Under Serra’s leadership, tens of thousands of Native Americans across Alta California, as the region was then known, were absorbed into Catholic missions – places said by one particularly rapturous myth-maker [ http://www.amazon.com/Father-Junipero-his-work-bi-centennial/dp/B0006BPHSI ] in the 19th century to be filled with “song, laughter, good food, beautiful languor, and mystical adoration of the Christ”.
What this rosy-eyed view omits is that these natives were brutalized – beaten, pressed into forced labour and infected with diseases to which they had no resistance – and the attempt to integrate them into the empire was a miserable failure. The journalist and historian Carey McWilliams wrote almost 70 years ago the missions could be better conceived as “a series of picturesque charnel houses [ http://www.amazon.com/Southern-California-An-Island-Land/dp/0879050071 ]”.
Opponents point out that, from the time Serra arrived in 1769, the native population was ravaged by European diseases, including syphilis spread by marauding Spanish soldiers. Indians brought into the missions were not allowed to leave, and if they tried they were shackled and severely beaten.
They were used as forced labour to build out the Mission’s farming projects. They were fed atrociously, separated from close family members and packed into tight living quarters that often became miasmas of disease and death.
When the Native Americans [ http://www.theguardian.com/world/native-americans ] rebelled, which they did on at least two occasions, their rebellions were put down in brutal fashion. When Native American women were caught trying to abort babies conceived through rape, the mission fathers had them beaten for days on end, clamped them in irons, had their heads shaved and forced them to stand at the church altar every Sunday carrying a painted wooden child in their arms.
In many ways, the issue is reminiscent of the Vatican’s campaign a few years ago to canonise Pius XII, the wartime pope accused in many quarters of failing to stand up to the Nazis and helping in their rise to power, but defended in others as a holy man who did his part to save many hundreds of thousands of Jews.
The cause of his sainthood, which was first proposed in 1930, was long ago assumed to have stalled because of the controversies surrounding his legacy.
But Francis, as the first Latin American pope, has an obvious interest in creating a role model for Latinos in the United States and the rest of the American continent – an interest echoed by the state of California, which can now look forward to a global wave of Serra-related tourism. The pope also appears to have an interesting theological take on Serra’s imperfections. Kevin Starr, widely regarded as California’s pre-eminent state historian [ https://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/faculty-and-staff/faculty.cfm?pid=1003730 ], summarised the Vatican’s view this way [ http://americamagazine.org/issue/culture/not-perfect-saint ]: “Saints do not have to be perfect. Nobody is perfect. Sanctity is just another mode of imperfection.”
In other words, it is enough to state that the good outweighs the bad. José Gómez, the first Latino archbishop of Los Angeles and an enthusiastic Serra champion, wrote [ http://stjunipero.org/americas-next-saint-st-junipero.html ] recently: “Whatever human faults he may have had and whatever mistakes he may have made, there is no questioning that he lived a life of sacrifice and self-denial.”
Gómez also argued that we cannot judge 18th-century behaviour by 21st-century standards – a form of historical relativism that the Serra critics find particularly galling. John Cornwell [ http://www.jesus.cam.ac.uk/?fellow=cornwell-john ], a British journalist turned academic who has written extensively about the Vatican, including an acclaimed book about Pius XII [ http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Pope-Secret-History-Pius/dp/014311400X ], said the argument also clouded the important question of whether Serra was an appropriate exemplar for today’s faithful.
“For those who argue that we should not judge the values of the past by those of the present,” Cornwell told the Guardian, “one could, and should, object that it’s important to learn the lessons of history.”
To Native Americans like Valentin Lopez, the chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band [ http://amahmutsun.org/ ] based in Sacramento, those lessons are not complicated. Serra, in his view, was part of a colonial enterprise whose goal was the complete subjugation of California’s native peoples. The mission system he set up was based on coercion, punishment and indifference to Indian suffering, against which his expressions of piety were no more than window-dressing.
“It’s amazing to me this is even a debate,” Lopez told the Guardian. “There is no debate – it’s like debating the pros and cons of the genocide of the Jewish people in world war two. The only reason this is not treated as a black and white issue is because of the lies that the church and the state of California [ http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/california ] have perpetuated from the time of the missions.”
“The perspective of Franciscans and Dominicans of that era was: God will punish us for the way we treat the Indians, so we’ve got to protect them as some kind of atonement,” Starr told the Guardian. “Serra knew he couldn’t keep California a Franciscan mission protectorate forever. He hoped that by the time Spaniards came in large numbers, Native Americans would be educated and competent to deal with it. That was the dream, but the dream never came true.”
The biggest philosophical divide among serious historians is whether Serra’s initiative was worth undertaking in the first place. Catholic scholars – including Professor Starr – tend to take an indulgent view of the church’s evangelizing mission, while Native American advocates like Lopez view the imposition of Catholicism [ http://www.theguardian.com/world/catholicism ] as a violation of the Indians’ longstanding spiritual traditions, just as the Spanish conquest disrupted and violated their way of life more generally.
The Vatican would like to believe that Serra and the missionaries were somehow separate from the Spanish colonial enterprise, and that the army’s abuses should not in any way be laid at Serra’s door. Pope Francis said in May [ http://stjunipero.org/pope-francis-celebrates-junipero-serra-a-founding-father-of-the-us.html ] that Serra was one of a generation of missionaries “who … defended the indigenous peoples against abuses by the colonisers”.
Most historians, however, dismiss that interpretation as fanciful. While it’s true that Serra was often at odds with military commanders in the region, he travelled to the New World at the behest and direction of the same Spanish crown in command of the army. He couldn’t be against the colonisers, because he was one himself.
“The church and the army were partners,” Lopez said. “Junípero Serra’s own handwriting details the cruelties. His policy was to enslave the Indians – he didn’t let them leave the missions. You can’t blame that on Spanish soldiers.”
Out of deference [ http://www.latimes.com/local/political/la-me-ln-resolution-to-replace-junipero-serra-statue-put-on-hold-20150702-story.html ] to the papal visit, the push to have Serra’s statue in Washington replaced with the late astronaut Sally Ride – championed by LGBT advocacy groups as well as fans of space exploration – has been deferred until after Francis is back in Rome. But the sponsors of the measure, including a Latino state senator from Los Angeles and the speaker of the state assembly, have vowed to reintroduce it thereafter – paving the way for yet more showdowns over Serra in the foreseeable future.
Related
The pope should not grant sainthood to a brutal missionary Native American groups accuse the pope of ignoring their concerns about Serra, a Franciscan missionary accused of atrocities. Junipero Serra brutally converted Native Americans to Christianity and wiped out entire cultures, languages and villages in the process 22 September 2015 Last modified 23 September 2015 http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/22/pope-grant-sainthood-brutal-missionary
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