[Alex Murphy]

The Crystal Cathedral was to Schuller what Graceland was to Elvis. Now it has been bought by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange, which has long coveted having a cathedral that sat at the center of its vast footprint of 1.2 million Catholics. The name has already been changed to the Christ Cathedral. But the work of liturgical consultants, priests and architects to transform a temple so closely identified as a symbol of Schuller's sunny, uniquely Southern Californian theology into one that conforms to the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church has just begun.

It'll always look like Elvis' Graceland, IMO. No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney.

[Fiji Hill]

The Catholics should have purchased some land and built their own facility, to their own tastes.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Graceland, hah! I tend to agree with you on that. It's --- to my mind --- gaudy without being sacred.

But the line between glory and gaudy may be a perpetual dispute. I really LIKE the Sagrada Familia Basilica in Barcelona:

I'm touched by the fact that even though the Catalan revolutionaries attacked and damaged it in 1936, they couldn't bring themselves to utterly trash and obliterate it. (They were bloody-handed anarchists, but, thank God, not a bunch of puritan wahhabis.)

[jodyel]

“coveted”

Says it all.