CNA Staff, Jul 11, 2020 / 12:40 pm (CNA).- A massive fire devastated an 18th century mission church in San Gabriel, in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, July 11. Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles called the fire at San Gabriel Mission church, founded by St. Junipero Serra, “devastating.”
The fire began early Saturday morning around 4 a.m. and destroyed the roof and interior of the 249-year-old structure. Local firefighters said they responded to an initial alarm at 4:24. By the time they arrived, smoke and flames were visible from outside the church – which is a California Historical Landmark.
Battling the four-alarm fire eventually involved 50 firefighters, according to the Los Angeles Times. Local fire department spokesman Captain Antonio Negrete called the damage “heartbreaking.”
“The roof of the mission is completely gone and the interior up to the altar is completely destroyed,” Negrete said, noting that it was not yet possible to establish the cause of the fire because of concerns over the building’s structural integrity.
“We’re going to have building engineers come in and see if we can shore up some walls to make it as safe as possible for the investigators to go in and start investigating this fire,” he said, according to the Times.
Adrian Marquez Alarcon, spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, said that because of renovations underway at the church ahead of its 250th anniversary, historic paintings and artifacts had been removed and were not in the building at the time of the fire.
Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez visited the church Saturday morning, saying on Facebook that “[he] woke up before dawn this morning to news that our beloved San Gabriel Mission, founded by St. Junípero Serra in 1771, was burning.”
“Thank God no one is hurt,” Gomez said. “I’m here to pray with the people. The roof is destroyed and there is much damage in the old church. St. Junípero, pray for this city, this state, and this country that you helped to found.”
The San Gabriel mission was the fourth mission founded by St. Junípero Serra, a Franciscan priest who founded a trail of missions across California. Serra helped to convert thousands of native Californians to Christianity, and taught them new agricultural technologies.
Many of Serra’s missions form the cores of what are today the state’s biggest cities— such as San Diego, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
An advocate for native people and a champion of human rights, Serra was often at odds with Spanish authorities over the treatment of native people, from whom there was an outpouring of grief at his death in 1784.
Serra was canonized by Pope Francis during a visit to the United States in 2015.
“Junípero sought to defend the dignity of the native community, to protect it from those who had mistreated and abused it,” the pope said in his homily at the Mass of canonization.
Despite Serra’s record defending indigenous peoples, statues of the saint have become focal points for protests and demonstrations across California in recent weeks, with images of the saint being torn down or vandalized in protest of California’s colonial past.
Rioters pulled down a statue of St. Serra in the state capital of Sacramento on July 4, during which one man burned the face of the statue with an ignited spray can, before a crowd pulled the statue from its base and struck it with a sledgehammer and other objects, dancing and jumping upon it.
Another statue of the saint was torn down in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, on June 19 by a crowd of about 100 people. The following week the San Juan Capistrano Mission and its neighboring church removed statues of Serra from their outside displays to preserve them from being targeted.
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Things progressively get sadder. I’m so sorry to hear about this.
Just coincidental? This is what happens when the infantile, acting-out, indulged, and narcissistic children among us throw temper tantrums by toppling statues from their pedestals and the adults in the room stand there and say and do nothing. After the children are finished breaking objects,they usually start hitting the parents. We’ve all seen the behavior of these children before in the supermarket and have watched as children terrorize their parents in public.
Arson?
Was that Archbishop Gomez’s first visit to the mission? No opportunity for a photo-op prior to this?
I taught at San Gabriel High School across the street from the Mission. For years, I had never visited there except for funerals of mothers of friends of mine. However, an AFS student from Denmark that I taught could never get anyone to take her there. Most of her friends grew up there, so there was a ho-hum attitude about the place. I had never been there, either, so off we went. What most impressed me were the graves of indigenous Americans. There were so many! My heart is broken because I could see the spire from all over our campus. May our prayers to St. Junipero rebuild our mission.
The Brown Shirts are now going after the synagogues!
Not a word about cause of the fire. One can presume it was arson and they do not want to inflame (pun intended) the passions of the leftist maniacs by speaking about it. If so, the intentional silence is a weakness and cowardice on the part of clerics in those cases that demand justifiable anger.
In the context of the past few weeks, the archdiocese has solid grounds for demanding an arson investigation. If this isn’t requested by the Church, the laity, in the spirit of Vatican II should petition the archbishop to do so. If that is ineffective, demonstrate in front of city hall. Enough is enough.