The Sunday Gentleman (16 page)

Others remembered stories passed down by great-grandparents of how Father Serra healed the sick merely by making the sign of the Cross, of how his words turned wildly charging bears away from cornered Indians, of how good crops resulted when prayers beseeched Father Serra to use his special influence with God.

Despite these verbal accounts of Serra’s ability to create miracles, as well as accounts of his reputation for holiness and for virtue. Father O’Brien has today to face the last and perhaps most exacting phase of his research. He must present convincing evidence, scientific evidence, of six miracles wrought by Serra since his death.

Exactly what does the Church call a miracle? “A miracle,” says Father O’Brien, “is an extraordinary occurrence which is visible in itself, and not merely in its effects, and which can be explained only by God’s special intervention. Thus, there have been saints who, like our Lord, walked on the water, healed sickness by a touch, or raised the dead to life. However, most modem miracles alleged as proofs of holiness are cures from physical diseases or defects.”

The hunt for these six miracles, the minimum required by the Church, a search which can go on even as the other evidence is being sifted by a series of ecclesiastical courts, may provide Father O’Brien with his most formidable hurdle. In the case of Mother Cabrini, the miracles were found and authenticated by the Church over the two decades following her death in 1917.

Since Father O’Brien first let it be known that he would investigate any miraculous cures attributed to Father Serra, he has received many helpful letters. Few, however, satisfy the rigid requirements of the Church—that the alleged miracles be substantiated by eyewitnesses, be submitted to the scrutiny of scientific investigators, and be explained only as the result of divine intervention.

About 75 percent of Father O’Brien’s mail on miracles comes from people in California, the rest from twenty-six other states, as well as from Mexico, Spain, Ireland, and Australia. The average month’s mail brings mostly trivia—a report from the young man in Mexico City who prayed to Serra and got his job back, from the family in Los Angeles who prayed to Serra and found a home, from the man in Baltimore who prayed to Serra and rid himself of stomach ulcers, from the gentleman in Oakland who prayed to Serra and whose weight went up from 96 pounds to 156 pounds.

Few letters merit investigation. When a letter impresses Father O’Brien, he shows it to a physician friend in Santa Barbara. If the physician agrees it is interesting, then Father O’Brien begins a correspondence. Recently, Father O’Brien’s curiosity was piqued by a California woman who fell from a building twenty years ago, seriously injured both her legs, and could hardly walk. This woman went to Serra’s grave, prayed, rose, and marched off, leaving her crutches behind. The physician shook his head. “Don’t bother with it. Father,” he said. “She suffered shock for twenty years. The visit to the grave, the kneeling, the confidence, the autosuggestion simply counteracted the shock. I don’t think it’s a miracle.” Then, as ever, the doctor sent Father O’Brien off with his repeated advice, “Wait until something comes in that knocks your hat off, Father, something the psychologists can’t explain. Then really investigate.”

Once, not long ago. Father O’Brien thought he had something that knocked his hat off. A letter came in from distant Mallorca. It began, “The object of the present letter is to report to you the seemingly miraculous cure of an eye worked by Fray Junípero Serra in favor of a Franciscan Sister of Mallorca, seventy-four years old, a native of Petra and now residing in Ariany.” The letter went on to explain that in April, 1945, the Sister, walking past woodchoppers, was hit in the eye by a flying splinter. After using a few domestic remedies, she went to a specialist. He said there was no hope. At least one eye had to be removed. The Sister was urged, by friends, to pray to Father Serra. “That same day,” concluded the letter, “she began to invoke Padre Serra and at about three in the morning, as the pain continued very intense, she again invoked Father Serra. Suddenly the pain ceased, and at the hour for rising, she saw perfectly.” When she visited her oculist, he was amazed. “Medical science cannot explain this cure!” he exclaimed. “To whom were you praying?” Upon arriving in Mallorca, Father O’Brien called on the oculist for the scientific case history that the Church requires. The oculist, fearful of what his colleagues might say, was irritable and uncooperative. “Father,” he snapped at O’Brien, “when my patients need miracles, I am the one who works them.” Since Father O’Brien preferred to have his miracles performed by a higher power, he took his search elsewhere.

