Father O’Brien, Crusader for Serra Sainthood, Dies

Father Eric O’Brien, who originated the movement to gain sainthood for Junipero Serra, the Spanish missionary who founded California’s first Catholic missions in the 18th Century, will be remembered as a kind, hard-working man at his funeral today, friends and colleagues said.

O’Brien, who had been in ill health in recent years, died Saturday of pneumonia at the Mission Santa Barbara infirmary. He was 78. Funeral services are scheduled for 10 a.m. today at the mission.

“He was such a brilliant fellow. He put a tremendous amount of work into the Serra cause. He was the one who put it together,” said Father Noel Francis Moholy, 75, O’Brien’s successor as Serra’s vice postulator, the Franciscan order’s chief promoter for an individual sainthood candidate.

Moholy described O’Brien as both a private and outgoing person.

“I regarded myself as a close friend,” he said. “He was ordained only three years ahead of me. . . . He was a difficult man to get to know personally. It was his temperament. . . . He didn’t have many close friends. He was very private, but he also had gregarious qualities.”

Church officials credit O’Brien as being one of three Franciscan priests responsible for persuading Pope John Paul II to declare Serra “venerable,” the first of the three steps to sainthood, in May, 1985.

The other two priests who have championed the missionary’s cause are Moholy, Serra’s vice postulator for 32 years, and the late Father Maynard Joseph Geiger, author of the definitive biography of Serra.

Serra was beatified--the second stage to becoming a saint--by the Pope in 1987. Beatification requires the recommendation of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints and approval by the Pope. O’Brien attended the ceremony.

Serra was known as the “Apostle of California” for founding the first nine of the state’s 22 Catholic missions from 1769 until his death in 1784 at the Mission Carmel.

But Serra also has detractors. Some historians say the missionary was brutal to the Indians, enslaving them in his effort to convert them to Christianity and replace their “primitive” cultures with Western civilization.

Serra’s defenders dispute those claims, saying he treated the Indians with kindness, risking his health and safety to ensure their salvation.

The anti-Serra movement is full of “Johnny-come-latelys” who have been discredited in the academic world, Moholy said. “Serra was a soul of kindness and consideration” who treated the Indians fairly, albeit paternally, he said.

“There were abuses, no doubt,” including preventing Indians from leaving the missions once they accepted Christianity, but Serra had asked the Indians’ permission to build his missions on their land and was responsible for persuading Mexico to enact laws to protect Indians in California, Moholy added.

“He described the Indians as a beautiful and proud people. He gave his life for them,” he said.

It was this fiery tapestry of the Golden State’s history that interested O’Brien, who in 1938 began his research of Serra’s life. It was a odyssey that would last 16 years and take the Franciscan priest around the world--sometimes on airplanes, sometimes on mules--in his attempt to trace Serra’s footsteps during the 18th Century.

Father Herman Schneider remembered O’Brien, the son of a Pomona carpenter, as an excellent student during their years as mission classmates and young priests in the 1930s.

“He was first-rate, one of the best students at the mission,” said Schneider, who did not see O’Brien again until recently at the Mission Santa Barbara.

O’Brien, Serra’s vice postulator until 1954, in recent decades watched in anonymity as the canonization effort of Serra continued.

Moholy described canonization as a complicated legal process that requires a great deal of dedication and persistence on the part of vice postulators, qualities that O’Brien had in abundance.

“He started the (Serra) cause. He assembled all the evidence. It was a tremendous task” for O’Brien to coordinate and present that historical information to a theological history commission in 1949, Moholy said.

Later that year, O’Brien was in New York on church business when he was seriously injured in a car crash that killed a fellow priest who was a close friend, Moholy said. O’Brien spent a year recovering from his injuries, which may have contributed to his later health problems, Moholy said.

During O’Brien’s convalescence, Moholy assisted in the Serra cause, and from 1950 to 1954, while O’Brien was doing research in Rome, Moholy assisted by conducting research in the United States.

In 1954, O’Brien was removed as Serra’s vice postulator by a church official who apparently believed he was moving too slowly. In a Times article in 1987, O’Brien said the move was a painful memory and he declined to discuss it. Franciscan officials had praised his work, but a church official who asked not to be identified said the replacement was a mistake based on a “rather hasty judgment.” The post was vacant until Moholy was named vice postulator in 1958.

Novelist Irving Wallace, in a 1965 collection of essays titled “The Sunday Gentleman,” wrote a profile of O’Brien called “Saint Detective.” In the profile, first drafted in 1949, O’Brien was described as a tall, solid, vigorous young man “who looks like a Notre Dame halfback.”

O’Brien’s dedication to Serra’s cause, Wallace wrote, was so complete that his daily schedule and exhaustive research--which took him throughout California, Mexico, Italy, Spain and Portugal--”would give an automaton a nervous breakdown.”

In appreciation of O’Brien’s efforts, the town of Petra, Majorca, Serra’s birthplace, declared him an adopted son on Oct. 31, 1946.

After stepping down as Serra’s vice postulator, O’Brien preached, counseled and did administrative tasks at various Franciscan retreats throughout California before serving as associate pastor of Misison San Luis Rey in Oceanside from 1977 to 1987. The mission was founded in 1798.

Moholy said it was a shame that O’Brien, whom he described as a superb writer, had little of his historical research on Serra published.

“He had a beautiful pen, but he was such a perfectionist that he feared publication,” Moholy said. “Everything human has some frailties, some imperfections, but he never got over that fear.”