The Political Assault on California’s Saint

By Allysia Finley
Wall Street Journal
June 4, 2015

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-political-assault-on-californias-saint-1433459931

When Pope Francis visits Washington, D.C., in September, he will canonize Junipero Serra, the 18th-century Franciscan priest who led the spread of Christianity in the New World. Last month, the pope exalted Father Serra for ushering “in a new springtime of evangelization in those immense territories, extending from Florida to California.”

Ironically, the Spanish missionary who will become the U.S.’s first Hispanic saint is being vilified by multiculturalists as a rapacious imperialist. To add injury to insult, in the lead-up to the pontiff’s visit, liberal legislators in Sacramento are looking to remove the soon-to-be-saint’s statue in the U.S. Capitol.

Father Serra spent most of his missionary life in Mexico. However, his greatest legacy was founding California’s first nine missions—there are 21—and the 600-mile connecting trail El Camino Real that runs from San Diego to Sonoma. Dozens of roads and schools, including NFL quarterback Tom Brady’s alma mater, are named in his honor. Generations of California fourth-graders have had to construct miniature cardboard models of the missions.

While being Christianized, natives learned how to cultivate crops, raise livestock, weave clothes, make soap and perform other tasks necessary to sustain themselves. Father Serra was as integral to California’s founding as John Winthrop was to the settlement of Plymouth Bay. Gov. Jerry Brown has hailed the priest as “a very courageous man and one of the innovators and pioneers of California.”

Yet revisionist historians take a dim view of the missions. A fourth-grade state history textbook (which my class used in 1997) noted that “for the people who had lived in California for hundreds of years before the Spanish arrived, the growth of the missions was tragic . . . Thousands of Indians died, and by the end of the 1800s much of the Indian way of life had died also.”