Old Mission on Modern-Day Mission to Keep Up With Times

If Father Antonio Peyri, the Franciscan padre who helped build Mission San Luis Rey back in 1798, could see the sprawling, adobe-walled religious compound in Oceanside today, his head would probably spin.

Consider:

- Aside from offering religious retreats, the mission has become something of a holy hotel, featuring a cheap no-frills, summertime getaway package for tourists of all faiths. Newspaper travel writers have dubbed it the best bargain in Southern California.

- While the sound of the mission bells still rings out for the faithful every hour on the hour, the heavenly carillon now pours forth from an eight-track tape player and loudspeakers.

- The thriving parish stationed on the mission grounds not only offers bingo three times a week to augment its resources, but recently opened a drive-up bank-style window where vendors sell California Lottery tickets. Business is booming, with more than 25,000 tickets sold the first month.

- Once frequented simply by solemn friars and their Indian converts, the mission compound today houses a home for battered children, a Montessori school, several senior citizen programs and a resource center for women. Classes are offered to teach basic skills such as sewing. Counseling sessions or retreats are available for married couples, the newly engaged, the recently divorced, alcoholics or anyone else seeking help.

This, Father Peyri would undoubtedly agree, is one thoroughly modern mission.

“They’re keeping alive the aspects of the past but still blending in beautifully with modern-day culture,” said Lucy Chavez, an Oceanside councilwoman whose father came to the area in 1893 as a Franciscan student to do restoration work on the mission.

“The mission has expanded its services to help more of the community as Oceanside grows. And that’s what it was intended for in the first place--to serve the spiritual as well as the community needs.”

The mission has, indeed, come far since its founding as a lonely religious outpost on the edge of civilization. But despite its unusual menu of activities and efforts to fill contemporary needs in the Oceanside community, Mission San Luis Rey de Francia in many ways remains hidden.

Although situated conspicuously on a grassy hillside rising next to busy California 76, the 188-year-old religious compound attracts relatively few visitors compared to many other, smaller members of the family of missions stretching up and down the California coastline.

In recent years, about 50,000 annual visitors have trod along Mission San Luis Rey’s arched walkways, strolled the verdant gardens and toured its cavernous cathedral. That number, however, is just a fraction of the tourists who have flocked to other nearby missions. Mission Santa Barbara, for example, gets about 300,000 a year.

Mission supporters blame the relatively thin crowd on the failure of Oceanside officials to sufficiently promote the historic attraction, long known as “the King of Missions” because it is physically the largest of the state’s string of 21 missions, founded by Father Junipero Serra.

Other cities proudly showcase their missions and organize frequent events designed to lure tourists, but Mission San Luis Rey has not even been blessed with signs announcing its presence in Oceanside.

“There’s not a sign all the way out here,” said Father Michael Weishaar, chief guardian of the mission. “I wish to heck we could get some signs. Santa Barbara has signs pointing to its mission on each block coming from the south and the north.”

The lack of visitors is troubling because much of the mission’s financial support comes from the $1 donation paid by visitors to its museum and from sales at the gift shop on the grounds. “Just to keep the place afloat is a tough job,” Weishaar said.

At the same time, some mission backers fear that development surrounding the historic complex threatens to rob the 55-acre facility of the peaceful ambiance that remains its chief attraction. Once the only major structure in the entire San Luis Rey Valley, the mission in recent years has been boxed in by supermarkets, fast-food outlets and tracts of box-shaped, stucco houses.

“The houses have come from all directions, over the hills toward us,” said Deacon Michael Newman, who runs the mission’s retreat center. “Before we get hemmed in by second-hand car lots and junkyards, I hope the city will begin to cherish the jewel in their midst.”

Oceanside officials have already started to make efforts to ensure the mission’s future.

Last month, the City Council approved an intricate 46-page planning document that will serve as a blueprint for growth in the area around the mission, which has been designated a federal historical landmark.

The prime goal is to develop a historical architectural theme within about half a mile of the mission in hopes of creating a distinct identity for the area.

Under the planning requirements, all new developments would mimic the mission style of architecture by featuring solid plaster walls, low-pitched tile roofs, arched corridors, patio areas with fountains and ornamental lighting.

A prime component called for in the document is the development of a commercial village to the west of the mission. As the planners see it, the center will be similar to Old Town in San Diego and will feature clusters of shops and pedestrian pathways linked to the mission grounds. In addition, a resort hotel is envisioned nearby at California 76 and Douglas Drive.

If all goes as planned, city officials say, the commercial complex, hotel and other new developments in the area would not only complement the character of the mission itself, but help the facility draw increasing numbers of visitors.

