The Sunday Gentleman (14 page)

It is this memorial that the amps deserve the most: In some near future day, standing on some high civilian bookcase, a square glass container filled with yellow fluid in which floats a repulsive object—an artificial limb, once known as a “prosthesis,” a relic of an ignorant and primitive age, now no longer needed, now obsolete.

4

Saint Detective

On a brisk December morning in 1946, a tall young American priest named Father Eric O’Brien hurried through the narrow streets of Seville toward the historic library known as the Archives of the Indies.

That morning, as on twenty-five previous mornings, Father O’Brien was joined by his scholarly associate Father Maynard Geiger. Together they entered the library, where Father O’Brien filled out the necessary library slip. “Today, Señor,” he told a Spanish attendant, “we wish to see all the documents recording sailings from Spain to the New World in 1749.”

The attendant disappeared into a room containing a small portion of the 50,000 bundles of original, rare documents in the Archives of the Indies. Father O’Brien waited anxiously. After spending five consecutive years relentlessly hunting down information on one man, Father O’Brien was on the verge of solving a historical mystery by learning, for the first time, from a holograph description written when he was alive, what that man looked like.

Waiting, Father O’Brien recalled the clues leading up to this moment. He knew, first, that his subject had, in September of 1749, sailed from Cadiz, on a ship named the
Villasota
, for Veracruz, Mexico. He knew that, since there were no passports in those days. all travelers to the New World were required to clear themselves through a government agency in Seville called
Casa de Contratación
. This agency required each traveler to state his name, occupation, business. These facts were recorded along with the individual’s physical description. The question in Father O’Brien’s mind was: Had his man, his subject, been so registered? If yes, then would his man’s description be included?

When the bundle of precious documents arrived, Father O’Brien hastily untied it. With mounting excitement, he scanned and turned the stiff pages. Nothing, nothing…and then, suddenly, leaping out at him over a bridge of almost two hundred years, the name, and for the first time, in ink turned brown on paper turned yellow, an authentic description:

JUNÍPERO SERRA, padre, almost 36 years old, of medium height, swarthy complexion, with black hair and eyes, and a sparse growth of beard.

Father O’Brien and his associate could hardly contain their pleasure. As soon as possible, they recorded the information on microfilm. It was one more powerful link in their chain of evidence.

On this day, after seven years on the trail of a man who died 164 years ago, after separate journeys ranging across California, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Mallorca, and Italy, after 20,000 miles in airplanes and two weeks on muleback, after consulting Franciscan friars and university scholars throughout the world. Father Eric O’Brien had 8,500 pages of material to prove that a priestly predecessor and a pioneer of the American Far West, Father Junípero Serra, was a man who deserved to be a saint of the Catholic Church.

No one knows precisely how many saints there are in the Catholic Church, although one authority estimates twenty-five thousand. To this number the Vatican is always prepared to add another, but admittance is not easy. An incredible ecclesiastical obstacle course stands in the way. “Sainthood is the climax of what has been well called the most complicated legal procedure in the world,” says Father O’Brien. “The day of sainthood, with all its pomp, may mark the end of centuries of research.”

Any Catholic group anywhere can nominate any person, dead one thousand years or dead one year, for sainthood. But such nomination is a waste of time unless the sponsors are fairly certain that their candidate can fulfill the three major requirements of sainthood—the deceased must have been a person of not merely ordinary virtues but of heroic virtues; the deceased must leave behind an extraordinary reputation or tradition for sanctity; the deceased shall have been gifted during his life or after his death with the power to work miracles.

If a candidate seems to measure up to these standards, his name is submitted to the Postulator General of the proper Catholic order in Rome. The Postulator General in turn appoints an expert, always a priest already residing in the vicinity where the candidate’s work was done, to investigate further. This expert becomes Vice-Postulator for this evaluation and functions much like a private sleuth—in this case, a Saint Detective. Upon the clues and facts he digs up, depends the elevation of his candidate to sainthood.

