![]() ![]() After beginning the restoration and rebuilding of San Diego, he came north late in the following October, 1776, to the site Lasuén and Ortega had established in a valley that ran down to the sea. Serra came south from his base at Mission San Carlos Borromeo in Carmel. In November 1775, Father Fermín Lasuén and Captain José Francisco Ortega had been frustrated in founding a mission two days north of Mission San Diego, when a group of Kumayai (De equeño) Indians attacked and burned the San Diego Mission. When the Americans arrived decades later they may have entered a Russian or British California, and history would have taken a very different turn.” Without his drive, Spain would not have advanced as soon as it did. “What Serra has not been given enough credit for,” Father Moholy pointed out, is that he single-handedly kept Spain in California. Siempre adelante: “Always forward, never back!” was his cry. The muleteer did and the next day Serra was able to rise and wait on the other men. “Why, Father, what remedy could I know of? Do you think I am a surgeon? I’m a muleteer I’ve healed only the sores of animals,” the mule driver protested.įather Serra replied, “Well, then, son, just imagine that I am an animal … Make me the same remedy that you would apply to an animal.” Turning to a mule driver, he asked what the man would do for a mule with a bad leg. “Even though I should die on the way, I shall not turn back!” Serra replied. Don Gaspar de Portolá, captain of the expedition, asked if Serra wished to turn back. When he made the journey up Baja California, the wound on his foot grew worse until finally he found himself unable to walk. Serra was chosen to lead a land expedition with Governor Don Gaspar de Portolá up Alta California to Monterey and establish a mission there. ![]() Serra had not governed these missions long when the authorities in Mexico City and Madrid grew worried over the move down the Pacific Coast by the British and Russians. After some time in Mexico City, Serra led a group of Franciscans assigned to the missions of Baja California. ![]() On the way, he received a mosquito bite that caused an infection in his leg that plagued him the rest of his life.įather Serra spent eight years learning the life of a missionary in the Serra Gorda region of northern Mexico. Offered the opportunity to ride the 300-plus miles to the capital, he stubbornly insisted on walking so that he could arrive at the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, near the capital, in the true manner of St. With 44 other missionaries, he landed in Veracruz, New Spain, today’s Mexico. But Father Serra felt called to the mission field and would not be talked out of going. He had 54 years behind him, and not nearly so many ahead of him. He stood only 5’2” tall and had congenital asthma, which kept him sick most of the time. He was well-suited to be a Franciscan scholar and live a quiet life. In his book, along with his public presentations, Father Moholy painted a picture of a stubborn little Spanish friar, a man who should have stayed home in Majorca, a Mediterranean island possession of Spain. ![]() Father Moholy would not live to see the canonization of “the Apostle of California” in by Pope Francis at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., in 2015, but if he had, he would have energetically approved.įather Moholy was co-author with Don DeNevi of the informative Serra biography Junípero Serra: The Illustrated Story of the Franciscan Founder of California’s Missions. Father Moholy’s travels to and fro were spent mainly in the cause of canonization of Junípero Serra, the determined, ailing scholar from Majorca who not only opened up what is now California to Spain, but to the Catholic faith as well. He subordinated everything, and himself most of all, to the demands of his evangelical task.”įather Noel Moholy (1916-1998) was a Franciscan friar and former resident of California’s Mission Santa Barbara, but his friends compared him to the wind: never in any one place very long. Junípero Serra: “He was an enthusiastic, battling, almost quarrelsome, fearless, keenwitted, fervidly devout, unselfish, single-minded missionary. California historian Charles Chapman on St. ![]()
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