Turbulent History Hasn’t Changed Role of Outreach Missions

Padre Junipero Serra’s chain of 21 California missions--starting with Mission San Diego de Acala in 1769--converted tens of thousands of Indians along the coast to Christianity and changed their entire life style to such a degree that they became known as Mission Indians.

The Franciscan fathers taught these native Americans how to develop gardens and grow crops, how to raise livestock and build homes out of adobe.

The priests realized, however, that they were unable to attract many Indians from the inland valleys to the missions or support them with food. So asistencias , or smaller outreach missions under the control of a mother mission, were established in the inland areas, to better minister directly to Indians who were otherwise ignored.

Today, those first 21 coastal missions are hybrids of sorts--tourist attractions as museums of early California history, as well as modern-day parishes with congregations that are more white or Hispanic than Indian.

But the smaller asistencias are still largely dedicated to their original task of ministering to the Indians for whom they were first established.

In San Diego County, the first asistencia was Mission San Antonio de Pala, founded in 1816 by Padre Antonio Peyri, under the auspices of Mission San Luis Rey, which was founded 18 years earlier.

The mission’s site was chosen because of the availability of the water in the San Luis Rey River valley; the name Pala was taken from the Indian word for water, pale .

Under the direction of the first missionary priests, the Indians built the mission with thousands of adobe bricks and tiles, and brought cedar trees down from Palomar Mountain for roof beams.

In 1834, after Mexico broke away from Spain and the missions were unwanted reminders of Spanish rule, the properties were secularized and confiscated by the Mexican government. The Pala mission fell into disrepair. The Indians were driven from the community by white settlers in the 1840s, and the property exchanged hands several times. But in 1883, the man who owned the mission was persuaded by his wife to return it to the Indians.

An earthquake on Christmas Day of 1899 further damaged the chapel. The mission buildings were partially restored in 1903, and floods in 1916 again damaged the complex, this time undermining the free-standing bell tower. The tower was quickly reconstructed, and re-dedicated on its 100th anniversary.

A more extensive restoration of the mission’s quadrangle building occured in the 1950s, again with Indians and priests working side by side. New adobe bricks were made from the ruins, and new cedar logs were brought down from Palomar Mountain.

But visitors today can still view some of the original timbers and walk along the same tipsy tile church floor dating from 1816.

Mission Santa Ysabel was founded in 1818 by Padre Fernando Martin, who, like his counterpart at Pala two years earlier, chose the site for its available water and because the inland valley seemed prime for establishing crops of grain and grapes.

The mission community thrived until 1834, when the secularization of the missions sent the padres home and the buildings deteriorated. The mission property was returned by federal government order to the Catholic Church in 1893, but there was no religious activity until 1903, when Friar Edmond LaPointe, a Canadian missionary, arrived and rebuilt the mission church several hundred feet from the original one.

For the next 20 years, the mission community survived infighting among the Indians over relations with the new white settlers in the valley. In 1926, the church was burned to the ground and the Indians unified by blaming the blaze on the non-Indian residents of the area.

The church was reconstructed a third time, but its two bells were stolen in the dead of night. Only a piece of one of the bells has since surfaced, and to this day there remains “the mystery of the missing bells of Santa Ysabel.”