By RON SCOTT SMITH
Editor’s note: Ron Scott Smith is on vacation. This column originally ran in the Sept. 22, 2002, edition of the Santa Monica Daily Press.
I had to see what the fuss was about, so the other day that was me in the corner, the corner of Temple and Grand downtown, getting a firsthand look at the new monument to the life and works of Jesus. The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels occupies two full city blocks, but there’s something about it I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s all straight lines and strong walls. They proudly announce that the elements making up the structure total 151 million pounds, with each of the magnificent bronze doors weighing in at 25,000 pounds. What an amazing and transcendent life Jesus lived, to be revered by millions of us — 25,000 pounds per door and 2000 years later. To be honored with such monumental opulence, I wonder what he’d say.
The church opened for business on Sept. 2, and the timing was probably not the best, this being not so good a year for Catholics. The $200 million spent to build it has suddenly become money that may have been better used settling lawsuits brought by countless faithful, who as innocent children were sexually violated by robed men of God in the back rooms of parishes across this nation. And now scores of social workers on the LA Catholic payrolls are being laid off in an effort to close the huge debt rung up by said lawsuits and said building costs. Hopefully none of those newly unemployed will end up with the thousands already sleeping in the imposing shadows of the new church in cardboard boxes on the street.
Houston, we have a problem. New York, LA, Boston, too. Cardinal Law, your Boston. Name a city, any city. Miami, Kabul, London, Ramallah, Paris … we have a problem. Baghdad, you don’t even want to know. What’s the problem? It’s the religion, stupid.
It’s been a bad year for religion everywhere on earth.
Things like guys flying commercial jetliners into buildings in the name of Allah. Things like terrorist boys and girls strapping bombs to their chests and blowing themselves — and anybody else who may have happened to be enjoying a slice of pizza at any given moment in any town in Israel — to smithereens — in the name of the same Allah. These lost young humans do this because the bad guys on the other side — in the name of their own holy Moses — have stolen their homeland, so they say, and use the even more lethal state-sanctioned violence to hold onto it. Meanwhile, Indian Hindus and Pakistani Muslims aren’t being real neighborly or divine, as they sit with fingers on triggers of fully loaded nuclear arsenals aimed at each other to protect and defend self-assured visions of their respective Gods.
But this worldwide mayhem in the name of religion isn’t anything new, as Christians, not without their share of shame and blame, can attest. The blood they spilled and walked through in the crusades long ago is not yet forgotten and in fact still motivates the radical part of Islam in their holy Jihad to destroy the “infidels.” How does it feel to be an infidel?
Bush has declared the current global crisis as a battle between good and evil, setting the stage for the kind of intercivi-lizational holy war that Muslim leaders like Bin Laden appear to be longing for. The true-believing Al Qaeda suicide soldiers don’t need fuel added to their fire by the true-believing Texan.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, Christian leaders and prophets like Falwell and Robertson preach to millions of followers in their own Taliban-like style. In the name of God they lash out at any lifestyle deemed to be outside their parameters, their God-given parameters. In fact, they claimed the 9/11 atrocities were brought on by the decadence befalling our left-leaning campuses and our barely leaning inner cities. God was mad at the adulterers and the gays, the thieves and the shiftless, and so this was His response. Under public fire, those hateful words were taken back, but how far back?
Somewhere tonight, Jesus and Muhammad, Moses and Buddha too, may be weeping for their righteous, good-intentioned minions for the sorry mess they’re making out of this planet in their name. They, if anyone, know where the road paved with good intentions too often leads.
My road led me home from that grand new cathedral last Sunday, past an old auto repair shop on Pico. Instead of 25,000 pound bronze ones, it had those cheap metal rollup doors where broken-down cars once pulled in for new water pumps or timing chains. Those doors were painted over with these words: “Iglesia de Dios.” It was a church. Every bit the church as the bigger one a few blocks back and would Jesus have loved it every bit as much?
It made me think about the giant new Cathedral one last time, and now I could put my finger on what was bothering me about it.
It looked for all the world like a fortress, ready for battle. (Ron Scott Smith His folk-rock band, Earth to Joe, appears at Rusty’s on the Pier on Friday, April 15, at 8:30 p.m.)
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 14, 2005. Read the original PDF.