Junipero Serra left mark in ways that weren’t all saintly, many say
Junipero Serra, a Franciscan friar who was one of the founders of California, has been a symbol in the West for more than 200 years. He is hailed as one of the fathers of modern California, but there is another side. Many American Indian people believe he helped destroy native culture.
On Wednesday, Pope Francis will proclaim him a Roman Catholic saint, someone with a place in heaven, a man to be venerated. He will be America’s first Hispanic saint.
“For those of us from America, the canonization holds a rich symbolism and spiritual significance, and is even more powerful and more personal for those of us who are Hispanic and Mexican,” said Jose Gomez, the archbishop of Los Angeles.
For others, the symbolism is very different. Declaring the priest who founded the mission system more than two centuries ago a saint has opened old wounds.
They see Junipero Serra as a symbol of Western European imperialism that changed California forever. He represented “the ultimate cultural intolerance that destroyed everything in the name of God,” said Greg Sarris, chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria in Sonoma County.
New way of life
Serra founded nine of the 21 Catholic missions on the western edge of California connected by El Camino Real, along what scholar Steven Hackel called “the spine of the state.” The missions were a key part of a system designed to bring Christianity to the native peoples and a new way of life centered around farming and ranching.
Serra was “a visionary indefatigable and unyielding,” Hackel said. He saw the missions as tools to recruit the native peoples, to make them into Christians, “gente de razón,” people of reason, citizens of Spain.
But the missions had fatal consequences that Serra had not foreseen. The Indian people had little immunity to European diseases, and they sickened and died in the missions by the thousands. By the end of Spanish and Mexican rule, in 1846, the native population was half what it had been when Serra first saw California.
“In fact, the missions were hellholes,” said Valentin Lopez, chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, whose ancestors were at Mission San Juan Bautista. “They brought suffering, destruction, death and rape” to American Indian people.
Lopez is flying to the East Coast to hold news conferences and protests during the papal visit to New York and Washington, D.C.
Not all California Indians agree. Andrew Galvan, an Ohlone, is the curator at Mission Dolores, or Mission San Francisco de Asis, to give the church its proper name. He has studied Serra’s life and has been an admirer. He was delighted, he said, when the pope decided to canonize Serra.
Part of the ceremony
He is going East as well, and will have a role in Serra’s canonization Mass.
Galvan sat the other afternoon in a pew at Mission Dolores. “I’m wondering,” he said, “if my great-great-greatgreat-grandfather was in the work party that built these walls.”
He said his ancestor had been brought to San Francisco from what is now Contra Costa County and baptized at Mission Dolores on Nov. 18, 1794.
“If he were here,” Galvan said, “he would tell our family story — that the faith he was taught in the missions took.” Galvan’s family is all Catholic.
But Galvan is aware of the contradictions in the mission story. He looked around the chapel, at the altar and at the ceiling, painted in bright colors, native hues with dyes made from local soils. “Pretty good work for slave labor,” he said.
Mission Dolores was established in Serra’s time as Father President of the California Missions, but the actual founder was Francisco Palou, a missionary who was Serra’s oldest friend and his right-hand man.
Biography by sidekick
After 15 years of work in California, Serra died in 1784 at the age of 70 at Mission San Carlos, which had moved to Carmel from its original site in Monterey. Palou returned to the Franciscans’ home base in Mexico City to write a long and glowing biography of Serra. In Palou’s view, Serra was a man with saintly virtues, a hero, the father of California. It was the first book about a California figure and ensured Serra’s reputation.
“Without Palou,” Hackel wrote, “there is no Serra.”
Serra was born Miquel Joseph Serra on the Spanish Mediterranean island of Mallorca in 1713. He joined the Order of Friars Minor — the Franciscans — in 1730 when he was not yet 17. He took the name Junipero after one of St. Francis’ companions.
He was a priest, and later a professor and renowned preacher, when, in 1749 he and Palou, among others, volunteered to be missionaries in the New World.
Many years in Mexico
He went to Mexico first, and spent years working there. By the late 18th century, King Carlos III of Spain decided the colonies in Mexico should expand north into the virtually unknown land of Alta — or Upper — California.
