As Eric already mentioned, today we had the incredible experience of visiting, exploring and immortalizing the magnificent Orthodox structure of Saint Sophia.  This first photo I’m posting is of the bishop’s chair on the right side of the altar and the stained glass behind.  The seat is of majestic beauty as its ornaments are endless.  Also, notice the penetrating reds that “cut through” the chair.  One of my favorite elements of this particular cathedral is “the writing on the walls” present, which are visible right behind the throne-looking seat.

Please, keep on checking the site, as we will post more images very soon.  Stay tuned…

Here’s a second image depicting Christ on the cross.  This beautiful artifact is placed in a space behind the altar, which walls are covered with golden mosaics (visible in the background). 

Today Francesco, Jim and I spent the afternoon at St. Sophia Cathedral in the Pico-Union District of Los Angeles. We are grateful to the cathedral dean, Very Rev. Fr. John Bakas, and our amiable host Jimmy Karatsikis, who regaled us with stories as part of his role of the cathedral’s face of hospitality to the community. Look for Francesco to post some photos soon.

In the Roman Catholic Church, the histories of our parishes often sound sterile and clericalist. They frequently refer only to priests as builders and planners, as though no lay people were involved. Occasionally, the name of a nun or two might be included. I once drafted a parish history for an anniversary booklet that narrated lay involvement, the development of the area over 90 years and how the parish and city grew and changed together. The pastor threw it out and replaced it with a chronological list of pastors, entitled “History of the Parish.” That’s fairly typical.

But I’ve found that histories of Orthodox parishes, by contrast, are often rich and interesting, chronicling the contributions of the many lay people involved in building up the parish and constructing its buildings. The Orthodox are not afraid to give credit to lay people. And few such Orthodox histories are as colorful as that of St. Sophia Cathedral and the pride of place given by that community to the memory of Charles P. Skouras.

Charles P. Skouras

Born in 1889, Charles was one of 10 children of a poor Greek sheepherder. In 1910, he and his brothers George and Spyros arrived in St. Louis. They saved their wages as workers in downtown hotels and by 1914 they were able to open a nickelodeon on Market Street in that city, where the Kiel Opera House is now located. They began to buy other theaters, and by 1924 they owned more than 30. Among their St. Louis theaters was the Ambassador Theater Building (1925-1996), designed by the prominent Chicago theater architects Rapp and Rapp.

The three brothers continued on to become influential in the entertainment business in Los Angeles. In 1932 they took over management of some 500 Fox West Coast theaters. George became president of United Artists Theatres (now Regal Entertainment Group, owners of the Regal, Edwards and United Artists theater chains). Spyros was chairman of Twentieth Century Fox from 1942-1962 and was one of the main forces behind the creation of Century City. Charles went on to become president of National Theaters, which at the time owned 650 theaters across the nation.

The first parish of the Greek Orthodox community of Los Angeles was founded in 1908. Annunciation Church (1912) was built at 12th and San Julian Streets downtown in what is today the Garment District and served the growing community for some 50 years. In 1942, Charles, a member of Annunciation parish, decided that the tiny church was no longer adequate to the needs of the community. He purchased a lot on the corner of Pico Boulevard and Normandie Avenue, then a center of the local Greek community, and for 10 years was tirelessly involved in the construction of St. Sophia Cathedral.

In 1949, architect Albert R. Walker drew up plans for a magnificent church. In his previous partnership with Percy Eisen, Walker had designed the Oviatt Building (1927) and the Fine Arts Building (1925) downtown, the Beverly Wilshire Hotel (1926) in Beverly Hills, the El Cortez Hotel (1927) in San Diego and The Breakers (1925) in Long Beach — as well as a number of theaters for the Skouras brothers. Over the next three years, the architectural firm of Walker, Kalionzes & Klingerman continued to refine the plans and supervised construction. The Athens-educated artist William Chavalas covered the interior with rich paintings, spending six months on the central dome alone, and enormous chandeliers were crafted of Czechoslovakian crystal. Chavalas also designed the stained glass windows depicting the Twelve Apostles.

