New San Jose parish built on faith, persistence

When Our Lady of Refuge Catholic Church celebrates its first Mass on Sunday, opening its wide double doors and stained-glass sanctuary to one of East San Jose’s poorest neighborhoods, seats will be reserved up front for three elderly nuns and a gray-haired monk.

They’ve been praying for this day since the mid-1990s, when they first held Mass on a dirt lot in the midst of the crime-ridden Santee neighborhood near Story and McLaughlin roads. They set up an altar in front of the communal laundry room, opening umbrellas to block the sun and rain.

Moving into rundown apartments on Tami Lee Drive, they opened their tiny living rooms for choir practice and their spare bedrooms for Bible study. Sister Miriam ran off drug dealers in the alley and took on landlords whose rentals were infested with cockroaches and mold. Brother Paco broke up gang fights and sheltered frightened children from drive-by shootings. Sister Catherine Irene, well into her 70s at the time, slept on a futon in a converted storage room with no heat.

This was an immigrant neighborhood, the newcomers found, filled with Catholics whose marriages weren’t blessed by the church, whose babies weren’t baptized, whose teenagers never received their First Holy Communion. The nuns remember when then-Bishop Pierre DuMaine, wearing full white regalia in a tall peaked hat and wooden staff, came to the vacant lot, which Santee residents dubbed “the dust bowl,” to serve Mass in 1995. He asked

the humble congregation, “What do you need?”

Esperanza Fernandez, who was raising five children in Santee, stepped forward and said: “We need a church!”

Nearly two decades and one bishop later, those prayers have been answered. The 3 p.m. dedication ceremony at Our Lady of Refuge, where Bishop Patrick McGrath will preside and a procession of 50 priests in white robes will follow, is the first new parish to open in the San Jose Diocese in 20 years.

It’s the diocese’s response to the tremendous influx of Catholics — mostly Mexican, Vietnamese and Filipino immigrants — in South and East San Jose who have been crowding into St. Maria Goretti and other parishes in the area. Our Lady of Refuge, which will now occupy a large church on Lucretia Avenue vacated by another Christian congregation, seats 1,000 — 250 more than St. Joseph Cathedral downtown. It will serve not only as a place of worship on Sundays, but also as an extension of what the nuns have been doing at the Santee Mission for years: providing a safe gathering place for young people, social services for families and lessons in English.

Along the way, the nuns and Santee families have forged deep bonds. For many who left behind their own relatives when

they crossed the border, the sisters became like grandmothers. They shared advice for family and legal problems, wrote letters of recommendation and translated traffic tickets. The families cooked them meals and invited them to quinceañeras. When Sister Miriam Daniel Fahey lost her brother, the neighbors sent flowers and attended the funeral. When Sister Catherine Irene Thoeni had a series of surgeries, they visited the hospital.

“The people here love, love all the sisters very much,” said Fernandez, 59, who first spoke up to the bishop all those years ago. “They’re my second family.”

For the nuns, being so close to family life has been a rare gift.

“We are families intertwined, this whole community,” said Sister Catherine Irene, 89, her voice breaking. “This was the most meaningful experience in my 70 years as a sister.”

Although both she and Sister Miriam, 84, recently moved to the Sisters of the Holy Names retirement center in Los Gatos, and Sister Catherine Irene now walks with a cane, they wouldn’t miss the Mass of Dedication. Brother Paco Gomes, a Marianist monk who moved back to his home state of Hawaii a decade ago, is flying in for the ceremony.

Of the original four nuns, only Sister Guadalupe Johnston, 77, still lives in the Tami Lee apartment. She runs the choir and plays the piano (she’s so petite she sits on a phone book to reach the keys). And a year-and-a-half ago, Sister Mary Becker moved to the neighborhood to help.

Sister Martha Bendorf, who started a lending library in a storage room, didn’t live long enough to see the new church.

Over the years, many city, police and nonprofit programs have worked to help the people of Santee, with varying degrees of success. Carports were torn down and apartments fixed up, but the neighborhood is still considered a “hot spot” for crime. But through it all, the humble presence of the nuns living in the residents’ midst has had a profound and lasting effect.

