When Pope Francis canonizes Father Junipero Serra on Wednesday at an outdoor mass at Catholic University of America, at least some American Indians will be plenty sore.
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Junípero Serra, a Franciscan friar who is seen as one of the founders of California, set in motion the establishment of a string of missions in the region starting in 1769 with the founding of one in Baja California.
Junipero Serra, a Franciscan friar who was one of the founders of California, has been a symbol in the West for more than 200 years.
Cutcha Risling Baldy, who teaches American Indian Studies at SDSU, said Native Americans suffered under the Mission system and that should preclude Serra from sainthood.
Serra and the California missions represent the brutal history and bloody legacy of colonization to many Native people, including fourth-grade me.
Critics of Serra’s project claim that Indians were compelled to join the missions, essentially as a slave labor force, and were baptized against their will. The consensus of responsible historians, however, is that both of these charges are false.
Pope Francis will arrive to the USA on Tuesday. His strategy was to create communities of baptised Indians, who would be trained and educated to fit in with the new economic system brought by Spanish rule and protected from harmful spiritual influences.
“This is the big story: The first Hispanic pope is coming to America to give us our first Hispanic saint”, Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez told reporters at a religious conference in August.
“Undoubtedly what puzzles and hurts us the most is how the Catholic Church has ignored the humanity of our ancestors”, Lopez wrote in the letter. In fact, Serra is deemed such a great evangelist for the Catholic Church that Pope Francis will officially declare him a saint this week during his visit to the United States.
Now, as Pope Francis prepares to canonize Serra, the controversy has reignited.
Serra, an 18th-century Spanish missionary, launched a network of missions along the California coast.
Within 12 years, Mendoza said, “More than 120,000 Indians out of the more than 150,000 California Indians that still existed at the end of the Mexican period were wiped out”. That’s because the Pope is about to make their ancestor… a saint. “The metals are solid bronze, and they’re replicas of the Caravaca cross that St. Serra was wearing when they exhumed his body, and was the cross that he would wear”. “Issues of alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide and poverty among our people are directly linked to this history”.
“I had an adversarial relationship with Serra which went unspoken up until that moment”, Mendoza said.
So why will Francis grant Serra sainthood – and even overlook the requirement of a second miracle by Serra that’s typically needed for sainthood?
“It’s accurate to say he tried to make them Catholics and take the best in native culture and use that to bring them to Catholicism”, Senkewicz said. But he said Serra, a Franciscan theology professor from Mallorca, Spain, meant well by the Native Americans he encountered. He’s loosened things up a bit at the Vatican, has moved the church towards an openness that his predecessor assiduously avoided, and has tried to affect a lifestyle of a regular guy, that is, if a regular guy could be a pope. Along the way, many Indian tribesmen converted to Christianity, and Serra helped put the stamp of Christianity on what would eventually become a part of the United States.
It is hard to imagine that Serra, the former college professor who corresponded regularly with church officials in Mexico City and Spain, was unaware of the writings of Las Casas. John Macias, a history instructor at Chaffey College and member of the San Gabriel Mission’s museum board, says he “sees it from two viewpoints”. “And that is not something the Catholic church should want”.
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Like Columbus and other explorers before him, Serra was motivated by the desire to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the pagan tribes, an effort that was remarkably successful from California down through Mexico and throughout Latin America.
