Want to Help Me Jumpstart a Book?

I'm trying to get going on an overdue project, a book about St. Junipero Serra and the American Saints. Input from you on this and future posts on this topic could be invaluable!

First some context. I do some part-time work for the Benedict XVI Institute for Sacred Music and Divine Worship in the San Francisco Archdiocese. For years before I started my little job with them a couple of years ago now, I was an avid follower of and cheerleader for the institute, from its very first public meeting[1], which included Vespers and an introduction by Archbishop Cordileone, who founded the institute. The institute’s first director, the well-known-among-sacred-music-enthusiasts-chant-composer Fr. Samuel Weber, O.S.B., gave a demonstration of how easy it is to teach chant to absolute beginners.

I was so enthusiastic about the goals of the institute, that it seems it was natural for me to become more involved, and eventually, I developed a working relationship with the current Executive Director of the Benedict XVI Institute, Maggie Gallagher. Currently, I edit the Facebook pages for the B16 Institute and its online magazine Catholic Arts Today, which actually means I write almost all of the almost-daily postings. I also edit the Ancient Liturgies San Francisco email newsletter, which means I actually write, research, compile information, take or find photos, design, and lay out most of what goes out when the newsletter is published via Mailchimp.

As part of my job, I attend the weekly B16 institute ZOOM meeting.

Hold on! I’m getting to the point, trust me.

As it happened, when I mentioned during a B16 meeting in April that I was about to leave in early May for an East Coast pilgrimage with two friends to the shrine of the North American martyrs in New York State and to a number of other shrines in New England and Canada, Maggie Gallagher asked me to consider taking on the writing of a book that the institute has committed to publishing on St. Junipero Serra and the American Saints.

After an early version of the planned book was drafted by a well-respected and skilled writer from England, Maggie had given it to the institute’s poet-in-residence to read and, don’t quote me, but as I recall, she said he said it didn’t have the right tone for an American audience and was not anecdotal enough. Another expert on the North American Martyrs whose shrine is in upper New York State had drafted a chapter, which was heartfelt in admiration and rich with details from her long immersion to their remarkable history, but which also apparently wasn’t what was needed.

Maggie thought it would be interesting for me to start from scratch and write about these saints from the point of view of my upcoming pilgrimage. And incidentally, that might inspire others to do the same. People don’t go on enough pilgrimages anymore.

Aha, I thought that’s a good fit for me. I write a lot of travel stories, and after my hippy days were over I became inspired more by John Steinbeck’s autobiographical Travels with Charlie than by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. This would, of course, be much more Catholic than those books, but if told well, it surely could still be interesting as a traveler’s tale. I can’t compare myself to Chaucer, but I can dream big, and Canterbury Tales is one of the greatest works in secular Western literature, although it’s about a Catholic pilgrimage. The Wife of Bath, the Miller, and the rest of that motley lot were on the road in Aprille to honor religious vows they’d taken to endure the rigors of travel to the Shrine of St Thomas of Canterbury.

But I digress. Moving along to a related topic, here is a painting of St. Junipero Serra and the American saints by figurative artist Bernadette Carstensen (bernadettecarstensen.com) that was commissioned by the institute.

The saints in the painting stand among decorated arches against a classic California landscape on Mount Tamalpais with roses and columbine that grow there. Columbine also represents the Holy Spirit. The roses look to be Roses of Castile, of the kind St. Juan Diego found growing in winter and gathered into his tilma after the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico.

The figure of St. Junípero Serra in the middle stands with arms upraised. From left to right on either side of Serra are Blessed Michael McGivney; St. Elizabeth Ann Seton; Servant of God Father Augustus Tolton; Saint Damian of Molokai; Saint Mother Cabrini; a Native American representing the Huron Christian martyrs; St. René Goupil, representing the Jesuit martyrs, and the Mohawk St. Kateri Tekakwitha. At the saints’ feet are Spanish tiles depicting the nine missions founded by St. Serra. Below is a dedication to Barbara Castor, whose husband commissioned the painting in her honor.

Out of the depicted saints, the saints whose shrines I would be visiting are Blessed Michael McGivney; St. René Goupil (representing several Jesuit martyrs; the Native American representing unknown native martyrs; and St. Kateri Tekawitha. Though there are no specific shrines for the Native American martyrs who accompanied the Jesuits and bravely died full of zeal for their faith, their stories are important too, and I hope to help them to be better known.

And perhaps the stories of the other saints in the painting could be told outside the framework of the pilgrimage. I’m still deciding how I might manage that.

Five Months Later: Nada!

