"How he wished to go": priest dies while celebrating mass

That is wild ... I was thinking that they are out in the desert but they are basically the original Cities in California, I don’t know why I thought what I thought.
I visited their Websites and just WOW, I can just imagine

Thank you

(We have the Alamo, down town San Antonio)

I love FR, I learn so much

I live in Riverside CA, and any time I get the chance I go to one of the missions. They have an air that can’t be explained. My wife and I go to Mission San Juan Capistrano every year on our anniversary. No particular reason we started that other than we love it.

Roughly speaking, U.S. Highway 101 in California connects many of the missions. Just plan a road trip up the coast between San Diego and San Francisco and you can stop at many of them along the way.

Some are very close to the highway. Others would be a little side trip. We seem to visit Mission San Juan Capistrano and Mission San Luis Obispo about once a year, and pick up the others occasionally, as well. Most missions are active parishes. However, the one near Lompoc, (La Purisima?) is a state-run museum. The church is not consecrated any more. It’s still interesting, but don’t expect to attend mass there. However, there’s another mission not too far from that, Santa Inez, which is an active parish. Also, San Antonio is in the middle of a military base in the middle of nowhere. When I visited as a child, the only other occupant of the parking lot was a steer!
I like Santa Barbara’s museum the best, for it’s explanation of why and how Indians and Spanish connected with each other. I like almost any of the churches as places to contemplate.

There are 21 missions and most of them still function as parishes. They had been seized by the Mexican government during the time that California was part of Mexico after the latter country obtained its independence from Spain, and basically then were obtained by ranchers who had friends in government. Years afterwards, when California became part of the US, Abraham Lincoln restored their ownership to the Catholic Church.

Some of them have been heavily restored and some not; some have good museums and some don’t really tell you much of anything. But they are all worth seeing. We started in San Diego and then worked our way up to San Luis Obispo (I think there were 5 or 6 missions in between the two). A few years ago, we had done the Northern and Central California missions, so this completed the chain.

Here’s a good website about them: http://www.missionscalifornia.com/

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