Opening Remarks
Mass Celebrating the Designation of Mission San Buenaventura as a Minor Basilica
Most Reverend José H. Gomez
Archbishop of Los Angeles
Mission Basilica San Buenaventura
July 15, 2020
Brothers and sisters,
It gives me great joy to be with you on this beautiful morning.
We are grateful today to the Holy Father Pope Francis for recognizing our great mission as one of the historic basilicas of the universal Church.
When the Pope designates a basilica, it means this is holy ground. Something beautiful and important in the history of salvation happened here. A basilica is a place where the mercy of God has been proclaimed in the name of Jesus Christ. It is a place where sinners have been saved and saints have been made, and the Kingdom of God has moved forward.
As we all know, Mission Basilica San Buenaventura is the last of nine missions founded by the great apostle, St. Junípero Serra, and it was consecrated by the saint personally on Easter Sunday, March 31, 1782.
Serra’s vision was to create what he called “a ladder of missions” along the edge of this great American continent. “Missions, my Lord, missions — that is what this country needs,” he said.[i]
I was reading the letter he wrote on that Easter night when San Buenaventura was founded, and he describes a wonderful scene, almost like a vision of heaven. Hispanic and indigenous families gathered together before a large cross, celebrating the Eucharist and praising God with joy.
Before founding this mission, St. Junípero had asked the approval of the Chumash, a sign of his respect for the great dignity of this land’s first peoples.[ii]
On the other side of the continent, the revolutionary war was still going on. But at the same time, the new American nation was also being born here, in this holy place where the Chumash and missionaries prayed and worked together in peace, creating a new culture.
Pope Francis has given us the gift of this new Basilica at a challenging moment in America’s history.
So as we begin this Holy Eucharist, we turn to St. Junípero, and we ask his prayers for this nation he helped to found. We entrust ourselves as he did, to Our Lady of Guadalupe, and we ask for the grace to continue the mission of making this one nation under God, where all men and women can live in equality, liberty and peace.
[i] Letter, July 27, 1776; Letter, August 22, 1778; Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz, Junípero Serra: California, Indians, and the Transformation of a Missionary (University of Oklahoma, 2015), 321, 357.
[ii] Letter, March 31, 1782. Beebe and Senkewicz, 387.