The Christmas lesson of Visalia’s ‘Amen Corner’
At Christmas, there’s no room at your town’s inn, and you’re running short of innkeepers. What to do?
People in Visalia might suggest building a bigger inn.
This is a Christmas story about a church managing the twin challenges of shortage and abundance, and how the biggest things fit best in our smallest places.
By 2021, Visalia, a city of just 136,000, will be home to one of America’s largest Catholic churches. With more than 3,000 seats in its 33,825 square feet, St. Charles Borromeo Church will accommodate more believers than St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.
If the notion of such a large church on the southwestern edge of a small city seems jarring, it’s only because the idea is so at odds with California’s usual logic. Our state too often responds to shortages of resources by making cuts or lowering our horizons. But in Visalia, the
Good Shepherd
Catholic Parish is treating its own challenges as an opportunity to foster community and create something new.
The new church is a response to the longstanding shortage of priests, nationally and locally. In the Visalia area, three full-time priests now cover 11 weekend Masses across four Visalia-area churches. But the church has said that, with fewer priests, they can’t maintain this structure for much longer.
In similar circumstances, other Catholic dioceses have downsized and closed churches, leaving parishioners bereft. But Visalia is a rare place.
Even as population growth stalls elsewhere in California, Visalia continues growing because of its low cost of living. The city also packs an outsized cultural punch, with its own symphony, opera and good restaurants and other services for people on their way to Sequoia National Park.
While Catholic church attendance declines nationwide, in Visalia it’s been up. So for two decades, Visalia has been searching for ways to serve growing congregations with fewer priests. Today’s massive church project is a culmination of that search.
First, the small Goshen church was combined with the Holy Family parish in Visalia; then Visalia’s three parishes were combined into one area parish, Good Shepherd. But, with growth and consolidation, the churches were soon jammed on weekends.
By 2006, church leaders, city officials and the business community were talking about creating one big church to serve thousands of people, taking pressure off the priests handling multiple churches.
By 2007, the city had approved a plan for a complex, including a large church, a school and a parish hall on churchowned land at Visalia’s “Amen Corner,” the intersection of Caldwell Avenue and Akers Road.
Big churches work there. Last year, First Visalia, an Assembly of God church of 7,000 people which has been based at the corner for two decades, opened a large and new sanctuary with a capacity of 3,000. Pastor Mike Robertson says his church and the new St. Charles Borromeo might have to cooperate on service times to avoid traffic nightmares.
The Catholic complex has been slow to take shape because of the Great Recession, and the church’s struggles with fundraising. Early in this decade, the parish managed to build a parish hall on the site, and it quickly filled with worshippers. With the local economy slow to recover, the great church idea wasn’t revived until 2017, with a new plan that made the $16 million building 25 percent bigger.
Church officials have told parishioners that one grand church will allow them to offer more ministries and services with just three full-time priests and a relatively small staff. All Sunday Masses will be moved to the church, while the other parish churches will still handle services and events during the week.
At the groundbreaking, Father Cesar Solorio said that a historically large church had Biblical precedent; Jesus managed to feed 5,000 people when he multiplied the bread and the fish, the priest noted. “The priest shortage doesn’t just mean we don’t celebrate as many Masses or we close down churches,” Solorio said then. “But we open up a big one so a lot of people can be served.”
The larger hope is that the church can be a source of inspiration. It could unify the Visalia parish’s congregations in one shared place, thus creating a larger community. The church’s national prominence could attract people from across the valley and the country.
And if it inspires Californians to keep thinking big in their own enterprises, Visalia’s huge new church may prove to be a gift to us all.