“Maybe the mission hasn’t been promoted enough up until now, but I think in the last year there’s been a push to make it a real showplace for the city,” Chavez said. “It’ll be good not only for the mission, but the city as a whole.”

When the mission was founded in 1798, worries about the nearest supermarket or housing development were unimaginable.

The 18th of the California missions, San Luis Rey was founded after a Spanish ensign named Juan Pablo Grijalva spent nearly three years searching for a suitable site between the existing compounds in San Diego and San Juan Capistrano.

Padre Jose Faura and Padre Peyri were left at the Oceanside site with nothing but a few rudimentary tools and some bolts of cloth. With the aid of the Indians, however, the rooms were completed one by one.

For Peyri, it was to be a three-decade adventure. The mission was not fully completed until 1830. But in the meantime, San Luis Rey became the largest religious facility founded by the Franciscans on the West Coast, with more than 50,000 head of cattle and sheep grazing on pasture land extending in a radius of 15 miles and an Indian population numbering more than 3,000.

As the friars tell it today, Peyri was well-liked by his Indian flock. Legend has it that when the padre finally left the mission to return to Spain in 1832, 500 Indians hurried on horseback to San Diego to prevent his departure. They arrived just as the boat bearing Peyri sailed away from the dock. As the Indians waded into the water, the friar stood at the stern and gave his last blessing to the group.

By 1835, the mission and its grounds had been turned over to the Indians by the Mexican government. The last padre died at San Luis Rey in 1846 and it would be 46 years before another Franciscan would take up residence. In the meantime, the buildings were plundered by vandals and colonials snatched up the Indian land at scandalously low prices.

California became part of the United States in 1850, and by 1865 President Abraham Lincoln signed a law that returned San Luis Rey to the church. It was not until 1892, however, that two Mexican padres visited the mission and asked for permission to establish a monastery. Restoration began, under the guidance of Padre Jeremiah O’Keefe, who went on to spend 19 years at the mission and become one of the best-loved Franciscans to live at San Luis Rey.

For many years the mission was used as a house of studies for young men preparing for the clergy, who received a full, four-year college education. In the early 1960s, the school was shut down after it was decreed that students should seek their education from traditional educational institutions.

Today, the mission houses a dozen friars, who serve as guardians of the historic complex. Dressed in their simple hooded brown robes, they spend their days caring for the facility along with a staff of several gardeners and maintenance workers.

“I feel we really, really have a great community,” said Father Weishaar. “They come together for prayer every morning, for Mass and prayers every evening. It really is a good thing.”

Weishaar oversees the activities of the mission itself plus the retreat center, which was opened to make use of the more than 50 small, Spartan bedrooms left empty when the seminary closed.

The retreats have been popular with both Catholics and groups of other denominations, but several years ago the friars realized that the facility was sitting unused for much of the week, particularly in the summer months. So, in 1980 Deacon Newman came up with the idea of renting out the rooms to vacationing families.

“I think at first, the friars thought they were going to get a lot of undesirables,” Weishaar said. “But it has not happened that way at all. We’ve gotten a lot of wonderful people, and of all faiths.”

Indeed, with a cost of only $125 for four nights’ lodging and meals for two, the idea quickly caught on. In particular, the Franciscans were aided by some unexpected attention from the national media, everything from the New York Times to the National Enquirer.

Newman recalls in particular one free-lance photographer who wanted to take pictures of the mission. Father Warren Rouse agreed to pose for several, including one in which he sat upon a bed. A few weeks later, Rouse was shown a copy of the National Enquirer featuring an article on the mission’s vacation deal and the photograph of him on a bed.

“He was absolutely startled,” Newman recalled. “It rather upset the friar community. But it got us more than 4,000 inquiries.”

Next to the mission is a complex of buildings that once housed a Catholic girls’ school. The school folded about a decade ago and since has been purchased by the parish, which operates and leases space for a wide array of programs, among them evening classes, the facilities for battered children and wives, the money-raising bingo games and other activities.

Perhaps the most unusual service offered by the parish, which includes five priests to handle the 10 weekend Masses for the congregation’s 1,500 families, is an outreach effort to aid the illegal aliens who live in the fields and hills of North County.

Father Luis Baldonado, head of the parish, said the program has one priest assigned full-time and is aimed at helping farm workers with food and clothing as well as celebrating Mass and offering sessions for Bible study out in the fields. Now, the church has also undertaken an effort to help workers put together the documentation to qualify for temporary resident status under the new immigration laws.

“On Thanksgiving Day we delivered more than 300 meals out in the camps,” Baldonado said. “We put the dinners onto trays and took them out into the fields while they were still warm.”

As Newman sees it, that sort of activity is following in the mission’s historic tradition of tending needy souls.

“We’re trying to perform a multilayered service,” Newman said. “We try to serve the community in every way we can.”