It was caused by using the wrong glue to hold up a 26 ton slab of concrete - which immediately caused me to say "There is a right glue?"
Dude..
They ended up settling with the contractors for much more.
Maybe not the Catholics, but the Latter Day Saints are still building plenty:
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/temples/photo-gallery/sa...
(For context, they refer to them as temples rather than cathedrals , but the general idea of it being a place of worship with lots of effort put into architecting it remains)
I visited a recently constructed Hindu temple in Atlanta last year. Very impressive. All imported marble. Sounds like these guys have been building them all over:
> A number of shikharbaddha mandirs (large traditional stone mandirs) were inaugurated in major cities; London (1995), Nairobi (1999), New Delhi (2004), Houston (2004), Chicago (2004), Swaminarayan Akshardham (New Delhi) (2005), Toronto (2007), Atlanta (2007), Los Angeles (2012), and Robbinsville (New Jersey) (2014).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bochasanwasi_Akshar_Purushotta...
Cathedrals were the result of centuries of research into materials science, physics, and geometry -- and that's just considering the buildings themselves, not even the often-intricate religious art within.
Some of the challenges and solutions in cathedral architecture took generations to solve; in many gothic and neogothic cathedrals with particularly tall, internally-unsupported naves, solutions like flying buttresses were thought up to support the walls externally -- sometimes with multiple layers of buttresses-upon-flying-buttresses. Developing the right cement and figuring out which type of stone you could use alone were often a project that took years, especially for landmark churches.
These churches sometimes took decades or centuries to build, depending on how you measure it (basically, if you include significant reconstructions).
They also weren't representative of the average construction project in essentially any region where there are cathedrals; those were more likely to be houses, shops, and other commercial buildings like port structures.
Things like flying buttresses or new, opulent-but-functional arch designs also weren't representative of the average innovation in those times. Depending on where you look, that might be stuff like, a new loom variant that lets you produce new patterns, or a new kind of cheese that ages quickly while having a similar enough flavour to a slower-aging, more expensive type of cheese.
My overarching point is -- at any given point in time, the average invention is small and boring. Specialists are a valuable resource, yes, but the more specialized they are, the smaller and more boring their contributions will seem to the average person outside of that specialization. Landmark innovations are built on thousands of smaller innovations made over years or decades, and those smaller innovations were usually invented by someone who's spent the past 25 years of their lives obsessing over that tiny thing, having published dozens of papers and argued for years about something you've likely never even heard of.
Also at least one DiY cathedral build: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justo_Gallego_Mart%C3%ADnez
China built a entire high speed rail network that's about the size of all the other ones in the world, combined, and they did it in 20 years.
China built a high speed Maglev train between Beijing and Shanghai, I think Japan is going to build one soon, too.
The US has been building hyper tall pencil looking skyscrapers in Manhattan for about 20 years.
There are tons of amazing tunnels being built around the world, as we speak.
India, China, Indonesia, etc. are building amazing subway networks in tens of cities.
The scale, complexity and sheer audacity of what we're building has never been seen in the history of the world.