Cathedral of Crystal – one careful owner
This summer, the Crystal Cathedral in Orange County, California, built for a Protestant televangelist, has been reopened as a Catholic cathedral.
The Rev Robert Schuller, who excelled as a preacher in his own version of the Dutch Reformed Church, built the church to the design of the Postmodernist architect Philip Johnson. Schuller had attracted auditors not only on television but also by inviting folk to drive-in services. “Come as you are in the family car,” his slogan went. Some sat in the car in the parking lot, others thronged the Crystal Cathedral.
Schuller had insisted the walls and ceiling be glass. This, I feel, was an error in a place with 278 sunny days a year. Inside, despite a convection cooling system, temperatures often exceeded 100F.
Anyway, Schuller, though innocent of any of the sexual misdemeanours some other televangelists fell into, lost control of the Crystal Cathedral venture, which went bust in 2010. The Catholic diocese of Orange had planned on building its own new cathedral because its population had risen from 300,00 to 1.2 million (half the population of Orange Country and more than three time the number of Catholics in the Archdiocese of Westminster in London, for example). So the diocese decided to buy the Crystal Cathedral.
The profile of the county’s population has changed in the past two generations. The new cathedral has four masses in Vietnamese each Sunday, three in English, three in Spanish and one in Mandarin.
The site cost $57.5million in 2012 and the renovations $77million. The dedication is now Christ Cathedral.
But, of course, Schuller’s building was designed as a preaching box, with vast screens on which to see the preacher. It is 400ft by 200ft unobstructed by pillars, with 130ft ceilings, and it seats 3,000.
The assumptions behind Catholic churches (varied as they might be in practice) is different. “A church is a building to contain an altar,” said the Anglican architect Ninian Comper, and that is the Catholic rule of thumb.
The solution for the Crystal Cathedral was to put the altar near one corner of the diamond-shaped building. It is raised on three steps. I think it could with advantage have been higher. To serve as a baldacchino (or ciborium as it is also called) a square slatted canopy hangs over it. It looks to me like a redundant bit of air-conditioning mounting, but focus is on a half-ton crucifix suspended at its centre. The figure of Christ is hieratic, the arms of the cross equal in length, like some 7th-century Lombardic crux gemmata.
Beneath the altar are relics from saints of different continents: the Canadian martyrs of the 1640s; Andrew Dung-lac beheaded in Vietnam in 1839; Junípero Serra, the Franciscan missionary of Baja California, who died in 1784; Andrew Kim Taegon, martyred in Seoul in 1846; and Rafael Guízar, a bishop in hiding during the years of Mexican government persecution, dying in 1938.
A large tapestry, a distant relative of Graham Sutherland’s in Coventry, shows Christ in a mandorla, the Evangelists’ four beasts in the corners.
In the cathedral now, the 11,000 large panes of glass have angled shades (like hanging chads), keeping sun at bay and making the windows seen from the outside starlike after dark. There is a carillon of bells, and the font is not quite drive-in, but large enough for full immersion.
A cathedral is different from other churches in being the bishop’s seat, surrounded by his people. On them Christ Cathedral’s future depends.