When in 1941, the day before Pearl Harbor, Father O’Brien, the son of an Irish carpenter, was selected as the expert to investigate the case—or the Cause, as the Church prefers to call it—of Father Junípero Serra, he was faced with a job of detecting beside which the manhunts of the Pinkertons and the Schindlers paled. Ordinary detectives, working in an age of photographs and fingerprints, find it difficult to investigate the private lives of persons missing a day, a week, or maybe a year. Father O’Brien, by contrast, was assigned to shadow a man who had been dead a century and a half, and to prove this man, first, a human being of extraordinary virtue so that he might later prove him a saint.

In spite of the seven years’ preliminary research already done by predecessors. Father O’Brien took another seven years to complete his case. This is relatively rapid. It took twenty-five years to make Mother Cabrini the first United States citizen saint. And down in Guatemala, a nominee for sainthood for two centuries is still being investigated. But Father O’Brien was able to do so thorough a job in his seven years of hunting down a legend and of bringing blurred history into focus, that today, in a special Catholic court in Fresno, California, churchmen are sufficiently equipped with facts to enable them to pass judgment on a candidate who died in August of 1784.

It all began in 1934, when the Franciscan Fathers in California decided that Father Junípero Serra was worthy of sainthood and proposed his name to the Postulator of their order in Rome. There were many who wondered then—as many must puzzle now—why Father Serra’s name was proposed at all. What difference whether he became a saint! Once, in a sermon, Father O’Brien posed the question and answered it: “Why should we ask to have this man declared a saint? For God, there is the added glory of our homage to His faithful servant. For Padre Serra, there is the recognition that he shunned on earth. For us, the gain is great indeed. The Church can point him out as a guide whom we can safely follow on the road to Heaven.”

When the proposal was originally made, the superficial facts known about Father Serra seemed to make him a natural choice for canonization. He was born Miguel José Serra, in November, 1713, in the village of Petra on the tiny Mediterranean island of Mallorca, or Majorca. This island today may be reached by overnight boat from Valencia, Spain, or by an hour’s flight from Barcelona. At the age of seventeen, inspired by his reading of martyred missionaries in the New World, Serra took his vows in the seaport town of Palma. As is the custom, he also dropped his first name, taking in its place Junípero.

His first job was to teach Scotistic philosophy at the Lullian university on Mallorca. One day, after seven years at the university, Junípero Serra was approached by a former student. Father Francisco Palou, who wanted advice about becoming a missionary to New Spain—that is, to Mexico—where four thousand Franciscans were already at work liquidating native deities. Instead of offering advice, Serra offered to accompany Palou.

The journey from Mallorca to Cadiz to Mexico took Junípero Serra and Francisco Palou ninety-nine days. They arrived in Veracruz on December 6, 1749. Rather than ride horseback to Mexico City, Father Serra decided to emulate St. Francis and make the journey on foot. (Recently, after retracing Serra’s journey but traveling by automobile, Father O’Brien admitted that the heat and mountains wore him out.) Father Serra’s hike required twenty-six days. His legs not only became a mass of open sores from insect bites but were swollen from sheer fatigue. One foot and ankle became ulcerated, and pain from this affliction plagued him the rest of his life.

In Mexico City, Father Serra attended San Fernando College, a Franciscan school for newcomers, where he learned a number of Indian dialects and more of missionary technique. After five months, he was sent with Palou to the Sierra Gorda Mountains, in Central Mexico, there to manage five missions established for the savage Pame Indians. It was one of the toughest posts in the New World. The climate was hot, damp, completely unhealthy.

Father Serra learned the difficult Pame language, and then he used it tirelessly to bring the natives into the Catholic Church. In nine years, Serra’s job was done. There was not an unconverted Indian in the region.

After eight more years of crisscrossing Mexico for Christ, Father Serra, at the mellowing age of fifty-four, received his most important assignment, the job of managing thirteen missions in Baja California. He began his assignment by walking 1,000 miles in six months to inspect his Lower California missions. Soon he moved farther north into what is today the state of California. Here the prospects were discouraging. The Indians, unclothed, eating rodents and snakes, practicing polygamy, dwelling in filthy brushwood huts, believed in demons and played at war. In his first year at San Diego, Serra failed to convert a single Indian. But he was accomplishing much else. By 1769—the very year Daniel Boone on the other side of America was poking about Kentucky—Serra had founded the Mission of San Diego de Alcalá. Four years later, to obtain further funds from his superiors, he sailed from San Diego to San Bias. He then walked the rest of the distance to Mexico City and all the way back to San Diego, 2,400 miles, on sandaled feet. Five times, although racked by illness, he hiked from San Diego to Monterey, the last time when he was seventy years old.

