Medieval church finds home in California Sacramento Valley

The New Clairvaux Abbey "chapter house" in Vina, Calif. is made from 800-year-old-stones from a Spanish medieval monastery. The New Clairvaux Abbey "chapter house" in Vina, Calif. is made from 800-year-old-stones from a Spanish medieval monastery. Photo: Max Whittaker/Prime, Special To The Chronicle Photo: Max Whittaker/Prime, Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 19 Caption Close Medieval church finds home in California 1 / 19 Back to Gallery

Vina, -- Tehama County - Father Paul Mark Schwan shivers in the morning chill of California's Sacramento Valley, a blue hooded sweatshirt layered over his monk's robes. It's almost eerily quiet at the Abbey of New Clairvaux, an order of Cistercian monks in this town 20 miles north of Chico, where Schwan serves as abbot. A blanket of mist hugs the walnut orchards as the abbot picks his way across the muddy ground.

Before him lies a surreal site: an intact medieval church with vaulted limestone walls and peaked windows, looking as if it was dropped there by accident.

"I believe these stones were going to be used as a changing room for an indoor swimming pool," says Schwan, 56, looking thoughtfully at the building. "Thanks be to God it didn't happen."

This is the famous Chapter House of Ovila - a Spanish Trappist monastery built in the 12th century, rebuilt in the 16th century and with a history so dramatic, it almost belongs in a pulp novel. Originally imported by William Randolph Hearst to be used in a grand estate that never was, the monastery stones were all but abandoned in Golden Gate Park for more than 60 years.

But through the tireless lobbying of Schwan's predecessor, and a 12-year campaign by the monks to raise $7 million for a painstaking reconstruction, those stones found a home in Vina.

To help raise proceeds for the reconstruction, in 2010 the Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. in Chico began brewing the Ovila Abbey beers, a series of Belgian Trappist-style ales, in conjunction with the monks.

This spring, the chapter house was finally unveiled. One of only a few medieval sites in all of North America, its ribbed vaults and pointed arches are classic examples of Gothic architecture.

At least another $2 million is needed, Schwan says, for window glass, floors, electricity and other basic amenities needed before the monks can use it as their church.

"Will it take another 12 years?" says Schwan. "I prefer it not."

But even in its current shell state, open to the elements, it is a triumph.

Shopping for ruins

Newspaper magnate Hearst (founder of the Hearst Corporation, which publishes The Chronicle) was a magpie of a collector who loved to marry European antiquities with grand architectural projects. By 1930, he had already collected one Spanish monastery, and a castle in Wales in which he entertained the likes of Charlie Chaplin. His castle at San Simeon, on the Central Coast, had an actual Roman temple installed as poolside decoration.

When his late mother's estate, Wyntoon, burned down in 1930, Hearst decided to rebuild it bigger and better, and directed his architect, Julia Morgan, to find a ruin he could buy.

A year later, Hearst purchased the collapsing Santa Maria de Ovila on the banks of the Tagus River northeast of Madrid. It cost $97,000.

Morgan's crew spent a year dismantling and packing up key pieces of the monastery. They took most of the chapter house, an important building where monks gathered each day to hear a chapter from the Rule of St. Benedict, the document that outlined the particulars of Trappist monastic life.

A narrow-gauge railway, 20 miles of dirt roads and a ferry were built expressly to move the stones out of Spain. Elaborate plans were drawn up, in which the ruined monastery would be rebuilt as an indoor swimming pool for Wyntoon.

"There was going to be a diving board where the altar was," says Gray Brechin, a historical geographer and visiting scholar at UC Berkeley who has studied both Morgan and Hearst.

With the Great Depression, Hearst's finances took a hit and Wyntoon was put on hold. The stones of Santa Maria de Ovila sat in crates for a decade.

Finally, Hearst decided to offload them entirely. He gifted the remnants of the monastery to the city of San Francisco, and the crates of stones were moved to Golden Gate Park. They were stacked behind the Japanese Tea Garden, with the idea that one day the ruins would be rebuilt in the park. It was never to be.

40-year fight begins

Schwan's predecessor, Father Thomas X. Davis, was a 21-year-old monk when he stepped off an airplane in San Francisco in 1955. On assignment from Kentucky, he had come to found the Abbey of New Clairvaux. But before he was driven to Vina, his father superior met him at the airport and drove him to Golden Gate Park. He wanted to show him the trove.

"Here are stones that housed Cistercian monks for probably 640 years," Schwan recalls. "And they're just in a rubble heap."

It was true. Vandals had set fire to the crates, leaving the pieces of the building exposed and charred. Many of them had begun disappearing, used for retaining walls in the Japanese Tea Garden and other bits of park upkeep.

It made an impression on the abbot, who began a 40-year fight to restore the remains of the chapter house to the Trappist community by bringing them to Vina.

"He came to one of our board meetings in his monk's habit - brown shepherd's robes with a big cross hanging around his shoulders, and made a plea" during the 1980s, remembers Harry S. Parker III, then director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which includes the de Young Museum and the Legion of Honor.

Davis' cause was championed by the late Al Wilsey, a museum trustee and a Catholic who Parker says was moved by the idea of the abbey being returned to Catholic monks.

In 1994, the city agreed to loan the stones to the abbey, under conditions that the monks take serious steps toward rebuilding the chapter house within five years, and that it be open to the public when completed.

The abbey arranged to move the stones - 19 semitruck loads' worth - to Vina, where they were housed in a building with its own history: The brick building had originally been used to store brandy produced by another of California's legendary figures - Leland Stanford, whose ranch had encompassed the New Clairvaux property.

With the help of several architects and a stonemason, the monks began putting the stone pieces back together. Limestone from a Texas quarry was used to fill in missing portions.

A dream comes true

The scaffolding came down this spring. On Good Friday, after evening prayers, the monks filed out in a processional and watched as the last support was symbolically removed from the interior of the building. A few wept openly.

"What do these sacred stones mean to this monastery?" asks Schwan. The project is "our legacy, our history. But it means something more than even that."

When you are a monk, he explains, you take a vow of stability. It weds you, like a marriage vow, to the cloister for life.

"Those monks that lived there were part of our family. Those stones are like a family heirloom. And they've finally come home."

This story has been corrected since it appeared in print.

-- The monks' beer: For more about Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.'s ales for the abbey, see the story that ran in Sunday's Food & Wine section at sfg.ly/YG669W.