On a trip back home to Southern California, I had the opportunity to visit the church of my baptism, my “mother church,” as they say. When I became Catholic at the age of twelve, in April 1976, Holy Family, in the city of Orange, had just the previous month become the cathedral for the new diocese south of Los Angeles. Not much seemed different with the passing of nearly half a century, yet the evolution of the cathedral for the Diocese of Orange in the intervening years is itself an interesting story.
There was nothing spectacular about Holy Family, which was built in the late 1950s, and I don’t know why it was selected as the first cathedral for the diocese. In the early 2000s, there was a move by the bishop at that time to build a new, larger cathedral in Santa Ana. His ambition for a seat worthy of his see had a price tag of $200 million, but the timing was bad, with the Church’s sex-abuse scandal hitting the diocese hard in those days.
Holy Family, Orange, California [source: Wikipedia]Another opportunity presented itself in 2010 when Crystal Cathedral Ministries, founded by televangelist Robert Schuller, declared bankruptcy.
Read more...
