Burned-Down Church on Rebound : Religion: A year after it was destroyed by flames, Poway’s St. Michael’s Catholic Church plans to begin rebuilding next month.

A year ago, ashes and twisted metal lay on the site where St. Michael’s Catholic Church had stood.

Only a statue of St. Michael along Pomerado Road remained standing, and parishioners of the Poway church placed fresh flowers daily in his sculpted hands as one would on a grave. They still do.

One morning in July, 1990, St. Michael’s erupted in a ball of flame. The fire, ruled accidental by San Diego County sheriff’s arson investigators, apparently started sometime during the night, high in the ceiling of the wood-paneled church, where it smoldered for hours. Faulty wiring, or perhaps a discarded cigarette, was the best guess of insurance investigators.

Msgr. Joseph Finnerty, St. Michael’s pastor, cut short his vacation in Ireland when he heard the news, and arrived home to view the devastation and to lead a chorus of voices urging that the church be rebuilt.

Now their dream is being fulfilled. Today the site is clean and the stench of the $2-million fire is gone, replaced by plans for a new, larger and more grandiose sanctuary that will rise on a site above the old church, away from the noise and fumes of busy Pomerado Road.

The fenced-in site of the old church will become a playground for youngsters at the adjacent St. Michael’s Catholic School. The parish administration building on a hill above will be razed to make way for a $3.1-million edifice designed by Chris Veum, a 31-year-old San Diego architect with Hallenbeck, Chamorro & Associates.

Funds for the 17,000-square-foot church come from a $1.2-million insurance payment and from the more than 2,000 members of St. Michael’s who have dug deep into their recession-worn pockets to more than match the insurance settlement with $1.5 million in pledges. A remaining deficit of $400,000 will come from the Catholic Diocese of San Diego in the form of a loan.

Memories of the fire still bring tears to Angela Connelly’s eyes, but they don’t get in the way of her volunteer task of stuffing building fund pledge reminders into envelopes.

She was there the day St. Michael’s burned.

“There was a lot of noise, popping sounds as the heat from inside caused the windows to blow out,” Connelly recalled. “We were there, about 75 of us, for the 7:30 Mass. We weren’t in the church, thank goodness, because they were painting it.

“All we could do was stand there and cry and watch it burn.”

A fellow volunteer, Jean Bores, is equally nostalgic about the old church, but optimistic that the new one will be even better.

“I remember that the first meeting of the building committee was a night when they were drawing (the state) lottery numbers,” Bores recalled. “Most of us had bought tickets, hoping to win $17 million dollars and donate a million or so to build the church.”

None of the parishioners has hit the jackpot. The pledges are mainly in the thousands of dollars, occasionally $10,000, $25,000 or even higher.

Since the fire, services have been held in the nearby church school auditorium, with a maximum seating of 500. Parishioners manage to squeeze in to one of the four Sunday morning Masses.

The new building will hold close to 1,000 worshipers within its white-stuccoed walls. Skylights will provide the interior with shafts of sunlight during the day and send out beacons of light at night.

The clean, plain lines of the light-colored stucco exterior are reminiscent of Italian churches with their free-standing bell towers and tiled roofs. Stone flooring will be used throughout the building and will continue onto a large patio to be used for outdoor gatherings.

After three weeks of walking the 9-acre hillside, architect Veum said, “the concept struck me in the shower.”

The hillside reminded him of Italian landscapes, and the site he chose, which stands above most of the rest of St. Michael’s church and school buildings, “will be much better than the old site, where there were street noises and where the building was hardly visible,” Veum said.

The interior of the new church will feature painted walls in place of the dark paneling of the 1971-vintage building, he said. Varying colors will be used, ranging from a deep blue-green near the entryway to pale, neutral colors around the sanctuary.

Among the few survivors of the fire are a 4-foot-tall statue of the Virgin Mary, which came through the fire sooty but unscarred, and a steel cross that stood atop the old church and was the last thing to topple into the inferno. Both will be given places of honor in the new building, Veum said.

Also saved were the church choir robes, smoke-damaged but unburned, and many of the chalices and other sacred objects protected by the heavy paneling of the old sacristy.

The new building will have all the modern conveniences: sound system, air conditioning, fireproofing and a $250,000 organ.

Among the embellishments will be padded pews and cushioned kneeling benches, additions that prompted Assistant Pastor Earl LaRiviere to quip: “Holy mackerel. Everybody is going to fall asleep.”

There were a few rocky moments in the rebuilding effort, first when some church members wanted to build the new church as a replica of the old building.

Then Catholics from other parishes suggested that St. Michael’s be moved to the fast-growing San Diego suburbs of Sabre Springs or Carmel Mountain Ranch to serve parishioners there, who now must travel to the three Catholic churches--St. Michael’s, St. Gabriel and San Rafael--clustered near each other in the more established neighborhoods of Poway and Rancho Bernardo.

But the schisms were healed and a successful fund-raising campaign showed that St. Michael’s parishioners were united in the decision to build a new church on the same Pomerado Road site.

Now only minor skirmishes remain, as church officials and architect differ on whether the supporting columns of the cruciform- shaped building will block the worshipers’ views of the stained-glass windows.

A group of contractors was invited to submit construction bids, which are due next week, and work is scheduled to start in October.

Veum hopes the church will be completed in about a year, in time for services to be held in the fall of 1992.