Mission San Carlos Borromeo

A group of San Diegans will begin a 740-mile relay walk Saturday, following the path of Father Junipero Serra as he established a series of missions from San Diego to Sonoma. Their aim is to draw attention to efforts to have the famous Franciscan priest declared a saint by church officials in Rome. The "pilgrimage," sponsored by the California Knights of Columbus, will involve hundreds of people.

With its Moorish domes and bell towers, the splendid Mission San Carlos Borromeo in Carmel is the jewel of the California mission system. The small cell where Father Junipero Serra lived and worked has been meticulously preserved. When he died on Aug. 28, 1784, the remains of California's apostle were buried at the foot of the main altar. Now, however, a displaced tribe of Indians is trying to stake a claim in what Serra called the "Garden of God," south of San Francisco.

With its Moorish domes and bell towers, the splendid Mission San Carlos Borromeo in Carmel is the jewel of the California mission system. The small cell where Father Junipero Serra lived and worked has been meticulously preserved. When he died on Aug. 28, 1784, the remains of California's apostle were buried at the foot of the main altar. Now, however, a displaced tribe of Indians is trying to stake a claim in what Serra called the "Garden of God," south of San Francisco.

A group of San Diegans will begin a 740-mile relay walk Saturday, following the path of Father Junipero Serra as he established a series of missions from San Diego to Sonoma. Their aim is to draw attention to efforts to have the famous Franciscan priest declared a saint by church officials in Rome. The "pilgrimage," sponsored by the California Knights of Columbus, will involve hundreds of people.

Big Sur, the 90 or so miles of rugged Pacific coast that unfurls south of Monterey, is known for pricey, reservations-only restaurants and as a capital of the New Age movement. It's a place, then, for well-fed people to get in touch with their inner selves in a spectacular natural setting. But before the arrival of $120 prix fixe dinners, before the human potential movement was founded at the Esalen Institute, Big Sur was associated with one of America's most austere and, for a while, famous artists.

About 20 members of the Knights of Columbus set out from the San Fernando Mission Thursday morning as part of a statewide march aimed at persuading the Vatican to declare Father Junipero Serra California's first saint. Members of the Roman Catholic fraternal organization are retracing Serra's footsteps across California, traveling from mission to mission. The Franciscan friar started the state's network of 21 missions in the 18th Century.

Only an obscure cement slab in the floor at the Mission San Carlos Borromeo here indicates his grave: "Fray Junipero Serra, Apostol de California, 1713-1784." Yet, 1.5 million tourists and pilgrims a year crowd this small church and dwellings-turned-museum, which together are more commonly known as the Carmel Mission, to admire the place from where Serra and a handful of other Franciscan missionaries spread the gospel to the California natives.

As they passed a wooden staff topped with a cross from one marcher to another Saturday, members of the procession likened their 30-mile trek to the Olympic torch relay across America. "What does the torch relay do? It builds patriotism," Frank Jacobowitz said. "What does our walk do? It builds faith." The daylong walk started at the mission in San Gabriel and ended at the mission in San Fernando.

One day last month, Ruben Mendoza, an archeology professor at Cal State Monterey Bay, flipped the light switch in the former Army mail and recreation building that he uses to store thousands of artifacts from two Spanish missions. Nothing happened. The university cut electricity to the one-story building after a transformer blew, deciding that the entire circuit was too decayed to warrant repairs any time soon.

Reporting from San Juan Bautista, Calif. -- On the darkest day of the year, a hushed crowd in a dim church awaited a few minutes of sheer brilliance. It was just after dawn Wednesday, the day of the winter solstice. Outside the 200-year-old mission at the heart of tiny San Juan Bautista, Native American drummers sang, urging the sun to rise. Inside, dozens of parishioners rubbed the sleep from their eyes. A woman stood up and sang in cadences haunting and solemn — phrases in no known tongue, she said, but "the language of the heart.

When Father Noel Francis Moholy signed on 30 years ago to lead the sainthood campaign for Father Junipero Serra, it was surely a match made in heaven. Many of the same adjectives used by contemporaries and historians to describe Serra, the 18th-Century missionary known as "the Apostle of California," apply equally to fellow Franciscan Moholy: tough, dogged, stubborn and determined. Moholy, 72, intends to be in Rome on Sept.

She was California's first First Lady, the "Queen of California." But she hated it here so much that she schemed to divorce her governor-husband in what has been recorded as California's first grand public marital scandal. Dona Eulalia Callis de Fages, the wife of early Spanish Gov. Pedro Fages, was the first resident First Lady of the state. A pampered spitfire of rank and social standing, she was uprooted from family and friends in Spain to live in Monterey.