“I’d like to think that we still would have done good things” even without the nuns, said Kip Harkness, who ran the city’s Strong Neighborhoods Initiative program for years before joining the city manager’s office. “But I was personally moved by the sisters’ commitment. They were fierce and determined to make sure the voice of the poor and the immigrants were heard loudly. They were a living symbol that this community is not abandoned.”

In the 1990s, many Santee residents certainly felt that way. Their neighborhood was a haven for crack dealers and gangs. Sagging carports lining the back alleys provided street thugs with perfect hiding places from the circling police helicopters with searchlights.

Upon the request of pastors Tim Kidney and Kevin Joyce at St. Maria Goretti, Brother Paco began knocking on doors, inviting the residents to join the parish. He soon realized how few had received the holy sacraments. Many didn’t have transportation to the church four miles away. Some were illegal immigrants afraid to venture too far.

“We thought if they won’t come to us, we’ll go to them,” Brother Paco said. “So we decided to pack up and move over to them.”

Within a year, the four Sisters of the Holy Names, all retiring teachers from the area in their 60s and 70s, began moving in. Instead of habits, they wore simple street clothes, with crosses or religious medals around their necks. Three of them brought what Sister Guadalupe called “quiet things” — Spanish language skills, music talents, and relationships with Catholic parishes that sent food, clothes and toys.

Sister Miriam brought fearlessness. At public meetings, she berated landlords for the deplorable living conditions. In dark alleys, she chastised suspicious characters: “Do I smell marijuana? It’s not allowed here!”

She remembers hearing rocks hit the window upstairs to get the attention of the drug dealer who lived there: “He would come for Mass on Sunday, I might add.”

Chimed in Sister Guadalupe: “He asked about ashes on Wednesday!”

Faith was the focus of the Santee Mission, a religious outreach center intended to be transitional, not permanent. It was built around dedicated families yearning to practice their faith. Many in the congregation volunteered to help with liturgies, religion classes and luncheons after Sunday Mass.

Over the next 18 years, the growing outdoor Mass moved to a portable trailer at Santee Elementary School down the block, then to the school cafeteria, then on to a larger cafeteria at Kennedy Elementary nearly a mile away.

Almost 400 people spilled out the doors every Sunday for the 10 a.m. Mass. Until the final Mass there last weekend, a core group arrived two hours early to set up chairs and decorate the altar, and they stayed late to put it all back in a shed across the parking lot. Sister Guadalupe brought the statue of the Baby Jesus home during the holidays because it “suffered greatly,” she said, having broken an arm in a tightly packed storage unit.

It will have a safe home at Our Lady of Refuge.

Still, a tinge of sadness comes with the move. Children will no longer gather at the nuns’ door for First Communion classes. Choir voices will no longer waft out the windows and down the alleys of Santee. Sister Guadalupe, who has lived in the same apartment since 1995, doesn’t know how long she will stay.

“We are going to miss this,” said Laura Morales, 67, who has been part of the Santee Mission since the earliest years. “But we are going to be better over there.”

During Sunday’s ceremony, Brother Paco and Sisters Miriam and Catherine Irene will hand Bishop McGrath the key to unlock the sanctuary doors. Inside, Sister Guadalupe will be playing the piano. And the choir will be singing.

Contact Julia Prodis Sulek at 408-278-3409.

if you go

What: Dedication of the first new Catholic Church in the San Jose Diocese in 20 years. Bishop Patrick McGrath will preside.
When: 3 p.m. Sunday
Where: Our Lady of Refuge Catholic Church, 2165 Lucretia Ave., San Jose

Led by Monsignor Francisco Rios and co-pastor Brendan McGuire, Masses at Our Lady of Refuge Catholic Church will be held in three languages: English, Spanish and Vietnamese.

FUNDRAISING FALLING SHORT

A $6 million fundraising campaign to pay for the church and renovations, including large pledges from several wealthier San Jose parishes, is still $1 million short.
Because most members of the congregation have little money to contribute, many have spent recent weekends pulling weeds from the church property, offering to sew altar cloths and cooking for Sunday’s celebration. Those who would like to donate to the new church should visit www.dsj.org/ways-to-give/our-lady-of-refuge-appeal. Contact Melanie Lara at lara@dsj.org or 408-983-0246 with questions.