Mission Santa Clara de Asís

The Story

Fray Tomás de la Peña celebrated the first Mass beside the Guadalupe River on January 12, 1777, founding the eighth mission under Serra's direction. It was the first in California named for a woman, St. Clare of Assisi, the founder of the Poor Clares and companion of St. Francis. The Ohlone people of the Santa Clara Valley built and sustained it.

No mission moved more often. Floods, earthquakes, and fire pushed the community to six different church buildings over 150 years. Serra blessed the site of the third church in 1781. An earthquake wrecked the church in 1818, and a fire destroyed its successor in 1926. The church standing today was dedicated in 1928 and was designed to recall the 1825 building, with painted decoration reproduced from the old ceiling.

After secularization the property passed to the Jesuits, who founded Santa Clara University here in 1851, making it the oldest college in California and the only one in the state descended from a Spanish mission. The bell tower holds bells cast in the late 1700s along with one sent by King Alfonso XIII of Spain in 1929. Adobe walls, an old lodge, and the Mission Gardens survive from the earlier missions.

Church Recognition

Mission Santa Clara de Asís was founded on January 12, 1777 by Fr. Tomás de la Peña, under St. Junípero Serra as father president. It is the eighth of the twenty-one missions of Alta California, and today it is university chapel of santa clara university.

The mission was built by Native Californians, and the Church has publicly acknowledged the coercion and harm that mission life involved. That history is told in full on the California Mission Trail page, and it belongs to this place as much as its founding date does.

Go Deeper

The only California mission that serves as a university chapel, at Santa Clara University.

This mission is one of the twenty-one on the California Mission Trail, the eighth to be founded. The trail page carries the history of the chain as a whole, including the Church's own reckoning with it.