Once upon a time, there was a diminutive but good-humored philosophy professor with a flourishing academic career at a first-rate university—and all this on a sunny Mediterranean island with beautiful beaches and an average temperature in the mid-seventies. When he was thirty-five years old, he traded all that in for a perilous Atlantic crossing, decades of privation, intense physical suffering, sleeplessness, fatigue, and lifelong infection. Oh, and he bade farewell—not in person, but by letter—to his mother and father, knowing he would never see them again.
Why? For a better position at a better university? No. It seems he traded in the scholar’s life to oversee “enslavement of both adults and children, mutilation, genocide, and assault on women.”
The diminutive professor (and diminutive he was—five feet, two inches) was none other than the Franciscan friar, St. Junipero Serra, founder of the California Missions. If claims of “genocide” and “assault on women” run contrary to the Serra narrative with which you are more familiar—the one in which he is a canonized saint—you’ve not read California Assembly Bill 338, from which the above description of Serra’s California is a direct quote.
The bill is the work of Assemblyman James Ramos and his eighteen co-sponsors, eleven of whom have, like Ramos, Hispanic surnames. Of the bill’s principal co-authors, at least one, Kevin McCarty, is a Catholic. The California Legislature overwhelmingly passed Assembly Bill 338. Governor Gavin Newsom, a baptized Catholic, signed it into law, so here is what will happen: a statue of Serra on the grounds of the state capitol (which, on July 4, 2020, had been torn down and vandalized by a mob wielding sledgehammers, improvised blow torches, and red paint) will now be replaced by one honoring—and, according the bill, paid for by—the indigenous peoples of California, whose ancestors, we are told, suffered so much under Serra’s tyranny.
It is disheartening to see Hispanics and Catholics so caught up in the passions of the anti-Christian frenzy of our current age that they slander one of their own. An equal—even greater—vigor in telling the truth about the man whose heroic selflessness improved, in fact, the lives of so many of California’s natives is long overdue.
It’s no exaggeration to say Junipero Serra rightly should be called the Father of California. Our elected officials should be passing bills to set up more statues honoring his legacy. California’s Catholic bishops and priests should unite in a formal effort to see icons and statues of Serra placed in all of the state’s Catholic churches and schools. (And why not public schools, too, while they’re at it?) All Californians—all Catholic Californians especially, but by no means exclusively—should give a place of honor in their homes to Serra’s image. Catholics should devote time to learning the life and motives of California’s patron saint so they can answer with irenic and informed voices the furious lies that have overtaken California’s popular understanding of this great man.
What of these lies? Genocide? Slavery? Abuse of women?
The third of these we can dispatch with a sentence: Serra deliberately separated Spanish soldiers from native women to protect the women from rape. His 1773 memorandum to the viceroy in Mexico (Alta California’s first written legal code, called by Pope St. John Paul II “a bill of rights for native Americans”) further secured protection for the natives from soldiers by putting the padres and not the Spanish military in authority over native affairs.
What of genocide and slavery? These words have specific definitions, not at all met by the Spanish and Mexican colonization of California or the Mission system itself. A genocide (the word did not exist in the eighteenth century) is a deliberate effort to exterminate a people for its ethnicity or religion, such as what Islamic Turks inflicted on over one million Armenian Christians beginning in 1915 or such as proceeds today in Islamic Sudan or Iraq. The Spanish brought diseases, to be sure, to California, and the contagions decimated or worse the native population, but it is hard to fix a charge of genocide on these grounds when knowledge of how infection spread did not exist. What is more, the Spanish government desired the populations of the Missions to grow, inspired in their colonization as they were by threats of Russian expansion southward. Population growth was essential to the design of the Mission system, which was established by the Church and Crown to hold in trust for the natives the property that was theirs by right until each Mission could be secularized into a pueblo with the former Mission church as its parish. At this point, the property would be handed over to the natives to own and manage. By all accounts, deliberately killing the people they hoped to turn into citizens of the Spanish Empire would have been a doubtful demographic strategy.
Some may see “paternalism” in this system, and Serra absolutely thought of the natives to whom he brought baptism as his children, but it is a fact that either the European West or Russia was coming to California. The Mission system of Catholic Spain was rooted in a desire to see justice and charity done to the indigenous people.