Here it is more than five months after the pilgrimage, and I have not finished a single chapter. That’s where you might come in. I’ll tell you more about how you can help in a bit. But first, even more background.

My traveling buddy now sixty-one-year-old Stewart, who is a great pray-er, had taken the East Coast pilgrimage previously about five times. In May for our East Coast pilgrimage, Stewart made adjustments to his normal itinerary to add in a visit to New Haven Connecticut for Blessed McIvney and to Oratorio for the Canadian shrine of North American martyrs. He also included a detour to Niagara Falls and was unperturbed when I teased him that the falls was known as a honeymoon destination. My seventy-one-year-old- friend Marie also came along, and after all we all went through together on the road, she became a good friend also to Stewart.

I want to note that Stewart has helped me travel to many places in the past year and a half, including to the Catholic Imagination Conference in Dallas in September 2022, where I met Dana Gioia in person for the first time.

I had already met Dana by phone. The first trip Stewart and I took together was soon after Dana called me out of the blue one day to ask if I would be interested in reviewing the Ancient Manuscripts exhibit at the Getty Museum in L.A. I asked if I could get expenses paid to travel there, and since I don’t drive much anymore, I would also need to bring a companion; when Dana checked, the answer came back as yes. Stewart volunteered to help me travel to the Getty, and, yes, the philanthropist sponsoring the exhibit even agreed to pay for separate rooms.

One cute anecdote: recently Stewart told me that when we met Dana in Dallas at the CIC, after I told Dana that Stewart was my traveling buddy, Dana told Stewart he was acting as Virgil to my Dante.

Since our return to the Bay Area from the East Coast tour, Stewart has been trying to help me get going on what is turning out to be a daunting project—with his prayers. He has even taken me from San José to Mission Carmel twice so we could pray at St. Junipero Serra’s tomb for my success.

But my job with the B16 institute combined with my having written several major articles about the Catholic arts renewal, along with my not-always-successfully-repressed urges to keep writing poetry, with this Substack, and with the unheralded but necessary work of staying alive and keeping my old Victorian from falling down over my head, I have had lots of distractions to tear me away from the big task of writing that book. I’m eager to do it; it’s an important and wonderfully enjoyable topic to write about.

But as Trump would often say about many things, It’s huge.

Sample Chapter about Blessed McGivney?

About two months ago, I decided it would help get me going to commit to writing a sample chapter, which I would then run by Maggie Gallagher to check the tone, level of detail, and interest. The chapter’s approval, if gained, would make it easier to continue with the rest.

A chapter on Blessed Michael McGivney would be simple to start with, I thought. The stories of the North American martyrs and St. Kateri Tekawitha are interwoven, so the telling of their stories would need to be more complex.

After all, this in-many-ways-ordinary second-generation Irish parish priest did not trek through wildernesses and die an agonizing death after mock baptisms with boiling water or have his fingers chewed off as did some of the Jesuit martyrs.

But it’s interesting to examine the things Blessed McGivney did, including his creation of the Knights of Columbus to build fellowship between Catholics, support Catholic families, and further the acceptance of the Irish and of the Catholic faith in mostly Protestant North America. So I told Maggie I’d give her a sample chapter about him.

But the thing is, I haven’t delivered the chapter yet either.

I wish I could write more about this, but I will soon. I need to go pack for yet another pilgrimage— which leaves tomorrow—for Japan. I’m going with Stewart and Marie again, another friend, Chrystal, and Japan-born Canon Raphael Ueda, the rector of the traditional Mass oratory Chrystal and I attend is leading us, along with about twenty-five others. We’ll be back on the 16th. I probably won’t be able to continue this thread before then. But I hope you can start giving me some feedback.

So, What You Can Do Is This

Basically, my request from you is to give me reactions to the ideas I’ve put down here and will continue to put down in future posts about the development of this book.

It could be an invaluable help to me, from what another Substack writer wrote. He had published a book before he started his Substack, and he wished he had begun earlier, while he’d been writing the book. The community that formed around his Substack posts has given him a lot of great feedback, of the kind he could have used when deciding what would be interesting to readers before the book was done.

I hope you might give me that kind of input if you have the time and interest. You can be a part of helping me bring this project to completion and maybe even appear in the author's acknowledgments, if it comes to that.

Hope to hear from you in the comments to this post and to future ones!

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[1] "The Benedict XVI Institute for Sacred Music" - Guest Article by Roseanne T. Sullivan. New Liturgical Movement, 30 January 2014

New Liturgical Institute in San Francisco, by Roseanne T. Sullivan. Regina Magazine, 6 December 2013