Remembering our pilgrimage on the California mission trail

Mission Carmel

SACRAMENTO -- You may have noticed that I've not posted here much recently. I am in my summer hiatus mode, and I just returned to my native land of California to see family and friends. It is summer break time.

Recently, a few friends asked me about a piece I wrote in 2006 about the pilgrimage Lori and I undertook to all 21 of the Spanish missions in California. The missions were established by Father Junipero Serra in the 18th and 19th centuries, and every fourth grader in California learns about them.

The missions begin in San Diego, and are one day's horseback ride from each other along the El Camino Real stretching to Sonoma north of San Francisco Bay. We did not ride horses, but rented an RV. It took us two weeks to visit all of them.

Here, for your summer diversion, is the piece I wrote in 2006 for the Diocese of California about the missions:

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On the California Mission Trail

We started out on a rainy November evening, driving South in a rental motor home. We were headed to San Diego to begin a two-week pilgrimage to see all twenty-one California missions founded long ago by Spanish Franciscan padres.

We had no idea what we were getting into.

Our plan: Drive South, and then start working our way north, one mission at a time, camping along the way with our dog, Chulita. We started at the first of the missions, San Diego de Alcalá, founded in 1769 in a river valley that was once the exclusive domain of the Kumeyaay Indians and is now dominated by shopping malls and a giant sports stadium. Next, we drove a half-hour to Mission San Luis Rey de Francia in Oceanside. And onward we went for the next two weeks.

As we lumbered northward, on some days we managed to see three missions, even four, while other days we saw only one mission or took a break.

The day after Thanksgiving we pulled into Sonoma and the last of the missions, San Francisco Solano, now a state park. Along the way we experienced not only slices of history, but found amazing communities still living faithfully in the missions.

Why did we set forth on this pilgrimage? The short answer was to see the vestige of California’s past that I have heard about since 4th grade like every California school child. The more complicated answer was that Lori and I wanted to experience the places where Christianity first came to California. Yet this was not just an exercise in antiquity. We wanted to know: Could the past be transformed into something new that speaks to the era in which we live? Are the missions more than museums? And what unexpected wonders would the missions yield?

Mission San Antonio de Padua

We found powerful, holy places, each offering a unique spiritual oasis. The location seemed not to matter; some missions were tightly wedged into a city while others were down an isolated dirt road. Some missions were amazingly peaceful, like San Antonio de Padua. Others were spectacularly beautiful, like the ruins of Mission San Juan Capistrano in the sprawl of Southern California. And we found communities alive with faith. At San Luis Obispo we arrived at the noon Sunday mass. There were two baptisms that day, and the service alternated between English and Spanish. At Santa Inés, near Solvang, we arrived in time for a wedding.

The first nine of the missions were founded by Father Junípero Serra at San Diego; other Franciscans built more missions after his death at Mission San Carlos Borromeo del Rio Carmelo (Mission Carmel) in 1784. The twenty-one missions were strung from San Diego to Sonoma, each about a day’s horseback ride apart along El Camino Real, roughly following the route of what is now modern Highway 101. Several major California cities eventually formed around the missions: San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Jose, and San Francisco. Others remained isolated and a few missions languished from the start.

Each mission was a working ranch producing food, cowhides and other products for sustenance and sale. The Franciscan vision was that each mission would be a self-sustaining monastery. While that vision is long dead, it is still possible to glimpse mission life as it once was. Mission La Purísima Concepción, near Lompoc, is in a state park that is preserved much as it was in the Spanish era. The only way to the mission is to walk down a dirt road, and La Purísima is still operated as a working farm.

An even more isolated mission, San Antonio de Padua, is on an Army base, Fort Hunter Liggett, nestled in the hills east of San Simeon. We had to drive past a tank and go through a security check point to get onto the base, and then drive another six miles to find the dirt road leading to the mission. The faithful from the surrounding countryside go through this routine every Sunday to go to church at Mission San Antonio. The day we arrived, we had Mission San Antonio all to ourselves and we sat for a long while in the peaceful sanctuary. Above the altar is a wooden arch painted sky blue and adorned with gold stars. I found the light switch and when the lights came on it was as though the entire sky lit up.

