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Scottsdale mission marks 75 years of history
By Ambria Hammel, ahammel@catholicsun.org
November 6, 2008
SCOTTSDALE — Several dozen Catholics who remember the early days of the Old Adobe Mission were on hand to celebrate its 75th anniversary last month.
“This church is a special house of prayer,” said Fr. Tom Hever, pastor of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish. The downtown Scottsdale landmark was the parish’s original church.
Roughly 20 families founded and built the mission in 1933. Many of their descendants were on hand for the Oct. 14 celebration Mass and reception.
Sr. Alice Ruane, SSC, pastoral assistant at Our Lady of Perpetual Help, invited each family forward after Mass to thank them for their service. Fr. Hever presented the families with a scaled replica of the mission.
“I was a little girl when my father was building this church,” Maggie Fabian Castillo said.
Her family came to Arizona in 1932 and by the following year, her father and a few other men had made enough adobe bricks for the mission to open. It was Scottsdale’s first Catholic church.
With 4,000 handmade bricks and several stained glass windows lining the left and right side, the old mission resembles San Xavier del Bac near Tucson.
Bernabe Herrera, a tinsmith by trade, created 15 stained glass windows for the mission. All of them were restored and re-installed in their original location.
Efforts to restore the mission began in 2000 when the City of Scottsdale asked Fr. Hever what he planned to do with the building. The mission sat relatively vacant since 1956 when a growing Catholic population moved to a new church less than a mile away.
Fr. Hever pulled together a committee of nearly a dozen Catholics, many of whom are long-time parishioners, to lead restoration efforts.
“They’re the ones who pushed this whole thing through,” Sr. Alice said.
The first of four phases of the restoration effort began in 2005 with repair work on the adobe, landscaping and a fresh coat of paint. Volunteers re-opened the courtyard as a reception area.
One of the mission’s original pews remains on display. Each family crafted and maintained its own pew. Worshippers who come for ecumenical services, quinceañeras, weddings and other commemorative events, now kneel at pews salvaged from another chapel.
Marianne Cox donated a week’s worth of her time and materials from her Scottsdale decorating company to restore the mission’s altar.
She found the bottom half of the marbled altar withered, but the top half in good shape. Cox wasn’t sure if she could do the project.
“It’s very difficult to match another artist’s work,” Cox said, but with a bit of painstaking effort to match the light vein pattern that runs through the piece, she got it done. “You can’t tell which is the original and which is mine.”
Some 10,000 tourists and local Catholics visited the mission last year and Sr. Alice said many return to admire the progress of the restoration.
“We’re thrilled at the number of people who come in and just love the mission,” Sr. Alice said.
Restoration efforts are funded in part by a grant from the Historic Preservation Heritage Fund administered by the Arizona State Parks Board. Corporate and private donations are a large source of funding.
The restoration committee hopes to ultimately insulate the roof, install new flooring, replace doors with the original design and add air conditioning.
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