A new Catholic cathedral will be dedicated Monday in Los Angeles. It is the first major cathedral built in the United States in more than 30 years. The city's Catholic archbishop, Cardinal Roger Mahony, hopes the new structure will be a gathering place for all of the city's people.
The new Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels is the seat of the Los Angeles archbishop, but the man who holds that post, Cardinal Roger Mahony, says people of all faiths are welcome here. That message is inscribed symbolically on two cast-bronze doors at the cathedral's entrance. Three stories high and weighing 23 metric tons, they portray traditional Catholic symbols and those from other faiths, notes Cardinal Mahony. The symbols include a Japanese character for heaven and a Chinese symbol of harmony.
"One of the big elements of the cathedral, obviously, is to be a very welcoming place for people of all backgrounds," he said. "Even though it is a Catholic cathedral, yet it is the great church for the city of Los Angeles, and therefore people who come here must be able to find signs and symbols of their own faith traditions as well."
Los Angeles has over four million Catholics, which makes its archdiocese the largest in the United States. Growth has been spurred by immigration from Latin America, the Philippines, and other heavily Catholic regions.
The city is also home to large numbers of Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and others.
The theme of diversity is seen throughout the structure, including in the nave or central worship hall, where 25 tapestries feature life-sized Catholic saints who represent the variety of the city's Catholics.
"There are 135 saints and 'blesseds' on these tapestries, some of the traditional ones from our faith tradition, but a large emphasis on this hemisphere and Asia-Pacific, in order to highlight the diversity of people and cultures here in the archdiocese."
The cathedral was designed by Spanish architect Jose Rafael Moneo, who adopted the themes of "procession" and "light." Visitors enter through the huge bronze doors, located not at the cathedral's center but off to its side. Worshippers proceed down a long corridor on a kind of spiritual journey. Along the way, they pass traditional and modern art, and narrow chapels.
He passes a 17th-century Spanish "retablo," an altar carving seven meters high covered with gold leaf. Further along, the corridor leads to the nave, a worship space 90 meters long which seats 26-hundred people. It faces east, the direction of the rising sun and of Jerusalem, the city where the Christian faith was born.
Light permeates the structure. Cardinal Mahony explains the light enters through translucent alabaster panels just below the ceiling, taking on the natural hues of the thin-cut stones.
"You go into many of the medieval cathedrals, and they're quite dark inside. But in Southern California, our greatest natural resource, of course, is light," he said.
The building, inside and outside, is built of earth-colored concrete and is made to resemble California's early adobe structures.
Although modern in design, it is reminiscent of California's historic 18th-century Spanish missions, says Tod Tamberg, a spokesman for the Catholic archdiocese.
"It doesn't look like a Spanish-architecture mission like we are accustomed to but it suggests that in the color of the walls, which are adobe, in the thickness of the walls, even in the way that the panes on the windows are cut so deeply that the light filters through them," he said. "All of those are reminiscent of our California mission heritage."
At the front of the cathedral is the massive altar made of a single slab of Turkish marble. There, the priest or bishop will celebrates mass. Behind the altar is an open area large enough to house a symphony orchestra. Symphonies and musical groups are scheduled to perform there.
Cardinal Mahony says the new cathedral is an important addition to downtown Los Angeles, were few churches are still standing. The city's last Catholic cathedral was condemned by safety officials after it suffered earthquake damage in 1994.
"They have over the years, including our own Saint Vibiana's, succumbed to earthquakes, and they all fell down," he said. "And most of the communities then went to the suburbs and rebuilt there. So this cathedral becomes the city's great church, and that's why we received so much support from the Jewish community, and from the Protestant community as well -- millions of dollars."