Some of the missions today are little more than ruins, while others have only a small chapel on a site near the original mission. Yet each mission is a jewel. Every mission, we discovered, has been shaped and reshaped by grace-filled people for generations. All but two of the 21 missions are still functioning parishes, and the two that are not are nonetheless unmistakably holy.

La Ofrenda at Mission San Juan Batista

The missions range from the ornate to the simple. In every mission, we found the symbols of piety from two centuries in a wonderful holy mix. We found old Spanish mission art next to Indian wall paintings, and Mexican Day-of-the-Dead shrines near shrines to Spanish Franciscan monks. Outside, contemporary statues of St. Francis were near the bright orange, blue and yellow wall hangings of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Nestled in the gardens were 18th century niches devoted to St. Benedict near the graves of Indians and Spanish monks. Even the ruins bulged with bells and statues and beautiful fountains. Everywhere we went we found a feast of color, symbol and life. Seeing California one mission at a time gave me an incredible sense of how each California community is connected to the other. Instead of whizzing up and down I-5 at 75 mph, we stopped every 30 miles or so to see a mission and the community that surrounds it. I can't really say where Southern California ends and Central California begins. In all, we drove 1,550 miles of California back roads and highways.

There were many surprises along the way. Mission San Fernando Rey de España, on the northern edge of the Los Angeles Basin, is now a convent and also the burial place of comedian Bob Hope. The story goes that his wife, Dolores, asked him where he wanted to be buried. “Surprise me,” Hope replied. She did. His gravesite in the mission convent gardens looks like a miniature Hollywood Bowl. Contradictions abound along the mission trail.

The missions were places of great pain. The Spanish padres who founded the missions used – and abused – the Indians in the surrounding regions in the name of Jesus Christ. The mission histories are difficult reading, documenting kidnappings, torture, and uprisings. Spanish soldiers forcefully rounded up Indians in the countryside, killing many. Tens-of-thousands of Indians died from European-born diseases, buried in mass graves near the missions. Today a few missions have memorials to the dead Indians, for example at San Juan Batista where a simple wooden sign marks the mass grave of an estimated 4,300 Indians buried on the grounds.

Yet as earnestly as the Franciscans tried to convert the Indians to European ways, the influence of the Indians on the missions is overwhelming to this day. The Spaniards are long gone, but the Indians are still there tending to the missions and their imprint is everywhere for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. At Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, an Indian holy man showed school children the mission of his ancestors, and he played a musical instrument that his father taught him to play. In other missions, abalone shells, spiritually powerful objects for the Chumash Indians, hold Holy Water in wall niches. Shells decorate graves at Mission Carmel and shells adorn the tabernacle that holds the Sacrament at Mission Santa Bárbara. The walls and ceilings in many of the missions are painted in bright blues and oranges, reds and yellows in geometric patterns designed by Indians.

The California missions have a tumultuous history beyond the Spanish era. The Franciscans maintained that they were holding the mission lands in trust for the Indians, but in the 1830s the new Mexican government secularized the missions, essentially revoking land rights for Indians and the Church alike. Secularization affected each mission differently. The Indians in San Luis Rey were so distraught that their priest was leaving when the mission was secularized that they marched 30 miles to the San Diego harbor to plead with him not to return to Spain.

Artist Christian Jorgensen painted watercolors
of the mission ruins in the late 19th century

Many of the missions were abandoned and fell into disrepair, ravaged by earthquakes, floods, fires and neglect. In 1848, the United States acquired California – and the missions – as spoils in the Mexican-American War. In the 1860s, Abraham Lincoln returned many of the missions to the Roman Catholic Church. But it was not until nearly a century later that the missions were rebuilt, many in the 1930s as WPA projects. Mission San José, in Fremont, is the last of the missions to be restored. A wooden Gothic-style Catholic church on the site was sold to the Episcopal Church for $1 and moved across the Bay to San Mateo. The old Spanish mission was reconstructed in 1985 and is spectacular.

