"A glorious building that was once the pinnacle of Seattle's skyline..." Detail of historic postcard of St. James Cathedral

           St. James Cathedral was in its early forties when I made my first visit.  The year was 1950.  My grandparents were parishioners of the Cathedral and, at their apartment at Summit and Madison, they lived almost within the shadow of the towers.  Long distance memories are bound to be a bit foggy but a nine-year-old boy doesn’t soon forget a vast, mysterious space filled with a forest of scaffolding.  That’s the St. James Cathedral I first remember.  Bishop Thomas Connolly, newly arrived from San Francisco, was putting his mark on the Cathedral which, during the years of the Great Depression and the Second World War, had deteriorated rather badly, inside and out.  By September of that year, just in time for the one-hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the Diocese, the scaffolding had disappeared and a multi-colored, startlingly neo-rococo Cathedral had emerged.

           My next memory of the Cathedral dates from three years later when I was part of a long khaki line of boy scouts who walked in procession to the Cathedral from the Knights of Columbus Hall one brisk spring afternoon to receive the coveted Ad Altare Dei award.  A year later, I came with my family to attend the installation of Father Thomas E. Gill, a close family friend, as pastor of the Cathedral, and two years after that, we came again to attend Father Gill’s consecration as auxiliary bishop.  Over the ensuing years, there were annual trips to the Cathedral from St. Edward’s Seminary to sing for Holy Week liturgies and to attend priestly ordinations, and on a few occasions during my college years I even played relief organist for the Monday night Miraculous Medal devotions.

           Looking back, I guess I could say that St. James Cathedral was a fixed point on my compass all during my growing up years, but never in my wildest imaginings did I ever dream that the Cathedral would one day become the ‘true north’ of my life as a priest!

           But my St. James story is but one among many.  For one-hundred years now, the Cathedral has been stimulating stories:  stories of faith, stories of discovery, joyful stories, comforting stories, challenging stories, humorous stories, life-altering stories.  A few of those stories are told in the following pages of this special centennial issue of In Your Midst, but only a very few.    Some are headline stories, others are the quiet reflections of a private journal.  Taken together, they tell of a remarkable place: a glorious building that was once the pinnacle of Seattle’s skyline, a building that one-hundred years later, while far less visually dominant, is still a dominant force in the lives of many people and in the life of our city.

           But it’s not just the bricks and mortar, the marble, stained glass and bronze that make St. James Cathedral the remarkable place it is.  It’s the people who make it truly remarkable—the people who gather in the Cathedral to celebrate the Eucharist and the other sacraments, who come to find solace in time of grief and to give thanks in times of joy.  The people are a living cathedral, “the dwelling place for God in the Spirit… built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus himself as the capstone.” (Eph. 2: 20-21).  The people, shaped by God’s Word and sanctified by the Sacraments, take the seeds of holiness and justice alive within them and plant them in the messy soil of the world outside the Cathedral’s walls.

           When Bishop Edward O’Dea dared to dream his exceedingly bold dream of a great cathedral crowning the hilltop above a still rather sleepy provincial city, he couldn’t possibly have imagined what that city would one day become or what his beloved Cathedral would one day become.  But in my more sanguine moments, I allow myself to think that he is smiling at the things that have happened and are still happening at St. James.  And I think he would tell us to go on dreaming boldly, no longer of a splendid temple—we have been given that, and we have labored mightily to make it even more splendid!—no, our dreams can be even bolder.  We can dream of a people awakened, a people rising to their full stature as builders of the City of God.  We can dream of a world transformed.

           The awakening begins within the great temple, thanks to the power of Word and Sacrament and thanks also to the power of all things beautiful—art, artifact, music—to ennoble and fire the human spirit.  But the transformation takes place beyond the temple’s walls—in homes and hovels and hospitals, in malls and marketplaces, in the corridors of power, in the high rises of commerce, and in the streets and back alleys of our city.  For this earthly city of ours, great as it is, has miles to go before it will even begin to look like the City of God.  We do have our work cut out for us!  And the work is a holy work.

           It is hard to think of St. James Cathedral without thinking of the holy work of two saints whom I will always think of as the Cathedral’s patrons par excellence.  They are separated in time by nearly two-thousand years but linked by a bond stronger than time—the living bond of the gospel of Christ.  The first, of course, is James, Apostle and Martyr, who, according to tradition, took the gospel as far as possible — to the remote Northwest corner of Spain, to a place ancient maps call finis terrae, “the end of the earth.”   There is a nice symmetry in the fact that, one hundred years ago, when Seattle was itself the finis terrae of this great land of ours, James should have been the one called upon to inspire the preaching of the gospel in this time and place.

       Our other Cathedral patron is one of our earliest— and surely one of our holiest—parishioners—a plucky Italian immigrant woman by the name of Frances Xavier Cabrini.  In the Cathedral’s fledgling years, Mother Cabrini traveled to this “end of the earth” more than once and, while in Seattle, often took her place among the worshippers at St. James.  Like so many over the years, she walked out of the Cathedral on fire with love, a love that led her to seek out the poor, the needy, the sick and the lonely and, against all odds, to build hospitals and orphanages that gave Seattle a heart.   Mother Cabrini’s was a love that made Jesus Christ come alive in this city.  She is the perfect partner for our patron, St. James.  With the two of them as our companions and our inspiration, we have every reason to believe that stories great and small will continue to be written on this holy hill, and that God, who one-hundred years ago, began a very good work here, will bring it to completion! 
 

Father Michael G. Ryan
Pastor