Cardinal Mahony’s Cathedral Project

People are prostrate in the streets of Los Angeles due to poverty. Cardinal Roger Mahony wants to spend some $50 million (or more) on an edifice. Mahony says that this is a “meaningful presence.” Will the poor and homeless come over from the Music Center or the Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters to be “nourished” by the Roman Catholic Church?

In my view, the vast sum designated for the construction of this new cathedral is an obscenity. The cardinal should reevaluate his position and do some soul-searching.

DAN MORIN

West Hollywood

* The pickets at the blessing of the new cathedral are out of touch with reality (Sept. 22). If you fritter away $50 million to feed the bums on skid row, all you get are fat bums.

If you invest the money in the future, the padres at the cathedral can feed and care for them for a hundred years.

JOHN KING

Van Nuys

* Re “Crossed Paths in the Shadow of the Cathedral,” by Jeff Dietrich, Commentary, Sept. 19:

Let me see if I got this straight. Cardinal Mahony asks the Catholic Workers if he can come over and say Mass. Although they think he’s “not a Christian,” they reluctantly agree. The cardinal tells them to keep opposing him on the cathedral but expresses his concern that this disagreement not keep them from working together on other issues affecting the poor. He takes no steps to publicize his visit. Dietrich then rushes into print to inform us all that there is just “no doubt” that the cardinal’s real motive was to con him into laying down his picket sign. But never fear, the cardinal’s visit at least “forces” Dietrich to consider “the humanity of my opponent.”

Gosh, after a concession like that, I guess every Catholic in the city should rush out and dance in the streets. Yes, the Catholic Workers do good, even heroic, work. Their tragedy is not that they have decided, as Dietrich puts it, to “fly in the face of 1,500 years of church tradition” or disagree with their archbishop. It is that their vision is so distorted by what they perceive to be their virtue that they cannot see either the breadth of the Catholic tradition or any basis for anyone to disagree with them about that tradition. Their self-righteousness has left them blind.

GEORGE D. CROOK

Los Angeles

* Dear Jeff. Poor Jeff. This is not a simple “family fight around the dinner table.” This is about right and wrong. The family dinner table, according to Dietrich, is where father gorges himself into a state of distention while his starving family watches longingly. But father is not cruel. His family will get to eat. He will graciously offer them his plates to lick clean.

Father Mahony, the sins of your excessive grandiosities cannot be washed clean by simply visiting some of the victims of your hypocrisy.

STEVEN WISE

Santa Monica

* While I was reading the commentary by Father Clint Albertson, “A Notre Dame for Los Angeles” (Sept. 17), my 7-year-old son took a look at accompanying pictures of Notre Dame Cathedral and the cardinal’s new cathedral. Musing over the pictures, Michael said to me: “That looks like a church that’s not finished.”

All of a sudden Albertson’s poetic waxing over the new cathedral took on a new perspective. A little boy whose favorite activity is building with blocks, Legos and Tinker Toys looked at the new cathedral. What he saw, and what the cardinal cannot see, is a building that is not finished. The empty space took on a more profound sense of emptiness, a reflection of the emptiness that accompanies modern man as he becomes completely engulfed in despair because he no longer has God.

MARIA ELENA KENNEDY

Covina