The Sunday Gentleman Page 13

  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 language
s 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.”

  WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE…

  Because I am fascinated by the highly formal and intricate, inflexible rituals of the Catholic Church—but no more and no less than I am interested in the equally involved machinery of the Communist party. General Motors, Rotary International, the Nobel Foundation—I follow the activities of the Vatican with unflagging interest. In fact, I have visited and researched inside Vatican City numerous times, and written and published stories about its Pontiff, its daily newspaper, its censorship office. But above all, I have been intrigued by the process through which the Catholic Church elevates one of its own to the universal veneration that accompanies sainthood.

  As long ago as 1949, apparently, I was already possessed of this curiosity, for when I learned in that year that a friend of my wife’s was working as a secretary to Father Eric O’Brien, I was instantly eager to know more about him and his activities. I spoke to my wife’s friend (in the years since, she has become a nun, and we have an Easter card from her occasionally), questioned her about her work, and gained my first information about the Cause of Junípero Serra. The superficial knowledge I acquired only whetted my appetite. I knew that I must see Father O’Brien himself as soon as possible, and write about him and about the entire evolution of mortal to saint. When approached, Father O’Brien was agreeable to a meeting, and this soon took place in my living room. Stimulated by a few drinks and my own questions, the handsome, thirty-six-year-old priest exceeded mere eloquence. Following that first meeting, there were several more—one, if I remember correctly, in a room of St. Joseph’s Church in downtown Los Angeles—and soon I was supplementing these interviews with additional research material gathered through intensive reading about the procedures for gaining sainthood and the life of candidate Junípero Serra.

  Presently, I wrote the first draft of my story. Being a non-Catholic, I had inadvertently filled the article with minor errors and heresies, and Father O’Brien was justifiably appalled. But being a servant of Christ, and endowed with patience and tolerance, and desirous of promoting the Cause of Junípero Serra still further through me. Father O’Brien did not reject my writings. Instead, he suggested revision and corrections of facts. These changes I dutifully made. My next submission to Father O’Brien received his approval.

  The story, through my literary agent in New York, was submitted to the marketplace. It went out, and it came back. Like so many of the short pieces I wrote without assignment, but merely for pleasure, this one drew praise but no acceptance. It was seen by two or three editors, no more. They were in complete accord: It was not commercial, did not have enough popular appeal for the broadly circulating periodicals (largely read by Protestants), because it was “too special, too Catholic, too limited.” I put it aside, reluctantly but with confidence that one day I should be able to include it in a book, when commercial appeal would not be the decisive criterion for my choice of subjects.

  In re-editing the story sixteen years after originally writing it, I wondered—as I have wondered about the subjects of all my earlier projects—what had happened to Father O’Brien and to the Cause of Junípero Serra. I had not seen the energetic priest since 1949. From time to time, in the years after, I had read newspaper accounts that gave evidence that the Cause of Junípero Serra was still being vigorously promoted. But, I speculated, how near had Serra been raised toward the high seat that his supporters desired for him? And, indeed, what had his crusaders been up to and what were they doing today? While Serra’s name was often in print, I realized that I had not seen the name of his champion. Father O’Brien, mentioned for many years. What, I asked myself, had become of that incredibly dedicated traveler-scholar of the Roman Catholic Church?

  The last that I had known of Father O’Brien’s activities was that he had completed his extensive legal brief, the articuli, setting forth in Latin the virtues of Junípero Serra, and he had presented it to the Bishop’s Court in the Monterey-Fresno diocese of California. At the time, Father O’Brien had had every hope that the Fresno hearing would endorse his efforts with its approval, and forthwith submit the favorable decision to Rome. Father O’Brien expected to go then to Rome and continue the good fight.

  Through recent interviews and correspondence, I have now learned that Father O’Brien’s faith in the imminent progress of his Cause was not unjustified. The initial test, before the Diocesan Court, lasted eight months. Father O’Brien paraded his research and his witnesses, and when the court sessions came to an end, there were 1,260 pages of testimony. It was agreed by the Diocesan Court that Serra’s heroic virtue had been satisfactorily proved. Photostatic copies of the bulky records of the trial were sent on to Rome, to be studied by the Sacred Congregation of Rites. This success was Father O’Brien’s first major accomplishment after his unremitting labors for the Cause, and his victory was rewarded by a worldly bauble in the summer of 1950 when St. Bonaventure University conferred upon him the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters.

  But the first triumph did not make Father O’Brien complacent. The battle had been joined, the opposition armor shallowly pierced, but the Devil’s Advocate in Rome had not been unseated. Continuing his assault. Father O’Brien left his and Serra’s easy, sunny California for the sophisticated, political, competitive arena that was Vatican City in Rome.

  As Father O’Brien recently reported to me, he arrived in the Eternal City during September of 1950, a
nd dwelt in Rome for almost four years. In those years, he did “the historical work for the Cause.” No doubt he kept a careful watch over his photostated research documents on Serra, one copy of which rested in the office of the Franciscan Order while the other copy received consideration in the office of the Relator General at the Sacred Congregation of Rites.

  Father O’Brien’s activity in those four years was divided—on one hand, he gave a portion of his time and energy to continuing the hunt for new facts about Junípero Serra in the archives of the Vatican, and on the other hand, he toiled at propagandizing the Cause, at making the Movers of the Vatican (and, in fact, all the world) Serra-conscious. Tirelessly, he corresponded with prelates in Latin America, and with organizations in the United States, seeking “commendatory letters” and backing for Serra. He delivered public addresses extolling the virtues and holiness of California’s Apostle. In the field of promotion, his greatest achievement was arranging to give a series of twelve talks on Serra, to an international audience, over Vatican Radio.

  In April of 1954, Father Eric O’Brien left Rome and returned to the United States. When he arrived in California, his role as leader and Vice-Postulator of the Cause came to an end. Whether or not he requested to be relieved of his arduous position, whether or not the Church removed and replaced him as a matter of rotating policy, I do not know. In any event, what he had begun as an eager young priest of twenty-nine was, so far as his part was concerned, ending in his forty-second year. He had done the pioneer work. He had traveled widely, read deeply, written ceaselessly. He had delivered an impressive total of 500 speeches on behalf of the Cause. His Franciscan brothers gave him their supreme accolade in print. Of Father O’Brien they said: “For sixteen years, the zealous Friar dedicated his talents to tracing around the head of Padre Junípero Serra the halo of a Saint. Inasmuch as one man can be credited with the present happy status of the Serra Cause, that individual is the former Vice-Postulator.”