New cathedrals soar despite tight economy: new construction at a 40-year high for houses of worship.

Robert H. Schuller has come a long way, architecturally, from the drive-in movie theater where he held his first church service in Orange County, Calif., 47 years ago. These days, Schuller's inspirational sermons reverberate through the Crystal Cathedral, a modern spiritual landmark in Garden Grove, where the proponent of "possibility thinking" can still see the sky through thousands of glass panes.

Nearby, Schuller can also see the progress on his International Center for Possibility Thinking, a $40 million project originally scheduled for completion in November but pushed back to early next year.

Designed by friend and architect Richard Meier, the International Center will become a-major addition to the 40-acre Crystal Cathedral campus. And it ranks as one of the noteworthy developments in a year of high-profile religious projects that are under consideration, under construction or recently completed.

As economic uncertainty slows the pace of office and retail projects, church construction in the United States is growing at the fastest rate in 40 years, according to Robert Murray, vice president and chief economist of The McGraw-Hill Construction Information Group. (See accompanying story on page 4.)

A few miles away from Schuller's campus, in the heart of Los Angeles, the Catholic Church is now holding mass in a more traditional cathedral but one that is no-less significant. The 12-story Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, built to stand for at least 500 years, became the first major American Catholic cathedral to be built in three decades with its dedication on September 2.

At a cost of $189.5 million, it was financed with gifts from foundations and individual donors.

"Because of the leadership of the (Dan) Murphy Foundation, the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Foundation and so many wonderful people -- Catholics and others -- the cathedral is now fully funded," Cardinal Roger Michael Mahoney told more than 3,000 people at the dedication.

Although not mentioned specifically, other donors include a Hollywood Who's Who of foundations, featuring names like Disney, Bob Hope and Merv Griffin.

As a replacement for earthquake-damaged St. Vibiana's, which was one-third the size, Our Lady of the Angels covers 5.5 acres on elevated terrain that makes it visible from the nearby Hollywood Freeway. As the "mother church" for the nation's largest archdiocese of 4 million people, the new cathedral is home for the Hollywood-born Mahoney, the first native Angeleno to serve as archbishop.

"Viewing the cathedral from any direction should evoke sure recognition that this is the City of the Angels Catholic Cathedral, while subtly luring the viewer by its sense of spiritual strength," Mahoney said in a prepared statement. "As people draw nearer, the size, proportions, and external beauty of the cathedral should cast an intangible sense of peacefulness and security upon all who behold it, while continuing to draw them closer -- almost irresistibly."

In a year when the American Catholic Church was drawn into one of the most damaging scandals in its history - widespread reports of sexual abuse by priests and attempts by church authorities to cover up the alleged misdeeds -- the dedication of Our Lady of the Angels was not as peaceful as church leaders had hoped. Because of the financial implications of the sex scandal, the archdiocese was forced to revise its budget.

Complaints about the cost of the new cathedral and the church's unwillingness to invest upwards of $20 million to restore St. Vibiana's at times detracted from the plans for opening the new religious center.

And even the design of the new cathedral by Spanish architect Jose Rafael Moneo was a bit startling, Mahoney told the archdiocese newspaperTidings.

"As Moneo began to explain it -- how it captured the natural light, how it had the theme of a mission complex, how it used an adobe color, how it all connected -- it really made sense," Mahoney said. "And from that first model, very little in the exterior design changed, except for a bit of tweaking here and there."

While the new L.A. cathedral might look daring to a Catholic cardinal, it appears extremely orthodox to Rev. Michael Piazza, senior pastor at the nation's largest church serving a predominantly gay and lesbian congregation.

Piazza, who convinced famed architect Philip Johnson to go out on a limb in designing a sanctuary for the Cathedral of Hope in Dallas, touts Johnson's design of an iceberg-like structure with no parallel lines as "the first true 21st century cathedral."

