The Sunday Gentleman (15 page)

When he and his associates finished their reading, in the summer of 1948, Father O’Brien had notes or photocopies of research amounting to 8,500 pages of material. To hunt down the original manuscripts that would authenticate this material, and even more important, to verify earlier stories firsthand. Father O’Brien made four separate trips to Mexico, and countless journeys up and down the California coast, as well as visits to Portugal, Spain, Mallorca, and Italy. Wherever, on the face of the earth, Father Junípero Serra had lived, worked, walked, two hundred years ago, there Father Eric O’Brien tried to live, work, walk today. In this way, every vague page in Serra’s life was explored on the scene.

Father O’Brien spent the greatest amount of his time away from home in Mexico, a country in which he encountered his greatest difficulties but for which he developed an intense love. While he never ran into physical danger in Mexico, despite the fact that it is an anticlerical country, he did have bad moments. It is against the law in Mexico to wear clerical clothes in public, so at the Mexican border Father O’Brien took off his Roman collar. “It was kind of fun to wear a necktie again,” he says. He went about in a black suit, just like the ones worn by most Mexican attorneys and physicians.

One of the least documented periods in Serra’s long life was the nine years in the 1750’s that he spent as a missionary in the Sierra Gorda Mountains of Central Mexico. “There were questions I had to answer, to make our case foolproof in court,” says Father O’Brien. “Did anything remain there of Serra’s work? What had become of the churches he built there? Were there any of his writings left? Did the people still cherish his memory? The investigation would never be complete without those answers. There were stories of robberies, murders, wild animals, poisonous snakes, diseases, bad climate. Besides, I’d not heard of a white man who had been in there since Serra. The trip was obligatory. In February, 1946, with the help of Governor Warren of California, I got special letters of recommendation from President Camacho of Mexico to the governors of the Mexican states in which I planned to work, and then I went into the Sierra Gorda.”

Accompanied by Father Hugh Noonan, an army chaplain who took leave from his Puerto Rican post. Father O’Brien boarded a train from San Luis Potosí to Rio Verde, the northernmost part of Father Serra’s old stamping grounds. Entering their first village at dusk, the padres rode in a two-wheeled sulky, their feet up against the horse’s rump, instead of in a taxi. “We rode between the pink, blue and green houses, built flush up to the street, into an eddying dusty fog, through which the tiny Japanese bulbs used for streetlights glimmered,” recalls Father O’Brien. “At corners, since he had no horn, our sulky driver stuck his whip handle into the wheel spokes, creating a rattling warning noise. Long before, the old church in town had lost its Serra documents. The papers had been burned by revolutionaries. So, the next day, by station wagon, over the worst excuse for a road I ever saw, we went on to Jalpán, known as Xalpam in Serra’s time, a village which had been his headquarters.”

At Jalpán, which had electric lights but no telephone, telegraph, or radio. Father O’Brien found courteous natives dwelling in one-room huts of brushwood, their roofs made of palm leaves, their floors consisting of dirt. Here Father O’Brien found the largest of Serra’s original five missions, with its cross-shaped Church of Santiago de Jalpán. While there was little in the church archives, Father O’Brien discovered what he believed might be a two-century-old original oil portrait of Father Serra.

“There is no title, signature or date,” Father O’Brien wrote in his notes, “but the painting is very old. It shows a padre standing alone, holding a large cross. The face is youthful—Padre Serra was only thirty-six when he came to Jalpán. But there is one mystery—the padre in this painting is wearing blue, and anyone familiar with Serra’s letters will recall how particular he was that Franciscan pictures for his churches show the saints as robed in gray. St. Francis of Assisi wore gray, and so did most of his followers.”

The blue robe in the Jalpán painting, on a man known to have favored gray, made the whole thing seem suspect. Father O’Brien was stymied until many months later, when a Serra specialist on the isle of Mallorca explained the enigmatic blue and solved the mystery in a letter to O’Brien: “Blue was the color of the habit of Mallorcan Franciscans. Blue is still worn by the Franciscan Sisters in Mallorca. This is said to have been a papal privilege, granted to the Mallorcan Franciscans, because of their devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.”