A few missions barely exist today. Mission Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, out in the lettuce fields near Salinas, was washed away in a flood in the 1820s; all that remains is a small chapel and a few weather-worn adobe walls marking where the mission once stood. Yet the mission still has a congregation and a group of elderly Mexican American women eagerly showed us their mission.

The missions reflect the rich history of diversity in our state. Mission San Francisco de Asís (Mission Dolores) in the heart of San Francisco, has the graves not just of the Spanish monks but of Irish immigrants who came in the years following the Gold Rush. At Mission San Rafael Arcángel, Sunday Mass is offered not only in English and Spanish, but also in Haitian, Vietnamese and Portuguese. In the garden is a memorial for homeless people who have died on the streets.

Nearly all of the missions have shrines and votive candles devoted to those who have died. Lori made it her practice to light a candle everywhere we went. At San Juan Batista, a special altar has been set up in a transept adorned with an American flag. People have placed on the altar photographs of men and women who are serving in the military, with notes asking for prayers for their protection and safe return. We lit candles and silently prayed before we left.

It struck me that despite the flaws of the Spanish missionaries, the Gospel still finds a way in these missions to break through to a hurting and broken world – and breaks through to this day. The padres who founded the missions had something in mind that ultimately did not succeed: they attempted to build New Spain and turn the Indians into Franciscan monks. Politics overwhelmed their project and disease and abuse killed most of the Indians. The missions, as originally conceived, failed. Yet the Spirit succeeded. The missions still are hugely sacred places, alive with the Spirit and alive with people. The faithful who tend the missions gave me hope that however flawed my own efforts are, the Gospel will still find a way.

Mission San Miguel

Mission San Miguel Arcángel is one such amazing place still proclaiming the Gospel despite the odds against it. Isolated on a lonely stretch of Highway 101 in a neighborhood of shacks and trailers, the old mission was badly damaged in an earthquake three days before Christmas 2003, and the sanctuary remains closed to visitors. The congregation holds Mass in a converted storeroom, sitting on metal folding chairs. An outdoor altar on top of an old mission millstone offers visitors a place to pray. Mission San Miguel has many cracks but it is still a holy and living place. The only thing holding up repair work is a lack of funding; the mission has more than enough volunteers.

[Note: Since this writing, Mission San Miguel reopened.]

Our journey ended in Sonoma, at Mission San Francisco Solano, built in 1823 as the northern most outpost of the Spanish-American Empire. The mission is now a state park and the chapel is no longer a functioning church. The interior suggests what the mission might have looked like. We walked the grounds, pausing outside at an old wooden wagon that had once hauled the harvest from the fields. A few blocks away is Trinity Episcopal Church, on East Spain Street, on what was once mission land. At the end of our journey we celebrated at a nearby restaurant on the Sonoma Square, and we gave thanks for our safe passage and for this amazing land of California. And we would gladly do this pilgrimage again.

By James Richardson, Fiat Lux

On our way back from away

We have been away the last few weeks. Mostly Lori and I have been reconnecting with friends and family in California. We've shared many meals, many laughs, hiked in the Sierra, fished in the Truckee River, walked on a fabulous beach at Asilomar, and rode cable cars in San Francisco. I've returned to my old haunts to open the state Senate in prayer, went to a Mumbo Gumbo concert and a River Cats baseball game, drank wine in Napa Valley, and was blessed by a living saint, Roman Catholic Bishop Francis Quinn. We've also shared in the deep sadness in a courtroom at the sentencing of two men convicted in the murder of a young dear friend and blessed the house where he was killed.

Today we are winging our way back to Charlottesville, ready for the next chapter in our new home with our new friends. Please pray that the angels will give us traveling mercies this day.

-- Jim & Lori

Today celebrating Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, la Virgen de Guadalupe – the Virgin of Guadalupe.

I believe there are many ways people experience God; I believe the Holy Spirit comes to people and speaks to them in ways they can hear. Today much of the world celebrates one of those ways. Today is the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

I must tell you, I find all-things-Guadalupe fascinating, and I've got a small collection of things-Guadalupe, and set them up on a small ofrenda at home, and I've got a photo collection on the topic.

