State Gives Mission $1 Million

The Great Stone Church at Mission San Juan Capistrano on Monday received a $1-million state grant, a significant step toward refurbishment.

Another $5.4 million is needed to complete the church and vestry. But Monday’s grant--the first time government funds have gone toward preserving the church--allows the preservation project to gear up again after being stalled since January for lack of funds.

The $1 million will be used to make the five-story dome, now cracked and held together by scaffolding, structurally sound.

Mission officials hope for a public-private partnership to speed up fund-raising for the $7-million preservation effort. So far, $600,000 in private donations has been identified.

The restoration has been a long time coming.

Although it was completed in 1806, the church’s heyday was all too brief. Just six years after opening, an earthquake knocked loose the 120-foot bell tower, which collapsed into the sanctuary, killing 40 worshipers.

Built by the Juaneno Indians for the Spanish missionaries, the church was the largest stone building west of the Mississippi when it was made. Experts laud its architectural significance and the achievement of constructing it in the early 19th century in California.

“It’s amazing that they could build a Greco-Roman temple in the wilderness 200 years ago,” mission administrator Jerry Miller said.

Although there have never been plans to make the church whole, “a magnificent ruin says something too,” Miller said. “Somehow this ruin says these people persevered, they survived, they overcame these disasters.”

The $1-million check, a mock-up of which was presented at the mission by two state lawmakers Monday, is urgently needed for the second phase of the restoration. It will allow the removal of much of the scaffolding that has obscured the dome’s beauty for a decade. Officials say the scaffolding may come down as early as March, in time for a visit from the fabled swallows.

Some of the birds have nested elsewhere since the scaffolding went up to keep the crumbling walls from falling on the mission’s 550,000 annual visitors.

“We’ve got to be ready for the swallows to come home to a safe haven,” Miller said.

People will gain safe admittance too: They will again be allowed to wander through the ruins that have been likened to America’s Acropolis and to gaze up five stories at the artwork on the sanctuary dome.

State Sen. Bill Morrow (R-Oceanside) and Assemblywoman Pat Bates (R-Laguna Niguel) asked for $7 million in state funds for the church, but the request was pared back to $2 million by the Legislature and cut again by Gov. Gray Davis.

Bates said she was awe-struck by the tour of the church and mission after the check presentation Monday morning.

“I was really humbled by the fact that, 200 years ago, the Indians and Father Serra toiled there to build a community,” Bates said. “California’s heritage is encapsuled there.”