Little Congregation Facing Big Odds in Bid to Save Church

Poor Paulita Cano couldn’t hear, or couldn’t grasp, what I was saying about her old neighborhood church, the charming mission named after the patron saint of workers, St. Isidore. The frail, 101-year-old woman blinked her cloudy, startled eyes and moved her lips without forming words.

She was too old and weary to talk about the sanctuary that has anchored this blue-collar neighborhood in Los Alamitos for nearly eight decades. It was built in brick by Mexican farm workers at a time when horse-drawn wagons rumbled down Katella, then called Church Street. For as long as anybody can remember, Paulita served as a volunteer at St. Isidore Catholic Church.

She cleaned the lovely stained-glass windows, cared for the pastor’s rich vestments and set out the votive candles. Paulita was inside the church when the big quake hit at 6:30 on the evening of March 10, 1933. The walls crumbled and the choir loft collapsed, leaving her buried in bricks to the waist. At least, that’s the story she tells people in a community that relies on oral history to document its humble past.

When residents learned recently that the diocese planned to shut down the 77-year-old church, the hurt ran as deep as the roots of this tight-knit neighborhood. The congregation gasped in unison when the announcement was made after Mass on Sunday, May 13.

Paulita was in bed at her home a block away when her neighbor, Alfonso “Poncho” Aguilar, brought her the sad news. Afterward, he regretted having told the skeletal old woman. She couldn’t stop crying and then fell ill for three days, said Poncho, a part-time sociology teacher at Cal State LA.

When I visited last week, Paulita was shrouded in white sheets, lying still in her bed with side rails to prevent her from falling. She seemed oblivious to the doom facing her beloved St. Isidore and the impassioned efforts of her neighbors to save it.

“What are they saying about the church?” she asked Poncho, who leaned close to her pale face to communicate.

“They say they’re going to close it,” he answered, as if breaking the news for the first time. “But God isn’t going to let that happen.”

It’s going to take divine intervention to save St. Isidore.

Catholic church officials say they can no longer afford to operate the mission, a satellite of St. Hedwig’s, the main parish built several decades ago to serve the booming population of Los Alamitos. It would cost $300,000 to retrofit the smaller church for earthquake safety, and keeping it staffed would drain the much-in-demand services of Spanish-speaking priests.

Neither the money nor the priest power is a worthwhile investment for such a tiny congregation, says the diocese. Every week, about 200 people attend Mass at the mission near the San Gabriel River Freeway. That’s a minuscule percentage of Orange County’s 700,000 Catholics.

“St. Isidore pulls at our hearts, but we also have to do what is right for the people of God throughout the county,” said Msgr. Jaime Soto, the diocesan official who had to announce the church’s closure in May.

The number of new Latino seminarians is growing, says Soto, but not as fast as the Spanish-speaking faithful. In 1997, nearly 69,000 people attended Spanish Mass on an average Sunday in Orange County, up from 43,000 nine years earlier.

Just to keep pace with the growth, the diocese would need to turn out two Spanish-speaking priests per year. Some years, not a single new one is ordained for local parishes. Those already in service must minister to nearly twice as many parishioners as their English-speaking counterparts--about 2,300 Latino Catholics per Spanish-speaking priest. And since Latinos are so much younger, the priests are busier, with baptisms, communions, and quinceaneras.

“We’re straining under our success,” said Soto, the diocese’s vicar for Hispanics. “We’ve got to place our guys where they’re going to serve the largest number of people.”

Ironically, missions like St. Isidore were founded to serve the once-isolated congregations of Mexican Catholics. They were called “chapels of ease” because they were located in small communities, the nuclei of barrios from Delhi to El Modena.

They were also chapels of segregation, ensuring that Mexicans would not mingle with white worshipers in the principal houses of prayer.

“I don’t want to be judgmental of my forefathers,” said Soto, “but to a certain extent, many of these [missions] were created because Latinos or Mexicans were not accepted in some of the main churches.”

