Posted on 09/20/2015 9:47:45 AM PDT by EveningStar
When Pope Francis canonizes Father Junípero Serra on Wednesday in Washington, D.C., Serra will be the first Hispanic American saint, and the first saint canonized on American soil.
He also figures to be one of the most controversial saints in the long history of the Roman Catholic Church – a symbol that roils some hearts even as it lifts others.
Serra, an 18th-century Spanish friar who founded nine of the 21 California missions, including Mission San Juan Capistrano, is gaining sainthood, in part, because he helped bring the church to the Americas. By one reckoning, Serra’s legacy is nothing less than California itself.
Serra also was revered during his lifetime, and is said to have reached beyond the cultural mores of his era to help individual native Americans and protect the oppressed.
Many Catholics, particularly in Orange County, have urged Serra’s canonization for decades.
But some Native Americans view Pope Francis’ decision to canonize Serra as a cultural and personal affront.
(Excerpt) Read more at ocregister.com ...
It's about time that he received more recognition.
SHUT UP those Native Americans err I mean Indians
There some atheist in Hispanic community who don’t want Pope even think about cantotize Father Serra there is growing movement I saw on Al Jazeera America that some Hispanic activists want get rid of Saint name for City of CA seriously ES
That just bat*** crazy story I saw on Al Jazeera
Grew up in greater Lost Angeles suburbs in the 1950s when Knott’s Berry Farm was essentially free. Therefore it was cheap entertainment for parents to use with children.
One exhibit was a pathway, including models of several if not all of the missions. This was reinforced by elementary school curricula. Kids in California learned about the history, and about Father Serra.
As I see on this thread, Father Serra is probably merely a figure of those times, when indoctrination of natives by churches was the norm. I wonder how the California experience compares and contrasts with the colonial New England, Florida, Midwestern practices with natives?
Show me another country with the word “American” in it and I’ll buy your logic.
The Spanish record makes it clear that the missions were established to maintain a port (at first a Monte Rey) so that Spanish merchant ships could resupply on the way to Mexico from the Philippines. Yes, they were concerned about the Russians and English getting there first but scurvy was a bigger problem for them.
All entrants into the mission system were voluntary.
But Serra and his thugs only inflicted death and destruction on the California Indians. They died by the tens of thousands of smallpox, just as the Aztecs and Toltecs of Central Mexico had died when Cortez arrived.
Here you are probably wrong. Smallpox apparently bypassed California, for reasons I explain here (do look at the reference bibliography, as it is extensive). The more deadly plagues began after the missions were established in tuberculosis, syphilis, and influenza. If you want a scholarly treatment on the topic, I suggest "A Time of Little Choice by Randall Milliken or Children of Coyote by Steven Hackel.
I wish to add that there was considerable strife between the Franciscans and the military people. The friars wished to "civilize" the Indians, developing trades so that they could make it in an industrializing world. They fought for Indian land claims against the civil authorities. A surprising number of the descendants of mission Indians live in Monterey County today, from which there is some reconsideration of their demographic losses in progress.
It may have been the Mexican "secularization" process that killed more Indians than even during the mission period, as the colonists outside the missions were less directed to protecting Indians' rights and claims and were more likely to engage in the prostitution that spread the syphilis back to more remote tribal enclaves.
A historical claim could be made that without the tough as nails Serra—there would be no California. It would have gone to the Imperial Russians. If thye Ruskies had found the gold of the mother load—so many would have come in— we never would have pushed them out—what would have happened if that gold had gone to the Tzars rather than the Young United States? What mischief could they have done? We might have onion domed Orthodox Churches up and down the state with city names like Novograd and Kiev in a Russian California.
Thank you for that information.
Serra wasn’t a Citizen—Citizens take part in their government in someway—Serra was a Subject of the Spanish King. His goal—to save the Indians souls for the Roman Church and reduce them to peons (serfs—not slaves) for the greater glory of the Spanish Empire and the King in Madrid. Many of the natives died of disease but that was not part of the plan—they tried all they could to save them. But 75% of the Native Population died.
Yeah. Father Serra was huge in settling California.
So many Junipero Serra streets all over.
The missions, Camino Real.
Interesting ideas about the potential Russian names.
WOW, I can't believe that there are two of you.....sad
Sorry, with all due respect, by universal usage, American, the world around, has come to mean a US Citizen. Of course it also can have the meaning you cited.
