Stripped chapel may be reborn as housing

By: GARY WARTH - Staff Writer
Abandoned by rebellious congregation, Pauma Valley church eyed by Father Joe | Friday, February 8, 2008 11:53 PM PST ∞

Flanked by the Rev. Luke Jauregui with the Mission San Antonio, left, and Raymonda DuVall, director of Catholic Charities, Father Joe Carroll of Father Joe's Villages checks out the interior of the former chapel at Centro Guadalupano in Pauma Valley on Thursday. Father Joe is using a wheelchair while recovering from a foot wound that is slow to heal because of diabetes.
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PAUMA VALLEY ---- The small Pauma Valley chapel is an empty shell today, a secular building stripped of its pews, crucifixes and other sacramental items that once had made it a place of worship.

But for six years, the recently vacated Centro Guadalupano was the site of a contentious standoff between a rebellious congregation and the Catholic Diocese of San Diego.

Its ownership finally settled by an appeals court that ruled in favor of the diocese, the chapel and surrounding 4.5 acres soon may be the site of up to 25 homes for needy families, said homeless advocate Father Joe Carroll, who wants to build the housing.

"I was afraid the windows would be gone, but it's actually in a lot better shape than I expected," Carroll said of the former chapel as he toured the property Thursday.

A rebellious parish
Until some time last month, Centro Guadalupano, about 10 miles east of Interstate 15 on Highway 76, had attracted up to 500 people for Sunday services led in Spanish by the Rev. Abel Quispe, a Roman Catholic priest from Peru.

Quispe never was authorized by the bishop to lead the church members, who hired him themselves after the diocese ordered their chapel closed in 2001.

Congregation members, including farmworkers and American Indians who have lived on the land for generations and whose families funded the chapel's construction more than 30 years ago, said they wanted only to continue worshipping in the only church they had ever known.

That put them in conflict with the diocese, a regional jurisdiction with authority over all Catholic churches and priests in San Diego and Imperial counties, and raised a question of whether activities in the chapel could be considered valid within Catholicism.

While there was no court to enforce canon law, there was one to answer the more mundane question of property ownership.

Two decisions, including one from an appellate court in December, backed the diocese's claim of ownership. The congregation and Quispe earlier had agreed to leave the property by Jan. 31 if they lost the appeal, closing the chapter on one of the most unusual episodes in the diocese's history.

Some time before the final decision, the diocese deeded the property to Father Joe's Villages, a San Diego-based program that provides housing, education, job training and other resources to the needy.

"I can see this as a community room where they have Thanksgiving dinners," Carroll said of the building, which was bare but for a few light fixtures and sinks.

Carroll is considering several possible uses for property, which he said could hold mobile homes or manufactured housing that might provide homes for up to 25 families.

Roots of the dispute
One rainy Sunday in 2000, San Diego Bishop Robert Brom visited Centro Guadalupano, a white cinder block building with a red tile roof just off Highway 76 in Pauma Valley. Seeing congregation members huddled in the rain outside the small, crowded chapel, the bishop said he found conditions unacceptable.

The diocese originally considered expanding the aging chapel, but opted instead to build a $3.5 million, 24,000-square-foot multipurpose center that would serve Centro Guadalupano and other area congregations in one building.

Consolidating the congregations would mean less traveling on Sundays for the Rev. Paul Marconi, then pastor at the mission, who also conducted services at Centro Guadalupano and at the Pauma, Rincon and La Jolla reservations.

But the new center would be about five miles to the east, near the Pala Mission, and many members of the Centro Guadalupano congregation did not like the idea of leaving the chapel that had served them for 30 years.

Congregants also were upset with the diocese's decision to close Centro Guadalupano in 2001, more than a year before the new center would open, to ease Marconi's schedule. The congregants were expected to attend services at the mission during the center's construction.

While some members of Centro Guadalupano did begin attending services at the mission, others stayed put, showing up on Sundays with their own Bibles to read themselves. After several months on their own, they began looking for a priest and found Quispe working at St. Mark's Catholic Church in San Marcos.

