Mission of Restoring Great Stone Church Is Accomplished

After a 17-year, $9.6-million restoration project, the ruins of the Great Stone Church at Mission San Juan Capistrano reopened to the public Wednesday with a Mass said by a priest who donned the vestments worn by mission founder Father Junipero Serra.

The massive project was undertaken to preserve the church’s crumbling stone walls and reinforce them with seismic retrofitting. Engineers anticipate their work will help the church survive 200 more years.

Mission visitors were pleasantly surprised Wednesday to find unadorned off-white walls and open spaces where work crews once stood. Gone were the familiar steel scaffoldings that for 15 years lined the jagged stone walls like latticework.

“It was impressive that they were able to restore it that well,” said Colleen Dominguez, 25, of Yorba Linda, who brought her two young daughters to the reopening.

“We’ve been to a lot of ruins in Mexico that weren’t as nice,” she said.

The building, begun in 1776 and finished two decades later, is the only California mission church made of stone. Most of the church collapsed in an 1812 earthquake. Only the vestry, the sanctuary and the wings remain.

Among those attending Wednesday’s celebration was Jerry Nieblas, 52, a descendant of the Juaneno Indians who helped build the church. He offered a Juaneno prayer of purification.

“This is going to open up a whole new history for the mission,” said Nieblas, who grew up in San Juan Capistrano and worked at the mission for 24 years. Like many others who watched the scaffolding go up and the work trudge along, Nieblas wondered whether the project would ever be finished.

“For years I would walk past and not look,” he said. “It would make me feel bad and empty.... It felt like we’d lost it.”

Even those doing the work didn’t anticipate that the project would drag on as long as it did.

“We knew we were in for a long haul, but we didn’t think it would take 17 years,” said John Loomis, 58, who has managed the project since its inception.

“The speed of the project depended on funding,” he said. County and federal grants and donations paid for the restoration.

Work stalled twice for several months because the money ran out, causing him to lose workers and some of his experts. Starting up again each time was slow.

“You don’t go to the yellow pages to find people to do this kind of work,” said Loomis, whose next project is to restore the mission’s chapel.

Since the stabilization project began in 1990, Loomis had employed at any one time six to 10 stone masons, two to three preservation experts, two archeologists, an engineer and an architect.

Most of the improvements are not visible: Steel rods and pins were inserted to hold walls together, and curling plaster was re-adhered to walls. A steel buttress was installed inside the vestry to reinforce its dome.

The only additions were the low stone walls built to show how far the original structure once reached.

“Our goal was to make it look like it’s never been worked on,” said Lorraine McVey, a preservationist. “The greatest compliment is for someone to look at it and say, ‘What have you done?’ ”