Mission Hosts Sale of Long-Sought Junipero Serra Stamp

Father Junipero Serra, the founder of the California mission chain, may someday be declared a saint by Pope John Paul II.

In the meantime, the priest has been honored with a different distinction: By order of the U.S. government, he is now on a stamp.

The honor was marked Friday on the grounds of the San Fernando Mission as hundreds of people gathered to buy specially canceled stamps with the likeness of the 18th-Century priest, who has been proposed for sainthood.

The 44-cent stamps, released Thursday by the U.S. Postal Service, feature a portrait of the missionary, with an outline of the coast of California and Baja California, where Serra was in charge of several missions. Before he died, Serra founded nine missions, and established a system in which 12 more were later founded.

‘Quite an Achievement’

“It’s actually quite an achievement,” Msgr. Francis J. Weber, director of the mission and the archivist for the city’s Roman Catholic archdiocese, said of the stamp. “Statistically, you might say it’s easier to become canonized.”

Weber’s good-natured remarks were pretty much the rule at the casual gathering at the mission, which was staged by the Postal Service and local Rotary clubs.

The ceremony, which followed Thursday’s official unveiling of the stamp at Mission San Diego de Alcala, was designed partly to raise money for maintenance of San Fernando Mission. The mission will receive the profits from sales of $1.50 envelopes bearing the the stamp and a local second-day postmark.

It also marked the end of a long-running struggle to put Serra on the mail. According to Weber, the effort to promote a Serra stamp has surfaced and resurfaced for nearly 30 years but met a number of official snags. Serra was not a U.S. citizen, and stamps commemorating foreigners are rare, Weber said.

Speaking as an archivist, Weber said the bureaucratic roadblocks gave way in 1984, at the suggestion of President Reagan. As a result, there soon will be 163 million Serra stamps on the market, priced to pay the cost of a standard overseas mailing.

Speaking as a priest, Weber said he was pleased with the stamp. Serra, he said, deserves secular recognition for his trailblazing efforts, as much as he merits attention for his life as a religious figure.

And on Friday, for a time, he got it. The ceremony at the mission drew a long line of mostly local residents, some of whom bought several sets of the commemorative stamps.

The ceremony soon will be duplicated at other missions in the California system, Weber said.

But Weber added that there was one man who might have been bothered by the hoopla.

“Father Serra wouldn’t have liked this,” he said. “Unlike the rest of us, he was known to be a humble man.”