Left: Monument of Junípero Serra on plaza de San Francisco de Asis in Havana; right: Mission church of Jalpan de Serra, Querétaro, Mexico, built by Junípero Serra between 1751 and 1758 (Images: Wikipedia)
Posted on 03/30/2015 6:02:39 PM PDT by Mrs. Don-o
Los Angeles, Calif.- California missionary Father Junipero Serra’s canonization is “long overdue,” says a university professor concerned that the priest’s history has been politicized and misrepresented.
“When he died, many native peoples came to the mission for his burial. They openly wept. Others of his colleagues and even colonists, believed that he would be made a saint, because of the way he had lived his life, a self-effacing life of a martyr,” said archaeology professor Reuben Mendoza of California State University, Monterrey Bay.
“Because of what he had achieved in his life, even then they had talked about his impending canonization,” Mendoza told CNA March 26.
Fr. Serra was born in 1713 on the Spanish island of Majorca in the Mediterranean. He left his position as a university professor to become a missionary to the New World, helping to convert many native Californians to Christianity and teaching them new and vital technologies. The Franciscan priest founded several of the missions that would go on to become the centers of major California cities.
The priest’s mission work often took place despite a painful ulcerated leg Mendoza said was caused by a spider bite soon after his arrival in Mexico. He died in 1784 at Mission San Carlos Borroméo del Carmelo in what is now the state of California.
St. John Paul II beatified Fr. Serra in 1988. In January, Pope Francis praised the missionary as “the evangelizer of the West” and announced his intention to canonize the Franciscan missionary during his scheduled 2015 visit to the U.S.
Mendoza learned from other researchers that Serra was “a very humble man and a man who had a great sense of humor.”
He said the “self-effacing” priest would sometimes insist on doing the work of young Indian boys who cleaned the Convent of San Fernando in Mexico City.
“He would sweep the halls and pick up the trash and maintain his spiritual stance through work and action.”
The priest’s sacrifices and “spiritual evangelization” led to the establishment of the missions that were “fundamental” to California’s history.
Mendoza lamented that “politics” had delayed the canonization.
“There has been a significant politicization of his canonization,” he said, pointing to opposition from those who feel that “the Church should not canonize a man who ultimately brought the missions to California and changed the lifestyles of native peoples.”
Mendoza rejected the possibility that native Californians could have avoided cultural change.
“As an anthropologist, I can tell you that all people change. There was already contact between other groups in the southwest and northern Mexico that had already initiated that process of change, and interaction and even conflict.”
Mendoza’s own view of Fr. Serra has changed from hostility to appreciation. While both of the professor’s parents had been devoted Catholics, his father “gradually soured on the Catholic faith” and “came to hate the Catholic Church for perceived wrongdoings.”
Mendoza had followed his father’s view and his initial research in archaeology, anthropology and history focused exclusively on Native Americans.
After the arrival of Spanish colonists, over 100,000 churches were built in a 150 year timespan in the New World.
“This is one of the greatest episodes of construction that the world has ever seen,” he said. “My eyes were pretty much closed to these churches.”
Mendoza still had a connection to Catholicism. He would sometimes feel moved to pray at the churches, preferring to say the Our Father in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec people. His archaeological work in Mexico and California, as well as his marriage to a Catholic woman, helped him see the missionary work in California and Father Serra in a different light.
He learned of the stories of Catholic missionaries he described as “good guys.” He cited Fr. Felipe Arroyo de la Cuesta of the California mission San Juan Baptista, an early 19th century linguist who cared for native people and led a raid to bring back two young Indian girls who had been abducted from the mission.
“He led that raid with Indian warriors at his back,” Mendoza said.
The professor began to realize that while it is common to consider the missionaries’ impact on the Indians, it is far less common to consider the Indians’ impact on the missionaries.
“Here we see them literally becoming acculturated – learning the Indian languages, even doing their homilies in the multitude of Indian languages that they recorded and saved for posterity.”
Mendoza found his perspective further altered when he heard false stories about California history from grade school teachers leading their classes on tours of the mission. They would tell their students, many of whom were Latino and Native American, “horrific tales that teachers were clearly making up as they went along in their efforts to try to explain history that they didn’t understand.”
“They would go to features on the mission campus and tell the kids, ‘you see these three kits here with all this iron grillwork and the evidence for fire? This is where the Spanish and the friars would literally torture the Indians with fire’.”
“I’m listening to this, and I go, ‘Wait a minute, those are 1930s-era barbeque pits for the yearly fiesta barbecue of chickens. And yet this is what they are telling the children’.”
Visitors would confront Catholic priests at the mission and blame them for alleged abuses. Mendoza himself received personal attacks from people claiming to be of Native American descent who said “every brick in this mission represents another dead Indian.”
“I began to realize: especially the most malicious comments about Fr. Serra were usually by people who knew nothing about him, who had picked it up secondhand on the internet or on a blog, or who simply just didn’t care for the Catholic Church and its doctrine.”
Mendoza said it is clear from Fr. Serra’s writings that the priest would have been “mortified” to hear some claims about his treatment of the native people whom he “truly loved.”
The professor discussed the historical context of the missions, noting that the Spanish Empire had officially outlawed slavery outside of the Caribbean. Unlike the slave plantations of the English-speaking colonies, entrance into the California missions was a choice.
