Deeply Flawed Televangelist Built a ‘Religious Disneyland’ in Mission Valley — Now It’s Up for Sale After Just 4 Years

Morris Cerullo was indeed a deeply-flawed televangelist, but in 2017, the San Diego City Council approved his Legacy International Center’s main campus for Mission Valley. It had a $160 million price tag. Construction began in 2018, and was completed in 2020, but Morris Cerullo died that same year.

Now, the massive, sprawling Hotel Circle property that was once envisioned by Morris Cerullo as a luxurious center for his global ministry and teachings has gone up for sale — after just four years.

As the Times of San Diego reported:

Morris Cerullo purchased the property, which was previously the Mission Valley Resort, in 2011. He originally did so with the idea of turning it into a “religious Disneyland,” combining entertainment with hospitality, imbued with a strong flavor of his particular brand of Christianity.

Originally, it included an international market, a five-story resort, restaurants, office spaces, a performing arts venue, a replica of Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall and mysterious “catacombs.”

The Rag covered Cerullo and his controversial plans for several years. This is how we reported on the Council approval back in 2017:

But what the Council also did was approve a mini Disneyland-type of religious theme-park that will promote controversial religious tourism, owned by the head of a extremist Evangelical empire who is outspoken in his opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage, who was expelled from India for religious disturbances, who is criticized by rabbis for trying to convert Jews, and whose disputed claims of being a faith healer and miracle worker have led to at least one documented death. He was also indicted for failing to report his total income for over 3 years in the 1990s, though charges were dismissed years later on a technicality.

When Cerullo’s project came before the city council, it was quite controversial. It’s interesting, now 7 years later, to see who supported and who opposed it this ultimately failed project. Again, here’s the Rag’s report:

The project has been scaled down some over the 5-6 year planning stage. Here’s San Diego Union-Tribune writer Lori Weisberg’s description:

The project has undergone a couple of iterations over the last few years, moving away from a more kitschy, Romanesque design to a much more modernist, campus-like setting, softened with meandering gardens, plazas and stone and glass low-rise buildings.

The Legacy Center was also downsized, significantly reducing the expected number of average daily trips, the environmental analysis showed.

With the downsize came a claim of a decline of the number of average daily vehicle trips from 4,400 to 2,873. When the project first appeared in front of the City Council a month ago, it was turned down over questions and issues about the potential for increased traffic congestion. According to city planners the project would add little more traffic to the area than what already exists currently.

A city planning report noted that the project would generate 221 average daily vehicle trips per acre, which is well below the 380 trips permitted in the Mission Valley community plan.

Here’s Weisberg:

Councilman David Alvarez, though, questioned how engineers arrived at some of the traffic computations. For instance, the analysis assumes that only a small percentage of the traffic associated with the 500-seat theater would come from those not already at the Legacy Center for other reasons. Alvarez said he could not see any evidence of how that conclusion was reached.

Councilman Scott Sherman, who represents Mission Valley, cited religious freedom as he urged his council colleagues to support the Cerullo project:

“Yesterday was Constitution Day and in our country we’re afforded certain rights and privileges — the right to free speech, right to assembly and the right to religious freedom. We may have disagreements with the applicant but if they follow the rules and the law, we can’t, nor should we, find against them. This plan does everything that it’s supposed to.”

Councilwoman Lorie Zapf questioned the traffic concerns raised by project critics, suggesting it was the religious nature of the development that was in fact fueling opposition.

“The comments I heard were clearly religious-based, and that is not a reason in this country to not have a faith-based project,” Zapf said.

In the end, the Democrats voted against it because of the lack of the validity of the traffic estimates, but everyone agreed to continue discussion of the project on October 17th.

But when Cerullo’s project did come back on the 17th, the Council passed the plan 7 to 2 – with Councilmembers Chris Ward and Georgette Gomez dissenting – a plan which included an environmental impact report and development permit and amendments to zoning plans.

Weisberg:

Required will be an additional two lanes on Hotel Circle South. In a move to allay some council members’ concerns and also win approval, the developer agreed Tuesday to conduct periodic traffic counts over a five-year period after the center opens. If those counts prove to be higher than what was projected, the Legacy Center will adjust the operating hours or its programming to help reduce traffic.

