A Land Swap Sealed in Heaven

To create room for a long-awaited expansion, a Catholic parish in Newport Beach has agreed to spend $6.7 million for a neighboring Presbyterian church to move a few miles down the road.

If the rare interdenominational deal goes through, Our Lady Queen of Angels Catholic Church will pick up four acres of land adjacent to its property near Corona del Mar High School, land now occupied by the Presbyterian church. There, it would build a 1,200-seat church for its 4,800-family congregation. It also will give the parish the expansion room to double its full-up parochial school. The current church will be torn down for parking.

The 385-member St. Mark Presbyterian Church will gain 10 acres of prime land near Fashion Island, along with a new sanctuary, meeting halls, offices and a preschool--with the Catholic church picking up the tab.

Nearly half of the land, which abuts a small coastal canyon, will be left in its natural state.

The combined project is expected to cost $20 million to $25 million, Catholic church officials said. The money will be raised by the affluent Our Lady congregation.

The public will get its first peek at the churches’ proposals at tonight’s Newport Beach Planning Commission meeting. Commissioners will be asked to start the process of granting an exception to the city’s general plan to accommodate the land swap and new construction. The deal hinges on City Council approval of the projects, which is expected in four to six months.

“It was a wild idea,” said Father Vincent Gilmore, parochial vicar at Our Lady and architect of the land deal.

The growth of Our Lady, established in 1953, has mirrored the steady expansion of Newport Beach during the past half-century. Residents from recent Newport Coast developments have placed additional strain on church facilities. Six Sunday Masses are celebrated to accommodate worshipers in the 750-seat church. Parishioners’ children are admitted to its school, which serves kindergarten through grade 8, on the basis of a lottery.

Two years ago, Msgr. William P. McLaughlin, Our Lady’s pastor, deputized Gilmore to find ways the church could expand. So Gilmore walked across the street to see if the Rev. Gary Collins, senior pastor at St. Mark, would consider moving.

“[Collins] said, ‘I like that kind of thinking.’ He understood our need,” Gilmore said.

Collins said his initial reaction to Our Lady’s overture was that it “could not fly. But I always like to say, ‘Let’s not draw an absolute conclusion.’

“Then I thought it over and got excited. We’d get better visibility and have the possibility of designing facilities to fit our ministry as we go into the new century.”

St. Mark and Our Lady have been neighbors and friends for almost 40 years, even sharing a number of ministries. In fact, that intimacy nearly prompted one longtime St. Mark member to vote against the deal.

“She didn’t want to move,” Collins explained. “She didn’t want the closeness between our churches to end.”

St. Mark would be uprooted after decades in the same location. And its sanctuary would be demolished, a sacred and beloved building where hundreds of baptisms, weddings and funerals have taken place.

“There were many with reservations about leaving the familiar,” Collins said. “Things are going very well at this stage in St. Mark’s life. But then someone offers you a deal like this, and our mission can be enhanced. And that’s what it’s all about.”

The new St. Mark church would expand its sanctuary from 300 to 450 seats, create a significantly larger social hall, and make five acres of open space a prominent design feature. St. Mark would add roughly 7,000 square feet to its facilities.

The project faced challenges from the start:

* Finding a chunk of open land in Newport Beach, which is nearly built out. Catholic officials scoured the city and found two sites for St. Mark, the best one on the corner of MacArthur Boulevard and San Joaquin Hills Road that usually serves as a Christmas tree lot in December.

* Getting the Irvine Co. to sell that property, which wasn’t on the market.

* Convincing the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange to approve a deal that amounted to giving another denomination money to buy more land and build a church and preschool. Diocese officials at first balked. But Our Lady Queen leaders proposed giving St. Mark cash for its current property, thereby not getting involved directly with the Presbyterian church’s purchase of its property and construction.

* Meeting with slow-growth advocates to show why one of the city’s last pieces of open space that had been proposed would work as a church site.

“They’re trying to please everyone,” said Claudia Owen, co-president of the group. “And they’re doing a good job.”

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Double Move

Our Lady Queen of Angels plans to pay $6.7 million to St. Mark Presbyterian so the church can move and build new facilities. Our Lady Queen of Angels then will build a 1,200-seat church the St. Mark property.

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Source: St. Mark Presbyterian Church