This column comes from sunny California, where Brother Maximilian Maria and I have just begun a two-state Catholic America Tour. Our first full day here in Blessed Junipero Serra country started with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in the traditional rite. It was offered at the lovely little Church in Guasti, California, called San Secondo d’Asti.
The church was built in or around 1920, so that its terrestrial patron, Signore Secondo Guasti, and his vineyard-workers could have a convenient place to worship. It is a replica of the church in Asti, Italy, whose heavenly patron was Saint Secundus (San Secondo, in Italian). This saint is the subject of a lovely stained-glass window above the altar. Guasti, California is named after Secondo Guasti, who started here what used to be the world’s largest vineyard.
Besides the window of its titular saint, San Secondo’s features a stained-glass window of Our Lady of Fatima. This is remarkable given that the apparitions took place only three years or so before the church was built. Two framed papal blessings, from Pius XI and Benedict XV, are prominantly displayed in the church. The one of Benedict XV has a papal zucchetto in the frame above the Holy Father’s photograph.
The Joseph Filippi Winery, which apparently procured Mr. Guasti’s vineyards, named their line of altar wines, “Guasti Sacramental Wines.”
On their web site, they briefly tell the story of Signore Secondo Guasti:
Guasti arrived in Los Angeles in 1878 from the Italian Piedmont via Mexico, an unschooled, penniless youth. He shoveled coal in the freight yards, cooked in a restaurant, married the owner’s daughter, and saved enough to start a small Los Angeles winery and to buy a vineyard in West Glendale. On occasional visits to the Cucamonga Valley, he noticed that the winter floods from the mountains flowed only as far as the desert and there disappeared. It occurred to Guasti that there might be water beneath the desert sand. One day he found a scraggly vine growing in the parched waste. Borrowing a shovel, he dug to find its root. Legend says that he discovered moisture after digging down twenty-four feet. Back in Los Angeles in 1900, Guasti organized the Italian Vineyard Company, selling shares to his countrymen. He bought eight square miles of the Cucamonga desert, built fences against rabbits, and planted a hundred varieties of grapes. He brought whole families from Italy to till the land and built an Italian town-which he named Guasti-with its own school, inn, general store, fire house, post office, and a church as lovely as those in the Italian countryside. Others planted in the desert, and more wineries were built. In 1911, Captain Paul Garrett acquired his 2000 acres at Cucamonga to grow grapes for Virginia Dare wine. By 1917, Guasti was advertising the IVC vineyard as “four thousand acres, the largest in the world.” San Bernardino County had 20,000 acres of vineyards, more than in Sonoma and twice as many as in Napa County-when Prohibition came in 1920.
