Oxnard community rallies to pay for $7 million church in La Colonia

Debt-free church nears completion Our Lady of Guadalupe gets a new ...

Stepping from the 40-year-old Our Lady of Guadalupe church to the new one — which is in the last stages of construction — one sees a striking difference in the light.

The old church is dark even on a sunny afternoon, while light pours into the new building from windows seen and unseen, shimmering on a white tile floor still being laid down.

"The light is wonderful," said the Rev. Roberto Saldivar, the church's pastor, on a recent tour of the construction site. "It just highlights the beauty of everything. ... The chapel is my favorite thing. It has the highest ceiling in the building, and it's so open, so it just brings you into a different prayer atmosphere."

Our Lady of Guadalupe, a Catholic cornerstone in Oxnard's La Colonia neighborhood, is on track to be finished by a self-imposed Feb. 25 deadline. Archbishop Jose Gomez, the new head of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, is scheduled to lead the first Mass there on March 28.

By the time construction ends, the church expects to have raised the last of the $7 million construction budget and cleared the last of its debt on the project, Saldivar said.

The most recent major donation was $100,000 from the Gene Haas Foundation, the charity arm of Haas Automation Inc. in Oxnard that makes computer-controlled machine tools. That brings the Haas Foundation's total contribution to $1.1 million, Saldivar said.

"We were planning to just have concrete floors because that's all we could afford, but that $100,000 grant paid for the tile floor," Saldivar said. "We just had to match it by raising our own $100,000, and we did."

Gene Haas, founder of the company, said former Ventura County Supervisor John Flynn, a member of the church's fundraising committee, approached him about donating years ago when planning was starting for the new church.

"I said I'd be glad to help, and he came up with a round figure of about a million dollars," Haas said.

Haas isn't a parish member but was raised as a Catholic.

"A lot of the workers here (at Haas Automation) go to church there, so it was just kind of a community thing," he said. "Someone asked for help, and we did what we could."

Haas' willingness "to donate whatever amount we needed was truly incredible," Flynn said in a statement.

Most of the money for the project came from parishioners of the church, which is in one of the poorest sections of the city. The Archdiocese of Los Angeles, which includes Oxnard, loaned the parish the money, but Our Lady of Guadalupe has been paying it back with the donations, Saldivar said.

"This community has generated over $5 million," he said. "We're talking about agricultural workers and these very humble people. ... It's not easy to raise that much money in a poor parish."

When the project ends, parishioners will have a good deal more elbow room. Saldivar said the church now holds about 600 people. To accommodate them, Our Lady of Guadalupe holds 11 Masses every weekend and two on most weekdays.

"It's standing-room-only most of the time," he said.

The new facility is about 17,000 square feet and will hold 1,300 people. Saldivar said he will cut back to nine Masses per weekend.

About 90 percent of church services are conducted in Spanish, Saldivar said. He hopes the new church will prompt some English-speaking people who live nearby to visit.

"We do have a couple of bilingual Masses and one in English, and we would like to do more," he said.

When the new church is done, the old one will be converted into a parish hall for meetings and other events. The existing parish hall will be turned into offices.

Then Our Lady of Guadalupe will focus on its school, which sits in the shadow of the new church. It needs to be renovated, which will cost about $4.5 million. The parish will start fundraising for that project as soon as it's finished with the new church.

"Now we start over and do it again," Saldivar said.

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Oxnard community rallies to pay for $7 million church in La Colonia