Standing in the charred ruins of the church in which he had recently been installed as the fifth archbishop of San Francisco on the morning of Sept. 8, 1962, Joseph T. McGucken announced that we would build a new cathedral. The moment was providential. There was a spirit of confident optimism in the air.
Looking up into the modern “rafters” of St. Mary’s Cathedral 50 years after it was dedicated, San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone marveled at the structure designed and constructed by chance in the years following the meeting of the Second Vatican Council from 1962-65. “It’s bold, it’s imaginative and it perfectly expresses what the Church has been discerning for a long time now, since the world moved into this modern era,” the archbishop said.