During an airborne press conference en route to the Philippines ultimate January, Pope Francis revealed that he's going to canonize Blessed Junipero Serra, the heroic "Apostle of California," for the duration of his go to to the USA this coming September. As a Catholic who changed into born and raised in California, I had been prayerfully looking forward to this ancient event for decades. As he has achieve

1. A Patron Saint for California
During an airborne press conference en route to the Philippines ultimate January, Pope Francis revealed
that he's going to canonize Blessed Junipero Serra, the heroic "Apostle of California," for the duration of
his go to to the USA this coming September. As a Catholic who changed into born and raised in
California, I had been prayerfully looking forward to this ancient event for decades. As he has achieved
with several different Blesseds who died in past centuries and who have been broadly honored and
commemorated by the devoted, Pope Francis has chosen to waive the ordinary requirement for a
second miracle obtained thru Father Serra's intercession because the situation of his canonization, as a
consequence allowing his cause for sainthood to continue to its conclusion with out in addition put off.
Father Junipero Serra, O.F.M. (1713--1784) changed into the humble and hardworking Franciscan friar
who added the Catholic religion to the local American peoples of California, as a result laying the muse
for the kingdom's Catholic culture this is nevertheless very a great deal alive these days. He changed into
born and raised at the Spanish island of Majorca in the western Mediterranean. As a thirty-six-yr-old
priest, he replied God's name to turn out to be a missionary to the Americas. After some years of
ministry along with his fellow Franciscans in Mexico and the Baja California peninsula, on the age of
fifty-three Father Serra become appointed to guide a Spanish day trip that headed north to colonize and
evangelize mainland California. There, with God's assist, he performed what he is most famous for: the
founding of the primary seven in a series of twenty-one California venture settlements that stretches
along the shoreline from San Diego in the south to fairly north of San Francisco. In addition to teaching
the faith and baptizing thousands of native Americans, Father Serra and his fellow Franciscans advanced
and taught the people precious strategies in construction, gardening, animal husbandry, agriculture, and
irrigation.
Although earthquakes and fires frequently. churches in ventura ca undid numerous years' really
worth of hard guide exertions inside a few seconds or minutes and now not all the missions were
successful, a terrific variety of them did prosper way to the patient persevering efforts of the
missionaries, and some subsequently evolved into modern-day cities such as Los Angeles, San Diego, San
Francisco, San Jose, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura. The Spanish missions of the 1700s and
early 1800s have left an indelible mark on the faith, tradition, art, architecture, and economy of the
Golden State. As a boy, my parents took my sister and me to go to a lot of them which includes Santa
Barbara, Santa Ynez, La Purisima Concepcion, San Luis Obispo, San Miguel, San Carlos Borromeo (where
Father Serra is buried), and Nuestra Senora de l. A. Soledad.
Some hundred years after his demise, in 1985, Saint John Paul II declared Father Serra "Venerable."
That identical yr, in popularity of his extremely good achievements, the U.S. Postal Service issued a
unique 44-cent USAirmail stamp in Father Serra's honor, which featured a portrait of the mythical friar
targeted between an define of the California and Baja California coast on his left and the façade of
Mission San Gabriel on his right. He become beatified with the aid of John Paul II on September 25,
1988. Later this yr, thanks to Pope Francis, California will sooner or later have its own customer saint
and the Church can have any other exceptional missionary position model and intercessor for the New
Evangelization.