Working out of Jalpán, Father O’Brien and Father Noonan went into the more primitive sections of the Sierra Gorda. All travel was on muleback, just as all distances were judged not by miles or kilometers but by the time it took a mule to make its way from village to village. Father O’Brien had not been on a mule in fourteen years, and the insides of his legs were bruised and painful.

The two American priests traveled over lonely trails, over steep mountains, and one night in a slashing rain they slept inside the best home in the village of Saucillo. “I’ll never forget that night,” says Father O’Brien. “One room filled with devotional pictures and a Singer sewing machine. Sugarcane-frond roof, the wind howling through. Candlelight. The usual dirt floor. I tried to sleep on a bed made of rawhide strips. It was like sleeping on an oversized tennis racket. And the fleas, they had never read that DDT was supposed to be fatal.”

Father O’Brien found the short, olive-skinned, Spanish-speaking natives of the Sierra Gorda courteous and considerate. With the aid of these natives, and a guide named Primitivo (“We paid him a dollar a day, which created inflation in the Sierra Gorda”), Father O’Brien located and photographed precious Serra documents, found the remains of an aqueduct Serra had built, and then visited and inspected each of the five missions constructed in the 1750’s.

But if the journey to Mexico was Father O’Brien’s most pleasant adventure in seven years of research, his stay inside Spain late in 1946, and his trip to Mallorca early in 1947, were his most productive. After an airplane crash in Ireland, which he survived without injury. Father O’Brien arrived in Madrid. There he lived at San Francisco el Grande, the city’s largest church, which had been a Franciscan center in Serra’s day.

Father O’Brien’s introduction to Spain occurred when photographers representing the Madrid and Barcelona dailies crowded into his room to photograph him. No matter where he posed in the room, the photographers did not seem satisfied. They kept moving him from one wall to another, until he protested. Finally, satisfied, they shot their pictures of him. Not until later, when the pictures appeared, did Father O’Brien understand. The photographers had been attempting, and had finally succeeded, in posing him under a framed portrait of General Franco.

Father O’Brien, and his assistant, Father Maynard Geiger, head of the Serra Historical Commission in California, avoided Spanish political controversy. They found Madrid rather like Boston, while they themselves were the subject of much curiosity since
Siguiendo Mi Camino
had just finished a record twenty-week run—that was the film
Going My Way
with Bing Crosby. Between their work in Madrid and their research later in Seville (where they discovered the only written description of Father Serra extant) Father O’Brien and Father Geiger registered 2,000 pages of new material on microfilm.

The only difficulty Father O’Brien had concerning Spain occurred much later, when he agreed to deliver a lecture on his trip before the Newman Club in Santa Barbara, California. When the impending lecture was given wide publicity, Father O’Brien became apprehensive and, to be sure that he was not misquoted, had copies of his talk handed to the press.

“I have not come here to speak in favor of the Franco regime in Spain,” Father O’Brien stated in his speech. “With a century of American ancestry, I love democracy as we have it, and I hate all forms of totalitarianism…Some I met in Spain said that Franco was not a dictator, that the last dictator was Primo de Rivera. Others said that Franco was a dictator, but his usurpation of power was justified by the excesses committed under the Republic. Some said that while he came to power justifiably, he had long overstayed his welcome. Others said that he never had a right to power, has no right now, and never will have…Because I am not a competent political observer; because I have been too taken up with my little study of one man’s part in California history; and because I feel that my superficial observations of Spain would be of no real help to the indispensable need of today—international understanding—I beg to be excused from stating any such observations.”

When the press, the morning following, completely twisted and misrepresented the speech, when certain reporters labeled him a Fascist, Father O’Brien vowed never to deliver another talk on the subject of Spain. And, to date, he has kept his vow.

From Valencia, Spain, Father O’Brien took a boat over the calm Mediterranean to Mallorca, the island where Father Serra was born, ordained, and where he taught until he left for the New World. Here most of the Serra documents were in the hands of private families rather than libraries.

