Pope Francis decides to make Father Junipero Serra a saint or In Which I Tell Pope Francis he needs to take a Native Studies class like stat

char·la·tan
ˈSHärlədən,ˈSHärlətn/
noun

1. a person falsely claiming to have a special knowledge or skill; a fraud.
   
2. synonyms: quack, sham, fraud, fake, impostor, hoaxer, cheat, deceiver, double-dealer, swindler, fraudster, mountebank OR
   
   Junipero Serra

Canonization (in American English and Oxford spelling) or canonisation (in British English) is the act by which the Catholic Church or Eastern Orthodox Church declares a deceased person to be a saint, upon which declaration the person is included in the canon, or list, of recognized saints. In the Catholic Church the act of canonization occurs at the conclusion of a long process requiring extensive proof that the person proposed for canonization lived and died in such an exemplary and holy way that he or she is worthy to be recognized as a saint. The Church's official recognition of sanctity implies that the persons are now in heavenly glory…

or

An act by the Catholic Church to erase and/or excuse the inhumane treatment of California Indians by the Franciscan missionaries (who would subject Native people to starvation, beatings, rape, humiliation etc.) that also demeans and dismisses these torturous/barbarous acts and elevates them to "righteous" sainthood.

I am not the first, nor do I hope to be the last person to refer to Junipero as a “charlatan.” I got that from the late, great Dr. Jack Forbes who in his wisdom and poise called em like he saw him. He is greatly, and with all sincerity, deeply missed. 

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Pope Francis decides to make Father Junipero Serra a saint OR In Which I Tell Pope Francis he needs to take a Native Studies class like stat

I find this statue super creepy TBH.

Today, the big news out of the Pope’s office is not that he is visiting the Philippines and the Philippine government is  arresting homeless children to put them in jail so that the Pope won’t have to be confronted with actual poverty. No, today’s news is that he has decided (unlike other Popes) that he will declare Father Junipero Serra a saint.

Pope Francis called Serra an "evangelizer of the west of the United States," and that he "has for centuries been considered a holy man" so Pope Francis will wave "Church rules that require a second miracle to be attributed to the candidate for sainthood after his beatification."

Junipero Serra. [eyeroll]

Junipero Serra is not a saint.

What is Father Junipero Serra?

He was a man. He performed no saintly public acts, no miracles (except the miracle that people are still insisting he could be a saint) and really what he is most responsible for in the annals of history is supporting, manufacturing and maneuvering a mass genocide of Native people during his run as the head of the Franciscan California Mission system.

Yeah I said it. Lots of people have said it before me, but you probably haven’t heard about it before. The Missions in California, seemingly tasked with“converting” Native people to good, Catholic citizens of New Spain, were actually mass murdering, concentration camps tasked with subduing and controlling the land, people, flora and fauna of California at all costs.

Oh, I’m just getting started.

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Not my California Mission Project. Mom wouldn't let me do one. (Good job Mom)

In the fourth grade in California we are forced (mostly forced and/or told that we have to or something really bad will happen to us) to learn about the “great” California mission system. Much of California was “settled” (or invaded) by the Spanish beginning in 1769 as part of a massive mission system attempting to “civilize” and convert Native people to Catholicism. It resulted in 21 missions founded between 1769-1834 (though it is important to note that the Franciscian mission program was a continuation of efforts that started in Baja, california and Mexico and made their way through Southern and Central california). 


Led primarily by the Franciscans, the Mission System was a well oiled machine of colonization and demoralization. This was not the Spanish church’s first time at the rodeo. Having already forcibly colonized (demoralized, destroyed) Mexico for over 100 years, and having already established Franciscan Missions (the first in 1533) throughout the southern part of the Western hemisphere, they knew exactly what they were doing.

Consider their means and methodologies against their own people during the Spanish Inquisition. I once went to a museum that was doing an exhibit on the torture devices of the Spanish Inquisition. It was an entire exhibit hall filled with various torture devices used by the Spanish against their own Catholic converts. It was creepy and a salient reminder that there are those of us who use our brains to invent sustainable ways to maintain the earth and care for our wildlife and assure the future of our planet and those of us who invent all kinds of torture devices. Or as my Great Grandfather wrote in 1971:

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"I have learned through my life that [Native peoples] were highly civilized, that of which will never be equaled. The civilization that is patterned from the materials that kills human lifes [sic] is poorly civilized."

Students in California are often asked to build a model of a mission as part of their mission project. It often focuses on the architecture, and happy little Indian people in happy little gardens with happy little Franciscan missionaries all happily living in this happy place. Deborah Miranda (YAY!) compares it to having children make happy little plantations or happy concentration camps and turning those in.   

