Samoa to serve immigrants, but importing clerics is not seen as an ultimate solution, for cultural reasons and otherwise.

The most dominant cry is for empowering the laity to take on ever greater roles in the ministry of the church.

On the recent feast day of St. Monica, for instance, Msgr. Lloyd Torgerson of St. Monica Church in Santa Monica invited a female lay member to deliver “reflections” on the church’s patron saint--a perspective from a wife and mother that Torgerson could not provide.

He followed that with his own remarks, in keeping with Vatican rules that say laypeople are not to deliver homilies.

At Holy Family, Connolly says the laity have claimed a range of duties, including parish administrator and director of liturgy. Breaking with a reliance on traditional rectories, the parish has bought condominiums to equip it for any future ministerial developments, including married or women priests.

And some priests, like Father Stan Bosch of Our Lady of Victory church in Compton, have surrendered decision-making power to lay committees on how to spend charitable donations.

Many say there is still a long way to go: Father David O’Connell, for instance, said the laity must have more authority to hold priests and bishops accountable--an issue that has come into focus during scandals over clergy sex abuse.

Yet no one seems sure how to precisely structure the changes.

They are expected to be hashed out in the archdiocese’s current initiative, known as the synod process, to bring together the clergy, religious leadership and laity in local, regional and archdiocesan meetings to set pastoral priorities.

Mahony launched the formal reexamination--the first in 40 years, and the first to fully involve the laity--two years ago after issuing a pastoral letter on lay ministry; it is set for completion next year.

“We are calling the laity to service of the church in a way that has not been done before--to new positions of decision-making and leadership,” said Torgerson, a member of the synod committee.

Many active Catholics also say they see a pressing need for greater evangelization to bring the church into the streets and into the lives of those who appear to be dropping away from the faith.

Many congregations have created small, intimate groups within the parish to meet regularly to pray, read Scripture, share personal faith journeys and train lay leaders.

The model comes from Latin America, another mark of the region’s influence on the Los Angeles church.

At Dolores Mission in Boyle Heights, the groups are working with law enforcement officials to improve policing, while Bosch’s parishioners participated in a rally last week to protest funding cuts at the only public hospital serving the area.

“The future of the church is in smaller communities,” said Bosch. “We see great power when people know each other’s names.”

Much of this kind of discussion dissatisfies orthodox Catholics, who believe the otherwise noble focus on the church’s social mission has left its spiritual one deeply neglected.

Christopher Zehnder, editor of the orthodox Los Angeles Lay Catholic Mission newspaper, said few Catholics seem to even know the tenets of their faith--the nature of the Eucharist as the literal body and blood of Jesus, for instance--or to bother to follow the teachings they know, such as bans on artificial birth control.

Zehnder said that few clerics, including Mahony, are effectively using the bully pulpit to teach parishioners the faith.

“A large number of people are leaving the church because they are not given reasons to stay,” he said. “They stumble to Mass, receive Communion and have no sense of what being Catholic is all about.”

Many others, however, seem imbued with a sense of rare opportunity to shape Catholic Los Angeles into a cutting-edge model.

“Now the institution has been broken down by scandal, and in some ways this has given us the space to rethink who we are,” O’Connell said.

“This is the time to do it. If we don’t do it now, we probably never will.”