Members of St. Isidore’s flock say they still feel unwanted at St. Hedwig’s, named after a relative of the developer of nearby Rossmoor. “When a Mexican goes there, the whites just stare at him,” said Raul Lopez, a janitor who lives across the street from Paulita, the centenarian. “There is a lot of discrimination. I can’t go there.”

Lopez shares a rented, ramshackle house on Florista Street with his wife, Margarita, and their four children, all grown. Every December on the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Margarita converts the front of her house into a shrine, with flowers, candles and a large portrait of the dark-skinned Mother of God. She makes tostadas and churros and takes videos of the procession passing in front of her gaily festooned house on its way through the neighborhood.

Standing on her old wooden porch with discarded chairs and lounging cats, Margarita said she’d be very sad if St. Isidore closed.

“Ay, no,” she exclaimed in Spanish, “we adore this church. Ay, it’s not fair for them to take it away just because we’re Mexican. All of us are in need of God.”

Father Daniel Hopcus, pastor at St. Hedwig’s, didn’t return my calls this week. Residents said they met with him to discuss starting a Spanish Mass, but the only time he offered was 1:30 p.m., much too late for Sunday service. Sorry, that’s the only slot available “to fit you in,” they say the pastor told them.

“They don’t want us over there, that’s very obvious,” said Leticia Aguilar, a nurse, no relation to Poncho. “And quite frankly, we don’t want to be there. I don’t feel that sense of peace or belonging I feel over here at St. Isidore. This is where my heart and soul is. Right here.”

By this time, Poncho, Leticia and Margarita had all gathered in the spick-and-span living room of Paulita’s house. Word got around that I was there and neighbors came over to talk, almost breathless at the chance to publicize their cause.

That’s the kind of neighborhood this is. Front doors are open for people to come and go. Strangers smile and say hello on the street. On Katella, traffic now roars past the church with its classic bell tower, surrounded by fast-food joints and an endless row of businesses. But for those who stop and walk the quiet side streets behind the church, a feeling from a friendlier, more peaceful past awaits.

This part of Los Alamitos bloomed before the turn of the century as a rough-and-tumble labor camp, a cluster of tents and one-room cabins for workers in the beet fields and the old sugar factory. But by the time the church was built in 1922 on property donated by the Bixby Land Company, it had become a settled and closely woven neighborhood of Mexican families. It was the workers who asked for the land and later helped build St. Isidore.

And during the Great Depression, it was the workers who held fiestas and sold Mexican food in front of the rubble of the quake-damaged church to raise funds for its restoration. Nowadays, even people of other faiths sense a sort of magic about this modest mission.

“Now there’s nothing left of old Los Alamitos except that church,” said Becky Schliskey, a volunteer with We Care, a charitable agency housed at St. Isidore but supported by various denominations and community groups. “It’s just an era gone by, I guess.”

Margrit Kendrick, the town historian and a Catholic, feels a special reverence for this simple structure, this “beacon of faith,” as she calls it.

“Every time I drive by St. Isidore, it gives me a feeling of, I don’t know, a feeling of being near something which is good for one’s soul, for one’s spirit,” said Kendrick with her marked Swiss accent.

St. Isidore was closed once before, after the new church opened in 1960 to accommodate new suburbanites. The old mission’s marble altar and imported statutes were given away. Later, a new pastor at St. Hedwig’s took pity and restored the mission.

This time, residents say they’re not going to let their little church go without a fight. They’ve organized as the Comite del Amor, or Committee of Love, and they plan a Web site and a letter-writing campaign to rally support. On Monday, they’re scheduled to appear before the City Council to ask for support in designating the mission a city historical landmark.

“The Mexicano Catolico is very united and very strong,” said Poncho, whose grandfather helped build the church. “They don’t know the battle that they’re in for.”

Their spirit of rebellion verges on subversiveness. People here feel wronged, abandoned and betrayed by the church hierarchy, seen as distant, rich and uncaring.

“Now they want to take away what little we have,” said an emotional Letty Aguilar, staring out the front window toward St. Isidore as Paulita slept in her bedroom, unaware of the passions still stirred by the church she served for so long.

“There’s no justice in that. That’s not what religion is about.”

Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com.