Angelus News | January 12, 2024 | Vol. 9 No. 1

Archdiocesan interfaith officer Rt.
Rev. Alexei Smith helps Archbishop
José H. Gomez light a candle in
remembrance of the homeless who
have died on LA’s streets at the
Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels
Dec. 21. Smith is the pastor of St.
Andrew Russian Greek-Catholic
Church in El Segundo.
‘NEW EYES’ NEEDED
On the longest night of the year, local faith
leaders prayed for the homeless victims of a
crisis with no end in sight.
BY PABLO KAY / PHOTOGRAPHY BY VICTOR ALEMÁN
Archbishop José H. Gomez called
on Angelenos to look at those
suffering on the streets with “new
eyes” at an interreligious prayer service
remembering the city’s homeless dead.
“We need to bear one another’s burdens;
we need to lift up our neighbors
when they’ve fallen, bind their wounds,
and find them a place to live,” said
Archbishop Gomez in his reflection at
the second annual Homeless Persons’
Interreligious Memorial Dec. 21.
“When one of us is suffering, we all
suffer.”
More than 200 people attended the
memorial, symbolically timed to coincide
with the date of the winter solstice,
the longest night of the year. As rain fell
outside, the lights inside the Cathedral
of Our Lady of the Angels were dimmer
than usual as a delegation of local
interreligious representatives, led by
Archbishop Gomez, began the service
processing in to the sound of “Amazing
Grace.”
Set near the cathedral altar were 1,665
battery-charged candles, bearing the
names of each of the people identified
by the LA County Coroner’s Office as
having died on the streets from December
2022 through Nov. 3, 2023. Each
name was also printed in the night’s
program, a detail noted by Lutheran
Bishop Brenda Bos, who was the first to
speak at the event.
“Every one of those people was a
prophet, was a witness, was an angel
among us … who had a story, who had
a family, who had a life,” said Bos, who
leads the Southwest California Synod
of the Evangelical Lutheran Church
of America. “I’m so glad that we could
honor them and we can thank God for
their presence in our midst.”
Other interreligious delegates at the
service included representatives of
Orthodox, Bahá’í, Hindu, Jewish, and
Mormon faith traditions. Speakers
invoked the importance of recognizing
our common humanity as they
appealed to the city’s conscience.
Swami Mahayogananda of Hollywood’s
Vedanta Center lamented how
“we are able to let our own brothers and
sisters die on the streets of our city, unloved,
uncared for, cold and hungry.”
Death may be a certainty of life, the
Hindu monk said, “but surely we all
deserve death with dignity.”
Rabbi Beaumont Shapiro of the Skirball
Cultural Center near Brentwood
admitted he’d considered trying some-
16 • ANGELUS • January 12, 2024