In July, Pope Francis “apologized for the ‘grave sins’ of
colonialism against the native people of the Americas.” The pope said, “I
humbly ask forgiveness, not only for the offense of the church herself, but
also for crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called
conquest of America,” So why then is Pope Francis canonizing Junípero Serra,
the embodiment of crimes committed against native peoples in California?
Pope Francis is conferring sainthood on a man whose actions
led to the destruction of native peoples in California. Serra founded missions
where native peoples were imprisoned and tortured, and where thousands died.
Junípero Serra, a Franciscan friar who is seen as one of the
founders of California, set in motion the establishment of a string of missions
in the region starting in 1769 with the founding of one in Baja California. As
San Francisco magazine’s Gary Kamiya recently pointed out, “Every schoolchild
knows that California Indians at Serra’s missions were taught the Gospel, fed
and clothed; few know that many were also whipped, imprisoned, and put in
stocks.” Serra’s mission, “to convert pagan Indians into Catholic Spaniards
resulted not only in the physical punishment of countless Indians, but in the
death of tens of thousands of them – and, ultimately, in the eradication of
their culture."
The missions were also designed to bring native peoples a
new way of life “centered around farming and ranching,” the San Francisco
Chronicle’s Carl Nolte recently wrote. Nolte pointed out that “By the end of
Spanish and Mexican rule in 1846, [60-+ years after Serra’s death] the native
population was half what it had been when Serra first saw California.”
Valentin Lopez, chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band and
whose ancestors were at Mission San Juan Batista, says that “the missions were
hellholes,” and “They brought suffering, destruction, death and rape,” to the
natives.
“I felt betrayed,” Louise Miranda Ramirez, tribal chairwoman
of the Ohlone Costanoan Esselen Nation, whose people occupied much of northern
California before Serra’s arrival,explained. “The missions that Serra founded
put our ancestors through things that none of us want to remember. I think that
the children being locked into the missions, the whippings. … That pain hasn’t
gone away.”
Steven Hackel, history professor at the University of
California, Riverside, and author of a 2013 biography of Serra, said “There's
no question that his goal was to radically alter Native culture, to have
Indians not speak their Native languages, to practice Spanish culture, to
transform Native belief patterns in ways that would make them much less Native.
He really did want to eliminate many aspects of Native culture.”
Serra arrived in Spanish-held Mexico in 1749 and quickly set
about working for the Inquisition, citing by name several natives who refused
to convert to Christianity; they were guilty, he wrote, of “the most detestable
and horrible crimes of sorcery, witchcraft and devil worship.” Serra soon
gained control of the missions of Baja California, but he found that the native
population had already been nearly extinguished by contact with the Spanish.
Looking for fresh converts, he led expeditions up the coast into the
present-day state of California, where he settled at Monterey and set up ten
new missions to spread the gospel through the new land. The California missions
formed a network of forced-labor camps where the once-vibrant native peoples of
California were systematically reduced to mere shadows of their former selves:
Under the mission system, the overall indigenous population of Southern
California declined by nearly 1,000 every single year.
If they were lucky enough not to be killed by European
diseases spread largely through sexual violence on the part of the Spanish,
many natives at the missions sought to run away. According to Carey McWilliams in
his 1945 book ‘Southern California: An Island on the Land’, the missionaries
didn’t even much mind runaways, because that gave them a reason to go on
fugitive-hunting expeditions to distant villages from which they could round up
more natives and bring them back to the missions. “With the best theological
intentions in the world,” McWilliams wrote, “the Franciscan padres eliminated
Indians with the effectiveness of Nazis operating concentration camps.” Serra
wrote to one governor of the territory, “That spiritual fathers should punish
their sons, the Indians, with blows appears to be as old as the conquest of
these kingdoms,” In the early 1780s, according to McWilliams, another governor
actually filed a complaint against Serra for sanctioning the harsh treatment of
native converts.
Papal supporters of Serra’s sainthood tell a different story
and see him as a man who gave up everything to dedicate his life to saving
souls, regardless, it should be added, of whether or not they wanted to be
saved. Some defenders point to evidence that Serra was not the most sadistic
Spanish colonial overlord in California at the time. Another argument in favor
of Serra’s canonization is that we shouldn’t judge the misdeeds of the past
according to the standards of the present. Anyone who makes this argument in
regard to opposing the renaming of schools and other public sites to rescind
tributes to slaveholders and white supremacists is properly labeled a racist
and an apologist for the worst that humans have ever done to other humans. Should
Pope Francis get a free pass to canonize a man directly responsible for the
brutalization and ultimately the near-extinction of an entire people simply
because it is, in some warped public-relations sense, a tribute to Hispanic
Americans, a growing constituency in the Catholic Church? How absurd it would
be to congratulate ourselves on the removal of the Confederate battle flag from
state capitols and Walmart shelves and to permit the pope to sanctify a man
complicit in, and responsible for, the eradication of entire cultures and
civilizations.
In order for
candidates to be considered for sainthood, they are normally required to
perform two miracles. The record shows that Serra “healed” a St. Louis nun of
lupus, but with no evidence of a second recorded miracle, Pope Francis decided
to waive that requirement.
Sources
1 comment:
I love that this LUNATIC priest wrote that he saw witches flying into caves.
Completely insane and evil.
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