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3 young adults and their dog Complete Lenten California Mission pilgrimage BY VALERIE SCHMALZ Director, Office of Human Life & Dignity
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trio of twenty-something young adults and their dog Laika walked more than 800 miles in the footsteps of St. Junipero Serra on a Lenten pilgrimage to pray for California that spanned the 46 days from Ash Wednesday to Easter Vigil. Hope Waterman, 27, Matthew Geier, 27 and John Paul Hanson, 24, began walking after the 7 a.m. Ash Wednesday Mass at the first mission, Mission San Diego de Alcalá, and concluded in time for Easter Vigil in Sonoma, where the 21st and farthest north California mission was founded by the Franciscan friars. “The thing I could do to bring about the radical reconversion of California was to pray to the man who brought the faith to California in the first place and to walk the missions of California as a prayer and penance for the salvation of California,” said Waterman, who was inspired to make the pilgrimage to ask the intercession of St. Junipero Serra who founded California’s mission system. Waterman met Geier, a park ranger at Chino Hills State Park and a musician with a medieval and renaissance ensemble, when she was scouting and planning the pilgrimage earlier this year. Geier thought it sounded like a great idea and his boss agreed, giving him six weeks off. Hanson was a childhood neighbor and is a family friend who up until two days before the expedition was undecided. “I meant to say no,” said Hanson when Waterman called him in Irving, Texas, to find out his final decision, “and somehow I said yes.” › JUNE 2022 | CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO
