Praying for a Miracle to Close a Long Quest

Father Noel Francis Moholy was deep in conversation in a small chapel on the grounds of the Santa Barbara mission. Moholy comes here often to talk to his soul-mate and alter ego--Father Junipero Serra, the Franciscan friar and founder of the Catholic mission system of California.

Of course, the friar has been dead since 1784, but that hardly lessens the intensity of Moholy’s interaction with Serra. On this day, Moholy was brooding about some bills he had run up in his quest to get Serra canonized as a saint.

As usual, Moholy got right to the point with Serra: “Look, old man,” he said, “we owe $200. . . . You better do something about it.”

It’s the kind of informal chat that Moholy has undertaken daily with Serra. For almost half of his life, the 79-year-old California-born priest has worked to get Junipero Serra canonized. The journey has defined his professional and spiritual life.

As Serra transformed California, so Moholy has tried to conquer Rome--or the arcane bureaucracy of saint-making, at least. It’s not a short expedition. This is a campaign not measured in a year of seasons but in decades--as befits the Roman Catholic Church, a 2000-year-old institution that administers change at a glacial pace.

Moholy began lobbying to get Serra put on a postage stamp during the Eisenhower administration. He was rebuffed by the Kennedy administration and was finally successful under Reagan. Now, the stamps have come and gone.

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In the meantime, Moholy has endured two heart attacks, four rounds of angioplasty and a bout of pneumonia over Christmas. He has seen Serra praised for leading a holy life of sacrifice in a frontier land and reviled as a man who virtually enslaved Indians.

But for Moholy the controversy matters little. Though he has sparred with the best of Serra’s critics, on television and in print, the real test is the Vatican’s hurdles to sainthood. So far, Moholy has managed to help guide Serra over two of the three stages in the climb to canonization: the Vatican proclaimed Serra “venerable” in 1985 and “blessed” in 1988.

Now, Moholy needs a miracle. Literally. Only evidence that someone prayed to Serra and received the benefits of a miracle will secure him the halo of sainthood. And it’s impossible to put a timeline on a miracle.

“I can’t predict that,” Moholy said, fatalistic about attaining the final victory he may not live to see. “That’s all in God’s province. I told Serra, ‘If you want me to finish the job, you better hurry up! Because I’m not getting any younger.’ ”

And how do you find a miracle?

“You pray,” he says, seated in his stucco-walled office along a shrub-lined walkway of the mission founded in 1786. “You never know how you’re going to find it.”

Actually, Moholy already has found a first miracle for Serra. That was in the mid-1980s when a nun in St. Louis, seemingly on her deathbed with lupus, prayed to Serra and suddenly recovered. Moholy interviewed the nun and her fellow sisters, collected testimony from doctors and escorted the nun to Rome to testify.

But that miracle only earned Serra beatification. It takes a second miracle to be proclaimed a saint--unless the pope waives the requirement, which is considered unlikely. So Moholy keeps looking, and as saint-watchers are fond of pointing out, it took 800 years for Bede the Venerable to get beatified.

To most historians of the period, Serra was a representative of the Spanish crown who started a mission system that destroyed Indian culture and lives. Indian residents were often whipped for running off, were compelled to do hard labor, and succumbed in droves to diseases inadvertently introduced to them by the Europeans.

To Moholy, Serra was a man who sacrificed a comfortable academic life in Majorca to bring Catholicism to an unexplored world. He endured a limp and the pain of a leg infection that never healed, waxed poetically about the beauty of the Indians and saw himself as their defender.

The harshness, Moholy contends, was a product of the times. “Serra came from a strictly disciplined society. Children were whipped in school,” said Moholy, who does not deny that Indians were whipped in the missions. (Most scholars say there is no evidence that Serra personally beat the Indians.) “Even in our day, in this country, it was that way.”

Critics of Serra’s canonization don’t buy that.

“It’s so Eurocentric to say that’s how people thought then,” said Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a professor in ethnic studies at Cal State Hayward. “The Indians didn’t think like that. They didn’t think the system was a good idea.”

“Church people usually say it was a different time, a different standard,” said Cal State Northridge professor Rodolfo Acuna, a longtime critic of Serra’s canonization. “My retort is if you’re a saint, it’s not relative to the times. You have the same standards.”

Professor Edward Castillo, a descendant of mission Indians and the head of the Native American studies department at Sonoma State University, went head-to-head with Moholy over the issue of Serra’s sainthood on a television talk show once.