All the latest technology was included, from the modern sound system to air conditioning and adjustable theatrical lighting. Even the deacon doors on the iconostasis were electric, silently gliding open and closed. Today they’re probably still the only electric deacon doors in any Orthodox church.

When St. Sophia was dedicated in 1952 as the seat of the local Greek Orthodox jurisdiction that then covered 11 Western states (the seat of the current seven-state Greek Orthodox Metropolis was later transferred to Annunciation Cathedral in San Francisco), Charles Skouras was honored by Archbishop Michael on the cathedral steps before the procession of clergy entered the church. And when Skouras died two years later, 2,200 people paid tribute to him in that great church he built as a monument to the Faith of his homeland.

I’ve never been big on big things. My eyes just glaze over when I’m on a tour of some landmark and they start talking feet and how much a tower weighs and the exact height of a groin vault.

But I know others find these numbers interesting, and I recently discovered that there is a lot of rivalry as to which are the largest cathedrals in the world. The tallest? The longest? The most square feet?

So just for fun I put together a list based on what I could glean from various sources according to square feet. See what you think, and let me know in the comments what number 15 might be to round things off!

The Seville Cathedral

* Also called the Washington National Cathedral
** Now a museum

I recently set up an interactive Google map of all the cathedrals of California. As we go, we’ll add photos of the cathedrals to the map. For now you can see photos of the former cathedrals when you click on their place marker.

You can zoom in to see each cathedral in a satellite view, switch to a map view and even get directions. Enjoy!

Go to the map.

As I mentioned in one of my previous postings about this cathedral, the “games” of light and shadows are one of the most interesting elements present in the church.  The following images capture two details that really stood out to me: one is a ray of light entering one of the lateral windows; the other one is the light produced by some candles with a very dark background.  The relationship between the two elements (light and darkness) is a constant in the Sacred Scriptures as much as it is in our daily life - our choices, our dark and bright sides, day and night, good and evil. 

Earthquakes play a major role in the history of California’s cathedrals. In the Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906, among the thousands of buildings destroyed were Old St. Mary’s Cathedral (1854), St. Francis Pro-cathedral (1849) and the pro-cathedral predecessor of Grace Cathedral. The Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 doomed Oakland’s Cathedral of St. Francis de Sales (1893) and San Francisco’s Greek Orthodox Annunciation Cathedral (1921) while the 1994 Northridge earthquake spelled the end for the Cathedral of St. Vibiana (1876) in Los Angeles and caused the Armenian diocese to abandon St. James Cathedral (1942) in Hollywood.

St. Francis Pro-cathedral and Old St. Mary’s Cathedral in ruins after the 1906 earthquake. Both were later rebuilt.

A statue of St. Emydius held a prominent place in the Cathedral of St. Vibiana. He is traditionally invoked against earthquakes. So what happened? Was Emydius asleep at the switch?

Emydius (also spelled Emidius or Emydigius) was a fourth-century German pagan who accepted Christianity. With a new convert’s zeal, he smashed a pagan idol in a temple in Rome. To save him from the authorities, Pope Marcellinus (or Marcellus I; the accounts are unclear) sent him into hiding as bishop for the region of Ascoli Piceno, where he was an effective missionary, baptizing many people. He was beheaded during the persecution under Diocletian. In 1703, the people of Ascoli Piceno invoked the protection of their first bishop during a violent earthquake, and gave him the credit when their city was left intact. Emydius became a popular saint in Los Angeles and San Francisco, for obvious reasons.

From the life of Emydius we learn something important about prayers of petition. First of all, the communion of saints is not a new pantheon of little gods with magical power over various natural events, or protectors we pray to so our lives may be more comfortable or prosperous. We ask the intercession of the saints in the same way we ask our living friends to pray for us; they pray to God, who alone has the power to intervene in human lives. More importantly, Emydius was a martyr. He believed there were more important things than just surviving or living a life free from hardship.

