Ecclesiastical ‘Pack Rat’ Has His Eye Set on a Papal Prize

He runs the church’s attic.

And this month, the man who calls himself “an ecclesiastical pack rat” will be angling discreetly for one more souvenir for his trophy cases: a little something from Pope John Paul II.

“I’m sure this Pope will say, ‘Oh, here’s another guy who wants my hat,’ ” said Msgr. Francis J. Weber, director of the San Fernando Mission and archivist for the Los Angeles Archdiocese.

“I can’t tell you what I’m going to try for,” said Weber, who would relish the offer of the unmistakable white papal zucchetto, or skullcap. “I’ll take anything I can get.”

Archives in San Fernando

On Sept. 16, the Pope will spend more than five hours at the San Fernando Mission complex, where the archives of the largest Catholic archdiocese in the United States are kept under Weber’s meticulous care. The Pope is not scheduled to visit the little museum, but “we’d be delighted if he dropped in,” Weber said.

Al Antczak, editor of the archdiocese newspaper Tidings, for which Weber writes, calls him “a high-level scavenger. . . . I figure he’s plotting” for a papal objet for the collection.

For Weber, the job of a lifetime also turned into a lifetime’s job. He is archivist to the only U.S. archdiocese with a separate archives building, and he has spent the last quarter of a century organizing the Southland’s 200 years of religious documents, something he initially estimated would take only five years.

“When I took over there was nothing,” he said. Now there are hundreds of thousands of documents, ordered and filed and microfilmed, which are consulted on an appointment-only basis by everyone from scholars to movie companies.

Assorted Objects

But history does not exist solely on paper, and over the years Weber has accumulated such venerable and varying artifacts as Pope Pius XII’s fuzzy-topped suede slippers, a bit of metal trim from the coffin of John A. Sutter (of Sutter’s Mill), a rosary of Holy Land olive pits; the napkin ring of the fourth bishop of Los Angeles, a 1928 campaign button for Al Smith, the first Catholic presidential candidate, and a 42-pound African elephant tusk engraved with Cardinal James Francis McIntyre’s coat of arms.

Housed in a library-gallery in the two-story archives and open to the public two afternoons a week, the collection became a collection almost inadvertently, in part as a storehouse for the plaques and honors that important personages--secular or ecclesiastical--invariably accumulate.

Odds and Ends

Among the artifacts is Cardinal Timothy Manning’s red plastic desk pad, adorned with two Swiss Guard dolls, from the 1978 papal elections. On shelves and in cases are keys to a dozen cities, a wood carving of Don Quixote and a plaster bust of Geronimo, and on one top shelf is a mortar and pestle trophy that Rexall Drug Co. once presented to McIntyre.

Beyond the items of value even in the secular world, such as bejeweled rings and crucifixes, the more cherished objects include a bone fragment from Father Junipero Serra, who is one step along on the three-rung ladder to sainthood, and a piece of nail from his original coffin.

“A museum becomes self-perpetuating,” said the droll, 54-year-old historian; once it is established, it becomes the repository of both the valuable and “a lot of things, as you say, people might otherwise throw away,” unmindful of their use as historical footnotes.

Weber’s own office is hardly a paean to technology. He has written many of his fourscore historical books on a bulky early IBM electric typewriter with the stately posture of a dowager duchess; his typing technique, he said, smiling, is “seek and ye shall find.”

A Wide Assortment

Like any attic trove, the collection runs from the sublime to the whimsical, such as the popular, amusing photo of John Paul II peering at photographers through his circled fingers, and a tiny Washington Monument made from $5,000 worth of worn-out, burned, chopped-up U.S. currency.

It contains other ashes, too--these from the concentration camp of Auschwitz, where a now-canonized Polish priest took the place of another prisoner in a death line, and a replica of a nail used in the Crucifixion that on May 16, 1871, touched one of the original nails, according to the attached note.

Not for nothing did Weber learn tact as a young priest, at a Hollywood parish where one of the parishioners, gossip columnist Louella Parsons, would call up daily and hector Weber’s superior for tidbits on the stars.

Asking and Receiving

His favorite Biblical verse might be John 16:24--”Ask, and ye shall receive”; he has found that “you get a lot of things if you’ll ask.”

“A lot of your really important people, since they live with their greatness, probably don’t realize the value of the things they work or live with,” but they are invariably generous and accessible, he has found. “Only the pseudo-great make life miserable for you.”

Weber asked for, and got, a red zucchetto belonging to Cardinal Joseph Mindszenty, the anti-Communist Hungarian prelate who was imprisoned and then later took asylum for 15 years in the U.S. legation in Budapest.

He had planned ahead, and asked for a cardinal’s zucchetto from Rome, and when Mindszenty visited Los Angeles, “I asked him if he’d exchange his for mine, and he graciously did.”

Waiting for a Ring

One thing Weber has been trying to wangle for a long time, to no avail, is one of the 3,000 rings from the 1962-65 Vatican Council. “Some bishops were buried in them, others passed them on to their successors,” he said. “I’ve had three promises, but I’ve never gotten one yet.”

At Weber’s feet is one small, furry scrap of living history: Small Pax, the 13-year-old sheltie dog, named not for the disease, he declares, but for its mother, Pax (Latin for peace), who was born the year the Vietnam treaty was signed.

Pocky is the last of a nearly two-century line of the dogs brought by the California missionaries to herd sheep and cattle; even in its old age, Weber said, it instinctively herds a roomful of people into a tight conversational knot.

During the visit, Weber said, the Pope will unveil a plaque honoring the breed. Pocky, however, is not invited.