Not exclusively; how about primarily?
Nice paragraph:
All the work in the missions, according to both European observers and reports by the Native Americans themselves, was performed by the Indians. Getting them to adjust to working required strict regimentation and often harsh discipline. In contrast to their lives outside the mission, the missionized "neophyte" Native Americans lived in an atmosphere of repression and rigid intolerance, and the work they performed was forced labor.
It goes downhill from there.
And as for my claim of half the Natives dying, I was wrong. It was more like 2/3 of them:
" In other words, mission life was the equivalent of a slow death sentence for the California Native American population, which, by 1834, when the missions closed their doors, had been reduced to about one third of its original size in 1769."
Real Saint, that guy Serra.
If not by design then willful negligence. It had been known since Cortez's conquest of Mexico that European diseases brought down the natives.
This happened all over the Americas. It was not a mysterious thing. Most likely the Europeans didn't think it was all that bad of thing since it got rid of a problematic population.
A little history here:Smallpox in the Americas.
Hey Mickey...you believe what you want to about your Papa and his guys.
The missions were about the grimy, failing and flailing Spanish Empire, which was the enemy of the Protestant Americans.
That would be me, Mick. Orangemen. Roundheads. Anabaptists. Huguenots.
Their pathetic little attempt to create yet another dusty, filthy, corrupt oligarchy in the Americas never amounted to more then 7000 men, women and children in California to the 300,000 natives and the 30,000 Americans who settled around Sacramento after 1835.
If in your mind Serra and Kino were the “Americans”, that’s your problem. No one else except possibly your kinsmen - the 30 million illegals in the Invasion force - agree with that.
But uh...the fact that you identify with them is all we need to know about your standing as an American.
California was built by the Americans. “Anaheim” is not an Aztec name, and Commodore Stockton should have renamed Los Angeles. Guess he was too busy that week.
Had the Americans not settled it and industrialized it the state would now be Russian or British, most likely the latter. The decadent New Spain was incapable of defending itself.
Serra was an agent of the Spanish Crown. His job was to forcibly baptize the neophytes so the Crown could claim them as subjects. It was the same game they played in Mexico, which was cut short by the first Mexican Revolution in 1811, as the Spanish Empire began to collapse.
And that was the end of it. Serra became a footnote in history, only important now because so many refugees of the nightmare he and his cohorts created in the land of the Toltecs have fled north to...the land and system of the Protestant Americans.
Live with the truth.
WOW, I can’t believe you don’t get any of it.
Of course you’re on the other side, right?
Protestant America is an unfortunate truth that you just have to kill somehow.
Doesn’t it sere you to know that the Greatest Country on Earth was founded and built not by you, but by the people who rejected your corruption and gangsterism? The Protestants?
And your heroes...the Spanish?!
The murderers? The Conquistadors, the takers who enslaved entire populations in the Caribbean and Central America, and when they ran out of natives in Hispaniola, they brought Africans in chains? Gosh, that turned out real well.
Those are the people you want us to revere? To beatify?
Revolting. Like what California is becoming with the invasion of the result of 500 years of Spanish Catholic oppression in Central America.
PS - While you’re worshipping your Spaniard Papa as he preens through the streets of the Protestant Edifice known as The United States, ask yourself how many people are desperate to get into his country - Argentina - a place of fabulous natural wealth, destroyed by corruption and oligarchy.
Answer: NONE.
You need to read more history. It was Catholic missionaries who for centuries educated huge numbers of indigenous peoples in the culture of the West.
Your premise is flawed and it was a Morman(no friends of the Catholic Church), Stewart Udall who, researching original documents put what is termed the Black Legend to rest. That propaganda is made up by a few Catholic hating Protestants.
Junípero and the Others: The Pope Praises the Courage of America's Missionaries
History, Truth, and Politics: the record on Father Junipero Serra
Statue of Pope Francis' new saint could be kicked out of US capitol
Pope's Canonization Announcement Surprises Even Serra's Promoters
Pope Francis Announces Sainthood for Junipero Serra, Founder of California Missions
Bl. Junípero Serra and the Holy Family
Cathedral yields more surprises: Crews unearth Presidio chapel remnants
Blessed Junípero Serra 1713 - 1784 (Mission Chronology, Biography, etc.)
The Significance Of Blessed Junipero Serra (pictures of Missions)
Start a Serra Club in your area and support vocations to the priesthood and religious life.
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