Ailing Priest Credited With Furthering Mission Founder’s Case : Father Serra’s Champion Watching Quest for Sainthood From Sidelines

From the sidelines, Father Eric O’Brien watches in anonymity as the effort to win sainthood for Junipero Serra--a cause he championed nearly 50 years ago--approaches a decisive moment.

Serra, known as the Apostle of California, founded the first nine of California’s 22 Catholic missions between 1769 and 1784, including Mission San Juan Capistrano.

O’Brien said that he does not know if his health will permit him to be in Monterey on Sept. 17. Pope John Paul II’s schedule was recently rearranged in anticipation of celebration of a Mass there for Serra’s beatification--the second of three steps to sainthood. Serra’s beatification requires the recommendation of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints, which is considering the matter, and approval by the Pope.

Nearing 75, O’Brien suffers the effects of circulatory problems, which sometimes make speech and concentration difficult.

“I have had injuries and other infirmities,” said O’Brien, who walks slowly and speaks haltingly. “Frankly, I’ve lost my memory.”

But enough memory and wit remain for him to recall parts of his travel and scholarly work on Serra, who died at the Carmel Mission in 1784.

The son of a Pomona carpenter, O’Brien served as Serra’s vice postulator--the Franciscan order’s chief promoter for an individual sainthood candidate--in the 1940s and ‘50s, and his eyes sparkle as he remembers his years tracing Serra’s footsteps on two continents.

“I had been interested in him since I was in high school,” O’Brien said.

For the last 10 years, O’Brien has served as associate pastor of Mission San Luis Rey in Oceanside. The mission was founded in 1798 by Serra’s successor as head of the mission system, Father Fermin Lasuen. Before that, O’Brien preached at various Franciscan retreats throughout California.

On the wall behind O’Brien’s desk chair are two mementos: a small tapestry picturing Serra and his missions, woven by the women of the parish, and a certificate declaring O’Brien an adopted son of Petra, Majorca, Serra’s birthplace, dated Oct. 31, 1946.

O’Brien said he can still recall the day the certificate was presented.

“I was young and brassy then,” he said.

Church officials credit three Franciscan priests with bringing the Serra cause as far as it has come: Father Noel Francis Moholy, Serra’s vice postulator for the last 30 years; the late Father Maynard Joseph Geiger, author of the definitive, two-volume biography of Serra, and O’Brien.

“If Father Eric O’Brien hadn’t put the Serra cause together as efficiently and as capably as he did and if I didn’t stick with it, unquestionably Serra wouldn’t be where he is today,” said Moholy, who is 70 and suffers from heart problems.

“He understood Serra,” said Father David Temple, former regional leader of the Franciscans who is now retired. “He made a tremendous contribution to the cause.”

Like Moholy and Temple, Bishop Thaddeus Shubsda of Monterey cited the critical role played by O’Brien in the Pope’s decision to declare Serra venerable, the first of the three steps to sainthood, in May of 1985.

“One of the things that made possible the declaration of venerable was that there was a Franciscan priest (O’Brien) who spent . . . years of his life researching the historical documents about Father Serra,” Shubsda said. “He put them all together to present to 11 professors of history for their evaluation.

“And once they agreed that it was actual history, then the theologians could look at that history and say, ‘Ah, he indeed practiced the virtues to a heroic degree--historically established.’ But now suppose (O’Brien) hadn’t come along. We’d still be waiting for that part of the process.”

For 16 years, O’Brien traveled throughout California and Mexico, to Spain, Italy, Portugal and Majorca, gathering material. In all, he logged more than 50,000 miles, on everything from an airplane to a mule, tracing each step taken by Serra throughout his life.

O’Brien, frequently traveling with Geiger, collected 10,000 documents, many of which formed the basis for Geiger’s biography.

Traveling California from San Francisco to the tip of Baja, O’Brien interviewed elderly members of Indian and Latino families for family reminiscences of Serra.

In 1943, O’Brien supervised the exhumation of Serra’s remains, and in 1948 and 1949 he presented Serra’s case before a Bishop’s Court in Fresno, whose charge was to determine if Serra lived “a life of heroic virtue.”

O’Brien’s work on Serra’s behalf went beyond the religious community. He gave 250 talks on Serra’s behalf, including a series of 12 in English and Spanish while in Rome, which were broadcast worldwide over Vatican radio. He edited a regular newsletter keeping track of the progress of the Serra cause.

Despite his efforts, O’Brien lost the post of vice postulator in 1954, after researching the cause for four years in Rome. The post was vacant for four years and then was given to Moholy, who worked as O’Brien’s assistant while the latter was in Rome. The circumstances of the move are still painful to O’Brien, and he declines to discuss them.

He said he is “sensitive about those times,” which included a traffic accident in which he was injured and a fellow priest was killed.

However, a Franciscan official who was present at the time and asked that his name not be used recalled that a visiting official of the order, who “did not understand the magnitude of the cause,” felt that O’Brien was not moving fast enough. The decision to remove O’Brien, the official said, was a “mistake,” based on “a rather hasty judgment.”

In a printed statement released at the time, the Franciscans said of O’Brien:

“For 16 years the zealous Friar dedicated his talents to tracing around the head of Padre Junipero Serra the halo of a Saint. Inasmuch as one man can be credited with the present happy status of the Serra cause, that individual is the former vice-postulator.”

As he watches Serra approach sainthood, O’Brien said the diminutive missionary is still in his prayers. “I talk to him,” he said softly.