Father O’Brien had to locate these families. His most memorable experience was with an old Mallorcan marquis, who returned from his Madrid vacation to show O’Brien his eighteenth-century papers personally. “His home was unforgettable,” says Father O’Brien. “One room, twice as high as our American rooms, was decorated with red damask hangings, gold-leafed mirrors, and original paintings by Goya. The room was seventy-five feet long. The living room had a pure silver charcoal heater in its center. The old marquis kept his Serra papers in the private family archives, and only he held the key. He brought down the aged documents from upstairs, then would not leave us alone, but sat stiffly across from us for hours, staring, while we took notes and made photographs.”

However, the most valuable treasure was found at the Monastery of San Felipe Neri. For a long time, Father O’Brien had known that as a professor at the Lullian university. Father Serra had delivered lectures on philosophy from the viewpoint of Duns Scotus. That was the clue. But for a Saint Detective, it was also a challenge. Where were those philosophy lectures? What were they about? Did they still exist? In Mallorca, Father O’Brien met priests who had found the old lecture notes, published in Latin, 1,160 pages of them, and at last, he knew exactly what Father Serra had spoken about as a pedagogue.

Having proved, to his own satisfaction, that Father Serra’s life had been both heroic and spotless. Father O’Brien had several other important items to investigate. He had to prove—and managed to do so—that Father Serra had never received unauthorized religious honors, such as being called St. Junípero by priests or being depicted with a halo. Next, he was required to exhume Father Serra’s body and report on the findings.

Twice, since Serra’s death in 1784, his grave at Carmel, California, had been opened, the last time in 1884, on the one-hundredth anniversary of his death, when a trainload of dignitaries came down from San Francisco to view the body. The third opening of Serra’s grave was a long, detailed operation filled with much suspense for Father O’Brien. There were two other bodies, besides that of Serra, in separate coffins. The first was a friend from Mallorca, Fray Juan Crespi. The second was Serra’s successor as
presidente
of the California Missions, Fray Fermín de Lasuén. Would Father O’Brien be able to identify one of the three as Junípero Serra? On the two other occasions when the grave had been opened, identification reports proved vague. Then there was another question mark. Was Serra in the grave at all? Historical gossip had it that the Spaniards, upon leaving California, stole Serra from his resting place by lantern light, and took him aboard a nearby ship, which was subsequently wrecked. A survivor was supposed to have recorded the incident in a stained leather-bound book. Father O’Brien tried to run down the book, and got as far as an Indian whose grandfather had been baptized by Serra. The Indian said that the book had been loaned out and lost.

On September 1, 1943, Father O’Brien, in the presence of two famous anthropologists, two United States Army orthopedists, and assorted members of the Catholic clergy, opened the grave and the coffins. While all principals were sworn to maintain complete secrecy, Father O’Brien admits absolute identification of Serra was made on the basis of some dozen arguments, some positive and others negative. The grave was kept open six days, the army took photographs for Father O’Brien, and finally Serra was returned to his rest in a new hermetically scaled copper casket.

Another question Father O’Brien had to answer was: What did people say about Father Serra before 1934, when his Cause was initiated? “This was important to our Cause,” says Father O’Brien. “The Church will not consider any candidate for sainthood, unless it can be proved that during his lifetime and ever since his death, he enjoyed a reputation for holiness and miracles.”

To establish Serra’s reputation for holiness. Father O’Brien traveled California from top to bottom, for nine months in 1943 and 1944, interviewing members of the state’s oldest families. Father O’Brien interviewed 151 native Californians, mostly Indian or Spanish, who had heard firsthand stories about Serra from members of their families. The oldest inhabitant Father O’Brien interviewed was a 104-year-old Indian lady in San Juan Bautista.

“The closest I ever came to Father Serra,” recalls Father O’Brien, “was when I interviewed the ninety-year-old granddaughter of Señora Perez de Guillén de Mariner. The granddaughter, when I talked with her in 1943, remembered everything her grandmother Mariner had told her about Serra. Señora Mariner had once owned much of Pasadena and Altadena through Spanish land grants. She was born in Baja California. She came up to Father Serra’s mission, was placed in charge of the mission keys as a girl, and got to know Father Serra quite well. Well, Señora Mariner lived on and on, long after Serra died. She married three times, and had a clear mind and a retentive memory even when she was over a hundred years old. She told her granddaughter many firsthand stories about Serra, and the granddaughter lived on to ninety and was able to relate them to me.”