‘Now We Can Graduate’--Teary-Eyed Cathedral High Students Exult

Eighteen months of tension and uncertainty over the future of Cathedral High School vanished with teary-eyed embraces and wild cheering after students and teachers learned during an assembly Tuesday afternoon that the inner-city Catholic school would remain open.

“This is a day of great pride for our community and our church,” the Cathedral principal, Brother Martin Yribarren, told the assembly, recalling the marches, petitions, prayers and trips to City Hall that marked the long campaign to save the school after the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese announced last year that it would be sold for development. “We all worked very hard for this day.”

The principal elicited an even louder cheer from students when he announced that they could take today off to celebrate.

“It’s great!” “It’s cool!” was the consensus among the school’s more than 300 students, who began hearing earlier in the day of the decision by Archbishop Roger Mahony that Cathedral’s doors would remain open.

‘We Can Graduate’

“Now we can graduate,” said Ronnie Cantarero, 15, a sophomore who, like his classmates, had not expected to graduate from Cathedral because of its scheduled closure in the summer of 1987. “We’re relieved and happy. We don’t have to worry any more about where we’ll end up.”

Older students expressed jubilation at the prospect of having a new freshman class to initiate during the school’s hazing week--a tradition that was discontinued this year when no freshman class was admitted in anticipation of the shutdown.

Yribarren said that the school will soon begin taking applications from freshmen for the spring semester. He added that meetings with principals from surrounding Catholic schools will begin today to determine whether students will be allowed to transfer to Cathedral.

The 62-year-old school, situated on a small knoll in Chinatown overlooking downtown, has educated successive waves of immigrant children. The student body is now predominantly Latino.

Widespread Criticism

The news in 1984 that the archdiocese had sold the property without informing students, parents or the Christian Brothers, who run the school, drew sharp criticism from alumni and others who charged that the inner-city school was being sacrificed for the financial gain of the archdiocese.

Many of those who participated in the campaign to keep Cathedral open said they drew new hope from the recent appointment of Mahony as head of the archdiocese. And on Tuesday, many on campus hailed the archbishop as a hero.

“I told the (Christian) Brothers not to worry,” said school custodian Manuel Palacio, 58, whose four sons are Cathedral graduates. “It was a real fight and everybody did a lot. We are a family here and we all stood by the school. I knew that at some point we would touch someone’s heart. And we did. . . . Mahony’s.”

Palacio, like other parents, some of whom are graduates of the school themselves, said that he can now look forward to continuing a family tradition.

“I’m looking forward to the day when my grandchildren come here,” he said.

‘First-Class Miracle’

Phil Ferguson, an alumnus who has taught at Cathedral for nearly 20 years, recalled that when he and a couple of his fellow teachers met with representatives of the archdiocese more than a year ago to discuss the issue, they left the meeting feeling that it would take “a first-class miracle” to save the school.

“And that’s what it took,” he said.

Ferguson believes that archdiocese officials must have been “shocked” at the unprecedented community reaction to the school’s closure. “The church by its very nature is non-democratic and used to giving orders. . . . We must have given them an Excedrin headache.

“It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears on the part of a lot of people,” he said. “And a lot of faith that justice would prevail.”