Archdiocese to L.A. - Sorry about the molestations, too bad about the cathedral
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The Archdiocese of Los Angeles admitted finally that, yes, nearly 5% of its clergy over the past 75 years had been accused of molesting kids.
For those victims who had been waiting years in hunkered silence, and scandalized Catholics all over Southern California who wanted a truly cleansing admission, the 34-page report must have seemed long on mea culpa and statistics, but short on facts.
But that's not the reason I'm ticked at the Archidiocese today.
The report's full of helpful charts: one shows the huge recent incident-report rate lagging nearly two decades behind a spike in the alleged molestation rate, another lays out the accused-accuser ratio (4 had 13 accusers each, and one had 38).
But the report signed by Cardinal Roger Mahony acknowledges by name only those clergy who have been formally charged in criminal courts in L.A. and Ventura counties, and vows to be vigilant in continuing internal investigations and enforcing zero-tolerance for priestly abuse.
For those lapsed Catholics like me who walked away from the Church years ago over its obsession with legislating sexuality, denigration of women (birth control is a sin and no, you can't be a priest), condemnation of homosexuality and tendency toward oppression it felt like just another link in a centuries-old chain of heavy dogma binding otherwise spiritual people to a power structure that long ago started caring more for its own fiscal and political expansion and survival than for the needs of many individual human beings:
Executive summary: "This is all we're releasing, we're really, really, really penitent over the whole thing and we'll see that it never, ever happens again and we'd really like to just, you know, sort of MOVE ON and get back to business."
Before you dismiss me as a rank cynic - or irredeemable sinner - let me make a few things plain: I was never molested by anyone, and count priests among dear friends and respected mentors; I bear no ill will toward the people who love the Church and choose Catholicism as their way of religion - theirs is by and large a powerful spiritual force for good in the world and I believe, as they do, in the sanctity of God and the humanity of the Christian catechism.
But the report hit with something of a clang - coincidentally just a day after my very first visit to the new Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.
And there's the rub.
Maybe I wouldn't be so off my head with disgust at the too-little-too-lateness of Mahony's clinically cautious hand-washing if I had not just toured the plug-ugly cathedral he fought tooth and nail to build at an astronomical cost with millions that could have - should have - been spent directly on the people of the archdiocese.
My wife and I had taken our first trip to the glorious Disney Concert Hall on Sunday night (see a 360-degree QTVR here). Even listening to the little Colburn School Orchestra working valiantly to fill the place, we were smitten by the hall's organic, intimate scale and quickly booked tickets for the Berlioz Requiem in June.
We were also struck by the contrast: They stand in stark counterpoint to each other - Frank Gehry's gracefully swooping steel-clad temple of culture and José Rafael Moneo's hideous pile of raw-cement trapezoids stacked around translucent windows in the rough approximation of a cathedral space.
The Church has always sought to modernize its trappings to appeal to young eyes and souls, but the whole building feels frightening and cold - a sort of massive bomb shelter in which the faithful can safely wait out the apocalypse.
In the one grand attempt to lend a human dimension to the pile, stark modernist tapestries along the walls show 30-foot-high saints trudging towards the altar, itself a weird sort of freestanding slab offset in the nave and completely overpowered by the massive pipe organ.
The organist was practicing as we entered - generally a lovely sound, but in this case harsh and electronic-sounding as it bounced off all those hard surfaces. He was playing melody through the woodwind stops on the top keyboard, and even the powerful youth-memory triggered in me by the tang of incense smoke in the air and the fact that I had just genuflected for the first time in something like three years couldn't wipe out the impression of someone noodling with a giant Casio.
The mausoleum in the basement - home to the remains of Mahony's parents and the first of good Hollywood Catholics to come such as Gregory Peck - feels like some creepy level of Doom, where you half expect moaning zombies to lurch around the corner wielding cast-iron candlesticks.
The cruciform walk-through baptismal font is really quite lovely - although an odd architectural nod toward the more evangelical practice of full-body dunking. And the little side chapels - hidden as they are between 10-foot-thick buttresses built like NASA command pillboxes - have a sort of spiritual intensity that soars when you look up and realize their ceilings are the cathedral roof itself, some 50 or 60 feet above.
But as an aesthetic whole the cathedral is to Notre Dame de Paris as Ripple is to Beaujolais.
More importantly, on moral grounds, lavishing $190 million on this heap versus $18 million to fix up the crumbling but venerable St. Vibiana's was wrong. Simply, sinfully wrong.
If the Church really resides in the souls of its people then what was the point?
Spiritual inspiration? It lies in PCH sunsets the Santa Monica Mountains, and largely in the small good works done every day by the people and priests of the archdiocese. Capacity? It will be a rare occasion indeed when all 3,000 seats are filled, and cramming that many people into a retrofitted St. Vibiana's 500 and spending the $162 million extra to feed, clothe, educate and nurture human beings might be a stronger testament to the vitality of the institution.
I'm betting there'll be no report now, nor in 75 years, admitting that.
Posted by: mack_reed on Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - 12:18 AM