The photo at right is from a shrine to the Virgin I saw in Fort Worth, Texas, a few years ago, and the photo at the bottom is from a shrine to the Virgin at Mission San Miguel in the Salinas Valley of California.

Let me tell you the story...

Nearly 500 years ago, an Aztec with a Spanish name – Juan Diego – saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary. The local Spanish bishop, Juan de Zumárraga, did not believe him and told him to bring back proof of this vision. Juan Diego came back with his tunic full of flowers – Castilian roses – and the roses were blooming in winter. When Juan Diego poured the roses from his tunic, an image of Mary was imprinted on his tunic.

That image is probably the most copied and venerated image of Mary in the world.
Today is her feast day: Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, la Virgen de Guadalupe – the Virgin of Guadalupe. This day in 1531 marks when an Aztec brought roses to the bishop, and the bishop had to believe him.

Whether you believe in the story, or believe it happened exactly that way, is less important

than what she represents primarily to the people of Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. Her shrine near Mexico City is the most visited Marian shrine in the world.

The Virgin of Guadalupe is sometimes known as the brown virgin – her skin color is that of the indigenous peoples of America. She is the Mary of the poor and the outcasts and those left behind or wiped out as Europeans colonized, industrialized and regimented the Americas.

Even the word “Guadalupe” has roots in native Aztec language, and many believe the image is filled with Aztec symbols. She is the Mary of hope to the poor of the Americas.

There is another level to this that I would commend to you: The Holy comes to us not just in male imagery (God the Father) but in female imagery.

The Holy Spirit is like a wind that will blow where she will, and will show her face in ways that speak to people in the depths of their soul, and give them strength and courage when they most need it.

The Virgin of Guadalupe does precisely that for so many, and I have met them (and they weren't all Latino). May you celebrate today!

My friend Peter Schrag calls it -30-

Peter Schrag is a friend, one of my finest mentors, a great journalist and columnist, and a wit. He used to run the editorial pages of the Sacramento Bee, then he retired, but not really. He kept writing columns and books, and his critique of California  public life is precise and devoid of partisan ideology. His observations have a western tilt but are far broader underneath.

He did more than he knows to help me in my work on Willie Brown and covering higher education topics, and his support for me on my path as a journalist and as a priest is without peer in the news business. 

He may not be a household name East of Reno, but he ought to be.  He still loves newspapers and California, and he doesn't much like blogs.

The other night I had a bad dream that I was standing in the newsroom and there was only one reporter there. It turned out to be true. Peter really is retiring, and this is his last column:

After Three Decades, Sacramento Columnist Says Farewell

Peter Schrag
Jan. 12, 2009 – By Peter Schrag

Those of us who began as print journalists in the 1950s belong to what was probably the luckiest generation in the business -- a rich and rewarding half century with a strong and confident press that knew it was an indispensable part of American democracy. But this is another era, and for me, after 55 years in the business -- 31 of them associated with this newspaper -- it's time to pitch it in. This is my last regular column for The Sacramento Bee.

At the El Paso Herald-Post, where I started, we still had a classic "Front Page" newsroom -- reporters with bottles of bourbon in the bottom drawer; a noisy, smoky city room and a couple of cranky desk men who claimed to have covered the assassination of Pancho Villa in 1923, and maybe did. This was the era of galley shears, paste pots and "etaoin shrdlu," an occasional typo produced by the letters on the first two vertical banks on the keyboard of a Linotype machine. The editor's name was Ed Pooley, known familiarly around town as "Cess" Pooley. My first big story was covering the trial of the mayor's libel suit against my own paper.

Inevitably during those 55-plus years there were encounters with some of the more notable figures of recent history, as well as the rush of great stories associated with them: the ongoing struggle for decent urban schools and for civil rights in the South; the street battles over the Vietnam War; the rise and fall of the counterculture; the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968 and the "police riot" that came with it.

