Angelus News | May 7, 2021 | Vol. 6 No. 9

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A MISSION’S NEW MISSION Could last summer’s devastating fire at Mission San Gabriel have been part of a divine plan to wake up LA’s ‘sleeping giant’? BY PABLO KAY 10 • ANGELUS • May 7, 2021
Behind those peeling layers of plaster, for example, workers have discovered painted walls with colorful designs that historians never knew existed. Beneath the sunken floors of the mission’s sacristy and tiny baptistery — crushed by the 150,000 gallons of water firefighters used to extinguish the blaze and save the mission from total destruction — previously unknown layers of old brick and slabs of stone mined from the San Gabriel Mountains have been unearthed. The interior of the fire-damaged Mission San Gabriel after new steel beams were installed to begin construction of a new roof. | VICTOR ALEMÁN Nine months after a mysterious fire ripped through Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, the historic church is still a mess. The fire-blackened sanctuary walls hide behind layers of scaffolding. Pieces of peeling plaster remain. A temporary timber roof protects the 200-year-old interior from the elements, while a pair of scissor lifts shuffle around over the makeshift particle-board floors. Outside, contractors mill around the parish parking lot while the structure’s warped steel beams wait to be hauled away after being carefully unlodged over the course of weeks. When the four-alarm fire struck in the predawn hours of July 11, 2020, destroying the mission’s roof and damaging most of its interior, mission officials and the local community were devastated. But now, as the mission prepares for its 250th anniversary, silver linings from the fire perhaps more valuable than the millions of dollars in damage it caused are starting to emerge. Discoveries like these are handy tools to help historians understand the mission’s spotty past. For Terri Huerta, the mission’s historical director, the hidden blessings of last summer’s fire are becoming clearer every day. “Mission San Gabriel has kind of been a sleeping giant,” she explained during a recent visit to San Gabriel. “It’s been here, but no one’s really had the opportunity, like we do now, to tell its story.” In other words, the fire may turn out to be just the providential sign that LA’s oldest Catholic outpost needed to reconnect with its historical and missionary identity — and right in time to kickoff a “jubilee year” that Archbishop José H. Gomez is planning to mark its 250th birthday. Telling the mission’s story has always been a challenge. The founding Spanish Franciscan missionaries were meticulous record-keepers — keeping track of everything from baptisms and weddings to crop yields — but after they were expelled in the 1830s, the newly privatized mission largely fell into decay under Mexican rule. Although it became a popular visitor attraction in the second half of the 1800s, its subsequent inhabitants did not always do a great job of keeping records. As Huerta admitted, the mission “has May 7, 2021 • ANGELUS • 11
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Angelus News | May 7, 2021 | Vol. 6 No. 9

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