The same cannot be said for the cultural attitude that informed westward expansion in the United States, Manifest Destiny, a euphemism for theft of land and, in fact, genocide. After the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, the Yankees of California paid bounties for native scalps to militia and private bounty hunters. John C. Frémont, military governor of California (for whom the Fremont Cottonwood and dozens of other plants are named), participated in this genocide. Sculptures celebrating his adventures stand untouched today in Fremont Park in Sacramento.
Slavery also has a definition: the buying, selling, and owning of human persons and the denying of such persons the fruits of their labor. Slavery did not take place in the California Missions. Not at all. The populations of the Missions grew under Serra because natives chose freely to live there. Did they work? Yes. Was it difficult manual labor? Yes. Did many natives prefer the unstructured life of a hunter-gatherer? Doubtless. But the Mission workday was not a slave’s workday. It comprised in the main an eight-to-five schedule interrupted by liturgy, prayer, and catechetical instruction. By one estimate, a plethora of feast days in the liturgical calendar plus Sundays meant about ninety days of rest a year.
Ascertaining the facts of Serra’s life and of the Mission system is hardly difficult. “Serra Studies” as a field in academia has been underway for more than a century. It is unlikely there is a single California figure from the second half of the eighteenth century about whom we know so much. We have a firsthand account of his life, written by his lifelong companion, Francisco Palóu. It is accepted as reliable even by such Serra detractors as U.C. Riverside historian Steven Hackel. We have an abundance of his correspondence and his journals. These documents provide the structure of the excellent work of husband-wife team Robert Senkewicz and Rose Marie Beebe. We have sermons. We have the meticulous records kept by the Franciscans who tended the Missions and the Spanish and Mexican government officials with whom Serra endlessly negotiated in pursuit of justice for the natives he loved so much. These documents constitute a vast corpus of primary source material, with new discoveries, especially from Mexico and Majorca, added each year. Excellent histories based on all this material, and accessible to the non-specialist, are plentiful. I recommend the work of Don DeNevi and Noel Francis Moholy. For engaging prose, pick up Agnes Replier’s 1933 biography of Serra, beautifully republished by Cluny Media and edited by Jeremy Beer.
The student of Serra’s life will quickly learn that to California’s natives Serra brought textiles and tanning, ceramics and forging, masonry and carpentry. He brought literacy, polyphony, and (my favorite) monogamy. He brought food preservation, irrigation, animal husbandry, crop rotation, and (my other favorite) viticulture. Every California vineyard should have a statue of Serra.
For these contributions alone to what we today call quality of life, Serra deserves honor, but celebrating him as mere predecessor of Peace Corps projects of clean water and electrification misses the man’s motives. It leaves us with a reductive vision of the human person. Serra is accused of treating the natives as subhuman. The opposite is true. He saw in the California natives what had not been revealed to them until he came: that they were men and women who had been created for eternal union with God. Introducing civilization and its advantages was the means by which Serra created the environment for his higher purpose, his heart’s greatest desire: opening the gates of heaven to souls who had never heard the gospel and had never been baptized.
Nor is this just history. A proliferation in California of statues and tributes to Serra would do more than just honor a man of the past; it would, moreover, encourage California’s people to take up again a vision and a worldview geared toward true prosperity, both now and in the hereafter.
Governor Newsom speaks often of the California dream. What is it? In our age, the promise of California is less inspiring than the untold wealth of the rancheros or the Gold Rush—really just a promise of delightful living. It seemed to begin innocently enough with the endless summers, the irresistible harmonies of Brian Wilson and his brothers, the infectious riffs of the Chantays’ Fender guitars. But now the delights of California are sybaritic. They are bacchanal—and any form of license, really licentiousness, must be held up for public approbation.
Why not return, instead, to Junipero Serra’s anthropology—to the Church’s anthropology, which respects every human person as the image of God foremost, which understands the true value and function of money, which uplifts the poor while striving for holiness in and eternal life for the rich?
The California Missions, called “death camps” by the journalist whose tendentious book alone informed the authors of Assembly Bill 338, were, in fact, life camps, where human life could flourish in pursuit of the common good—the natural common good, undergirded by the supernatural. This legacy, which a self-sacrificing Franciscan left us by God’s grace, is a prescription to cure the Golden State’s ills today—if we would only just commit to more of St. Junipero Serra, not less.