Father O’Brien’s final task, before submitting the Cause of Junípero Serra to Church courts, was to prepare a legal brief known as the
articuli
. This covered two hundred required points regarding Serra’s virtue—a typical point was the heading “Faith,” with twenty-one questions underneath, with other points like “Hope,” “Fortitude,” “Love of God,” with questions underneath them. Instead of searching through his 8,500 pages of documents for his answers to include in the
articuli
, Father O’Brien had merely to consult any of his four filing cases. In these lay the cream of the 8,500 pages, each excerpt on a yellow card if Serra’s own words, on a salmon-colored card if another’s words, each marked with cryptic symbols like F-17 (meaning the answer to question seventeen under “Faith” in the
articuli
).

Father O’Brien finished the brief, written entirely in Latin, in August, 1948. A high Roman official, a Franciscan specialist in such matters, then traveled from Italy to California. This official spent ten days reading and discussing Father O’Brien’s
articuli
. Recently, the brief was completed and submitted for trial to what is called the court of the first instance in the canonization process, that is, the Bishop’s Court in the Monterey-Fresno diocese of California.

This trial, taking place in secrecy behind closed doors, sometimes before the bishop, mostly before three priests appointed as judges by the bishop, will continue until the late spring of 1949, perhaps longer. Similar trials, in the past, have been noted for their extreme length—the Cause of St. Therese of Lisieux, at the same stage, required 109 court sessions, each session almost six hours long, merely to determine her reputation for holiness (the evidence being recorded then, as it is now at Fresno, in longhand by a priest who covered 3,000 pages with closely packed writing).

With the evidence in, and the trial under way, Father O’Brien feels for the first time a sense of progress in his work. “The Fresno court is only a receiving station,” he says. “If we run into a wall there, if we see our Cause isn’t good enough, then the bishop will simply tell Rome to cancel the whole investigation. But that is unlikely. The Fresno court will probably pass on our
articuli
. If satisfied, the bishop will send, by special messenger, a sealed report on our Cause to the Sacred Congregation of Rites in Rome.”

After that, in Vatican City, for possibly three years, there will follow a complicated series of legal steps including the study of Serra’s writings by two theologians in search of errors against the Faith, three court hearings which will discuss heroic virtue, three more which will discuss miracles, and one final session of the Congregation before the Pope. When the candidate has thus graduated by stages from Servant of God to Venerable to Blessed, he is finally canonized in the Catholic Church’s most splendid ceremony. Here the Pope celebrates a Papal Mass and commands all Catholics to honor their new saint.

When the Cause of Father Serra leaves Fresno for Rome, Father O’Brien will go with it. He will assist the theologians defending the case because so much of the material is in Spanish, a language in which he is proficient, and because so much of it deals with early California, a subject on which he is more expert than the officials in Rome. He will dwell in Rome proper, work inside the Vatican City, and fight a long running battle with his archenemy, the prosecutor, a priest expert in canon law designated as the Promoter of the Faith, but more popularly known as the Devil’s Advocate. One church attorney currently fills this role in the Fresno court. Others will enact the role in Rome. It is the villainous job of the Devil’s Advocate to study the briefs submitted, probe for weaknesses, and prove that the candidate in question is not worthy of sainthood. In Fresno, Father O’Brien is not permitted to argue with the Devil’s Advocate. But in Rome, he will have his chance for rebuttal.

Father O’Brien anticipates the objections that the Fresno Devil’s Advocate will find to Junípero Serra. “He will argue that Serra had a bad temper, that he was jealous of his power, that he used questionable tactics in ruling the Indians in California. He will search the documents and note that there were many disagreements between Serra and the California governors, and so he will try to prove that Serra was irascible. He may even say that Serra was selfish. I’m sure he’ll use that hike Serra made from Veracruz to Mexico City, two hundred years ago, when Serra ruined his leg and risked his life. The Devil’s Advocate will argue that the hike was headstrong, imprudent, that it was like thoughtless suicide, like flaunting the Fifth Commandment. Nevertheless, I feel Father Serra will survive these objections. If he was headstrong, he was Spanish. If he was quarrelsome, it was with good reason. He had faults, but he acted in good faith. He was, at all times, a human being, not a bloodless machine.”

