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Visitors to North Beach holy site drawn by faith, mystery, curiosity
Msgr. Borys Gudziak, eparch of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Eparchy in Paris, stops in to the chapel to pray for peace and justice in the Ukraine. Earlier in the week he was a speaker at the Napa Institute. (Photos by Christina Gray/Catholic San Francisco)
July 26, 2018
Christina Gray
An estimated 25.5 million people travel to the city of St. Francis each year and for the last 20, an unmeasured number of them have made their way to the national shrine bearing his name.
The National Shrine of St. Francis of Assisi in North Beach was designated a pilgrimage site in 1999 by retired San Francisco archbishop Cardinal William J. Levada and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The site includes the shrine church – formerly the historic St. Francis of Assisi parish church built in 1849 to serve Gold Rush-era Catholics – and the adjacent Porziuncola Nuova chapel, a near-replica of St. Francis’ chapel in Assisi built by the Knights of St. Francis, a local religious group, in 2008.
Catholic San Francisco spent an afternoon at the Porziuncola July 16 with longtime volunteer docent Angela Testani to ask visitors what brought them to the chapel and why. A Canadian tourist, a local office worker, a bishop from Paris, a theology professor, a parish handyman, a Buddhist from Arizona and a city tour group each came in for reasons of their own.
For Rosa Sanita of Toronto, it was a vision.
“I had a dream about this church,” she told Testani. She extended her arms to show the goosebumps the unexpected recollection produced.
Strolling past gelato shops and Italian bakeries with her husband and daughter on touristy Columbus Avenue on their first visit to San Francisco, the sight of the Porziuncola set into a corner at Vallejo Street stopped Sanita in her tracks.
“It was specifically just like this,” she said looking around the chapel and recalling the tall, narrow structure with the same entryway. The dream had involved a friend’s mother which concerned her, but after she was assured all was well, “I forgot about it until now when I walked by.”
Inside the chapel Testani showed Sanita, a Catholic, an encased rock reportedly brought to the National Shrine from the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi, Italy after a 1997 earthquake turned parts of it to rubble. She pointed at a box at the foot of the altar with slips of paper for personal prayer intentions that would be on the altar for Mass the next day in the shrine church.
All pilgrims learn about the “Assisi Pardon” and some journey to the shrine specifically to obtain it. The plenary indulgence was once granted exclusively to pilgrims to the chapel in Assisi, Italy. The plenary indulgence, “the remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins that have already been forgiven,” according to shrine literature, is now a grace afforded pilgrims to the National Shrine and its Porziuncola chapel with certain conditions.
Raina Sainz from Phoenix is not Catholic and in fact said she leans toward Buddhism. Still, she said felt compelled to come in to the chapel after noticing it as she passed by. “It’s peaceful,” she said. “I pray for people to be less aloof and more kind to one another.”
Testani said that it’s not at all unusual for people to tell her they felt “called” to come inside. And she added that unplanned visits can turn out to be “a more profound experience than the planned ones.”
Either way, she said, each encounter is a “new opportunity for evangelization.” But one question she doesn’t ask is if a visitor is Catholic.
“I ask if they are familiar with any part of who St. Francis was,” she said. Their answers help her present the spirituality of St. Francis in an approachable way.
“I say St. Francis is the best imitator of Jesus Christ who was all love,” Testani said. “That can bring up stuff in their lives and then we let the Holy Spirit take over.”
A retired nurse, Testani is a Third Order Canossian Daughter of Charity whose charism calls her “to live the love of Christ crucified in the secular dimension.”
After retiring, she co-founded Mother of Mercy Charitable Foundation to support the spiritual, educational and health care needs of the people of Nigeria.
Testani jumps up to greet a homeless man from Ethiopia named “John” whose face has suddenly appeared at the window. Layers of rosaries and holy medals peek through his clothing onto which at least a dozen miniature American flags are anchored. Every Monday for the past 15 years she has had a meatball sandwich and a paid bus pass ready and waiting for him.
Jimmy Burke, a handyman at Sts. Peter and Paul Parish, took a tentative step inside the Porziuncola lobby “to say hello.” He said he was born and raised Catholic, but he turned down Testani’s invitation to enter the chapel to pray or her offer of a bulletin.
Two men who seem at first to want to keep to themselves say they were in the neighborhood for “relaxation and gelato” after attending a conference. In time they reveal themselves as Msgr. Borys Gudziak, eparch of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Eparchy of Paris, and Father Mark Marozowich, dean of the school of theology at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Both had been featured speakers at the Napa Institute conference that ended the day before.
“I came in to pray for peace in the Ukraine,” said Msgr. Gudziak, subdued by the news out of the summit that morning between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“We were hoping President Trump would speak out to Putin about the injustices there,” he said.
Msgr. Gudziak appealed to St. Francis for Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian film maker arrested and convicted to 20 years in jail by a Russian court on fabricated charges and now past 60 days of a hunger strike. He asked for our prayers and the prayers of Catholic San Francisco readers before leaving.
“It is a long time, 60 days, so we are concerned,” he said, “This is on our minds and in our hearts today as we have this little vacation walk.”
The Capuchin friars are the stewards of the national shrine, and the current rector, Father John De La Riva, OFM Cap., is working to improve “branding” in order to fortify its identify as a pilgrimage site. He said this may include better exterior signage and a “pilgrims portal” seashell over the church shrine door.
“Hopefully more people will start to associate it as pilgrimage site” and not as just another San Francisco attraction, Father De La Riva said.
Members of walking tour for tourists congregate in the lobby of the Porziuncola Nuova at Vallejo Street and Columbus Avenue in North Beach. The chapel is a stop on the group’s tour of local attractions. (Photo by Christina Gray/Catholic San Francisco)
Rosa Sanita of Toronto said she recognized the Porziuncola chapel from a dream after she walked by the chapel with her vacationing family. (Photos by Christina Gray/Catholic San Francisco)
A lay member of the Society of Jesus from the Philippines talks with docent volunteer Angela Testani during a self-styled pilgrimage. (Photo by Christina Gray/Catholic San Francisco)