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Catholic Down to The Bootstraps

HOW FATHER SERRA WAS BEATIFIED

By Anne Knight

Another chapter in the saga of Father Junipero Serra, the Franciscan founder of the California missions, closed with the death of Father Noel Francis Moholy, on September 4 in Santa Barbara, at age 82. Father Moholy was the vice postulator for the cause of Father Serra, who died in 1784.

Father Serra's cause for beatification and canonization as a saint in the Catholic Church was opened in 1934. Father Maynard Geiger, archivist at Old Mission Santa Barbara, the headquarters of the Serra Cause, completed much of the historical research. From 1941 to 1955 he travelled in California, Mexico and Spain, compiling documentation for the Serra cause and his biography, The Life and Times of Fray Junipero Serra (1959). Father Geiger died in 1977.

The cause received its first vice postulator with the appointment of Father Eric O'Brien in 1941. Fathers Geiger and O'Brien made several trips together for the Serra cause. In 1945 Father O'Brien hired Kay Hardy to handle public relations for him while he toured California missions to gather evidence for the canonization process. Hardy got his offer upon finishing a novena to Father Serra requesting help getting work. "So I ended up working for Father Serra after I asked him for a job!" laughed 80-year-old Carmelite Sister Francisca (formerly Kay Hardy).

On the tour, conducted in the late 1940s, the two Franciscans questioned descendants of mission Indians and others who knew of Father Serra's life from their ancestors. Among the witnesses was Abel Espinoza, whose prayer that he would live long enough to testify for Father Serra was answered when, at 92, he provided testimony at the Carmel Mission. The trials were conducted with a "devil's advocate," Father Lucien Arvin. Father Arvin searched for negative evidence on Father Serra's character.

"I got a different approach to holiness when I worked for that cause," recalled Sister Francisca. "It's not visions and high thoughts and all that sort of stuff. It's just good old theological virtues [faith, hope and charity], and they also go through the cardinal virtues. They don't ask too much about this other stuff except way down the line." Besides demonstrating his widespread reputation for holiness, testimony obtained during the trials yielded an account of Father Serra bilocating to cure a sick man, and several reports of him restoring ailing crops in various places.

Father O'Brien left for Rome in 1950, to compile the Summarium, written to present Father Serra to the Vatican's Sacred Congregation for the Cause of Saints. In his absence he asked Father Moholy to serve as his administrative assistant. Soon thereafter Sister Francisca received her call to religious life. Father Moholy's reaction: "He practically collapsed and said, 'You're leaving me with all this work?'" In 1951 Sister Francisca, then 33, entered the Carmelite Monastery in Carmel, and is now its prioress. "I've done whatever I could to help it [the Serra cause] along from this end.... He [Father Moholy] counted on the Carmelite [nuns'] prayers. He said, 'You get those girls working.'".

In 1954 Father O'Brien returned from Rome and had to resign as vice postulator in 1958, due to effects of a 1949 auto accident (nerve damage and aphasia). "He was such a fine homilist, and the fact that he couldn't make his words come out right was a real suffering to him," Sister Francisca said

Father Moholy, a professor of sacred theology at the Old Mission Santa Barbara Theological Seminary, was appointed as the second vice postulator for the Serra cause in 1958 "For many years he was quite ill," Brother Timothy Arthur, OFM, provincial archivist at the Santa Barbara Mission, said. "It's amazing that he kept on plugging away like he did." Brother Tim was Father Moholy's secretary during the last few years of his life. "Father Serra kept him going."

Father Moholy delivered lectures, made several television appearances, conducted a local television series, served on historical commissions, coauthored a book (Junipero Serra: The Illustrated Story of the Franciscan Founder of California's Missions, 1985), and convinced the federal government to issue a Serra stamp and Serra medal, and place a Serra statue in the U.S. Capitol building. Father Moholy remained steadfast in spiritual practices. Brother Tim described them: "He said the divine office every day in Latin; sometimes he said Mass in Latin because he enjoyed it. He believed that everything in the Mass should be a sacred thing, and should be done with dignity and reverence. He had great respect for the Eucharist."

In 1986 the cure of Franciscan Sister Mary Boniface Dyrda in 1960 was authenticated as the miracle required for Father Serra's beatification, the most difficult step of the canonization process. Shortly before the Holy Father honored Father Serra at the Carmel Mission (his burial site) during his 1987 visit to California, a chorus of public accusations against Father Serra and his Franciscan confreres erupted. The accusers alleged that early Franciscan missionaries were oppressors of California Indians. Father Moholy rebutted such charges. On September 25, 1988, Pope John Paul II beatified Father Serra in Rome.

From 1990 to 1998, Father Moholy visited twin sisters Cecilia and Mary Preissler, at their home in Garden Grove on his travels. The Preisslers head the Orange County Chapter of the Serra Cause. "Father Moholy was such a humble, dignified and traditional priest," Mary said. "Father would stay in his room; he'd study, he'd pray, he would read his breviary every day. He always said his rosary and he kept up with all the old traditions of the [Franciscan] order." The Preisslers also described Father Moholy's stories and homilies, his readiness to help the sick, and the people he evangelized and brought into the Church, even within the past year.

Catholic writer Lesley Payne met Father Moholy when she interviewed him for an April 1994 Catholic World Report article on controversies surrounding Father Serra's canonization ("An Artificial Storm"). "Father Moholy was an authentic Franciscan... jovial, filled with the love of Christ, devoted to the Church, theologically mature... a true brother of St. Francis," says Payne. "As a theology professor he represented the Bonaventurian tradition (Saint Bonaventure was, of course, a Franciscan). I began thinking that what the Church around here really needs is a Bonaventurian revival, perhaps with an orthodox college, similar to Thomas Aquinas College, to reopen that line of thought."

Father Moholy was diagnosed with cancer two months before he died. A month before his death, Father Moholy made his last visit to Sister Francisca in Carmel. "We both suspected it would be the last [visit]," she said. "It was very heartrending." Monsignor Francis Weber, director of the Los Angeles Archdiocese archives at Mission San Fernando, reported, "When he got sick, I asked him if he was going to pray to Father Serra, and he said, 'No, that would be a conflict of interest.'" His funeral was held on September 8 at the Santa Barbara Mission. Brother Tim is currently handling Fr. Moholy's affairs until a new vice postulator is appointed by Rome. According to Brother Tim, there are two cures which are currently under investigation. If either one is authenticated as a miracle, Father Serra could be canonized as a saint. "I think there have been many [miracles through Father Serra's intercession] myself," he said. "It's just that a lot of them were never followed through on, or there was never time to look into them."

Reflecting on Father Moholy's influence, Monsignor Weber, asserted, "Had it not been for Father Moholy, Serra would not have been beatified." Father Moholy, he said, carried the torch for the Serra cause by himself for many years: "Other people talk, but he was a doer.... He was a Catholic all the way down to the bootstraps. That was his whole orientation; nothing else mattered in his life."

For more information, contact the Serra Cause, Old Mission Santa Barbara, 2201 Laguna St., Santa Barbara, CA 93105-3611, (805) 682-4713.

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