Anne Ryan, Junípero Serra

2953 Anne Ryan, available writings index

Anne Ryan. “Junípero Serra.” The Commonweal 16.12 (July 20, 1932) : 309-310
archive.org : link

paragraphs numbered for ease of reference

directory of Anne Ryan writings : link

In Palma the winter is never sharp; the friendly half-dark begins at four o’clock, the sun sets, the first stars are like torches imperceptibly arcking above the black-vivid, naked mountains, and “people move, love, hurry, in a gently arriving gloom.” But when the rain sweeps, shutters are put up and donkeys, waiting outside the misted fondas to take belated peasants into the country again, have a goat pelt thrown over them — a patch of different colored hair about which there is something ludicrous, tantalizing and indifferent.
It was on just such a night of early rain that a young Franciscan was returning to his monastery in the town of Petra. He had been sent into the city of Palma that morning on an unimportant errand, one connected simply with the daily affairs of his convent. Now through the courtyard and arches of the bishop’s palace, past the spiked windows of ancient casas, past the twisted and frantic toldos — those linen awnings over the windows, now dripping into the street — he was hurrying toward the one light visible. At the turn in the narrowest passage an old bookseller was waiting for him.
Because this young monk had the zealous and curious mind of youth he invariably used his supper hour in this manner. Afterward he would meet, on the edge of the city at a given road, the three or four companions who also had been messengers that day; then they would climb into the canvas-covered carro, by means of strings draw its canvas top into a close little hood, light the candle to shine dimly in an open paper bag, chain the wolfish bitch between the wheels, and start again those first prayers of the evening, that “Ave Maria Purissima,” with which every traveler and every peasant begins his journeys.
So this one hour to himself was highly prized by the young monk. There is something inner, dim and tunneling about browsing in a bookshop — the unexpected is at hand, a new country like a half-familiar name is found, or a newly linked memory; moods like a smoldering fire burn, and a name in the pages may blaze, rise, beacon, to be seen even a long way off. When he had stopped in the morning to tell the bookseller he had come, that Palma old one had shown him a history he had found; it might interest Father Torrens because it spoke in the first chapter of Petra and because later on the word America appeared. All day Torrens had been thinking of Petra, making a sort of equation in his head in which his forgotten city-of-the plain could be made to link in some manner to the terrible sum of a continent. The conjecture was fruitless; Petra remained, as it does to this day, a place where shepherds drive in their flocks at night, where water is drawn from a common well and “wheat of any class” is garnered.
Night had already come when he reached the bookseller’s. He stood in the doorway out of the rain, shook the rain from his cloak, and they settled the brazier between them. It was a volume loosened with age that he had in his hands. The shopkeeper hadn’t read it... his arm leaned even then against a tower of stiff volumes, and as they became silent his fingers commenced to turn again thin, stained pages as evenly as though they had been good, slow bites... .
The great Franciscan, Junipero Serra, was born at Petra, November 24, 1713. He came of peasant stock, the tough fiber and steady heart of the country man. When he was but seventeen years old he received the habit of his order, and it is recounted of him that, reading the Franciscan chronicles to which he devoted his novitiate, there “burned in him the desire to devote his life to pagan conversion.” It was nineteen years [310] later, when he was thirty-six years old, that his desire was granted. Only then, in the flower of his maturity, when the facts of his eloquence and sanctity had been related by his cardinal-archbishop in Rome, was the brave and still youthful man allowed to go. At that it was by chance that he got his place.
From the convents of Europe a band of Franciscans had been organized. They had gathered at Malaga, a seaport on the southernmost coast of Spain, and they were waiting in that cathedral town for the first favorable winds of spring. But a winter of strange climate in a strange land where the continuous song of women is like a shuttle from lips to lips, and the sun is like a black, sweet wine, had disturbed the spirit of some of these men. Their zeal weakened. They had had time to think of wild lands and barbaric gods, to listen in the hours of speaking to tales of torture and of superhuman hardships. The whispering grew. So it happened one morning that two stood against the others — not defiantly, but sadly, giving over with tears that which had been a vivid dream. ‘The superiors then looked on the list of those who had applied; one name had held for years, the name of Junipero Serra. The reward of his perseverance, his eloquence, his wisdom, had come at last; word was sent to his Mallorcian convent and he was allowed the added joy of selecting a companion, another monk from his house, one Francis Patlou who afterward became his chronicler. The link of this relationship was never broken; in death, in history, the names of these two are still remembered together.
