A cathedral for the new millennium

Los Angeles is not the city I particularly like to visit. Unlike New York, you can’t explore the city on foot or by bus or subway and unlike Melbourne, you can’t take the tram or train or bike. It hampers your freedom of movement and you are virtually reduced to arm-wrestling your friends or in my case, in-laws, to be able to move and get around. That’s because in the "City of Angels," it is essential to have a car and like what Burt Bacharach sang, it is one "great, big freeway" – a long, endless stretch, in fact.

My latest visit, however, got me eating crow. I found one interesting place outside the usual theme parks, Hollywood homes, malls and factory outlets. If Rome, Spain, Paris and Cologne have magnificent cathedrals to bring in droves of tourists into its steel and gothic spires, al fresco domes and wide piazzas, Los Angeles now has the Cathedral of the Lady of the Angels to do just that except, it is uh, different – by a ball park length!

To begin with, the Lady of the Angels is bare, as bare as can be. It is austere, streamlined and definitely frou frou-free. In a fashion, it reminded me of the stripped down churches in Geneva that were inspired by Calvinism and other protestant movement. It also brought images of the Getty Centre in Los Angeles and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao to mind, with its futuristic, satellite, space-age design. Michael Rose of The Wall Street Journal described it as "decidedly abstract with its hulking shape, sharp-edged profile, asymmetrical layout and unsettling lack of right angles..."

You can‘t miss it! It is the only structure in downtown LA that pays homage to its cornucopia of glass and steel buildings that houses multi-national accounting firms and utilitarian office structures, with a huge alabaster cross on an angle facing the freeway and its "sea" of motorists.

We entered from the underground car park that had big, well-lighted, clean and well-stocked rest rooms, definitely user-friendly – a "convenience" that we sorely lack in our local churches where the personal comfort of the public seemed to have been totally ignored, but for a few.

Our visit began from the main plaza where a dozen King palm trees, recalling Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, line the entrance. You go up a few steps that lead to the main door – a massive, 25-ton bronze designed by Mexican-born sculptor Robert Graham featuring pre-Christian and Christianized images from around the world including an eagle, dove, dolphin, even Tai Chi.

On top of the door is the eight-foot image of Our Lady of the Angels. She is not clothed in regal silk, gold and jewelry. Instead, sculptor Graham carved her wearing a simple, v-neck long dress with her hair combed neatly away from her face with a thick braid down her back. The braid, according to the artist, evokes the appearance of Native American or Latina women. Her eyes, lips and nose don’t look at all like the typical "Italian-inspired" images of Mama Mary, the kind we see in stampitas and icons. This time, Mary conveys her being Asian, African and Caucasian. In place of a jewel-encrusted halo, the sculptor built a gold wall behind the image with a big hole that stood behind her head capturing the sky, the blue clouds and even the stars at night. From a distance, the sculptured hole does look like a halo!

Past the massive bronze doors are wide and spacious hallways called "ambulatories" that surround the main body of the cathedral. They reminded me of the great expanse of the "El Escorial" in Spain.

The first chapel on the right holds the Blessed Sacrament in a bronze tabernacle with chaffs of wheat, grape leaves and clusters sculpted on the cover and polished to shimmer in soft aqua and gold. The sculptor, Max DeMozz, designed it to suggest the Jewish Ark of the Covenant, the chest that held the Ten Commandments given to Moses. Again, the design of the tabernacle abstained from gems, jewels, and fancy garment.

The main altar can seat a total of 3,000 churchgoers. The first thing I noticed is the absence of pillars that block vision. This was possible because nine steel trusses and the chapel structures on each side support the soaring cedar wood ceiling. Every pew you sit on therefore gets a full view of the altar (in contrast to St. Patrick’s in New York where TV monitors had to be installed so devotees could "watch" and follow the Mass as they sat behind the massive columns and pillars).

There are no statues of saints or stations of the cross – again, a departure from the common. Instead, it has bigger-than-life tapestries called "The Communion of Saints" hanging on the north and the south walls, that depict 135 saints and other blessed people, some known to us (like Pope John XXIII and Mother Teresa) including children (from different ethnic backgrounds) representing those unknown holy ones who are still alive and living among us.

