Posted on 05/03/2015 1:33:15 PM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
Pope Francis weighed in on a thorny topic in California history Saturday when he spoke at length at a Rome Mass about Father Junipero Serra, the controversial California mission founder set to become America's first Latino saint later this year.
Addressing an audience that included many American priests, including Los Angeles Archbishop Jose H. Gomez, the pope referred to the 18th century Franciscan priest as “one of the founding fathers of the United States” and praised his willingness to abandon the comforts and privileges of his native Spain to spread the Christian message in the New World.
I wonder if today we are able to respond with the same generosity and courage to the call of God,” Francis said during a homily at Rome’s American seminary, the Pontifical North American College.
Francis will formally declare Serra a saint in September during the Washington, D.C., leg of his first visit to the United States. Although the Vatican has canonized Americans before, Serra will be the first saint canonized on U.S. soil.
In California, Serra has been criticized by native American activists for his role in a Spanish colonial system that mistreated and displaced indigenous people, and some have accused him of forcing people to convert to Catholicism. The state Senate voted last month to replace a statue of Serra in the U.S. Capitol with astronaut Sally Ride.
(Excerpt) Read more at touch.latimes.com ...
Catholic ping!
See my post #33.
I have, you should read it, in fact you are still living it, Mexico and everything South, is still there, and still haunting us.
The guy had nothing to do with the United States and never set foot in it.
He was a part of the ugly Spanish/Catholic empire, which gave us the hell of Mexico and Latin America.
The story of the Catholic foundations of this great land seems to piss off pretty much everyone.
Honestly, this Pope is way out of line.
“Father Junipero Serra was part of our curriculum in elementary school in San Diego, CA.”
Mine too...IMHO, he was a great man.
History you say? Whose?
“They went to missions because they had few other options,” he said, since diseases devastated the tribes and the invasive plants and animals brought by the Spanish for agriculture overwhelmed native food sources.
Missions appeared to be “a place for them to rebuild their communities”, Hackel said.
Yet, according to Miranda, as populations grew they became “disease factories”. Historians estimate that hundreds of thousands of Native Americans died in the decades after Europeans arrived, mostly killed by diseases.
Converts were taught to farm, breed livestock and live in regimented communities. They were flogged for disobedience, captured if they tried to flee, and sometimes raped by soldiers of the local garrisons.
French explorer Jean François de Galaup de la Pérouse, Serra’s contemporary, wrote that the missions treated “too much a child, too much a slave, too little a man” and were akin to slave plantations. On several occasions tribes tried to revolt, until eventually new settlers took over the missions.
And no Mrs. don-o I haven’t changed my mind. I have read hundreds of pages from the mission records and contemporary records in Old Spanish. The story is there, people in the church just choose to ignore it.
Oh yeah. Like they wouldn’t have found that anyways.
;)
Wow so you hate the Spanish and the Catholics. Good to know.
Yes because President Jackson treated them so well and they were so blessed to have the reservation system imposed.
And to put this in perspective: the forces that wanted to get rid of Serra in his lifetime, were the hacienda owners who wanted the native Californians for serfs, and the soldiers at the presidios who wanted the women for undignified, coerced sexual slavery.
Serra fought hard to counter the overwhelming political power of the hacendados and the Spanish military. He had only a very few choices of how to do that.
Serra and his friars are today criticized for being "paternalistic" toward the Indians, and indeed they were: these were rough times, but they were as fathers to them --- in contrast to the hacendados and soldados, who were to them as wolves.
Serra was in conflict with with three successive governors, Pedro Fages, Fernando Rivera y Moncada, and Felipe de Neve. And only a few decades after Serra's death, the Spanish power-brokers got their way, the missions were taken away from the Franciscans, and the Indians reduced to prostitutes and serfs on the haciendas.
I still stand by my conclusion that "If we were in the exact same situation, with the same range of options, we would have done nobly indeed to do as Serra did."
Mercy, he is as ignorant of American History as he is on the science of global warming
I don’t hate anyone, but I appreciate that you couldn’t find a factual disagreement with my post, not even the pro-american tone of it.
He was aware of the struggle going on in the American colonies and got some money together and sent it to General Washington because he had heard that men were going without shoes at Valley Forge in the deep of winter.
So in my book he certainly qualifies.
lol, i’ve done that too, had a few FR windows open and got things mixed up.
:-)
Actually he did founded the mission you got give him props for that
He brought Cathoicism to Native Americans
I think Native American miltants should lightin up
As person who live in Alaska
Thank you what about that guy LOL!
Maryland was started by English Catholics. Lord Baltimore was a Catholic. Has anyone tried to blame the riots in Baltimore on the Catholic Church yet?
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