The Great Stone Church

Fourth grade is now over for my daughter, but one of the last big events of the school year came on a warm and sunny day on the cusp of summer, when her class, accompanied by a handful of parents, took Amtrak's "Pacific Surfliner" down to the old Spanish mission at San Juan Capistrano.

We gathered early in the morning at Union Station in downtown Los Angeles and boarded the train as a group. The Surfliner made its slow, clanking way east and south through rail yards and alongside the Los Angeles River and its graffiti-scarred bridges. The train picked up speed through a gritty industrial corridor, chugged across the suburban sprawl of northern and central Orange County, then skirted the open spaces of the old El Toro Marine Air Station . We pulled into San Juan Capistrano barely 75 minutes out of Los Angeles.

Fourth-graders and their parents disembarked at the quaint depot and drifted in small groups along the two-block walk to the Mission. Outside the gate, the teacher called us to order, then organized us and issued instructions. I was given two students to watch over, my daughter and one of her friends.

We entered the front gate and found ourselves in a lushly cultivated plaza, with beds of lavender and roses surrounding a fountain full of water lilies. Beyond was the restored Convento building (living quarters), a symmetry of arches under sun-hardened tile. Patches of moss spread across large portions of the roof, adding to the aura of antiquity.

To the right, rising like a specter, were the ruins of the Great Stone Church.

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The Mission was founded in 1776 as Alta California’s seventh Franciscan mission (eventually there would be 21). The founding was auspicious – Fr. Junipero Serra himself presided – and the Mission enjoyed great success in its early years. In 1796, the Mission’s priests made a fateful decision -- San Juan Capistrano would become the site of the grandest and most beautiful church in all California.


The priests sent to Mexico City for a master stonemason, Isidro Aguilar. He came north and brought with him a vision of a basilica built of stone in the shape of a cross. There would be a succession of domed naves – six in total – and a 120-foot campanile (bell tower) that would dominate the horizon.

Construction began in 1797. Stones for the foundation and walls were quarried locally and hauled to the site in ox-drawn carts. The process was time-consuming, but with Aguilar’s expert guidance, the new basilica began to take shape. Unfortunately, Aguilar died unexpectedly in 1803, with the project well short of completion. The priests carried on as best they could, in some cases improvising when the construction work failed to comply with Aguilar’s specifications (the walls were ultimately found to be uneven and it was decided to add a seventh domed nave).

The Great Stone Church was finally completed and dedicated with much fanfare in 1806. It stood just six short years. On December 8, 1812, a large earthquake shattered Southern California’s Sunday morning calm. Geological evidence suggests a magnitude 7 (or greater) event centered near present-day Wrightwood on the far side of the San Gabriel Mountains, some 70 miles north of Capistrano.

Missions much closer to the epicenter experienced damage of low-to-moderate severity. At San Juan Capistrano, however, the results were catastrophic. The front and center portions of the church, including the bell tower, collapsed on a congregation attending Mass. Forty people died, most of them Indians residing at the Mission.

It was a blow from which Mission San Juan Capistrano never entirely recovered. No attempt was made to rebuild the Great Stone Church. Its weathered remnants still stand, offering mute testimony to California’s seismic character and to Iberian hubris.

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With my daughter and her friend the day of the field trip, I drifted quietly through the stone wreckage, taking in details brought into sharp relief by the bright sunshine. We took a few pictures, but talked very little. What the children thought of the scene remains unknown to me. My own mood was somber. A phrase from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets – “bare, ruin’d choirs” – came and went, a faint whispering in my head.

After a time, we pushed on to the Convento, a quadrangular building housing the Mission museum. It was arrayed around another lush courtyard garden with yet another Moorish fountain as centerpiece.

Many of the museum displays focused on the working life of the Mission in the days of Spanish California – construction, agriculture, animal husbandry, manufacture (particularly leather and related goods) and trade. To modern eyes, the implements and machinery on display are crude and primitive. To see them is to see through some of the romantic haze that continues to obscure the reality of Spanish California. The arduousness of Mission life is immediately apparent.

Less apparent is the social context that prevailed in the world the Franciscans made. When I was a Catholic schoolboy, this world was presented as wholly benign. The paternalism was presented without apology. The sinister import of the Spanish habit of distinguishing “gente de razon” from the aboriginal people of California did not occur to me until I was much older.

My daughter attends the same Catholic grammar school I attended as a child, but history as taught there today appears to be far more balanced and realistic than it was in my day. In the social studies text used by my daughter’s fourth-grade class, Franciscan idealism is acknowledged, but so is the imperialism that motivated the Spanish occupation of California. The exploitative and coercive aspects of the Mission system are openly acknowledged and discussed. Most tellingly, the demographic fate of California’s native population under Spanish rule is displayed in graphic form.

Historians estimate that the Indian population of California in 1769, the year of the Portola expedition, was approximately 300,000. By the time the Missions were secularized by the Mexican government in 1834, the population had fallen by half, to 150,000. The decline is believed to have occurred almost exclusively among coastal tribes, those within the orbit of the Missions and El Camino Real, a people who were transformed from dispersed hunter-gatherers to a concentrated and disciplined agricultural work force -- one exposed, moreover, to the depredations of diseases aboriginal Californians had never experienced before. The result was a human disaster.

But it is one thing to read about the cruelties of Convento life, or to see graphs depicting abnormally high child and infant mortality rates in Mission neophyte populations, and another thing to escape entirely the pull of associations forged deep in one’s childhood imagination.

For me, to see Spanish California as a halcyon time is a conditioned response, almost a reflex. It occurs every time I see Churrigueresque decoration, a terra cotta dome, and adobe arch, or a Moorish fountain. The California I imagined as a boy was a place where galleons sailed on a fair wind, where brown hills tumbled to blue seas and white surf under a brilliant sun, where willowy pepper trees swayed in listless majesty in the faint breeze of a summer day, where graceful bell towers reached high above the arid plain.

This imaginary California was an uncrowded place, free of industry, smog, freeways and blight. It was intensely romantic, filled with adventurers of every description, including a heroic band of mendicant friars, grey-robed pilgrims traveling dusty roads, willing to risk everything for the Word. It was a place where the simple faith of my childhood seemed not only possible, but truly alive.

It was all so very long ago, in the haunted corridors of imagination, before the realities of inhumanity, cruelty and exploitation made themselves known to my adult mind.

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With my daughter and her friend, I left the Convento and tried to shake off the gloomy thoughts. The beauty of the inner courtyard helped, with its flowing fountain and a late spring bloom that was heavy and full. There was a large grassy space where the children played -- running, laughing, screaming, enjoying themselves in the way of children all over the world. I sat with the other parents. We chatted, happy with our school as another year came to an end, happier still not to be at work on such a fine day.

Even in the garden, however, the Great Stone Church remained on my mind. When it came time to leave, I decided on a last glimpse, approaching it from behind the sanctuary, daughter and friend in tow. We arrived and found ourselves under a pepper tree, watching a woman work behind an easel, painting the scene in front of her. She smiled at us as we watched her work the canvas with deft strokes from her brush. It was easy to see why she had chosen this scene to paint. A gate draped in bougainvillea led to a small garden lodged between the stone sanctuary and the Convento building. Behind the small garden was a wall that held the bells that had tumbled down from the campanile in 1812. The afternoon sunlight was golden.


The halcyon world of the California Missions -- oil on canvas. It may be a "bare, ruin'd choir" to me, an artifact of childhood memory and imagination, but its pull remains very powerful even now.