The San Antonio Mission is frozen in time even while retrofitting for the future.

In 1749, Junipero Serra took the first of what would be many long walks. Assigned to perform missionary duties in the New World, he arrived in Veracruz, Mexico and walked 240 miles to Mexico City. Twenty years later, he established the first mission in what was then Alta California, in San Diego, and the year after that, a second mission in Carmel. In 1771 that he walked down the Big Sur coast and across the mountains near King City, and established Mission San Antonio de Padua.

It was the first mission without a fort – ironic given that today, Mission San Antonio is an island of Diocese-owned property surrounded on all sides by Fort Hunter Liggett. The base, some 167,000 acres, was once property of William Randolph Hearst contiguous to where Hearst Castle is in San Simeon – he donated part of his Milpitas Ranch back to the mission, and in 1940, facing financial hardship, sold the eastern part of his property to the U.S. Army for training for World War II.

“It’s a blessing now to be surrounded by the military because we don’t have the same kind of problems a lot of missions have with people coming in and vandalizing or trespassing,” says Mission Administrator Joan Steele. “Because of that, it’s peaceful.” (The vandalism, she says, has been on the rise since Serra was canonized in 2015.)

The animus toward Serra in this century comes from missionaries’ enslavement of Native Americans, who lived in this area well before Serra developed Mission San Antonio. There’s a small cemetery on the grounds where Salinan people were buried; it’s overgrown and there are no visible grave sites, and it’s only inside the mission’s museum that visitors learn some 1,000 people were buried within these walls – perhaps on top of each other. Archaeological remains include an aqueduct and irrigation system, a millhouse, a tannery.

There is an active parish, with some 35 regulars at Sunday mass, but the peacefulness of the place comes through mostly in the mission’s other role, as a nondenominational retreat center.

“We have psychiatry groups, artist groups, writers, painters,” Steele says, estimating only about one-third of guests are Catholics. “It’s supposed to be educational or spiritual in nature; it’s not a hotel.”

One university group asked about outlets for computers they planned to bring; Steele told them she wouldn’t give them the Wi-Fi password. “With teens, the first thing we do is confiscate the phones,” she says. “They come unglued Friday night, but then they go, ‘I’ve been going to school with this kid for four years and didn’t even know who they were.’ They get back to being able to hear their own thoughts.”

On a recent Saturday night, there are only four of us staying overnight, plus a caretaker we never even see. The loudest sound at night is a distant owl, and in the morning we see a coyote and a flock of wild turkeys just outside.

There are also two friendly black cats who live in the garden courtyard, Hope and Joy. (One snuck into the sanctuary overnight during our stay, and was discovered in the morning just before mass, high up on a statue on the altar, after leaving paw prints all over the place.)

But these cats get a pass; they’re the niece and nephew of Rosario, the original mission car who died in 2017. Steele wrote a short book about him titled Mission San Antonio de Padua’s Holy Cat, available in the mission gift shop. “[God] speaks to us through the animals that he allows into our lives,” she wrote. “Rosario has been a wonderful ambassador for our mission and for God’s unconditional love.” To honor the beloved feline, Marin’s Vineyard, a nearby winery with a tasting room at the Lockwood Store, made a wine called Rosario’s Red.

The cats occupy a garden that’s about to be torn apart as part of a $15 million retrofit and remodel. (Less glamorous phases of the work – low-flow toilets, seismic safety, accessibility improvements – have already been completed.)

In the garden, some 300 rose bushes are about to be torn out so new irrigation pipes can go in; benches will be added; the fountain will be repaired and deepened, and will have fish.

“The garden should welcome you in,” Steele says. “The garden says ‘look at me,’ it doesn’t say ‘come in,’ which is what a garden should say.”

Yet hundreds of people, from small groups seeking solitude to families of fourth-graders studying mission history to confirmation students come here every year, generating some $250,000 in revenue annually. The dorm-style rooms go for $60/night for adults and $30/night for children under 12.

“Our retreat center income is what keeps this parish open,” Steele says. “I’m booking into 2021 right now.”

MISSION SAN ANTONIO DE PADUA is open 10am-4pm Tuesday-Sunday. Located on Mission Road in Jolon. 385-4478, missionsanantonio.net.