I slowly followed the north wall and the south wall to see which saints I would recognize like Therese of the Child Jesus, Ignatius of Loyola, Francis of Assisi and our very own Lorenzo Ruiz wearing a simple loose cotton "coolie" pants and camisa chino and in his bare feet. I swear he was a dead ringer for Basil Valdes which my in-laws, Leo and Monette Aranda, concurred.

The Baptistery was also unique because the font is designed to allow baptism by immersion. There were steps that lead into the immersion pool where people can literally submerge themselves. My grandson found the pool interesting because water was flowing continuously, "alive and murmuring," but I had to caution him not to dip or play with it since it was holy and blessed water! A sign even reminded parishioners not to "throw coins" either. The wall facing the Baptistery has a huge tapestry showing Jesus in a kneeling position with his half torso naked and about to be baptized by his cousin, John the Baptist.

I was rightly informed that a cathedral isn’t necessarily a large church. What makes a cathedral special is a chair, in Latin the cathedra or Bishop’s chair. From this chair, "the archbishop exercises his leadership responsibilities of teaching, governing and sanctifying."

Well, this Bishop’s chair is different. It was not made of marble nor velvet lined and gold-sprayed. Designed by Jefferson Tortorelli, it was made of polished, natural wood with the back of the chair composed of linked crosses that float in the framework. Each cross is made from different woods from around the world: Olive wood from Israel, carob wood from Lebanon, coca bola from Central America, ebony from Africa, holly from the United States, lace wood from Australia and buena burro from Thailand. All the pieces of wood were joined together in such a manner that they are locked, not hammered, like in a puzzle. The chair weighs 800 pounds, literally a solid piece of furniture.

Beneath the church is a bright and well-lighted mausoleum with more than 1,200 crypts and nearly 5,000 cremation niches. Sixteen of the historic stained glass windows from the old, destroyed by earthquake St. Vibiana’s Cathedral have been fully restored and installed. Any one can buy a niche or a crypt. Although I failed to confirm the cost, a reliable source told me that it runs to four zeros – in US dollars, of course!

The church further boasts of translucent and veined alabaster windows, the largest architectural use of alabaster, a grand pipe organ, a sound system that bounces off crisp, clear and solid audio from anywhere at the main altar to the huge ambulatories, a 150-foot campanile tower, 2 1/2- acre Grand Plaza including gardens, reflecting pools, mission-style colonnades, a two-story Conference Center, a high-end gift shop (selling Lladro porcelain ware, vintage wines, and coffee table books, etc.) and a café operated and catered by the Patina Group that serves everything from gourmet coffee to cocktails and what else? A big group of church volunteers who can answer any question or statistics about the church (during our tour, the "courtesy" desk was being manned by two pleasant, wide-smiling Pinays).

To residents of earthquake-weary Californians, the best news yet is the church rests on some 200 base isolators, all 151 million pounds of it. It makes it possible for the church to "float" up to 27 inches during a magnitude of 8.0 earthquake.

I noticed one, persistent "omission" however – the whole complex had no fresh flowers.

The Cathedral of the Lady of the Angels has broken the centuries old, traditional images of a house of worship. The Spanish architect, Jose Rafael Maneo designed the cathedral to represent the new millennium, to symbolize a church for as many peoples of many races as possible.

Skeptics, however, believe that it was designed to perpetuate one man, Cardinal Roger M. Mahoney, Archbishop of Los Angeles, likening it to how the pyramids served the pharaohs.

The cathedral cost $189 million. When such a mind-boggling amount is involved, the finished product cannot but be subject to controversy and thick rumors. The archdiocese has embarked on an austerity program resulting in massive lay off, budget cuts and mass resignations within its ranks. While sex scandals and bad investments plague the rest of the Catholic Church, I wonder which stories hold water and which ones are merely fish wife tales?

My Philippine STAR fellow columnists, Impy Pilapil and Paulo Alcazaren, would have been the best traveling companions. Their insight into art and architecture would surely have been valuable not to mention their honed-in talent to critic the computer-designed tapestry, woodwork, carpentry, masonry, limestone, columns and pools.

Still, one LA-based writer, Benjamin Epstein, described the Cathedral of the Lady of the Angels as having "mass appeal."

Either that or "mass hysteria."

Hmmm, I would have been quite happy just to hear Mass.