Road to Father Junipero Serra’s Beatification Was a Long and Arduous Journey

When Father Junipero Serra died at the Carmel Mission in 1784, his reputation for saintliness was so great that guards had to be posted at his open casket to keep people from cutting locks of his hair and pieces of his Franciscan habit to use as religious relics.

The physician who cared for Serra in his last hours, Dr. Juan Garcia, asked Serra’s good friend and biographer, Father Francisco Palou, for a square of material from the dead priest’s robe.

“With this little cloth I expect to effect more cures than with my books and pharmacy,” Garcia said.

One of the most surprising things about the beatification of the “Apostle of California” is that it has taken so long to come about. The speed with which the complex process has progressed since 1934, when Serra’s “cause” was opened, has been remarkable. On Dec. 11 the Vatican announced that the Pope has promulgated the decree of beatification--the second of three steps to sainthood. Canonization, the final step, is by no means automatic and Father Noel F. Moholy, Serra’s chief U.S. backer, declined to predict how long it might take for Serra to reach that stage.

To Moholy , one question remains: Why wasn’t the process begun 200 years ago?

“There’s no explanation,” Moholy said. “It’s ridiculous. The Franciscans missed the boat.”

In addition to Serra’s reputation during his lifetime, most of the elements required to begin on the road to sainthood were available to the church within a few years of the missionary’s death. These included a great body of Serra’s own writings-- beginning with his graduate dissertation at the Lullan University in Majorca and continuing through his extensive correspondence as founding head of the California mission system--and Palou’s full-length biography.

“It would have simplified our work” if the process had started then, said Moholy, or even made it unnecessary. “But nobody had that foresight.”

By the early 1830s, the upheaval of the Mexican revolution and its attendant anti-clericism, including seizure of all 21 California missions from San Diego to Sonoma, scattered the Franciscans and effectively eliminated Serra as a sainthood candidate for decades.

In the 1880s, it fell to a group of novelists, journalists and business boosters to begin to revive interest in the mission period of the state’s history and to ressurect Serra’s reputation. Kevin Starr, in “Inventing the Dream: California in the Progressive Era,” characterized this development as “a paradox, because the mission myth was an essentially Protestant creation for an essentially Protestant Southern California.”

The best known among this group of popularizers were Helen Hunt Jackson, author of the novel “Ramona” and scores of laudatory magazine articles like “Father Junipero and His Work,” and Charles Fletcher Lummis, former city editor of The Los Angeles Times and founder of the Assn. for the Preservation of the Missions.

Critics like Starr charged that over the next half-century this group created a romantic mystique around Serra and the Franciscan missions, in part to sell Southern California to prospective homeowners from around the country.

It was no coincidence that the mission revival took place “at precisely the period when the great real estate promotion of Southern California was being organized,” Carey McWilliams wrote in “Southern California Country” in 1946.

“The newness of the land itself seems, in fact, to have compelled, to have demanded the evocation of a mythology which could give people a sense of continuity in a region long characterized by rapid social dislocations,” McWilliams wrote.

This “myth,” according to Starr and McWilliams, required considerable white-washing of the treatment of California’s Native Americans at the hands of the Franciscans, given the precipitous drop of the Indian population who lived within the missions.

By 1934, the Catholic Church had formally opened Serra’s cause, and Franciscan historians and Catholic lay people picked up his standard from the Protestants. Two extremely dedicated and energetic Franciscan priests, first Father Eric O’Brien and then Moholy, were appointed to serve as Serra’s vice postulator, or chief supporter in the United States, and gather the required documentation for the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

The critics’ principal argument, that Serra was essentially an emissary of empire, paving the way for Spanish colonial rule, was dismissed. Their thesis that Serra’s celebrated fight for an “Indian Bill of Rights” was simply a power struggle with Spanish civil and military authorities for control of the main supply of cheap labor in the new colony was also discounted.

Over the next 50 years, as in the previous half-century, Serra’s most effective backers among the laity were people of wealth, power and influence. If Serra is ultimately canonized, Moholy acknowledges, he will be as much the patrons’ saint of California as its patron saint, in light of the more than $1 million the cause has cost to date.

Moholy recognized another lever to push Serra forward in the early 1980s, when the increasingly peripatetic Pope John Paul II began a custom of celebrating beatification Masses for sainthood candidates during visits to their native countries. In 1985, the Pope named Serra venerable, the first of the three steps to sainthood, and Moholy learned shortly thereafter that the pontiff was planning to visit Monterey and the Carmel Mission in the fall of 1987.

The remaining issue before the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in the two years between the declaration of venerable and the scheduled papal visit was verification of a miracle performed through the candidate’s intercession, which is required to elevate a candidate from venerable to beatified. In Serra’s case, that meant the recovery of a St. Louis nun who had a severe case of lupus erythematosus 27 years ago after praying to Serra for help.

Here again, the assistance of wealthy Californians was helpful, sometimes in small ways. One prominent lay member of the Diocese of Orange paid a courtesy call on the congregation in 1986 and asked how the Serra cause was progressing. When he was informed that it would move somewhat faster if the office had a new photocopying machine, the man wrote out a check for $3,000.

In his lobbying in Rome, at the congregation and elsewhere in the Vatican, Moholy and the Franciscans emphasized the Pope’s schedule in urging the prompt consideration of his medical documentation of the miracle. Although observers say this approach was effective in moving Serra’s cause through the congregation’s labyrinthian machinery, the process was not completed in time for the Pope’s September visit to Carmel. By late July, the congregation’s work on the Serra cause was completed, except for a final decision by the full body. But by then many of the cardinals and bishops who are members had already left Rome for the summer.

Moholy and others vainly urged the Pope to bypass the last requirement--formal session of the Congregation and approve the beatification. There has been speculation since that--with demonstrations by Jews, Catholic women and gays during the U.S. visit already in prospect--the possibility of additional demonstrations in Carmel by Native American Catholics convinced the Vatican that there was little to gain by shortcutting the procedure.

In any event, on Aug. 7 Dr. Joaquin Navarro Valls, the Vatican spokesman, announced that “The normal procedures (leading to beatification) have not been completed yet, and there is not sufficient time to complete them before the visit.”

Although Serra’s California supporters were disappointed, the Pope seemed to signal his feelings about the beatification through glowing remarks about Serra to a gathering of Native American Catholics in Phoenix on Sept. 14, and again at Serra’s grave at the Carmel Mission basilica Sept. 17.

In December the final announcement came: Sometime next year, Junipero Serra will be beatified in Rome.