When faced with the witness of a martyr, we recall especially the petitionary attitude of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane the night he was arrested: “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass by me. But if not, your will be done.” This is the proper Christian approach when we ask anything of God: resignation to the fact that we do not always know what is best. We must have a loving trust in God to accept what comes our way, knowing that God will always pull good from evil, triumph from tragedy, power from pain.

St. Mary’s Cathedral (1891; the second of three San Francisco Catholic cathedrals of that name) was spared devastation in the 1906 earthquake and became a relief center feeding 2,000 people a day in the aftermath of the disaster. It was finally destroyed by fire in 1962.

I was living in one of the Park La Brea towers (a large apartment complex in the Miracle Mile District) in 1994 when the Northridge quake hit. My apartment was a mess; furniture and bookshelves toppled, dishes and kitchen utensils covering the floor, hundreds of books strewn about, and plaster rubble all over everything. (My two cats were so traumatized they would not emerge from under the bed for two days.) I went downstairs, and there my neighbors began to gather — people I had never met who lived in my building, some of them I had never even seen.

Of course I knew what would happen, because we Angelenos are no strangers to catastrophe. Just like in the riots two years before, we sat down and talked, exchanged stories, then the food began to show up. Everybody brought whatever they had to eat to the park in front of our building and the food became common property. We brought cars around, turned on the car radios to find out what was happening in the rest of the city. We learned about each other, because we had to. There was no electricity, no water, no television, no Internet. We exchanged advice and experience from previous earthquakes and when it got dark we all brought down to the park whatever candles we had to sit up late into the night talking.

Now there were many people worse off than we were; some even died. The point of the story is that our faith in God doesn’t offer us a way out, but a way through. If we are attentive, we can even draw good from bad things that happen, with the grace of God and the prayers of St. Emydius.

Underneath is a photo of the “Our Lady of the Angels” statue placed above the main entrance on the cathedral.  The modern figure is presented as a woman “clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet” (Revelation 12:1). The halo shaft above her head shines God’s light on her as the sun travels from east to west.

The question of what was the first Episcopal cathedral in the United States is somewhat complex, as it reflects an evolution in the ecclesiology of the Episcopal Church that is central to the very concept of a cathedral.

James Lloyd Breck (1818-1876) was an Episcopal priest, educator and missionary to the Native Americans who became a prominent advocate for the establishment of cathedrals for the Episcopal Church.

Although the first Anglican bishop in the United States, Samuel Seabury, had been ordained a bishop in 1784, the authority of the bishop in the Episcopal Church was not what it is today. As Breck explained in 1867, “After long years of waiting on Heaven-commissioned men, who ought to have acted for us with alacrity, we at length obtained the Episcopate for America! But the condition of things here had been so long that of a Presbyter-Church, it was not an easy matter to put the Bishop in his right place. He had been imported for only two things, Ordination and Confirmation! He had no cure in a Diocese beyond these, except he went down to the rank of a Priest, in which case he could become the Rector of a Parish.”

Breck was heavily influenced by the Oxford Movement, which advocated a return to more ancient practices in the Anglican Communion. Key to the restoration of the role of bishop in the Episcopal Church, according to Breck, was the establishment of cathedrals, an idea avoided in the formative years of the new American church. Early Episcopal bishops who dared to wear a mitre, set up a cathedra or speak of cathedrals often faced stiff opposition from clergy and laity.

Cathedral of Our Merciful Savior, Faribault, Minn.

In 1862, as founder of Nashotah House in Minnesota, Breck worked with the bishop of Minnesota, Henry Whipple, to organize what is often said to be the first Episcopal cathedral, in Faribault, Minn. The Cathedral of Our Merciful Savior, a gothic church designed by James Renwick, was dedicated in 1869. Thus, while the Episcopal Church was an established presence in the East, the frontier became the place where tradition was re-established.

The Faribault cathedral is not without rival claimants to being the first Episcopal cathedral. Ss. Peter and Paul Cathedral (Chicago, 1862; destroyed by fire in 1921) St. Paul’s Cathedral (Buffalo, 1866) and All Saints Cathedral (Milwaukee, 1873) all lay claim to this title. The Cathedral of All Saints (Albany, 1888) claims to be the first “Episcopal Cathedral in America built on the English and Continental model of bishop’s church, school and hospital.”

