Christ Cathedral, Garden Grove

The Story

In 1955 a young minister named Robert H. Schuller began preaching from the roof of a snack bar at a drive-in theater in Orange County. His congregation grew, and in the late 1970s he commissioned Philip Johnson and John Burgee to design a sanctuary entirely of glass. When Schuller saw the model he called it a crystal cathedral, and the name stuck. The building opened in 1980, a four-pointed star more than 400 feet long sheathed in over ten thousand panes of glass, and became familiar to millions through the televised Hour of Power.

The ministry could not sustain itself. Crystal Cathedral Ministries filed for bankruptcy in 2010 with roughly $43 million in debt. In late 2011 a bankruptcy judge approved the sale of the 34-acre campus to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange for $57.5 million, and the sale closed in February 2012. The diocese, which had never had a cathedral built for the purpose, now had one of the most recognizable religious buildings in America and the problem of turning a preaching auditorium into a Catholic liturgical space.

The firm Johnson Fain led a multi-year renovation. Thousands of angled quatrefoil panels were hung inside the glass skin to soften the light and control heat; the floor was reshaped around a new altar, ambo, cathedra and a suspended ciborium; a baptistry and Blessed Sacrament chapel were added. Bishop Kevin Vann dedicated the building as Christ Cathedral on July 17, 2019.

A visitor today walks into an enormous room full of filtered daylight, with the Hazel Wright Organ -- one of the largest pipe organs in the world, restored and returned to service in 2022 -- along the walls. The campus also holds the 1961 Arboretum, the Tower of Hope, the Crean Tower carillon, the Our Lady of La Vang shrine honoring the diocese's large Vietnamese Catholic community, and the memorial gardens where Robert Schuller is buried.

Church Recognition

Christ Cathedral's standing is straightforward: it is a Catholic cathedral in the full canonical sense, the seat of the bishop of the Diocese of Orange. It was not a disputed apparition or a contested miracle but an ordinary and very public act of the Church -- a purchase, a renovation, and a rite of dedication. Because the building had been a Protestant church, it was not simply reopened; it was dedicated for Catholic worship on July 17, 2019, with the anointing of the altar and walls with sacred chrism, the deposition of relics in the altar, and the installation of the bishop's cathedra, the chair that makes a church a cathedral. The anniversary of the dedication is observed as a feast in the diocese.

The transition was handled with unusual public goodwill on both sides. Robert Schuller and his wife Arvella publicly encouraged Catholics to take up stewardship of the campus, and Schuller family graves remain in the memorial gardens. Work continued after 2019, including the completion of the St. Callistus Chapel and crypts in October 2024. The cathedral is an active parish as well as the bishop's church, with Masses celebrated in English, Spanish and Vietnamese.

Catholic Teaching

A cathedral is not simply a large church; it is the church that holds the cathedra, the chair of the diocesan bishop, and so it is the visible center of the local Church's unity around him and, through him, with the Bishop of Rome. Everything in the renovated building is arranged to say that: the altar at the center, where the Eucharistic sacrifice makes present the one sacrifice of Christ; the ambo where the Word is proclaimed; the font where new Christians are born; the tabernacle where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved for adoration and for the sick. The rite of dedication, with its anointing and its relics sealed in the altar, teaches that a building becomes a church by being set apart for the Eucharist -- which is why a glass auditorium built for broadcasting could become, with that rite, a cathedral.

Go Deeper

The diocese publishes the cathedral's history, Mass schedule and tour information at christcathedralcalifornia.org.

The campus is about fifteen minutes from Anaheim, which makes it an easy addition to a family trip, and roughly an hour from Mission San Juan Capistrano and Mission San Gabriel Arcangel -- two stops on the California Mission Trail, and a striking contrast: an adobe church of 1776 and a glass cathedral of 1980, both of them the same Mass.