The house that faith and beer built: 12th century Spanish church gets new life in Vina

Jessica Skropanic | Redding

Show Caption Hide Caption 12th century church from Spain rebuilt at abbey in Vina It was an 87-year journey from Trillo, Spain to California, but a 12th century church made it. Monks in Vina rebuilt it stone by stone.

After 24 years of planning and work, monks at the Abbey of Our Lady of New Clairvaux in Vina have a new place for contemplation.

They rebuilt a medieval church, brought from Spain more than 80 years ago by William Randolph Hearst, on abbey grounds. The project involved prayer, fundraising and beer sales.

“In a sense, the work will probably be always in progress,” said Abbot Paul Mark Schwan, pointing out how old buildings always need care.

Schwan has been at the abbey for 38 years. He saw the project from its beginning to its end on July 2. He and the other Trappist-Cistercian monks weren't fazed by a mere quarter-century of waiting.

“We’ve built for a thousand years, not for ourselves but for future generations,” Schwan said. “It’s never about us. It’s about the kingdom of God.”

Monks persuaded the city of San Francisco to give them the deconstructed Santa Maria de Óvila monastery in 1994. Resurrecting it was no small undertaking.

“We had to do some work on the stones” before we could break ground, Schwan said. “Every stone had to be studied and measured to determine its capability” to withstand the pressure and support the weight of the building.

The project required additional building materials. These included new stones to replace those missing and reinforcements for earthquake resistance. About a third of the building is made up of new materials.

"It was a big jigsaw puzzle," Schwan said.

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Workers broke ground in 2003 and finished the foundation in 2004.

“By then we had all the missing stones recurved or repaired,” Schwan said. “All the pieces were numbered and ready to go.”

But the abbey needed someone skilled in both ancient and modern architecture to put it together.

Frank Helmholz, a master mason, grew up around old buildings in Wattenberg, Germany. His high school was built over a Roman bath. At 17, he started work as a stone mason’s helper. He was invited to be his boss's apprentice after two months.

He moved to the United States in 1985 and lives in Dobbins, 26 miles northeast of Marysville.

Helmholz said structures like the church are “timeless because they were built — to not be a passing fashion. They don’t get old. If a building is used, then it’s living.”

Helmholz’s team built the exterior in 2005.

“My first involvement was facing the outside with new stone from Texas,” Helmholz said. “The Texas limestone was chosen because it’s fairly close to the original stone in color and hardness.”

Then the abbey ran out of money. Rather than incur debt, the monks wanted the interior built as donations came in, so Helmholz took a vacation — sort of.

“I visited Egypt for the first time,” Helmholz said. “I got so strongly affected by it.”

He took a job with University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute.

When the abbey called to say they had enough money to start work again in 2006, Helmholz felt torn, so his employers agreed to share. For 12 years, Helmholz spent six months in Egypt and six months at work on the church’s interior.

The abbey raised funds during the downtimes.

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Brewery hops in to help

The project, including restoration and new parts, was to cost about $10 million just for construction of the building. Grants and donations included $50,000 from the McConnell Foundation in 2009 to reconstruct the vaulted ceiling. The abbey built as money came in.

“That’s what took so long,” said Schwan, who counted the number of donors in the thousands. These included private residents, businesses, grant organizations — even beer brewer Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. in Chico.

When the abbey approached businesses to ask for donations, it crossed paths with Sierra Nevada. The brewery's owner, Ken Grossman, proposed his company produce a Trappist premium brew and give a portion of the proceeds to the building fund.

“We signed the contract in 2010 — with beer," said Schwan, who does not know how much the abbey received overall from beer sales.

Eight years later, there have been several Óvila beers, said Robin Gregory, content manager at Sierra Nevada. The brewery developed the recipes.

“We usually use some ingredients that were sourced from the property," the abbey's farm and orchard, Gregory said. These include mandarins, cherries and sage cultivated by the monks.

The money made a small dent in the budget, but the beer made a huge difference by spreading the word about the project, garnering more donations, Schwan said.

Although the church is done, Sierra Nevada plans more beers in the Óvila series. The abbey will continue to get a percent of the profits.

"Right now, we have our Óvila Abbey white ale, a Belgium Whitbier," Gregory said.

How the church got here

Perhaps an 87-year journey from Trillo, Spain, to California isn’t that long for an 843-year-old church.

The Santa Maria de Óvila monastery was founded around 1175 under the rule of King Alfonso VIII of Castile.

Monks lived there until 1835. Then came a rule suppressing any monastery that had fewer than 15 monks, Schwan said.

The monastery and its lands were sold to private owners. The church housed storage and livestock until 1931. That's when Hearst decided to build a castle on the banks of the McCloud River in Siskiyou County.

It would have been the newspaper publisher's second castle. The other is what has become the central coast destination, Hearst Castle across from Highway 1.

At the time, “Hearst had basically unlimited funds, and he wasn’t shy to use them,” Helmholz said.

Hearst purchased parts of the monastery, had them dismantled and moved the stones to California. That’s as far as they got. The Great Depression took enough of a toll on Hearst’s holdings to puncture his palace plans.

Some stones went into storage, including those from the church. Others were scattered or rebuilt throughout California. The latter include stones in Golden Gate Park's Botanical Gardens and the old church portal at University of San Francisco.

It took a lot of political wrangling for Schwan and his fellow monks to get San Francisco officials to give the Abbey of Our Lady of New Clairvaux the pieces of the church. In 1994, they agreed on the condition the monks start reconstruction within a decade. The stones were shipped to Vina.

The rest of the monastery is still in Spain, Schwan said. “It’s still a working farm and ranch with horses.”

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A surreal end

The monks didn’t wait for the church’s July 2 dedication service to use it.

“We moved in and started using it in January,” Schwan said. “The basic furnishings we needed to use were there.”

Even with the church in active use for six months, to have it finished feels surreal to Helmholz. He said he also feels gratified.

“I’m not Catholic, but I do have a strong spiritual connection,” he said. “I always felt privileged to be working on it (the church). Not many masons in this day and age get to rebuild an entire structure from the ground up. To do the whole thing, and from old stones, is pretty unusual.”

The church is open for self-guided tours from 2:30 p.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays to Saturdays. For group tours, call the monastery’s development office at 839-9936.

“It’s a huge project in faith,” Schwan said.

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