When Fr. Virgil Cordano died on May 22, 2008, the bells of the Old Mission Santa Barbara tolled to tell the city. His funeral Mass was held outdoors on the Mission steps—the only way to accommodate the people from every faith and walk of life who had come to say goodbye.

From Sacramento to Santa Barbara

Fr. Virgil was born in Sacramento in 1919, the son of Italian immigrants from Genoa. At twelve, he felt called to the priesthood. In 1934 he came to Santa Barbara as a teenager to study at Saint Anthony’s Seminary — located adjacent to the Old Mission — and received the name Virgil when he was given his Franciscan habit. Apart from the novitiate in San Miguel and doctoral studies at Catholic University in Washington D.C., he spent the rest of his life in Santa Barbara. He was ordained in 1945, trained generations of Franciscan priests, and served as pastor of the Santa Barbara Mission from the 1970s through the 1990s.

Everybody’s Church

Fr. Virgil embraced everyone—and everyone embraced him back. His brown Franciscan habit became a fixture across Santa Barbara life: sixty years of Santa Barbara Fiesta, the Blessing of the Motorcycles, a long commitment to the Anti-Defamation League and interfaith dialogue. He was chosen to greet Queen Elizabeth II during her 1983 visit. Named Man of the Year in 1988. In his seventies, he came out to bless a new soccer field at Marymount and then kicked the first ball.

A local congresswoman captured it perfectly, writing that he was “equally at home blessing the fishing fleet and the Los Rancheros Visitadores as he is saying Mass at the Monastery of the Poor Clares or sitting by the bedside of a dying parishioner.”¹

A former Santa Barbara mayor said simply: “Fr. Virgil is the heart and soul of Santa Barbara.”

He was also genuinely funny. One of his friends who served as emcee at countless Santa Barbara benefits, had a running bit with him. “I would shock the audience by asking Fr. Virgil why he never married,” Crandell recalled. “His answer: Why please one woman and disappoint 50!”

Near the end of his life, he wept from gratitude — grateful for his faith, his Franciscan brothers, his family, and his friends in Santa Barbara. St. Francis wrote that when we leave this earth, we can take nothing we have received, “only what you have given.” Fr. Virgil felt he had received far more than he gave. For a man who had given so much, that says everything.

The Center That Bears His Name

A chair in Catholic Studies at UC Santa Barbara was endowed in his honor. A book by UCSB historian Mario Garcia documented his life and ministry. But the most living memorial opens its doors every weekday morning at 9 a.m., where nearly 100 neighbors are welcomed by name, many of them people Fr. Virgil himself would have sought out.

He believed that seeing Christ in every person wasn’t a metaphor. It was an instruction. The Father Virgil Cordano Center exists because Sister Margaret and Father John believed the same thing, and because Santa Barbara needed a place where that belief could be practiced every single day.

St. Francis wrote it plainly, in the Admonitions: *”Blessed is the person who supports his neighbor in his weakness as he would want to be supported were he in a similar situation.”

Fr. Virgil spent 63 years proving that possible.

See what that looks like today at the Father Virgil Cordano Center.