Article

By Ben Lilly

Dec. 19, 2023—It’s a California cliché: an old church tower peeking above the oaks. But the view glimpsed from the parking lot of Rancho San Antonio County Park and Open Space Preserve in Los Altos is anything but typical.

For one thing, there’s the ornate Chinese-inspired tower, which makes the building an almost too-perfect Bay Area fusion. And then there’s the fact that the Maryknoll residence is inhabited not by the echoes of Spanish padres, but by retired members of a Catholic non-profit, Maryknoll, headquartered in New York State.

“We are a missionary community, so we are not the average priest or brother,” says Brother Tim Raible, director of the residence. Raible grew up in Vallejo but spent his career around the world.

In Kenya he provided end-of-life assistance to AIDS patients; in the Philippines his house was strafed with gunfire multiple times while he slept, a not-so-subtle message from the Marcos regime, which the Church openly criticized. He recounts this as calmly as if he were talking about lunch. As he shares stories, fellow residents call out greetings, with Raible introducing this one as an alumnus of the Chinese prison system and that one as a fluent speaker of Bolivian Quechua.

Built in 1924, just fifteen years after the society’s birth, the Maryknoll residence was designed in honor of the first mission on which Maryknoll priests were sent: China. The upturned eaves are said to repel evil that may fall on the building.

That same year the Diocese of San Francisco built St. Joseph’s College, which stood just below Maryknoll on fields that are now laced with popular trails surrounding the Rancho San Antonio entrance. As you leave the open space preserve’s parking lot behind for the calm of the woods, you may see a plaque standing beside a suspiciously flat meadow. Here were a swimming pool, a tennis court, and playing fields.

Rich Shrieve, who went to high school at St. Joseph’s College, recalls how the students were divided into four teams: “Once a year we had a choose-up for the freshmen as to which of the four teams they would go on. And you were just sort of keeping your fingers crossed that you would get picked for the Trojans or the Bears or whatever,” he laughs. “Everybody had a rank and a sort of function. There’s the Head of Table, and then the guys at the end scrape the plates… This is 1960s Hogwarts in the South Bay.”

Walk past the plaque, toward the third-largest bay tree in California (which Shrieve says was already “a grand tree” during his school years), and you may glimpse a flash of blue among the trees. Tucked into the cool shadows of an arroyo is a rustic shrine to the Virgin Mary, crumbling and overgrown by poison oak. Shrieve sheds some light on how it may have gotten there.

“There was a little – we called it a grotto – a woodsy path along the creek, that was a devotional walkway,” he says. “There’s a devotion in the Catholic Church called the stations of the cross, and at each station there would have been something, like a sign with a marker on it.”

Destruction and Rebirth

As a shocked nation watched the news cameras cut to static during the “Bay Bridge” World Series on Oct. 17, 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake wrought havoc on the twin buildings. The belfry of St. Joseph’s College collapsed inward, killing one person. Up the hill at Maryknoll, the carved lattice of Chinese wood surrounding the altar crumbled into pieces and the monumental orange-and-teal-tiled roof separated from the top of the building and fell to the ground, landing in one piece.

St. Joseph’s College would never reopen. The Diocese of San Jose planned to develop the St. Joseph’s site into luxury homes to fund other renovations. In the end, local authorities authorized them to sell 25 percent of the parcel to developers if they agreed to give the other 75 percent to the Open Space trust.

And Maryknoll was able to rebuild. The distinctive roof visible from Highway 280 today is the same original roof tiled in 1924–albeit placed on a tower one story shorter. By that time the building had ceased to be a seminary for young Maryknoll initiates and been converted into the retirement home it is today.

The college may be gone, but Raible and his ten housemates are still not the only Catholic organization on their hill. Though the new neighbors are much quieter: Since 1971 the local diocese has run the Gate of Heaven cemetery, which also borders Rancho San Antonio.

Both these facilities are open to respectful visitors, with mass taking place at the Maryknoll chapel every day at 8 a.m. As you stroll the grounds of the cemetery and think about loved ones at rest, or sit in the Maryknoll gardens and imagine settling here after a lifetime of adventure, the through line becomes clear. We hikers aren’t the first or the only ones to realize that the woods along Permanente Creek are an ideal place to seek out some peace.

Visit Rancho San Antonio.