The pastor of St. Stephen Church reclaimed the San Francisco parish’s defunct baptistery room by commissioning a floor-to-ceiling mural awash with scenes of Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan River.
Father Anthony La Torre approached Catholic artist Stefan Salinas last year with the idea to "awaken the space’s true nature.” Salinas completed the work just before Christmas and well in advance of the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord Jan. 12.
Father La Torre told Salinas his goal was to make the baptistery functional again after baptisms were moved in recent years to the sanctuary.
When cabinets were installed in the underused room, he said it made the room where the baptismal font sat “look like a storage room.”
Salinas conceived and hand-sketched the mural with the intention of timelessly connecting Jesus’ baptism by St. John the Baptist with all baptisms, past, present and future.
One way he accomplished this was to merge visual elements of Christ’s life with those of the Bay Area’s natural world.
Friends and family are seen gathered at the river’s edge looking on at Jesus and John in the river, but they are surrounded by coastal scenes of the Pacific Ocean and local flora and fauna.
“We are standing in the Holy Land, and at the same time we are right here in San Francisco,” Salinas said.
The mural also includes visual allusions to Scripture, such as the fishermen seen dragging a net, a nod to Christ’s call in Matthew 4:19 to, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”
“Standing in the room, it is as if we are also standing in the water,” said Salinas, who converted to Catholicism in 2011. “Another reminder of our baptism.”
There is a little white dog seen in the mural that is significant too, though perhaps only to Father La Torre, who requested it be included. Vito is the pastor’s terrier and omnipresent companion.
The baptistery is not Salinas’ first project with Father La Torre and may not be his last.
He designed a stained glass window of “St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio” for the chapel at St. Philip the Apostle Parish in San Francisco when Father La Torre was pastor there, and also did a mural for St. Philip School. He has also been commissioned by Church of the Visitacion, Most Holy Redeemer and St. Agnes parishes.
- Christina Gray, Catholic San Francisco