Quispe moved into a doublewide mobile home next to the chapel and began leading services at Centro Guadalupano sometime in 2001. In May 2002, after Quispe had returned from a trip to Peru to be with his dying father, the diocese asked him to leave. Quispe obliged.

Things got ugly the next Sunday when congregation members came to the chapel and found they had no priest to perform baptism. An estimated 150 parishioners drove to the mission to demand that Marconi perform baptisms, and deputies were called to protect the priest, according to a sheriff's report on the incident.

Marconi, who is no longer at the mission, at the time said he refused to perform the baptisms because they must be done with proper preparation.

In a 2003 interview with the North County Times, Quispe said he had left for Peru with hopes of finding work in a church after the incident, but could not meet with his bishop. Believing he should go where he was needed, Quispe said he returned to Pauma Valley, and this time he would not listen to the diocese.

Unable to evict Quispe or the congregation, the diocese began warning other North County Catholics to stay away from Centro Guadalupano through announcements in church bulletins.

"He is a priest that does not have the permission from the diocese of his country (Peru) to give any type of sacrament," read a note that ran for several weeks in the Sunday bulletin of Escondido's Church of the Resurrection. "He also does not have the permission of our bishop or our church to officiate his priesthood in the diocese of San Diego. If you receive any sacraments from him, they will not be valid."

At the time, a spokesman for the diocese said he knew of no other case of a Catholic priest defying eviction orders from his bishop and continuing to perform ceremonies that the diocese said may not be officially recognized by the church.

Legal steps
The Centro Guadalupano congregation, which had formed a group known as Centro Guadalupano de Pauma Valley, fought back with a lawsuit that claimed the diocese had no right to evict them because the congregants were the rightful owners of the building, which they paid for more than 30 years ago with money they had raised.

The courts disagreed, and the congregation appealed.

By then, the diocese had given the property to S.V.D.P. Management Inc., which does business as Father Joe's Villages. S.V.D.P. Management filed a lawsuit to evict the congregation in October 2006. As part of that lawsuit, the congregation agreed to vacate the property within 30 days if they lost their appeal.

Last December, a state appeals court ruled that the congregation had failed to show they have any legal right to the property. Carroll said the agreed-upon evacuation day was Jan. 31.

By then, Carroll said his staff members had visited the site and found the building, which had never been lavishly decorated, had been gutted.

"They pretty much stripped the chapel," Carroll said. "They took everything with them."

Carroll said the missing items were not worth fighting over.

"As far as we're concerned, they're gone," he said. "We just want the property, and them off the property."

Looking ahead
The Rev. Luke Jauregui of Pala Mission and Raymonda DuVall, director of Catholic Charities, joined Carroll at the former chapel Thursday.

"This is so wrong," DuVall said as she saw the condition of what had been the back wall of the church, where services once were led.

Three empty candleholders with sacred images were the only reminder that the empty room had once been used as a church. A silver-leaf portrait of Our Lady of Guadalupe has been torn from the wall, leaving behind only a damaged turquoise panel that was its backing.

Pews were missing and no appliances remained in the kitchen, although water still worked in the sinks. A few Christmas decorations hung from the ceiling as a reminder of a final celebration.

Outside, where the congregation once had gathered for services after growing too large to fit inside the chapel, only the wooden studs remained to what once was the sacristy, the structure that had held sacred vessels and vestments used in Mass. At the front of the chapel, light fixtures and even the letters that once spelled "Centro Guadalupano" had been pried off the wall.

Carroll said Catholic Charities and the Pala Mission Parish will work with him in a three-way partnership to develop the land into a housing project.

State, federal and private money may be available for such a project, he said, and Carroll expects homes to be on the property within two years. Off the top of his head, Carroll said he expects the project to cost between $10 million and $15 million.

Jauregui said he will help identify families in the area who can benefit most from the new affordable housing.

"We're not lacking in poverty here," Jauregui said.

Contact staff writer Gary Warth at (760) 740-5410 or gwarth@nctimes.com.

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