Today, even as he assists in the presentation of his case to the Fresno court, Father Eric O’Brien finds time to tackle a daily schedule that would give an automaton a nervous breakdown. Seven years of relentless research have hardly weakened O’Brien’s energy. At the age of thirty-six, his six-foot frame is tireless as ever. Despite chaste rimless spectacles, his ruddy square face gives him the look of one who is constantly outdoors. Yet Father O’Brien is almost never outdoors.

He rises at five o’clock every morning from a cot behind his files and three statues of Father Serra. In the next two hours, after dressing, he, and the sixty other inhabitants of the mission, go to the community chapel for prayers, meditate for thirty minutes, chant the breviary, hear Mass, offer more prayers, more breviary, and then consume a homemade breakfast. The mission has its own garden, its own chickens and cows, with lay brothers to handle the cooking.

After glancing at the morning papers, Father O’Brien begins work at seven-thirty and keeps at it until noon. Following prayers in the chapel, and a half-hour dinner, there are more prayers, a chat with the other priests, a short nap, breviary, added prayers. Then, from two o’clock to five-thirty. Father O’Brien is back at his desk. In the evening, there is meditation, a half-hour supper in silence while two students alternate in reading aloud, a procession to the church for prayers, then relaxation for most, but none for Father O’Brien. From seven-fifteen until midnight, with one break for coffee and conversation, Father O’Brien toils.

What does he do in these long work periods? For seven years, it was digging on Father Serra, and today there is still supplementary work on the same subject. Now there are publicity articles to be written for the Catholic press. There is the unremitting search for six miracles. There is the studying of specialized law, not taught in seminaries, dealing with canonization. There is the distribution of the pamphlet Father O’Brien has written to encourage prayers to Serra, a pamphlet which has already gone out in four languages to 938,000 people. There are the speeches Father O’Brien is required to write and deliver before organizations. He has 250 talks behind him already. He is never a peddler of platitudes. Sometimes his candor makes listeners squirm. Recently, he reminded the Native Sons of the Golden West, a California version of the D.A.R., that there were some old California families no different than “the icy dowagers who are forever harping on their Mayflower ancestry.” Then O’Brien proceeded to debunk the vanity of ancestry:

“Some of the oldest and haughtiest families of this or any state are descended from persons who, if they were alive today, would be ignored or kept discreetly out of sight. The haze of time may soften, but should not distort or hide, facts. Some Spanish soldiers were notorious all over California for their immorality and cruelty. Some forty-niners made their fortunes by sharp dealings with the easygoing rancheros. This last may be the reason why so many of our oldest families seem to have an unwritten law that there must be at least one lawyer in every generation.”

The most exhausting work at present, for Father O’Brien, is his correspondence. He exchanges letters with Serra scholars in Mexico, France, Spain. He also finds it agreeable to keep in touch with the other seven Saint Detectives in the United States. One of the most interesting of these was the late Reverend John J. Wynne, a Fordham University professor who devoted twenty-five years to trying to make a saint of Catherine Tekakwitha, known as the Lily of the Mohawks, who died in 1680. Among others. Father O’Brien continues to keep in touch with Vice-Postulator Father Salvator Burgio who is promoting the Cause of Mother Seton, a widow with several children who became a Catholic nun and founded the Sisters of Charity. A distant ancestor of Franklin D. Roosevelt, she died in 1821.

Even though he knows how slowly other American Causes have advanced, Father O’Brien remains confident. He is encouraged by the knowledge that, as recently as two years ago, thirty priests who were martyred in China’s Boxer Rebellion were promoted to sainthood, and twenty-eight of these were Franciscans. Father O’Brien prays that the next canonized Franciscan will be his Mallorcan companion of seven intense years.

This close investigation of Serra has had a Svengali-like effect on Father O’Brien. While he does not think Serra has changed him, he feels that the old padre has affected him in one way. “He has been a constant source of reproach to me. He has made me feel that I am not doing much. He has given me the desire to have the same generosity in the service of God. I would enjoy going back to the Sierra Gorda, in Mexico, to live and work among those people, as Father Serra did, not because he did, but because I want to.”