Perhaps because of differences in how these early Episcopal cathedrals were organized (many appear to be parish churches acting as pro-cathedrals), there is the further distinction of which is the first “full cathedral.” The Cathedral of St. John the Divine (New York, founded 1873; dedicated 1941) and the Cathedral Church of Ss. Peter and Paul (Washington National Cathedral, founded 1893; dedicated 1976) appear to be the first to have this distinction, for when St. Paul’s Cathedral in Los Angeles was granted this status in 1957, reports indicated that St. Paul’s would thus join the ranks of these two “full cathedrals.”

The question of what constitutes the first Episcopal cathedral in the United States appears to be open to debate, and no doubt some of our more learned Episcopal brothers and sisters can further enlighten us in the comments section. But one thing is clear: the influence of the Oxford Movement and the devoted missionary James Breck have left their mark. Something to think about each April 2, when the Episcopal Church commemorates James Breck on its liturgical calendar.

For the last two days, Los Angeles has experienced a storm that brought an unusual clearance in the air, along with spectacular clouds and light effects.  And so, I decided to capture the outside of the cathedral under this rare vault.  In the first image, the post storm golden sunset light hits the building in such way that its colors become very vivid.  You can see the clouds reflecting on the main window, which is split in four sections by a cross.

In the second photograph the sunlight is much weaker, giving a less contrasty effect on the building and a much less intense color.  You can now admire the entire facade from a higher point of view.

The third photograph is taken from a different angle near the 101 Freeway which gives a little of the cathedral’s surroundings and shows the beautiful light after the storm.

Founded in 1890 as a mission and made a parish the following year, St. John’s Episcopal Church has always been located at the corner of Adams and Figueroa. At the time, West Adams was the most desirable area of the city, dense with grand mansions.

In 1913, Rev. George Davidson became rector of the parish, and led a period of growth that overwhelmed the small church building. In 1919 it was announced that a new church would be constructed on the site. The initial announcement in the Los Angeles Times showed a sketch by local architects Montgomery and Montgomery of an English Gothic structure.

Montgomery and Montgomery sketch of proposed Gothic church for St. John’s

The building committee of the parish decided against the Montgomery & Montgomery plan, and in 1920 hired the prominent New York architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, who would go on to design the Los Angeles Central Library downtown (1924) and the Nebraska state capitol (1924). Perhaps the parishioners of St. John’s turned to Goodhue because of his striking success with the Byzantine-Romanesque style of St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church (1913) on Park Avenue in New York. Goodhue and his partner Ralph Adams Cram were reigning American proponents of Gothic Revivalism, exemplified by St. Thomas Episcopal Church (1906) on Fifth Avenue in New York, but Goodhue had recently been exploring other styles.

Eventually, however, in a competition the parish selected the local architects Walter and F. Pierpont Davis, who were largely responsible for developing the distinctive Los Angeles architectural genre of courtyard apartments; many of the finest existing examples of this residential style are the work of Davis and Davis, such as the famous Villa d’Este Apartments in West Hollywood. The Davis brothers believed that Mediterranean architecture was best suited to Los Angeles, and accordingly they designed an impressive Italian Romanesque structure for the congregation. Ground was broken in 1923 and the new church was dedicated in 1924.

In a 1925 New Year’s Day feature, the Los Angeles Times proudly reported that 62 new churches were built in the city during 1924 — among them St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral downtown — adding to the previous total of 412 churches in the city. The church building boom of the Roaring ’20s would continue to result in magnificent landmark houses of worship in Los Angeles, many of them along Wilshire Boulevard, until the Crash of 1929 put an abrupt end to the fevered construction of grand religious monuments in the city.

We sometimes forget the importance of libraries. So I should mention that I researched this post in the Los Angeles Times archive at the very Central Libary designed by Goodhue. Go there sometime!