POWERFUL PHOTO: The San Jose Fire Department captured a poignant scene on Monday. Fire crews helping the community salvage what was left of the Holy Cross Catholic church, were able to recover a 10-foot-tall, Italian-made gilded wooden crucifix that somehow survived the 4-alarm fire Sunday afternoon. According to the SJFD twitter page, "Some call it a miracle."

The crucifix that was rescued, apparently undamaged, from the 4-alarm fire at Holy Cross Catholic Church in San José, California, has an even more fascinating history for traditional Catholic readers 

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A precious crucifix from Italy that once hung behind the altar was almost thrown away, then rescued, stored in a garage, and finally returned to the church almost 40 years later.

According to an article published in the archdiocesan newspaper The San Francisco Monitor on 9/11/1911, the first “neat little Italian church … was built in the memorable year of 1906.”  A typewritten history of the parish written in the mid 30s, which was found in the Diocese of San José's archives, stated that the church was built for “the convenience of the Italians living in St. Patrick's parish” by the St. Patrick's pastor Father J. Lally.  Since San José was at that time part of the San Francisco archdiocese, Bishop Montgomery, coadjutor of San Francisco Archbishop Riordan, formally blessed the new church on December 8, 1906.  Father Lally's completion of the Holy Crucifix Church on Jackson Street is especially noteworthy considering that his own St. Patrick's Church was destroyed by the 1906 earthquake 2 months earlier in September

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[↔] An item in the “Church News of the Week” section of

The Monitor on 9/21/1907 reported about the erection of a large crucifix over the main altar on Sunday 9/17, and it lauded the stations of the cross as “beautiful oil paintings, imported from Italy.” (The Monitor was the newspaper of the Archdiocese of San Francisco, and Holy Cross was part of the San Francisco archdiocese at the time.)

[↔] [That crucifix, which was also imported from Italy, merits a modern description in greater detail.]  The body of Christ, the corpus, is painted, and the wood of the cross is gilded.  A small painting of God the Father and God the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove is at the head of the cross, and another small painting of Our Lady with John the Evangelist and Mary Magdalen is at the foot. The arms have silvered representations of the symbols of the four Gospel writers, the lion, the eagle, the ox, and the man.

[↔] Holy Crucifix Church continued as a mission of St. Patrick's Parish until it was changed in 1911 to an Italian national parish at the same time as its name was changed to Most Precious Blood.

[↔] After a new, larger stucco church was dedicated in 1920 [...], the old church was used for catechism classes and parish offices for many years.

[↔] It was given its current name “Holy Cross” in 1928.

[↔] In 1966, then-pastor Father Joseph Bolzon C.S. installed a new altar to face the congregation.  During the remodeling, the 10-foot painted and gilded wooden crucifix that had formerly hung from the half-dome behind the altar was removed along with a Pieta and 14 painted stations of the cross. [↔] It had faded from the parish memory that the installation of the [first] crucifix and the stations of the cross had been an important event.

[↔] In 1966 the church caretaker rescued the crucifix, stations, and statues and took them home.

[↔] The crucifix in use after the remodeling was a much-smaller one that topped a gold tabernacle.  The tabernacle was kept on a table behind the altar in front of a black marble backdrop with a gold-embossed depiction of the Last Supper.

[↔] A few years [ ago  later] the caretaker died.

[↔] No one remembers what happened to the original [1906] church building [in which the large crucifix was originally hung]. [....]  It may have been razed in the early 1970s after the parish purchased adjacent properties and tore down several buildings to clear the way for a new convent and the present classrooms, which were dedicated as a CCD (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine) center on May 23, 1974.

[↔] The [caretaker's] family kept the stations and statues but circuмstances led them to contact Brother Charles Muscat, C.S., to ask if Holy Cross would want the crucifix back.  By that time the crucifix was  in  broken in pieces.  Brother Charles ’s  accepted the offer and with the help of A family member, put the pieces back together and the patched-together crucifix was hung in one of the CCD classrooms.

The current pastor Father Clair Antonio Orso, C.S., hired an art restoration expert, to restore the crucifix, which as it turns out is an irreplaceable piece of art that was originally crafted in Italy. The expert stated that the crucifix was crafted of close-grained, knot-free joined wood that was skillfully aged beforehand to prevent shrinkage, a quality of wood that would be impossible to obtain today.

[....] The restoration was complete in time to be unveiled during the Feast of the Triumph of the Holy Cross on September 14, 2005.  It was reinstalled in a place of honor behind the [ alter  altar] after almost 40 years of absence.

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Note *: All text above following this mark is from the uncopyrighted original source on the Web: <http://www.holycrosssj.com/History.html>; text after the italicized paragraph above was rearranged into chronological order; a bracketed ellipsis indicates elision; a bracketed left-right arrow (Unicode 2194 thus '↔') indicates verbatim wording moved out of its original unchronological sequence.  Bolding, italics, and color are all added. Underlined ellipses indicate those present in the original.  That Web page has photos including a well-composed one of the crucifix over a traditional altar & reredos, and a 'before' color photo attesting to the lack of damage to the crucifix as shown in the 2014 'after' photo by SJFD.

Note #: Perhaps a powerful aftershock ?   The "1906 earthquake" famously but imprecisely identified as if its epicenter had been in San Francisco, infamously occurred on April 18.