The naiveté of the monks of Petra is woven with their records. In 1607, says one account, “the jurymen of Petra asked for a foundation of Franciscans; since that time these have been the consolation of afflicted persons, having always broth for the sick and cheese for the poor. And they were getting that broth and that cheese from their sheep which grazed in the boundary pasture grounds. .. .” What new fervor at the announcement of Junipero Serra’s acceptance must have descended into the hearts of these farmer monks! They must have felt sure that the happenings of that time would live as a story retold forever. But it was forgotten. Even today nine-tenths of the people of this region can neither read nor write; the peasant seldom hears of America, and then only as a fabulous place. It was in the monastery itself that from time to time legends were recounted, particularly the one of how, before he left, the simple missionary — whose words everyone could understand — had preached his final sermon and visited each in turn the chapels of his special devotion. And so vivid was his feeling then when he looked for the last time on the face of Santa Monica, of Santa Clara, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, San Carlos de Monterey and Los Angeles, that when he came, in his full vigor, to his own foundings, the relation to his life of these dim chapels had not faded but grown; for each and every one of these altars still there, there is wonderfully, even now, a mission or a city named in the fairest valleys of the world.
It took fifteen days for the two missionaries to make a crossing from Palma to Malaga. Once he arrived at Malaga, Junipero Serra, fearing that too much discussion had undermined the morale, and that the entire band would dissolve, hurried the expedition on to Cadiz where they were to embark. What he had expected, partly took place; three more monks refused to sail. Three more Mallorcians were sent for, so that now the Balearic Isles were represented by a third in this band. Like the good general he was, he knew the value of men.
It was ninety-nine days before they reached Vera Cruz. Horses were waiting for them, a cavalcade. But in an excess of zeal, unwearied by the journey, Junipero Serra set out on foot with his companion, Patlou, for Mexico City; and the Indians who came through the smoky dusk-forests to the camps on the way at once knew his humility, his healing hands, and his eyes blazing with holiness.
For nine years he preached at Xalpan, Mexico, and it was only after this time that he was sent into California and the great work of his life commenced. Nine missions in all, besides the settlements of San Francisco, Los Angeles and San José, are his glory. Indians helped him to build his first churches and of these, the old bells, the plateresque portals, the wonderful simplicity of line and mass are but the very definite character of a transplanted Spanish architecture.
Pope Clement XVI granted him the faculty of confirming, and the last seventeen years of his life were principally devoted to Indian conversion. He died at Monterey and was buried there August 28, 1784, being seventy-one years of age. Patlou relates that on that day in all the valleys Indian drums were sounding, and in every remote teepee a barbaric mourning for the dead man was heard.
The name of this great soldier-priest of the West is written on every page of its history: he was its history, he was the West. The frail legends about his name grow more sturdy, widespread and honored. At Washington he has his place in the Hall of Fame and in California he has several monuments.
But Petra, his birthplace, because it existed century after century, obscure and illiterate, in the center of the Forgotten Isles, was totally unaware of the gigantic figure of her son. The drama lies in the discovery of the stained paper volume that rainy night in Palma; the drama lies in what happened in the imagination of the young seminarist, as all great drama lies, in its essence, merely in a gesture, in a fleeting expression, in a tremendous excitement, in the inner state of that unearthly country of the mind. Torrens is still alive. He is a gracious, quiet priest; his work at Palma is among the orphans of the Hermanas del Temple — those nuns who, garbed in beautiful red habits and blue veils, seem to have stepped out of an old book of pictures. To go to see him is an experience; his closed study has its faint odor of incense; the austere Spanish wall-surface is cut by exquisite niches; he moves carefully the little, native copper lamps about the room, from darkness to darkness, like successive steps in an unknown stairway. At last he settles with a brazier at his feet, to tell again his part of discovery, and in an instant the whole dynamic force of the man is visible — the drama, the gesture....
On the wall over his head hangs a framed piece of rich embroidery; it is the letters simply of one word, the name of a country he will never see — California.

Junípero Serra (1713-74)
wikipedia : link

aside —
Loomed large over Catholics — and Catholic school students like myself — in the early 1960s. A rather more complicated and dark picture, now.

Patlou would be
Francisco Palóu (1723-89), “Spanish Franciscan missionary, administrator, and historian on the Baja California Peninsula and in Alta California”
wikipedia : link

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The passages about an old bookseller, in paragraphs two and four, seem to owe to some personal experience of their author, Anne Ryan.

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