"While the LA Cathedral is appropriate for a traditional church led by an 88-year-old Pope, it looks like something that could have been built in the '50s," Piazza said.

Johnson, 92, sometimes described as "the father of modern architecture," is known for the AT&T headquarters in New York, the Kennedy Memorial in downtown Dallas, the Water Gardens in Fort Worth and a number of other high-profile projects, including his own home-in New Canaan, Conn. But it was Johnson's Crystal Cathedral that led Piazza to seek his services in designing the Dallas sanctuary.

"I was actually on my way to an event at the Crystal Cathedral and I was reading an article about how it made Robert Schuller one of the most famous people in the western world," Piazza said. "It was Philip's cathedral that sort of propelled him to that level of visibility. When I read that article, I actually didn't know that Philip was gay."

After an initial rebuff, the architect agreed to design a building, but the first draft was not what church leaders were hoping for.

"I told him I hated it," Piazza said. "We wanted something really different. We didn't want a building that looked like the library at Texas A&M."

What Johnson ultimately produced was, in his own words, "the most exciting sanctuary in Christendom ... the thing by which I will be memorialized."

The avant garde design is certain to represent a challenge for contractors when construction begins, tentatively in 2004.

In the meantime, the Cathedral of Hope will be clearing land and raising the anticipated $30 million needed to complete the sanctuary. This summer, the church opened a new conference center to serve as a base for charitable and service work. To date, the cathedral has raised about $12 million, with plans to sell about $5 million of church bonds next year, said Randy Sprabary, director of development. While the weak economy and the aftermath of September 11 have slowed the effort, church leaders are taking a long view of the campaign, he said.

For gay and lesbian Christians, Piazza hopes the new Cathedral of Hope becomes the spiritual equivalent of Salt Lake City's Temple Square for Mormons, a faith experiencing an unprecedented construction boom.

Reaching out to new cities, the Mormons -- or Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, as they are officially known -- have also returned to their ancestral homes, with temples in Palmyra, N.Y, where Joseph Smith reported the revelation that led to the church's founding and Nauvoo, Ill., where the original temple was built 156 years ago.

The Nauvoo Temple is built on the same site and with virtually the same exterior as the original temple destroyed by angry townspeople and a tornado after the Mormons began their westward migration. That makes it unique and a major tourist attraction for thousands of Mormons drawn to the small town in western Illinois.

"This is one of the most significant events in our 172-year history and a defining moment for us as a people," said Elder Donald L. Staheli, president of the Church's North America Central Area, before the dedication June 27.

"Thousands of our members have ancestors who, at great personal sacrifice, built the original temple in the mid-1840s and drew strength from within its walls before making their 1,300-mile exodus from Nauvoo to the Rocky Mountains," Staheli said.

Today, more than half of the 108 LDS temples have been built in the past five years. In August, the LDS announced plans to build a Manhattan temple near Lincoln Center that will serve 62,000 Mormons in the New York area.

In the northern Arizona town of Snowflake -- named for two Mormon pioneers Snow and Flake -- the church dedicated a new temple in the birthplace of former LDS Prophet Spencer Kimball. The rapidly growing faith has 17 more temples in the planning stages around the country.

Among the decorative flourishes in the Snowflake Temple are stained-glass windows from a Catholic Church in Boston that was razed. Valued at more than $100,000, the windows were purchased by the Deseret Foundation, a nonprofit that raises money for LDS causes.

Like all Mormon Temples, the one in Snowflake is easily identified by its gilded statue of the angel Moroni blowing a trumpet, an increasingly familiar image around the world.

For church President Gordon B. Hinckley, the construction boom he launched in 1998, is fulfillment of Joseph Smith's prophecy that temples would someday "dot the Earth."

"I think this is the natural consequence of sending missionaries throughout the world, and people joining the Church in many lands," said Paul Koelliker, managing director of the temple department. "And so the notion of temples dotting the earth is now being literally fulfilled."