The Downtown Cardinal : Mahony’s Amazing Temporal Power

The Watts Towers notwithstanding, L.A.’s not the place for spires or steeples. They don’t fit neatly into the low-slung California style; the few left in the city seem artifacts from another time and place. Last weekend, a major one was lost, at least partly, when construction workers, at the direction of Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, removed the cupola from atop the bell tower of St. Vibiana’s Cathedral, and were then enjoined, first by a city building inspector, then by a court, from carting off the rest. Who would have imagined that the future of the 120-year-old cathedral would assume such life-and-death importance to Los Angeles?

A decade ago, the idea that the fate of St. Vibiana would be considered crucial to the destiny of all downtown would have been dismissed as ludicrous. Then, downtown was a boomtown; glass and steel towers, home to burgeoning banks and law firms, were rising along Figueroa Street and on Bunker Hill; a downtown-west was being planned for the far side of the Harbor Freeway. St. Vibiana, home to the archdiocese, was a nice old church in a rundown corner of downtown, but the question of whether the archdiocese wanted to keep it, or rebuild it, or even move, was as much a spiritual concern as it was temporal.

In the post-boom downtown of 1996, it’s become temporal as all hell. The banks’ executives have been carted off to San Francisco or Tokyo; billable hours at the law firms have dwindled; vacancy rates in the skyscrapers built for those bankers and lawyers have soared. And the decline in real estate isn’t even the worst of it.

In the mental landscape of millions of white Angelenos, downtown seems to be vanishing altogether. Since the riots of ‘92, it has become a dangerous void--a place not to go, a place that isn’t there. Local TV news, the mud-caked window most Angelenos have on Los Angeles, doesn’t seem to know where City Hall is or what its occupants do. Football has fled the Coliseum. The Disney Concert Hall remains stubbornly unbuilt. If the Valley doesn’t secede, it won’t be because the city’s center is holding.

The market having failed downtown, a succession of other saviors have come forth and been found wanting. The state of California put up a new office building on Spring Street, but that didn’t stop the downward spiral; the city put a theater a few blocks south, and not enough patrons came. So when the cardinal announced that he would build a great cathedral on the site of St. Vibiana--the otherwise dismal corner of 2nd and Main streets--he immediately became downtown’s main man. The church, after all, is just about the only institution in Los Angeles that isn’t downsizing. The era of big government may be over, and from downtown’s perspective, the era of big business seems infuriatingly kaput. But the era of big religion--at least, big Roman Catholicism--is very much alive in Los Angeles.

With roughly 4 million members, the L.A. archdiocese is the largest, and one of the fastest-growing, in the land. Large enough for Mahony to put a $45-million cathedral downtown without having to worry that the banks, or the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., or any of the usual L.A. naysayers, would try to stop him.

He had not reckoned on the Los Angeles Conservancy, though. When the preservationist society (which wanted only that Mahony’s architect consider including some of the old church in the new) persuaded a court to stop the sudden dismantling of St. Vibiana in mid-bell tower, the cardinal was plainly furious. His response, in a terrifically theatrical press conference Monday, was to threaten to yank the archdiocesan headquarters right out of Los Angeles. He would build a new cathedral, all right, but maybe in Burbank, or in Glendale, or in the San Gabriel Valley, unless he was allowed to proceed as planned at 2nd and Main streets. He would leave behind the rotting hulk of St. Vibiana, from which he had already removed all the relics, all the stained-glass windows. To center-city power players, from conservative businessmen to liberal City Council members, this was no mere press conference. The cardinal had just threatened to administer downtown the last rites.

And he may not be entirely bluffing. Many affluent white lay leaders in the archdiocese have privately contended that 2nd and Main streets isn’t really a place that’s very convenient for them any longer, or very prudent for the church. This is anything but a particularly Catholic thought process, by the way: Wilshire Boulevard Temple has recently decided to abandon its venerable building--still the grandest synagogue in town--near the (also abandoned) Ambassador Hotel for new digs on the Westside. Staying downtown is anything but the course of least resistance in today’s Los Angeles. Indeed, it’s a political statement.

Which is why the church, above all institutions, shouldn’t--and probably won’t--leave downtown. For we live at a time when Los Angeles has lost virtually all its citywide institutions--its committee of businessmen, its Bradley coalition, its once-sizable union movement--and is lapsing, partly by default, into ethnic tribalism. Only one institution remains that stretches across town and ethnicities: the Roman Catholic Church. If only by dint of its shifting demographics, the archdiocese has become the organization best suited to mediate between L.A.’s white and Latino populations--that is, between its old majority and its new one.

And under Mahony, it has tried, if sporadically and imperfectly, to do just that. The cardinal has been the most prominent public figure in town to defend the rights of immigrants, legal or not. His homily in opposition to Proposition 187 was read on the Sunday before the election not just in Eastside churches, but in the churches of Woodland Hills. From the evidence of the polling, it’s not clear the church was able to persuade many white Catholics on this count, but Mahony knows the numbers and they haven’t seemed to deter him.

The archdiocese must soon confront a kindred challenge. The same immigrants whose rights Mahony has defended against the state will shortly attempt to assert their rights in the workplace. They’re centered in the part of downtown that’s booming, beginning just a few blocks south and east of the power players’ downtown. They’re at work in parts factories and garment factories, for poverty wages and in sweatshop conditions. The labor movement, suddenly awakened from its 40-year nap, is planning ambitious organizing drives among these mostly Catholic workers. As it did in the ‘30s, it will turn to the church for support--the church whose doctrines have, for a century, defended workers against the kind of cockroach capitalism currently rampant in L.A.’s sweatshop nouvelle economy.

Mahony’s record on questions of economic justice is somewhat more mixed than his record on immigration. He was an early champion of the farm workers, a brutal opponent of the unionization efforts of the archdiocese’s own gravediggers and a silent bystander to welfare cutbacks other bishops quite audibly opposed. He remains a work in progress, with some important choices before him.

His most fundamental choice is whether he wants fully to become the downtown cardinal--head of our only existing citywide institution, tribune for immigrants and the poor, a bridge between Eastside and West. Siting his cathedral is only the beginning. Literally and figuratively, Mahony can place the church at the center of an otherwise centerless city. Or, like countless Angelenos before him, he can leave downtown to a Dickensian fate and start life anew in the Valley.*