Serra was chosen to lead the religious portion of the effort, which eventually included soldiers and settlers. Serra’s aim was simple: He was a missionary, and he wanted to bring his faith to people he had not yet seen. “He was on fire with his understanding of the love of God,” Galvan said.
When he first met the people of California on the Spanish expedition headed north from Baja California in 1769 he fell on his knees. “I praised God,” he wrote, “and kissed the ground and gave thanks to Our Lord for sending me the opportunity to be among the gentiles in their land.”
He saw the land before him and the people in it as an empty slate: “The gentiles were totally naked, like Adam in paradise before the fall,” he wrote.
Rich native cultures
However, California was a complex world. It had more than 300,000 inhabitants, the largest native population outside Mexico, and there were dozens of tribes, organized in small groups, speaking close to 90 separate languages.
They were hunters and gatherers, not farmers. They had no writing, but they had a rich oral tradition. They had a culture reaching back thousands of years. The Kumeyaay, who live in the San Diego region, say their history goes back 600 generations.
“It was not a military conquest as much as it was an environmental conquest,” Hackel said of the Spanish expansion into California. The Spanish brought cows, pigs, horses and European vegetation. “Within 10, 15, 20 years there had been (the start of ) an environmental transformation,” he said.
‘Destroyed’ way of life
In short, the Spanish settlers, the military and the missionaries began the development of modern California. The new people hunted down the wild game and made the countryside safe for cattle ranching. They eliminated the vast crops of acorns the Indians used to make flour, and changed their world.
“They destroyed the environment we had lived in for thousands of years,” Lopez said, “and then they took our spiritual beliefs.”
The first mission, at San Diego, was founded in 1769, then others, including the flagship mission, San Carlos in Monterey, followed in 1770. The Europeans discovered San Francisco Bay in 1769 and sent a party of settlers to found what became a mission, and a presidio, or fort. A great city grew out of these beginnings.
Serra was determined. He thought he knew what was best for the “gentiles,” as he called unbaptized Indians. Indians who came to the missions were rewarded at first, but once they joined, they could not leave. They were required to work, to till the new fields. They were to become farmers.
If they disobeyed the padres, they were treated harshly, either flogged or locked up. The punishment was common in the 18th century in European society, but completely unknown in native California. This discipline is something the modern Indian people hold against Serra. “They were enslaved and could not leave,” Lopez said. “They were whipped and put in stocks and tortured.”
They also died. In the missions, they were kept close together, in unsanitary conditions. About 80,000 Indians were baptized by the missionaries. By 1834, at the end of the mission period, 60,000 mission Indians had died.
Mission Dolores had one of the worst records. Galvan said that mission records show that 5,700 Indian people are buried near the mission, at 16th and Dolores streets. In 1806, an epidemic of measles and flu killed 343 of the 850 native people living at the mission.
Causes of death
The death rate was not all Serra’s fault, of course, but it was the change, the impact of European disease and culture that killed them. “It was an unintended consequence,” Hackel said.
Now Serra is to be declared a saint.
Pope Francis is an Argentine, the first pope from Latin America, the first pontiff from a country colonized by the Spanish.
“And so it is significant that Blessed Junipero will be America’s first Hispanic saint,” Archbishop Gomez said. “He will be the first American saint to be canonized on American soil.”
Not long ago, the proclamation of a new saint was greeted as a great, holy — and uncontroversial — event.
But even the Catholic Church has acknowledged that Serra has “opened old wounds and revived bitter memories about the treatment of Native Americans,” as Gomez put it.
“Father Serra had many imperfections,” said Kevin Starr, a professor at the University of Southern California and one of the state’s leading historians. “Perhaps the pope is trying to teach us something — that all humans have imperfections but can still be saintly.
“All the great heroes of history were flawed, and so are saints. St. Olaf, who brought Christianity to Scandinavia, was a warrior saint. So was St. Stephen, who converted Hungary.”
And so, Starr thinks, was Serra. “You should not judge people solely by their imperfections,” he said.