Posted on 01/16/2015 2:25:55 PM PST by marshmallow
WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Surprising even the people who have been promoting the sainthood cause of Blessed Junipero Serra, Pope Francis announced Jan. 15 that in September, he hopes to canonize the 18th-century Spanish Franciscan who founded a string of missions across Mexico and California.
Blessed Serra is credited with directly founding nine missions in California, one in Baja California in Mexico and with reinvigorating established missions in Mexico. Friars under his tutelage founded many others across California, in territory that was then part of New Spain.
The vice postulator for Blessed Serra's sainthood cause, Franciscan Father John Vaughn, told Catholic News Service he was taken completely by surprise by the pope's announcement. Even among the friars at Mission Santa Barbara, where he lives, "I was the last to know," he said.
The announcement came when Pope Francis, aboard a flight from Sri Lanka to the Philippines, explained to reporters his decision to canonize St. Joseph Vaz, a 17th- and 18th-century missionary to Sri Lanka, bypassing the usual process, including verification of a second miracle attributed to the saint's intercession. Pope Francis said St. Joseph was among great evangelists whom he planned to canonize without such preliminaries, in an effort to celebrate the practice of evangelization.
(Excerpt) Read more at catholicnews.com ...
Hard to imagine what this guy did. 36 years old, in Spain. Has a PhD in theology and a good position. And 36 wasn’t young in those days.
And he volunteers to go to the new world, and then winds up in a desolate corner of the new world, among the savages.
In modern terms, that is probably not too far removed volunteering to leave for Mars. Brave guy.
Of course, he gets condemned for “cultural genocide” by the same folks who get in a froth over the word “redskins.”
Is granting sainthood becoming political? I’m probably naïve, but I thought the two-miracle thing was very serious.
Some claim it wasn’t cultural.
I was taught as a child that the missions were one day’s burro ride apart.
Fr. Serra was lame, so he had to ride.
The pathway is El Camino Real, Highway 101.
“but I thought the two-miracle thing was very serious.”
Now you don’t need any miracles.
Like Obama this Pope doesn't need to be shackled by process and procedures. These guys can just issue decrees.
You know, I’m not Catholic and don’t see I ever will be. But the man was brave as anyone can imagine. And he believed in Christ enough to leave for a strange and forbidding place, literally a “New World”, where he knew he would likely never return from.
He brought civilization to California. I think he deserves to be remembered and honored.
God alone knows what he would think of California’s morals today. Hard to imagine what he saw and endured for Christ.
Some of my ancestors used to practice ritual human sacrifice, killing their children, and poisoning each other, until they got converted to Christianity by missionaries in the 1820s. Until the missionaries showed up and told the women to “keep their pants on,” they were being decimated by venereal diseases being spread by sailors among the native population. The missionaries stopped all that.
And yet now the missionaries get excoriated for “cultural imperialism.”
It used to be four—two for beatification and two more for canonization.
I read that the native Hawaiian religion had lots of taboos. When the sailors started showing up and completely ignored the taboos, with no bad consequences, that caused a collapse of the belief in the traditional religion...shortly before the arrival of Protestant missionaries from New England.
“It used to be four—two for beatification and two more for canonization.”
I think it was one for beatification and another for canonization.
“that caused a collapse of the belief in the traditional religion..”
Kamehameha the Great’s wives converted to Christianity and ordered the destruction of all statues and temples.
Yep, yep, yep. But the native religion (which kept people in total subjugation to the chiefs as well as prescribing all sort of religious requirements) was based on fear, since the punishment for pretty much any infraction of the kapu system was instant death. For example, women could be put to death for eating a banana or the wrong species of fish, or eating together with a man. You could be killed if your shadow happened to fall on a chief, or if you mistakenly stepped on his shadow, or if you didn’t fall flat on your face if the chief was passing by.
It frankly was a pretty miserable place before the missionaries showed up, everything was in collapse, large numbers of people were dying from disease, and all sorts of other problems.
The missionaries brought the Gospel, and completely changed the islands within 10-20 years. Hawaiians were so interested in learning to read the Bible that by the mid 1800s Hawaii had the highest literacy rate in the world.
As I understand it, it was John Paul II (whom I loved) who unfortunately set off this wave of quick canonizations. It's said we all need these good role-models to emulate. Fine. However the wholesale aspect of it really vitiated and almost de-solemnized the process.
If God wants these people canonized, let's pray for the miracles to come.
And they will. We're still in the Age of Miracles.
That said, I wish they'd waited for the second miracle.
Serra directly opposed both the slave-catchers and the military who wanted to prostitute the Indian women.
The Indians who entered the mission system for protection did so freely, and they were treated the same as the monks. True, once in, they were not allowed to leave --- but they knew that when they joined. Just like the military or any other ""institution" in those days.
They acquired literacy and manual skills; they prayed; they had families --- the sanctity of marriage was honored and respected --- and they cared for their children; they worked, and they shared equitably in the products of their labor. They could be subject to corporal punishment for theft, for fleeing their responsibilities, by refusing to work (like like monks, or even just as they would be in their own tribes.) Solders of the Spanish crown fared worse!
There was no money, because neither the California Indians nor the Franciscans had a money economy: they had a monastic economy.
The Spanish military wanted the Indians to get into a money economy, because he wanted them to pimp their own sisters, wives and daughters to the soldiers for money and liquor. When Serra opposed this, they agitated to the governor to get the mission chain taken away from the Franciscans.
And that's what happened.
Eventually the Indians ended up as serfs on the haciendas, and sexual consorts for the soldiers, but this was not Serra's doing. He strove, labored hard and suffered much to obtain the well-being and redemption of the California Indians all his life. In this tumultuous contact of two civilizations (Spanish and Indian) that the Spanish seized the ascendancy was inevitable; but the way they did it was unconscionable. Serra was on the outs with the colonial military power structure and did everything he knew how to protect and prosper the Indians and to safeguard their human dignity.
If we were in the exact same situation, with the same range of options, we would have done nobly indeed to do the exact same thing.
“Is granting sainthood becoming political?”
Always was - but not in the way some might think. Those who were beatified still had to have miracles attributed to them.
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