It was also agreed that events drawing more than 200 people to the project’s 500-seat theater would not start or end during peak commute times.

Opposition to the project came mainly from San Diego’s gay and lesbian community. Rebekah Hook-Held of The San Diego LGBT Community Center told the council that traffic and noise were the real concerns:

“This is proposed to be built in the already impacted Mission Valley area. This contains too many negative impacts to this area. It’s bad for Mission Valley, bad for the (nearby) neighborhoods in Hillcrest and Mission Hills and it’s bad for San Diego.”

Will Rodriguez-Kennedy, head of San Diego Democrats for Equality, said his group believes the city should be focused on building more housing, not tourist attractions and convention centers.

Weisberg:

Underlying the debate, though, has been a sense of uneasiness from some, mostly unspoken, about the Legacy International Center’s religious theming and Cerullo’s evangelical teachings. Both at the beginning of the hearing and also before the vote was taken, the City Attorney’s office warned the council that it could not take into account the religious nature of the project in its vote.

Several local religious leaders turned out to praise both the development and Cerullo, while some members of the LGBTQ community voiced their strong opposition but emphasized that their concerns were rooted solely in fears about increased traffic.

Morris Cerullo World Evangelism has consistently maintained, as it did again on Tuesday, that the vehicle trips generated by the proposed Legacy Center would fall far short of what is permitted in the Mission Valley Community Plan and that they do not contribute to a significant impact on traffic in the area.

Councilman Scott Sherman, whose district includes Mission Valley, acknowledged the religious undertones of the conversation about the project. “We can’t take into consideration a lot of this ancillary discussion about religion and values,” Sherman said. “We should not be using that as a benchmark for whether it’s allowed. What’s important is whether it meets guidelines set forth by the city, and I believe it does.

“We have property rights and it’s very important we don’t abridge those property rights, especially when it comes to matters of religious organizations.”

To round out our coverage today, here’s more:

Here is a quote from Ken Williams of the Mission Valley News:

Who Is Morris Cerullo?

He was born to Russian Jewish and Italian parents on Oct. 2, 1931 in Passaic, New Jersey. He was orphaned at age 2 when his parents died in a car crash, and sent to an Orthodox Jewish orphanage. But he became a Christian during his teenage years, eventually embracing the Pentecostal faith and becoming ordained in the early 1950s by the Assemblies of God. He is the founder of the Morris Cerullo World Evangelism as well as the Morris Cerullo Schools of Ministry.

Cerullo made a big splash in 1990 when he bought the assets of televangelist Jim Bakker’s bankrupt ministry, PTL. Among those assets, the bankruptcy court approved Cerullo’s $7 million offer to buy PTL’s cable TV operation, The Inspiration Network, and which has since been spun into a new entity called The Inspiration Networks. Cerullo’s son, David, is president and CEO of that company, which is based in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Throughout his pastoral career, Cerullo has been dogged by controversies. His Schools of Ministry have been set up in Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America to convert the natives to his brand of Christianity. His claims of being a faith healer and miracle worker have come into dispute, particularly in the United Kingdom where a BBC documentary told the story of a woman who believed Cerullo healed her of epilepsy, so she stopped taking her medication and died.

In 1992, Cerullo was expelled from India after disturbances tarnished his large rallies where he vowed to heal people, according to the Times of India. When audience members were not healed of their afflictions, the crowd turned against the televangelist and called him a “cheat.” The San Diego Union-Tribune later reported on Cerullo’s banishment from India.

Cerullo has also come under fire from rabbis for his efforts to convert Jews to his faith.

Then there are accusations that Cerullo underrepresented his income from 1998 through 2000, and he was indicted by a grand jury. But in 2007, the U.S. District Court, Southern District of California, dismissed charges against Cerullo of filing a false tax return on a technicality after the prosecutor gave inadequate and inaccurate explanations to the grand jury.

Cerullo is also outspoken in his opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage — urging his followers to ignore the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June — as well as LGBT rights.