“He’s no historian,” Castillo said. “We have a cordial relationship . . . [but] I wish Moholy would devote some energy toward recognizing that the Indians made the missions what they were.”

At 79, Moholy is an energetic raconteur with a shock of white hair. A second-generation San Franciscan, he was born at home and not expected to live. “I was the runt of the litter,” he says, chuckling.

He has known that he wanted to be a priest since he was 6. Today, he still wears the Franciscans’ distinctive brown robe circled at the waist with a long black beaded rosary. But each autumn he trades his sandals for closed shoes--a capitulation to old age.

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In a vocation that values deference, Moholy can be irreverent whether he is communing with Father Serra or sparring with his Franciscan superiors. He drives a 1996 Chevrolet Caprice, a gift from a benefactor, with personalized plates that read SERRA.

He once refused to divulge the finances of the Serra cause to the West Coast provincial, or head, of the Franciscan order. Technically, he can get away with this because he uses only private funds. And though he is a Franciscan priest, the Vatican gave him the job of vice postulator--a cryptic title held by those who plead cases for sainthood.

“I take my orders from Rome,” he said crisply.

Moholy inherited the job in 1958 from an ailing priest, Father Francis O’Brien, who collected most of the writings and testimony that became the basis for arguing that Serra lived a virtuous life. Until then, Moholy had been teaching sacred theology to seminarians.

At first, Moholy was just being a dutiful friend and priest when he took over the cause. But his passion for Serra grew with his admiration. “He was the greatest name in California history,” Moholy said. “And he was a winner. Everyone likes to be with a winner.”

Since then, Moholy has lived a kind of dual life. In California, he has been shuffled between Franciscan churches, not a pastor, not a teacher anymore, just the representative of an odd cause. He lived for nearly 20 years at St. Boniface in a crime-plagued downtown San Francisco neighborhood where he was mugged twice and made do with little room. “When they decided to remodel, they put me and Serra in a closet,” he grumbled.

But in Rome, he is known as a man with a mission and a title. He has walked the reverent halls of the Vatican, conferring with officials, finding out just what is necessary to get Serra canonized and how to do it.

“He gives me the impression of being a good and holy priest, dedicated to Father Serra,” said Robert Sarno, an official of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

Sarno, an American priest, won’t even hazard a guess on when Serra might be canonized. “I’m not God,” he said. “What is required from Father Serra is one miracle, granted by God.”

If tact fails Moholy, courtliness does not. He has been known to slip out of a dinner party of priests to fetch a plant as a gift for the hard-working hostess. Recently, he scoured the mission seeking a Diet Coke for an interviewer.

A chat with Moholy is a glimpse into another era; he is a priest from the pre-Vatican II era who never really changed. In the late 1960s, the provincial of the Franciscan order on the West Coast summoned Moholy to a meeting and told him to stop the cause--he wanted no more Franciscan money spent on an antiquated pursuit.

Moholy exploded. “I said, ‘You shut up right there!’ ” It had been years, Moholy told them, “since this province gave a single solitary penny” to the Serra effort. Moholy was left to pursue his cause.

And he can be bluntly politically incorrect. He still smarts over the fact that the Franciscans have given nothing to the Serra cause since 1950. “But they have millions for Cesar Chavez and things like that.”

These days, Moholy’s preoccupation is finding the crucial second miracle. On his desk is a letter from a woman in Colorado. Several years ago, when she was pregnant, doctors told her her baby would be malformed. She prayed to Serra and her baby was born healthy.

“I believe because of our strong faith and connection to Father Junipero Serra, [our 4-year-old daughter] is alive and healthy today,” the woman wrote.

There is also a letter from her physician suggesting that the baby’s healthy birth could possibly be a miracle.

“Apparently they gave him the wrong pitch,” said Moholy, a bit exasperated. “Nobody’s going to declare it’s a miracle except John Paul. What we want from him is a full medical report: ‘What was your diagnosis? What was your prognosis?’ ”

Moholy fingers the letters. “They’re a lot of things we have to get from them before it even warrants setting up a tribunal to investigate,” he said.

He sounds a bit weary.

He says he has a premonition that Serra will let him complete the campaign for sainthood--and then whisk him away from his earthly life.

“I’m fearful the day after the celebration in Rome, he’ll say, ‘This is it, boy.’ ”

Moholy laughs uneasily and goes back to work.