“You could not be coerced to come in, as was the case with African slaves who were being forced out of their homeland, and forced into servitude.”
He compared the missions to religious communes in which the friars were obliged to protect the “body and soul” of mission members.
Life outside the missions was difficult as well. Mendoza said that near the San Miguel mission, native people in the Central Valley were starving as a result of drought.
“They were beginning to settle around the missions, and when they saw that everybody got three square (meals) a day, everybody was clothed, everybody was housed, everybody was defended, people began to join the mission.”
“I don’t doubt that it’s likely that in some of these initial conversions, people didn’t fully understand what they were getting into,” the professor said. But while life in the missions was highly regimented, the work was intended to benefit the Indians and to sustain the mission as a community.
“Serra, I think, was mortified whenever native people succumbed to illness or disease. That’s not to say these didn’t exist prior to his arrival in the region, but clearly this had an impact on him.”
Mendoza predicted that the controversies over Fr. Serra will subside.
“The wide body of scholarship, the growing number of people who are beginning to understand who Serra was, will ultimately change a lot of the way we see him and the mission system overall.”
Mendoza particularly praised the book “Junípero Serra: California, Indians, and the Transformation of a Missionary,” by Rose Marie Beebe and Robert Senkewicz. Their scholarship relies on new translations of documents and letters.
He also recommended the history of Fr. Serra by Gregory Orsola, saying he “humanized” the priest.
Without efforts to humanize Fr. Serra, Mendoza said, “we continue to see books that literally pick and choose the facts that will support agendas that are clearly antithetical to the Hispanic tradition, to the Catholic tradition, and to the life of Serra proper.”
The Kumeyaay people (Mission Indians) are still around today. They are very prosperous today and well educated. They have several reservations in San Diego County. They make a lot of money from the casinos and resorts on their reservations and they give a lot of money to charity. They appear to be far better off than the Indians I have seen in Montana. They have a school where they teach their young people the old language and customs. The Spanish missionaries probably treated the California Indians much, much better than their contemporaries in other parts of of North America.
When I was growing up in CA in the 1940s and 1950s, Fr. Serra was taught as a California hero — and this was in public school.
San Juan Bautista was my favorite Mission. I have visited it many times.
Even in 1970s my school teaches that Father Serra was hero I agree
Nowww Leftists I think they want scrub out his contribution of founding California because he was Cathoic priest that was big no no in today PC society
Trust me there was Latinos has fondess for Father Serra
There was no money, because neither the California Indians nor the Franciscans had a money economy: they had a customary exchange-based 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 system taken away from the Franciscans.
Eventually the Indians ended up like serfs on the haciendas, and sexual consorts for the soldiers, but this was not Serra's doing. He strove, labored and suffered to obtain the well-being and redemption of the California Indians all his life.
In this tumultuous contact of two civilizations (Spanish and Indian) the Spanish ascendancy was inevitable; but the way they did it was unconscionable. Serra was an opponent of the colonial military power structure and did everything he knew how could to protect 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.
Ping
Excellent information. Thanks for posting!
Thanks.
Lol.
I hate the God-hating leftwing monst e rs -soulless ghouls.
Well balanced article.
Thanks
When he did his love opus to America in 1972 Alistair Cooke openly regretted that NBC made him cut his segment on Fr. Serra because of time considerations. He did include it in his companion volume to the TV series. Serra, he said , was one of the truly great and important figurers in the history of the lands that became America.. But then Cooke also lavished praise on the Puritans and Winthrop which would not be countenanced today.
I used to live, in the late ‘70’s, on Camino Real in Carmel-By-The-Sea. Population then right around 4,000. Great little place then.
Father Junipero Serra died in this mission and is buried under the sanctuary floor
The Mission in Carmel-By-The-Sea
Yea in CA in the 60’s too.. we all learned about father Serra and we even built model Missions ..
think of that making models of a Church as a project in a public Elementary School...
Now they teach about Harvey Milk and make models of San Francisco bath houses in elementary school
lol you poor people. the Spanish were to the American Indian what Hitler and the Nazis were to the Jews. In N. and S. America they killed thousand upon thousands with arms and disease. Only you Catholics would fall for this sham of “history”.
From what I can tell, while Serra was revered, his administration of the missions was not as crucial as is portrayed here. There were a great many fine men who did the best they could under very difficult circumstances. Still, the damage they did to California ecologically was and continues to be enormous. Be sure to check the bibliography at the end of the chapter. I am in the process of adding to it now, but have yet to complete about four more books before I do.
There were big differences between the secular and mission systems in California, particularly insofar as regulating the behavior of the soldiers was concerned. So for you to lump these two administrations together is in this case unfair. For the most part, most of the damage to the tribes that the Franciscans did was due to cluelessness.
As to overt genocide, the Americans who came to California were worse to the Indians than the Spanish ever thought of being.
I’m looking at the bottom line, pretty well know that the Nazis were responsible for the death of 6 million jews. The Spanish , in N. and S. America were responsible for way more than that. I’ve seen estimate of up to 70 million but the number vary but no matter , the end tally is way more that 6 million . They’re motto was kill the indian to save his soul. So I lump.
In over 5,000 pages of research into translated documents from that period I have never seen such a motto. I can't possibly fathom Crespi, Palou, Boscana, Costanso, or Fages for example saying such a thing. Could you please point me to an authoritative source?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