In his fifteen years in California, hobbling thousands of miles on a crippled leg (thirty-five hundred miles in five round trips between San Diego and San Francisco alone), dealing with hostile Indians and officious governors, Serra was able to give California nine great missions and six thousand converts—a masterpiece of material and spiritual architecture that swelled, within a half century, to a chain of twenty-one missions and eighty thousand converts. He died in Carmel the afternoon of August 28, 1784, aged seventy-one. His worn body reposed on a bed of two planks, and to the end he called himself “the tepid, wicked, and useless servant of God.”

These were the bare facts readily available on the candidate for sainthood. They were sufficient to convince the Postulator General of the Franciscan Order in Rome, Father Fortunato Scipioni, that Junípero Serra was worth investigating further. In 1934, Reverend Augustine Hobrecht, a California historian, was appointed to do the preliminary work, but Hobrecht was so swamped with other Church duties that he could not devote full time to the task. The Church decided to appoint someone else.

“When the Postulator General in Rome needed a new deputy,” says Father O’Brien, “he asked the Provincial Superior in California to suggest someone who had studied Padre Serra’s life as well as early California history. Since the work involves a great deal of time and travel, it is customary to choose a young man for the task. There were about forty thousand priests in the United States in 1941, but only seven of them had been assigned to this kind of work.”

On December 6, 1941, Father Eric O’Brien, a handsome Franciscan friar, then twenty-nine years old, became the eighth.

Father O’Brien, a solid six-footer who looks like a Notre Dame halfback, was well qualified for his assignment. His Irish, Iowa-born father had migrated to California to work as cattle rancher and then carpenter. O’Brien was born in Pomona, in 1912, the youngest of nine children. Upon finishing grammar school in Los Angeles, O’Brien heard the call, and felt that he had a vocation. After four high school and two college years in St. Anthony’s Seminary in Santa Barbara, and a year as a novice in the monastery at San Luis Rey, he took his vows. He now spent three years studying subjects as diverse as psychology and Hebrew, then four more years in the major seminary at Santa Barbara Mission concentrating on theology and the Scriptures, offering the Mass and other church rituals.

Father O’Brien’s first assignment as a priest, in 1939, was to return to St. Anthony’s Seminary to teach Greek, Latin, and English literature. He did this for two years, until 1941, when he was appointed Vice-Postulator in the Cause of Father Junípero Serra.

Father O’Brien’s first task as a Saint Detective was to prove that Junípero Serra was not only a holy Catholic, not only an extraordinarily holy Catholic, for there are many of these, but that Serra was a Catholic of heroic virtue who deserved to be held up to the entire Church as a model for imitation. Every movement of Serra’s life had to be examined, and his record had to be proved spotless, if he was even to be considered for sainthood.

Father O’Brien began by doing more reading about Serra. The best source was a biography written in Spanish by Serra’s close friend and onetime student, Francisco Palou. Printed in a small edition in Mexico City during 1787, three years after Serra’s death, the volume was crowded with examples of Serra’s fortitude and courage. There was the incident when Indians stormed Serra’s San Diego camp, and he prayed none of them would be killed and thus lost for baptism. There was the time when, at Mass in a Mexican village, the wine was poisoned and Serra was carried from the altar (although modern scholars question this incident, since priests are not supposed to sip the wine, but merely lift the cup symbolically). There was the occasion when, on a ship to the New World, he argued religion with the ship’s captain, an English Protestant, and though almost thrown overboard, Serra refused to accept the other’s un-philosophical arguments.

There were, of course, almost endless other sources for Father O’Brien to read. The forty-thousand-book library in the Santa Barbara Mission was only his kindergarten. During the seven years following. Father O’Brien’s reading ranged from an original packet of Serra’s letters deposited by Serra’s nephew in Barcelona in 1789 to dozens of books in the library of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in Vatican City, to items on Serra in fifty-eight libraries throughout Mexico and the United States. Everything interesting or pertinent that Father O’Brien found in these books and documents, he copied or photographed on 35-mm microfilm which he later enlarged to legal-size prints.