Aboriginals upset with candidate for saint

Spanish missionary marched with conquistadors in 1700s

VATICAN CITY— The Vatican is mounting a campaign to defend an 18thcentury Franciscan missionary who will be canonized by Pope Francis in the U.S. despite protests from native Americans who have compared his conversion of natives to genocide.

The Vatican is teaming up with the archdiocese of Los Angeles and the main U.S. seminary in Rome to host a daylong celebration May 2 at the North American College to honour the Rev. Junipero Serra. He introduced Christianity to much of California as he marched north with Spanish conquistadors. Francis will celebrate mass in his honour.

For the church, Serra was a great evangelizer and a model for today’s Hispanics. Many native Americans, though, say Serra helped wipe out native populations, enslaved converts and spread disease as he brutally imposed Christianity on them. They have staged protests in California and there is a move to remove his statue from the U.S. Capitol.

Vatican officials on Monday defended Serra’s record, saying it shows he worked in defence of Native Americans, often intervening to spare them from the more brutal colonial officials.

The Rev. Vincenzo Criscuolo, a Franciscan at the Vatican’s saintmaking office, said it was important to look at Serra as “a man of his time” who, like many others at the time used corporal punishment as an educational tool. “It is not to be excluded, but it wasn’t ‘genocide,’ it wasn’t a death penalty,” he told reporters.

Guzman Carriquiry, the No. 2 of the pontifical commission for Latin America and a friend of the Pope’s, denounced plans to remove Serra’s statue from Congress’s National Statuary Hall. He noted that he’s the only person of Spanish descent in the collection.

Francis is due to canonize Serra on Sept. 23.