As I walked into St. Boniface Catholic Church, it struck me that I was entering one of the largest churches I've been into in California.

The Anaheim church — located a mile and a half from Disneyland — traces its history back to 1860, when an adobe chapel named for St. Anthony was erected on the rancho of Don Bernardo Yorba.

The chapel was never big enough to gain parochial status, though it served Catholics in what became the city of Yorba Linda for a number of years. In the 1870s, the parish of St. Boniface was established in Anaheim and San Antonio was made a mission of the church that it predated.

The second-oldest parish in the Diocese of Orange (the eldest being Mission Basilica San Juan Capistrano), St. Boniface had wide parameters at the turn of the century. In the 1899 Diocese of Monterey and Los Angeles directory, the description of St. Boniface reads, “The Anaheim parish includes the whole of Orange County and has, therefore, an area of 730 square miles.”

The population of the county and the parish grew, requiring construction of a new church and, in 1887, the establishment of another mission church. Our Lady of the Rosary was built in Santa Ana, which became the county seat. The “new” St. Boniface Church was a Gothic masterpiece 100 feet long and 42 feet wide, but soon enough the parish had outgrown it. In 1919 a contract was given for construction of the east and west wings.

As the Catholic population in the county grew, so too did anti-Catholic sentiment. One news report describes a fiery cross, set ablaze by the Ku Klux Klan, burning before the doors of St. Boniface. KKK activity was relatively minimal throughout the county, however, and St. Boniface remained safe, faring better than its mission church. Our Lady of the Rosary was destroyed by fire in 1896 under mysterious circumstances; some speculated that the anti-Catholic American Protection League might have been behind it.

In 1960 the parish built the St. Boniface Church that today faces bustling Lincoln Avenue, one of Anaheim's many major streets. The church plant — including a rectory, parish hall and St. Boniface School — is tucked in among historic homes and tiny offices near Interstate 5.

Even on peaceful afternoons, when the church is dotted with people silently praying for their petitions before the altar or in one of the church's shrines, the sound of traffic zooming past makes an interesting counterpoint. At 6:30 a.m. Mass on a weekday, however, the shuffle of worship-pers and the boom of the homily drown out any sounds from the world outside.

Boniface's Bigness

The décor is an unusual but reverent combination of traditional and contemporary. On the left side of the church is a shrine to Our Lady of Perpetual Help, always bursting with flowers; in the back of the church is a chapel for Our Lady of Guadalupe. The temperature here is noticeably warmer than in the rest of the high-ceilinged church, as flickering candlelight dances before statues and portraits of the Blessed Mother. The church's Stations of the Cross are painted directly on the walls, and the altar is a simple, black marble arch atop black marble steps.

Furnishings and decorations are not the only things that have changed. The parish's demographics, too, have shifted over the decades. Anaheim's first Catholics were mostly Mexican laborers hired to lay out the German settlement that was established in the heart of the former Spanish rancho. (Boniface has a strong connection to the German community; born in Devonshire, England, in the seventh century, he served out his priesthood in Germany, where he was eventually killed by pagans.) Later, St. Boniface's parish rolls included German surnames as well as Spanish and those of many other cultures.

Today, the parish offers five Sunday Masses in English, four in Spanish and one in Vietnamese. And even at the earliest weekday Mass, virtually every culture in the diocese is represented in the pews of St. Boniface.

Together they gather beneath the long vivid windows, each one with a purpose: naming the sacraments, illustrating Bible verses, painting the history of our faith.

Just as with the church itself, it is not the size of these windows that makes them so impressive — though their dramatic length is certainly that.

As I worshipped with the parishioners of St. Boniface, it seemed to me that it isn't the size of church or even its history that makes it a vital part of our Catholic heritage. It is the depth of parishioners' faith, then and now, that makes this Orange County church so striking.

And, of course, it is the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist — reserved here in a lovely tabernacle, as in so many other Catholic churches and chapels around the world — that turns a house of worship into God's own home.

It's an obvious distinction, to be sure — but one St. Boniface (feast: June 5) would have given his life to defend. “In her voyage across the ocean of this world,” the bishop and martyr wrote in the early 700s, “the Church is like a great ship being pounded by the waves of life's different stresses. Our duty is not to abandons ship but to keep her on her course.”

Elisabeth Deffner writes from Orange, California.