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 ...
“It’s not like Serra got lots of Spaniards to move here creating a significant Spanish population.”
Because no moving was necessary. The hispanic population was created FROM the indigenous population. It needed little from Spain. There are far more hispanics than Russians in California - not all because of Serra, but it’s true nonetheless.
Obviously you can't beat the US for sheer quantifiable quality of life, but that doesn't mean everywhere else on earth is a dump.
Thank God that America was founded as it was, and that we aren’t like the nations south of the border, although they are overwhelming us now.
We’re more like our southern neighbors than you apparently realize.
Well, immigration is making us more so everyday.
Immigration is destroying what we created.
If someone claims to be a native Californian, ask him which mission he picked for his fourth grade mission report or project. Mine was Nuestra Senora de la Soledad in Monterey County. I still have that report in my archives.
Nowadays, most schools assign kids to build models of their chosen mission, so public libraries have to maintain a lot of books on how to build models of missions in their children’s book collections.
We had a ‘46 De Soto for our family car. It was loaded, complete with a spot light.
The analogy is Serra is to California as St. Herman is to Alaska.
There being more Hispanics in California than Russians (or Russians and culturally Russian natives) is a not very interesting observation.
The wiki where this link leads doesn’t have a citation for this $137 to Washington. Do you have something?
Junípero Serra - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junípero_Serra
Wikipedia
Blessed Junípero Serra at age 61, ten years before his death. .... collected amounted to roughly $137, but the money was sent to General George Washington.
Serra died in 1784, ten years before, the war hadn’t started. Just an example of the unreliability of wiki. And the paragraph, while it relates the story, has no citation.
We didn’t have to build models (war time privations) but my favorite was San Juan Bautista. We drew maps and pictures.
When I was raising my own kids in Texas, one of my neighbors’ kids built a model of the Alamo — about 5 ft. high and 6 ft. side to side — and struggled to school with it on the school bus. The teacher threw a fit and told him to get that “big, old, ugly thing” out of the classroom. The boy was crushed. He was one of my Cub Scouts, and I thought that was unfair because nobody specified size.
Didn’t our Revolutinary War start in 1775? And our soldiers were marching without shoes in the winter of 1776-77. By my reckoning, that is long before 1784.
Did you miss the dates here? Some were before the Revolutionary War!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/3285864/posts?page=15#15
He doesn’t seem to be getting the concept of much these days. Dude’s as gaffe-prone as Joe Biden but his get a lot more publicity than Slow-Joe’s.
This left wing pope is an enemy of the United States.
Not in mine.
He brought Christ to America. So yes he was a “Founding Father”. To be hated by the anti-God crowd, which includes all leftists.
Well this should agitate some of the Pope’s fans on the Left:
http://the-american-catholic.com/2015/05/04/popewatch-junipero-serra/
“Pope Francis said during his homily he wanted to discuss three aspect of the life of Blessed Serra – his missionary zeal, his Marian devotion, and his witness of holiness.
Pope Francis said it was “that heartfelt impulse which seeks to share with those farthest away the gift of encountering Christ: a gift that he had first received and experienced in all its truth and beauty” which drove the Franciscan Missionary to leave everything he knew and go to the ends of the earth.
The Holy Father said this a challenge to us today, and asked if are able “to respond with the same generosity and courage to the call of God, who invites us to leave everything in order to worship him, to follow him, to rediscover him in the face of the poor, to proclaim him to those who have not known Christ and, therefore, have not experienced the embrace of his mercy.”
Pope Francis noted Blessed Junipero wanted to consecrate his life to Our Lady of Guadalupe and to ask her for the grace to open the hearts of the colonizers and indigenous peoples, for the mission he was about to begin. The Pope said you cannot “separate her from the hearts of the American people.”
And finally, Pope Francis pointed out he was one of the founding fathers of the United States, a saintly example of the Church’s universality and special patron of the Hispanic people of the country.
He said this zeal was also true for the many missionaries who brought the Gospel to the New World and, at the same time, defended the indigenous peoples against abuses by the colonizers.
Leftists by and large hate Christianity and adore racial identity politics. This makes Junipero Serra an obvious target of the Left and the Pope’s defense of him maddening to them”.
Jackson isn’t up for sainthood. Nonsequitor.
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