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.”
That said, I wish they'd waited for the second miracle.