Judge Hears Arguments on St. Vibiana’s

As protesters opposed to a new building temporarily occupied St. Vibiana’s Cathedral on Monday, a Superior Court judge heard arguments on further demolition of the existing bell tower at the landmark downtown church.

The court hearing raised issues of whether the Los Angeles archdiocese and city inspectors offered misleading evidence of seismic damage to the 120-year-old cathedral and whether preservationists are violating Catholics’ religious freedom.

Judge Robert O’Brien reserved judgment on a Los Angeles Conservancy lawsuit seeking to turn his 2-week-old ban against bell tower demolition into a more lasting injunction. The judge suggested that his ruling would focus on archdiocese claims that a 3.6-magnitude quake May 23 so dramatically worsened tower damage that emergency demolition should be exempt from the environmental review usually required for razing city-designated landmarks.

In its legal filings, the conservancy alleged that the archdiocese “desperately attempted to conjure up evidence” about the May 23 temblor but that “this suspect attempt utterly fails.” In response, senior assistant City Atty. Claudia McGee Henry compared the tower to a chair with a sawed-through leg, a disaster waiting to happen.

Meanwhile, police arrested six protesters who scaled the cathedral walls with a ladder Monday morning, climbed up the tower’s stairway and unfurled a large banner proclaiming: “We Reclaim the Church for the Poor.” The six, later charged with misdemeanor trespassing, want St. Vibiana’s converted into a service center for the poor and have suggested finding another church to serve as the new cathedral.

“If Jesus happened by 2nd and Main with $50 million, he wouldn’t spend it on a gleaming temple. He would use the money to feed and house the homeless,” said Alice Callaghan, advocate for the homeless.

An Episcopal priest, Callaghan joined the protest with five members of the Catholic Worker organization, which runs a skid row soup kitchen. Jeff Dietrich, a member of the Catholic organization said: “We’re here to cleanse the temple of the robbers and the fat cats.”

The protesters have no affiliation with the conservancy, which supports a new cathedral complex but wants it to include the old church.

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony wants to demolish the cathedral at 2nd and Main streets and replace it with a much larger, $50-million complex. But Mahony has warned that he will move the project out of downtown and possibly out of the city of Los Angeles if lawsuits and other problems delay it. The private funds donated for construction cannot be diverted into bolstering the many charities that the archdiocese sponsors, church officials said.

On May 31, an archdiocese-hired engineer told the city’s Department of Building and Safety that the recent quake had weakened the tower further. After an inspection the same day, the department ordered the archdiocese to quickly abate the danger, an order that O’Brien stressed Monday did not require razing. On June 1, the archdiocese began dismantling the tower, but another city inspector and a previous judge in the case halted the work because the archdiocese had not obtained the required demolition permit.

On Monday, archdiocese attorneys said they will seek a permit even though they were able to tear down three church bell towers in the San Fernando Valley after the Northridge earthquake without permits. O’Brien said those 1994 demolitions may or may not have been legal but are irrelevant to the conservancy lawsuit.

The judge also said he was concerned about the reliability of a videotape of tower damage because the tape’s existence appeared to contradict deposition statements by Nabih Youssef, a church engineer who was not in court Monday. Reached later by telephone, Youssef said his statement that no recent photographs existed was intended to deny knowledge of any images shot after the June 7 videotape.

Conservancy attorneys pointed to a city inspector’s statements that he relied heavily on Youssef’s judgments and did not enter the tower before declaring it an imminent hazard. “I think the outcome was about as questionable as a professional wrestling match at that point,” preservationists’ lawyer Richard Stone told reporters after the hearing. He also challenged archdiocese photos of tower cracks, alleging that some were taken before May 23.

City and church lawyers deny that evidence was doctored and stress that exterior danger was so evident that inspector Richard Holguin did not need to closely examine the tower interior. “Neither law nor logic” supports the conservancy’s lawsuit, archdiocese legal briefs declared.

The archdiocese argued that the conservancy is interfering illegally with Roman Catholics’ religious freedom. Church lawyers cited, among other cases, a 1992 Washington state Supreme Court ruling that the Seattle City Council violated a local Protestant congregations’s 1st Amendment rights by putting a church building under city landmark protection rules.

Conservancy attorneys relied on a 1991 U.S. Supreme Court action as supporting claims that churches can be subject to local landmark controls. In that case, the high court decided not to review a lower federal decision that New York City could forbid St. Bartholemew’s Episcopal Church from razing its landmark rectory.

Monday’s protesters remained inside St. Vibiana’s for about four hours. Then they agreed to surrender peacefully to police officers who had been summoned by church officials. Arriving on the scene, Mahony said of the protesters: “We are very concerned about their safety.”

The protesters--Callaghan, Dietrich, Christopher Kidd, Donald Nollar, Eric Debode and Martha Scarbrough--later were released on their own recognizance and scheduled for a July 8 hearing.