Author: Steve

I was going to comment at length on the new Cathedral in L.A. but I think these bloggers and pundits have it covered. I do have a few original thoughts, though. Please, gentle readers, have a gander at this whole post before you go bonkers with these links.

Mark Sullivan makes it very clear what he thinks. The photos are not to be missed. Cue dancing nuns – activate smoke, err, incense machine. . .

Amy Welborn

What strikes one from the pictures is the starkness of the place, which is, of course, part and parcel of the modern sensibility. Why? Because we are, even as Church, deeply uncertain about everything and reluctant to hang our hat on the hook called “Truth.” This fear ties our hands. We are afraid to impose, afraid to offend, afraid to ascertain anything as true and worth communicating to others, present and future. So we are left with starkness, broken only by artwork that expresses our ethnic and cultural diversity. We don’t know who God is, and even if we do, we are afraid to tell the world anything interesting or compelling about Him, so we build a Church that expresses exactly that.

How profound and true! Jesus said, “For if they do these things when the wood is
green, what is going to happen when it’s dry?” This is what we do when the wood is dry. Don’t miss the comments on Amy’s site.

George Neumayr from The American Prowler. Ouch. Here’s a snippet but do read the whole thing.

Eli Broad, a non-Catholic developer and Democratic Party godfather who helped finance the cathedral , calls it “architecture for the ages.” Many Catholics, when they look up at the tapestries on the walls depicting people in sneakers and birkenstocks, will wonder if it can last even a generation as a Catholic building.

Tapestries with people wearing sneakers and birkenstocks? How transcendant! So new it’s old!

Dom Bettinelli has several posts including this one that says the inside of the Cathedral looks like something out of the movie Stargate.

Gerard Serafin has tons of pictures here and here.

I will add only one thing – since the dedication Our Lord is residing there in body, blood, soul and divinity. Let’s not forget that.

Does anyone know where the tabernacle is in the Cardinal’s new digs?

Our comments are broken so Michael Tinker sends email instead.

I much prefer registering my cranky presence in
public! that way other people know without checking
your traffic meter that I am one of the caring,
concerned 5!

5 readers he means. See “full disclosure” post below.

What I would have asked in re: your niece being yanked
out of your alma mater is “was your niece turning out
to be too much like her uncles?”

Now if you had read the part how she thinks all cops do is eat donuts you would know the answer to that one is “yes!”

– another somewhat interesting piece from the Washington Times. Interesting in that it contains some grave factual errors and says idiotic things like “transitional pope.” No time to comment on it now. Perhaps I will later.

Feel free to tell them what you think via email – letters@washingtontimes.com

– Irritating . . . but not culpable from the Washington Times.

At 1:43 p.m. on Dec. 27, Mr. Waksal’s secretary took this message from Miss Stewart: “Something is going on with ImClone, and she wants to know what.” That appears to be the closest thing congressional investigators have to a “smoking gun.” At some point that afternoon, Miss Stewart tired of waiting for a return call, so she sold 3,928 shares of ImClone.
At 3:13 p.m. — 90 minutes after Martha Stewart’s message — Bloomberg News noted that, “ImClone Systems Inc. shares fell as much as 9.7 percent on concern about whether the Food and Drug Administration will approve the company’s Erbitux cancer drug, financial news network CNBC reported.” That story appeared even earlier on CNBC. But nobody even had to watch TV to notice “something is going on” with a stock that suddenly dropped 9.7 percent.
By the close of business Dec. 27, ImClone was down 8.4 percent — far too huge a drop to blame on a few family insiders, much less on Martha’s puny stake. Martha appears no guiltier than thousands of other investors, including mutual fund managers, who obviously participated in the big sell-off that day.

For the record I am not a fan of Martha Stewart. I admire her business acumen but couldn’t give a hoot about home decorating and making Christmas more magical with mistletoe toilet seats. It seems that in the wake of other corporate travesties she is being painted in the media as a greedy fiend. What she made on the sale of ImClone stock seems like big cash to us but she probably has a few purses worth just as much. The aftermath for her was much worse – it was reported she lost about $200 million when investors bailed out of their stock in her company. I’m not crying any tears for her, it seems like a ridiculous amount of money to lose over rumor and innuendo.