Looking back, it was like covering history: the Pentagon Papers case, the trial of Daniel Ellsberg in Los Angeles in 1972-73 and the unraveling of Watergate with which it became linked. The last two, lest we forget, closely connected to a courageous, enterprising press. Those of us who were not on Richard Nixon's enemies list envied those who were.

There was also the chance to work with outstanding editors, writers and reporters -- Willie Morris at Harper's, Carey McWilliams at the Nation, John Ciardi at Saturday Review, David Halberstam, Tony Lukas, all now gone -- and to have the work of great journalists and essayists as models.

Closer to home, there was the privilege of working with Frank McCulloch, managing editor of The Sacramento Bee, and reporter and editor for other news organizations, who spent much more time shaping good stories than he did on reader surveys; John Jacobs, The Sacramento Bee's political columnist, who knew that writing about politics was only meaningful if it was linked to its consequences for policy, and Bee editor C.K. McClatchy, who tried to teach all who worked for him that integrity and credibility were the indispensable assets of any news organization.

It was under McClatchy, sometimes with a little nudging, that his newspapers grew out of their historic misogyny, hiring women for senior positions, coming to grips with its historic racism, apologizing for his papers' support of the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II. Thirty years ago, it would have been unthinkable to have a woman editor as The Sacramento Bee has now.

My nearly 40 years in California, 19 as the editor of the editorial pages of The Sacramento Bee, the last dozen as a columnist, brought great colleagues and friends, lively exchanges with readers and some memorable characters -- Willie Brown, whose meetings with journalists were the best political seminars in town, and usually the funniest; Clark Kerr, creator and biographer of the multiversity; Jerry Brown, California's leading career anti-politician; Howard Jarvis, curmudgeon par excellence -- plus a large cast of bores, miscreants and mediocrities.

Sadly, however, the big story of those years was retrenchment. This was the age of Proposition 13 and other tax limitations, of ballot-box budgeting, of term limits and autopilot criminal sentencing laws, of borrow-and-fudge fiscal policies, of initiatives throwing illegal immigrants out of the public schools, and of eroding optimism and a growing unwillingness to pay for public goods. There can't be many serious Californians who would claim that California is better for it.

There were bright spots: California's leadership in environmental regulation and energy efficiency; legislation, too little noticed at its passage, to broaden financial aid guarantees to low-income college students; the passage of the medical marijuana initiative; the continuing greatness of the state's public colleges and universities.

There was the calming voice of Legislative Analyst Elizabeth Hill, who tried her low-key best to keep the state from going off the fiscal rails altogether, the countless other public servants who got too little credit for diligence and integrity under often terrible demands, and the creation of the California Budget Project and the Public Policy Institute of California, two invaluable private research organizations focused on California policy.

Through it all, we had our quota of fires, floods, drought, landslides and earthquakes. Latinos and Asians moved in and Anglos moved out. California became a majority-minority state, as will the nation 40 years from now.

But the sturdy ships on which journalists embarked a half-century ago are now buffeted by new technologies and a print-phobic, individualistic, less communitarian culture. Some of us had watched once-proud magazines sink around and sometimes under us; others survive only with the support of angels and foundations. Now newspapers seem to be struggling the same way. Many of us now know how blacksmiths and harness makers must have felt a century ago and, ironically, how Detroit's autoworkers must feel today.

The American press -- once a party press, then a penny press thriving on sensation -- was never as strong, enterprising and serious as it became in the decades beginning with World War II. Now the blogs seem to be taking us back to an electronic version of that ancient history.

Unlike some others, The Sacramento Bee and its parent company have a good chance of coming through the storm, not as a clipper ship, but, if it retains the courage of its historic convictions, refitted as a sturdy sloop not so different from what it was a century ago. Our democracy can't remain healthy without the professional reporters and editors and the strong voices that try to make order of the information on which an informed citizenry and healthy communities must depend.

Mistakes were made. In trying to show confidence in the future of the industry, McClatchy caught a huge fish called Knight Ridder at just the wrong time. But it still has the best leadership in the business. I hope to write occasionally for this and other outlets, but this cuckoo's weekly pop-out is over.