The Churches of San Francisco
One Man’s Odyssey
through the Catholic (and Orthodox) Churches of God’s Favorite City
by
Ikaros, The Angel who Crash-Landed
PART VI
Misión San Francisco de Asís
(Mission Dolores Chapel)
3321 Sixteenth Street at Dolores, SF,
CA 94114 (The Mission District)
Visited Saturday, 1 February, 2014 (Vigil of the
Presentation) 5:30 mass
ARCHITECTURE:
Not just “Mission Style”, but an actual original
mission church, hardly modified in nearly 225 years
Strengths: Original
three-foot thick adobe walls & roof tiles, imported Spanish Reredos &
statuary, Indian geometric painting
Weakness: If any, the incongruous
Neoclassical side altars added in the mid-1850’s
LITURGY:
Liturgical Style – Appropriately humble and minimal
Music – Cantor
and Organ
Homily – Mixed Reviews (H3/H2; see homily ratings below)
“Mission-Style Mass”
Bear with me as I
begin with a history. Mission Dolores is
more than a parish, less than a parish, having sat in one place while the land
underneath it changed hands between three foreign countries. It bears a long and storied history which attempts
to makes sense of the confusion. And so I
begin with a trip through time.
The Mission began
as an answer to a dare between a Mexican Viceroy in La Paz hungering for
strategic port locations along the largely-uncharted coasts of the north, and a
poor friar in tattered robes asking permission to name his next mission after Saint
Francis, the founder of his humble order.
The pompous viceroy’s reply went something like this, “If your saint
wants a mission, tell him to show us his harbor and he’ll get one.”
Imagine the look
on both of their faces when little Padre Serra returned a couple of years later,
after Portola’s land expedition happened across this vast sheltered bay which
the galleons had been passing without notice for decades. And thus, five days before the Declaration of
Independence was signed on foreign American soil a continent away, the Franciscans
got their mission of "San Francisco de Asís", named for the poorest-of-the-poor founder of their order, on
the shores of the Laguna de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores (Lagoon of Our Lady
of Sorrows), and the Spanish got their port, called “Yerba Buena”, with its
military garrison (The Presidio of San Francisco) completing the third point of
this triangle at the entrance of the bay.
The same summer
fog which had concealed the narrow entrance to the bay had also chilled the
bounty out of the mission’s summer crops, and the laguna which looked so
promising in the spring had run brackish when the creeks dried up in summer. The little mission of the poverty-loving
saint had lived up to Francis’ reputation, coming in last place, year after
year, in its production of crops and the livestock that fed off of them.
The mission padres
exchanged the graces of sacraments and the shelter and meager crops of the
Mission for the Indians’ skills in procuring the harvest of the bay and their labor within the mission,
in a relationship which seemed to have benefitted both parties in a mutually tentative,
intermittent and almost begrudging way.
Times passed
slowly in this catatonic outpost of the Spanish Empire. The War of Mexican Independence passed the
mission, port and presidio from Spanish to Mexican hands. The drowsy port of Yerba
Buena was renamed “San Francisco” to merge its identity with those of the
outlying mission and presidio, and just in time for it all to change hands once
again as John Fremont raised the American Flag in our dusty town square. There was barely anyone around to
notice. Maybe a dozen scruffy guys looked on and shrugged. And then, just months later,
gold was discovered near Sacramento in the waning months of 1848, and the
Golden Gate (named after its biblical counterpart in Jerusalem?) got the chance
to earn its name.
A sleepy
crossroads erupted into an overcrowded tinderbox of shacks built from the wood
of the argonauts’ abandoned ships, as the trading post grew from 45 people to
4,500 almost overnight, and to 45,000 in a year, and to 450,000 by 1900. The mission courtyard had been carved away by
the street grid of the new city, a sprawling quadrangle giving way to an
imposing gothic church which seemed to scoff at the humble mission chapel by
its side. Then the city was levelled in
the earthquake of 1906, reducing the gothic church to rubble while the little
adobe chapel of Poor Francis lost only a few roof tiles. The fire triggered by the quake roared
through the city, engulfing what little the quake had spared, and Francis’
little chapel looked on as the wall of flame gasped to halt right across the
street.
Over the rubble of
the old gothic church rose a Spanish Baroque Basilica dedicated to Our Lady of
Sorrows (to whom was named the old Laguna which had long-since been filled and
housed-over by the greedily growing city).
So today, the little mission chapel and cemetery sit anomalously within
the heart of a big gritty city, overshadowed by a towering basilica, to form a
unique double-church. Mission Dolores is
the historic remnant of a mission, the subsidiary chapel of a larger and more recent church,
and a soaring basilica which belongs as much to the pope as to the local bishop
or pastor. Its adobe bricks were molded
by the Ohlone, built into a church by the Spaniards, handed over to Mexico and, finally, claimed by the United States at a time when the California Missions had
already spent 150 years providing Holy Mass, in a Catholic faith which was still
struggling to be legalized in the “Land of the Free” back East.
And so, in the
context of this lengthy local history, I walk through heavy wooden doors to
attend Mass in what is now referred to simply as “The Old Mission”.
