Defending St. Junípero Serra

Sept. 1, 2020

California bishops respond to the vandalism and removal of memorials to the Catholic missionary

Sept. 1, 2020

A painting of St. Junípero Serra hangs in the Santa Barbara Mission Archives-Library in Santa Barbara, Calif. The Franciscan friar founded the first nine Catholic missions in what is now the state of California. (CNS photo/Nancy Wiechec)

Only five years after St. Junípero Serra was canonized, statues of the Franciscan missionary have fallen like dominoes in the state of California. Protestors toppled Serra statues in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Sacramento in June, and more were removed in July.

Serra was a philosophy professor in Spain when he felt called at age 35 to evangelize in the Americas. He worked in Mexico and Baja California for 20 years before he was sent north in 1769. He then founded the first nine of 21 missions in present-day California, spanning from San Diego to San Francisco, before his death in 1784. This year marks the 250th anniversary of his mission headquarters, San Carlos de Borroméo in Carmel, where he is buried.

In St. Junípero’s time, the area was part of the Spanish empire, but modern-day protestors who view him as a symbol of colonial oppression of Native Americans are misreading and distorting history, explain the bishops of California.

“The historical truth is that Serra repeatedly pressed the Spanish authorities for better treatment of the Native American communities,” the California Catholic Conference of Bishops affirmed in a June 22 statement. “Serra was not simply a man of his times. In working with Native Americans, he was a man ahead of his times who made great sacrifices to defend and serve the Indigenous population and work against an oppression that extends far beyond the mission era.”

Several bishops further addressed St. Junípero’s life and legacy — and the movement to remove his statues — in articles and letters. The following are excerpts from three of their responses.

From “Statues of St. Junípero Serra Deserve to Stay” — The Washington Post, June 30:

To the protestors who tore down his statue in Los Angeles this month, the priest, friar and saint Junípero Serra represents “hate, bigotry and colonization,” as one activist put it. Nothing would have made Serra sadder, for the real man was a profound lover of all people and especially of the Indigenous peoples he came to serve.

Who, then, is Junípero Serra after all?

First and foremost, Serra represents the true spirit of a Church identified with the poor and outcast. He left his home, his family, his sinecure as a philosophy professor to offer the very best thing he had to the California people: the news that God himself loved them enough to send his only Son to die on a cross to redeem them. St. Junípero Serra is “the Apostle of California.” Serra repeatedly intervened for mercy on behalf of Indigenous rebels against Spanish authorities. He famously walked to Mexico City with a painful ulcerated leg to obtain the authority to discipline the military who were abusing the Indigenous people. Then he walked back. …

There is no denying that Native Americans in California endured grave human rights abuses. They suffered wrongs during all three eras: the Spanish colonization (known as the Mission era), the Mexican secularization and the American era. But Serra should not bear the weight of all that went wrong and all who did wrong. If we looked at him with clear eyes, we would see Serra as one of the first American champions of the human rights of Indigenous peoples, a man who protested abusive police powers by government authorities.

— Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of San Francisco

From “Letter to the faithful for the memorial of St. Junípero Serra” — June 29:

I understand the deep pain being expressed by some native peoples in California. But I also believe Fray Junípero is a saint for our times, the spiritual founder of Los Angeles, a champion of human rights, and this country’s first Hispanic saint. …

The sad truth is that, beginning decades ago, activists started “revising” history to make St. Junípero the focus of all the abuses committed against California’s Indigenous peoples. … It was California’s first governor who called for “a war of extermination” against the Indians and called in the U.S. Cavalry to help carry out his genocidal plans. That was in 1851. St. Junípero died in 1784.

The real St. Junípero fought a colonial system where natives were regarded as “barbarians” and “savages,” whose only value was to serve the appetites of the white man. For St. Junípero, this colonial ideology was a blasphemy against the God who has “created (all men and women) and redeemed them with the most precious blood of his Son.” …

St. Junípero came not to conquer; he came to be a brother. “We have all come here and remained here for the sole purpose of their well-being and salvation,” he once wrote. “And I believe everyone realizes we love them.” …

St. Junípero was 60 years old when he traveled 2,000 miles from Carmel to Mexico City to protest the injustices of the colonial system and demand that authorities adopt a “bill of rights” that he had written for the native peoples. That was in 1773, three years before America’s founders declared this nation’s independence with those beautiful words: “all men are created equal … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”

Pope Francis called St. Junípero “one of the founding fathers of the United States.” He recognized that the saint’s witness anticipated the great spirit of human equality and liberty under God that has come to define the American project.

Yet in online petitions today we find St. Junípero compared to Adolf Hitler, his missions compared to concentration camps. No serious historian would accept this, and we should not allow these libels to be made in public arguments about our great saint.

— Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops

From “Canceling Padre Serra” — Word on Fire article, July 20:

When I saw the videos of Serra statues being torn down, burned, spat upon, trampled and desecrated in San Francisco and Los Angeles, I shuddered — not only because such behavior was boorish and unjustified, but also because it called to mind very similar activities at earlier stages of American history.

In the mid-to-late 19th century, anti-Catholicism was rampant in the United States, due in part to prejudices inherited from Protestantism but also due to the arrival of large groups of immigrants from Catholic countries, who were considered inferior. A powerful political party, the Know-Nothings, was organized precisely around the theme of opposing Catholicism, and in many of the major cities of our country, Catholic convents, parishes, cathedrals, statues and churches were burned to the ground by unruly mobs. Moreover, in that same period, the Ku Klux Klan, which was active not just in the South but in many northern cities as well, endeavored to terrorize blacks and Jews, of course, but also, it is easy to forget, Catholics.

If you doubt that this sort of knee-jerk opposition to Catholicism endured well into the 20th century, I would recommend you consult some of the histrionic rhetoric used by the opponents of John F. Kennedy during the presidential campaign of 1960. …

So when I see mobs of people tearing down and desecrating statues of a great Catholic saint, canonized just five years ago by Pope Francis, how can I not see the ugly specter of anti- Catholicism raising its head?

We are passing through a Jacobin moment in our cultural history, and such periods are dangerous indeed, for there is no clear indication what can stop their momentum. …

One can only hope that cooler heads will prevail and that responsible people might bring to an end this ridiculous and dangerous attempt to erase Padre Serra.

— Auxiliary Bishop Robert Barron of Los Angeles, founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries

The Council of Nicaea (18th century) by F. Pavlovskyi, I. Maksimovych, A. Galik, et al. / Holy Trinity Gate Church / Photo courtesy of Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra National Reserve

Defending St. Junípero Serra

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