Monsignor Kevin Kostelnik, a native of Lorain, Ohio, was educated in Detroit parochial schools and a public high school in the Los Angeles area. At 20, he felt a calling to the priesthood. Monsignor Kostelnik attended California's St. John's Seminary College (bachelor and master degrees) and Indiana's Notre Dame University (another master's degree), and was ordained in 1982. After two associate pastorships, he became priest-secretary to then Archbishop (now Cardinal) Roger Mahony in Los Angeles. He held that post for ten years until the Cardinal appointed him to the Cathedral pastoral post on February 1, 1999.

"When they come to the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels -- passing through the gathering plaza, entering through the great bronze doors, walking through the ambulatory and the various devotional chapels, entering the worship space to celebrate Mass, and approaching the altar to be nourished by Christ, then leaving to take Christ into the world -- they will find their worship experience to indeed be a total sensory experience, an experience of sight, of sound, of taste, touch and smell," - Msgr. Kevin Kostelnik, Sept 2002

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