The music began,
and immediately I was stricken by its simplicity (a small electric organ
accompanied by a wavering voice), and I couldn’t help but to imagine an era of
dusty trails traversed by local Indians on their way to mass. I wondered how it would have sounded to hear
the chant of Ohlone converts straining to produce hymns in Latin while still
struggling with Spanish, to an accompaniment of untrained fingers on unfamiliar
foreign instruments. And I felt very
lucky to be in this holy little place, the poorest of the poor missions, attending
this humble and beautiful liturgy.
They made the
right choice of hymns: older, more traditional music which, were it pumped out
through an overblown pipe organ, could sound pompous and stuffy, but in the
gentle imperfect hands of this simple music ministry, presented a moving image
of church history cradled and carried forward in loving arms.
The first reading
from Malachi focused on God’s use of purification by fire for a pleasing
sacrifice; harsh-sounding words, but a reminder that the Feast of the
Presentation (also known as Candlemas) was once called the feast of the
Purification. Father’s homily
side-stepped the purification angle, and focused on the themes of Candlemas –
of the triumph of light over darkness, of hope against despair, of God’s Light
appearing to Simeon and Anna in the form of a helpless newborn child, of us in
our suffering being embraced by the light of God in Christ.
Personally, I found
more “meat” in today’s readings than what came through in the homily, and
well-charred, deeply grill-marked meat at that, but we don’t come to mass to be
reminded of the trial-by-fire we all need to grow in faith, and father’s homily
delivered a solid, heartily-sauced pasta course. And I appreciated his warm and genuine welcome
to me after mass.
This liturgy
perfectly embraced the simplicity of St. Francis, and the directness of Pope
Francis, in a way that should make Padre Serra proud. I would recommend it to anyone, like me, who is seeking to return to a simpler and
more genuine expression of liturgy, and to do so within the historic walls of a
sacred and meaningful church.
I had an errand to run in The Mission District today before mass, a rare treat for me to do business in this part of town, and made it from there to the Mission in good time. I have always loved this neighborhood, and never tire of seeing and photographing it with new eyes.
I can never walk past this place without wondering what our Mother is being thanked for. A humble immigrant's prayer to earn and save enough capitol to open a business in this city, perhaps? If you let The Sign speak for itself, what does she tell you?
I just noticed the Barbie Head on the roofline of this über-kitsch watering hole and had to laugh. Who drinks at a place like this? I bet they sell a lot of Skinny-Girl cocktails here at the "Bar Bie", anyway.
Great markets around here, great food.
Isn't this the Comic Book bank where Superman, Batman or Underdog always caught the bad guy?
This outdoor neon sign is new, but the oil painting of the zoot-suited immigrant on Baker Beach, with someone's heartfelt "I love you man" scrawled across the bottom, has hung behind the cash register forever.
Mission Dolores and neighboring Lutheran Church in 80's video
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Wierd Al's Re-make
The fig trees in front of the Basilica have grown since that 1983 video, haven't they?
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Tailgate:
Pícaro Tapas Restaurant:
Just the bread and mojo rojo sauce alone were gorgeous!
Manchego, Morcilla, tortilla, Sangría: Sheer Heaven!
The name of this band, playing Saturday at Mission and Duboce, cracked me up
* * * * *
My “Hurricane-System” of Homily Ratings
H5: Transformative
The
priest said or demonstrated something which altered my perspective, so
profoundly, that I leave the church a different person than when I entered, and
remain so. The priest has not only
challenged me toward growth but provided me with the tools or information I
needed to accomplish and sustain that growth.
I have heard just a few such homilies in my life, so don’t be surprised
if there aren’t (m)any times you see this rating come up.
H4: Challenging
The
priest has made it clear that we are not complacently at the end of our
journey, but in need of Christ to bring us closer to where He is calling
us. I feel challenged and encouraged to
move beyond where I am now.
H3: Inspiring
This
is a category of many beautiful and moving homilies, in which the priest has
painted with words an image of spiritual fulfillment toward which we are all
striving, but not necessarily mapped out the process for me to get there.
H2: Feel-Goodie
Everybody
wants a homily that makes us leave Mass feeling good about who we are, but how
will we ever grow in faith if all we get is a spiritual pat on the back and a
candy bar? Typically, these homilies
ignore our church teachings, blithely side-stepping them, rather than outwardly
contradicting them. They can be harmful “Pharisee-makers” in boosting our
smugness and self-righteousness when what we need is a stern correction. Happily, I have heard very few homilies of
this nature in the city of San Francisco.
H1: Negative
The only thing worse than a
priest making me feel good about being the unrepentant sinner that I am is a
priest who makes me feel bad about it.
Gladly, I have heard so little fire-and-brimstone negativity in my lifelong
practice of Catholicism that I can honestly expect not to use this rating at
all.
H0:
Heretical
Let’s hope that this is
another category I can safely expect not to use. I have, in my travels, heard views from the
pulpits of Catholic churches which contradict Catholic teaching, but I don’t
expect to happen across any contrary teaching here in my City and County.
