‘Official’ Pilgrimage to Vatican Disputed : Competing Tours to Serra Beatification Mass Create Friction

Less than two months before Pope John Paul II is scheduled to beatify Father Junipero Serra, moving the 18th-Century missionary one step closer to sainthood, at least seven separate California tours are competing for the patronage of pilgrims who will attend the colorful Vatican ceremony.

Travel agents for the various packages estimate that more than 400 Californians will be traveling to the Sept. 25 beatification in groups, with perhaps an equal number, such as Los Angeles Cardinal Timothy Manning, going on their own.

Six of the tours are led by Catholic clergymen, including Bishop Thaddeus Shubsda of Monterey, who is leading a trip that is going head-to-head in Northern California with one led by Father Noel Francis Moholy, the Franciscan priest who for the last 35 years has been the chief U.S. promoter of sainthood for Serra.

Conflicting Advertising Claims

A dispute between the two clerics has erupted in the pages of San Francisco newspapers over conflicting advertising claims for the tours. Moholy and Ted Elisee, director of communications for the Monterey diocese, disagreed on which of the respective trips is the “official” pilgrimage, which can provide the best seating for the Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica as well as chances for a private papal audience.

The tour led by Shubsda is being arranged by a local travel agency and is advertised in its brochure as the “Official Serra Pilgrimage.” Serra is buried in the Carmel mission in the diocese. The brochure for the tour includes a promise of a papal audience following the beatification Mass. Elisee told a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner, “We are guaranteeing that private papal audience.”

Papal Audience Claims

That brought a rise from Moholy, whose tour, organized by the Catholic Travel Office of Chevy Chase, Md., is called the “Official Pilgrimage of the Serra Cause.” That brochure, with a color portrait of Serra on the front, lists the “hope” that members of the group will be included in “a special audience for pilgrims of many countries” with the Pope on the Monday after the beatification.

“For anyone to imply, much less to promise, a papal audience because of some sort of Curial contact, real or imaginary, is less than childish, it is fatuous,” Moholy wrote in a letter to the editor.

The papal audience, the San Francisco priest explained in an interview this week, is actually “semi-private,” and may include as many as 10,000 pilgrims from around the world.

In an interview earlier this week, Elisee hedged a bit on the audience, saying the group was still hoping for a papal meeting involving about 150 people, but he was no longer guaranteeing it. He called the dispute between the two tours “an unfortunate situation” and pointed out that the diocese’s tour flyer “does not say ‘the official.’ It just says ‘official.’ ”

He emphasized that “it is important to recall that all of us who are going are going as pilgrims and this is not a competition.”

At last tally, the two tours each had reported about 50 people signed up and were expecting to reach 75.

Moholy’s brochure also promises that, at the Mass in St. Peter’s, “select seating has been reserved for the official Serra pilgrimage.”

‘No Influence Whatever’

This was arranged through Father Juan Folguera, who oversees all the Franciscans’ candidates for sainthood in Rome, Moholy explained. “Ted Elisee has no influence whatever in that matter,” he said. “Father Folguera will be aware of who did the work on the Serra cause and who’s footing the bill.”

Moholy estimates the cost of beatification, plus the drive for the third and final step to sainthood--canonization--at more than $750,000. Most of the funds for the sainthood drive were raised by Moholy personally, although the order is paying for part of the costs of the beatification ceremony.

Msgr. Francis Weber, the archivist of the Los Angeles diocese who is leading a separate Serra tour--pointedly advertised as the “unofficial” pilgrimage--that sold out its 40 places weeks ago, agreed that as a Franciscan, Moholy should have some pull in Rome.

‘They’ll Do All Right’

“Their Mother House is in Rome and Serra was a Franciscan, so I’m sure they’ll do all right,” said Weber, who also serves as administrator of the San Fernando Mission. “I’m a poor old country priest,” Weber said. “I’ll take what I get.”

While there was no difficulty filling the 50 slots on the tour led by Los Angeles Archbishop Roger M. Mahony, which likewise makes no claim to be official, that has not been the case everywhere. Originally there were eight tours announced, but in the last week one was canceled and a second is in doubt.

The packages are roughly equivalent in cost for air fare and a week in Rome--about $1,600--with a range of different options to extend the trip, departing through Los Angeles International Airport between Sept. 18 and Sept. 22. Three offer postbeatification trips to Serra’s birthplace in Majorca. Most of the other tours offer visits to other areas of Italy.

All of the Serra tours were put together by travel agencies that either specialize in religious tours or have ongoing relationships with Catholic parishes, and most have been advertised in church publications. Some of the priests were contacted by travel agents and asked to organize the pilgrimages, while others, such as Moholy and Shubsda, took the initiative and sought bids from various agencies.

Apart from the itineraries and points of origin, each pilgrimage offers something different in its clerical tour leaders, who are known as “spiritual directors.” In general, tour operators say they do not pay the priest. Instead--like other non-religious, special interest tours--they provide the leader with a free slot on the tour.

Shubsda and Mahony provide the opportunity to rub shoulders with a bishop for a week. Moholy and Weber have written extensively on Serra’s life. Accompanying Weber’s group is Father Francis Guest, archivist of the Santa Barbara mission and one of the best known historians of the California mission system.

‘God’s Matador’

Jim Kinney of Pacific Grove, an actor who does a one-man show dressed as Serra, called “God’s Matador,” is also offering a tour. However, according to Pacific Grove Travel, which is handling reservations, there may not be enough interest to make the trip.

Not all of the priests claim special knowledge of Serra.

Father Bernard Kangley, a Carmelite who is taking about 20 people from Los Angeles, said his interest in the mission system is “kind of a hobby.” Kangley, who holds a Ph.D. in Latin and Greek, said his strength as a tour leader is that he has been taking groups to sites around the Mediterranean for 25 years and that he “knows Rome better than Los Angeles.”

Father James Kinzig of San Diego, who calls his tour the “Official San Diego Pilgrimage,” said he has had a lifelong interest in both Serra and martyred Mexican Jesuit Father Miguel Pro, who also will be beatified that day. But Kinzig claims no particular expertise on either.

In 1984, Pope John Paul II declared that Serra, who founded nine missions from San Diego to San Francisco, lived “a life of heroic virtue” and was worthy of the title “venerable,” the first of the three steps to sainthood.

Last December, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints determined that a miracle occurred when a St. Louis nun was cured of a nerve disease 25 years ago after praying to Serra to intercede on her behalf. That finding, affirmed by the Pope, qualified Serra for beatification. The final step to sainthood, canonization, would require that the Congregation verify that a second miracle occurred as a result of Serra’s intercession, although this or any future Pope could dispense with this requirement.

Moholy said that he has invited the nun, Sister Mary Boniface Dyrda, and the Mother Superior of her order, the Franciscan Sisters of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, to be his guests on the tour. Members of the order plan to attend the ceremony--Dyrda will participate in the Mass--but they have not decided how they will travel.