UNITED STATES
The Tablet (UK)
07 May 2015 by John Quinn
When Francis travels to the US in September he will canonise a Spanish Franciscan friar, Fr Junipero Serra (1713-1784), who founded the first missions in California that converted native Americans to Catholicism.
Last Saturday Pope Francis described Serra as “one of the founding fathers of the United States, and a special patron of the Hispanic people of the country”.
Meanwhile Fr Vincenzo Criscuolo, a Franciscan from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints, said Serra was “a man of his times”.
Neither of these statements necessarily contradicts suggestions that, as the San Francisco Chronicle put it, “the missions were little more than concentration camps where California’s Indians were beaten, whipped, maimed, burned, tortured and virtually exterminated by the friars”. But the paper’s claims might prove difficult to reconcile with Francis’ comments about Serra’s “holiness” and “saintly example”.
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