“That’s why it’s time for the Mission Fantasy Fairy Tale to end. This story has done more damange to California Indians than any conquistador, any soldado de cuera (leather-jacket soldier), any smallpox, measles, or influenza virus. This story has not just killed us, it has taught us how to kill ourselves and kill each other with alcohol, domestic violence, horizontal racism, internalized hatred. This story is a kind of evil, a kind of witchery. We have to put an end to it now.” -Deborah Miranda (xix)

Holy crap she is awesome.

The “mission mythology” is one that attempts to venerate the leaders of the mission system. They are the manifest destiny come to life, ordained by god and welcomed with open arms not only by the Native people, but by the land, just hungry for what the Priests were selling.  This false (very false, epically false, insanely false) idea that everyone in the missions was happy is done on purpose. It’s a very easy way to erase the intent of genocide and to make it a sort of “whoopsey daisy” in history. “Whoops, we meant to bring you into our happy missions and make you civilized people but instead we killed over half of your population, enslaved you, forced you to procreate, committed violent acts against you and introduced violence into your relationships.”

Junipero Serra was the "great evangelizer" and leader of this crazy train. Choosing to canonize him is choosing to canonize what he proliferated while he was running the mission system. Here are some things he proliferated, this soon to be canonized “saint”:

• Sexual assault of Native women, which BTW was one of the first recorded acts by Spanish Missionaries when the Spanish entered California. Not only that, Native people at the time testified that Serra turned a blind eye to sexual assaults and rapes because he wanted to keep the Spanish soldiers happy.
  
• Forcing Native people into slavery and working them to death. They were required to build the missions. If they died while building the mission, they would be buried in mass graves (yup, this process required MASS graves) and the building would go on.
  
• Beating Native people with (sometimes) over one hundred lashes. Sometimes with a wooden club. Sometimes with a “Cat-o-nine tails” or a wooden club with ropes and knots tied at the end of it.
  
• Starvation of Native people. Feeding them as little as 400 calories a day, rationing their water intake and forcing them to work.
  
• Forcing Native people to procreate. There is one story about a woman who was not getting pregnant. The padres brought her in and demanded to know why she wasn’t with child. They forcibly did a vaginal exam of her.
  
• Allowing Missions to run what were akin to slave labor shops/ sweat shops. Native women and children were forced to weave for long hours and those items were sold to support the mission activities. Natives were not paid, nor were they allowed to make money off of their labor. 
  
• Locking up women. These “dormitories” were supposed to protect chastity and control reproduction. They were unhealthy, dirty, crowded and forced Native people to go to the bathroom in a bucket by the door. Today, we would call this torture and inhumane. We would write a big report about it and Congress would congratulate themselves for writing such a big report. Fox News would debate if it was actual torture.

I guess Junipero Serra can be a saint for you Pope, but what that means is that the Catholic Church is saying that they venerate and believe that these torturous acts against Native peoples are not only righteous, but they are the true path to a holy, sainted life.

And now comes the part where somebody says: “But he didn’t know it was wrong” or “he was a product of his time” and “for his time” he was way ahead of the game because it’s not like he just killed them, first he used them for labor and forced them to do things that he wanted them to do. That's what happens when you are a "product of your time" you don't know what you are doing is "wrong" per say.

Well, a lot of people“of that time” knew it was wrong.

Do you know who knew it was wrong? The Native people.

• In 1781 the Quechan revolted against the mission system and killed nearly 100 Hispanic colonists.
  
• In 1775, Natives in San Diego killed two soldiers and a Priest. They also burned the San Diego mission to the ground.
  
• In 1812, Natives in Santa Cruz killed Father Quintana for his continued abuse of Native peoples.
  
• Natives often ran away from missions. They refused to have children. Sometimes they practiced abortion and infanticide to keep children from being born in this system. They resisted the system by refusing to work, working very slowly, maintaining their cultural ceremonies and revolting against the imposed system of slavery and work camps.

Other people who knew it was wrong:

The French.

“...We mention it with pain, the resemblance is so perfect, that we saw men and women loaded with irons, others in the stocks; and at length the noise of the strokes of a whip struck our ears.” (Jean Francois Galaup de La Perouse comparing the missions to slavery (1785-`1788)

Other visiting explorers.

“From all I saw, I must say the Spainards are bad men.”

and

“[Indians] were bound with rawhide ropes and some were bleeding from wounds and some children were tied to their mothers. The next day we saw some terrible things. Some of the run-away men were tied on sticks and beaten with straps.” -Russian otter hunter Vassilli Petrovitch Taragkanoff.

Other Spanish dudes.

“The treatment shown to the Indians is the most cruel I have ever read in history. For the slightest things they receive heavy floggings, are shackled, and put in the stocks, and treated with so much cruelty that they are kept whole days without drink of water.” (Padre Antonio de la Conception Horra, 1799)

“There is not a single mission where all the gentiles have not been scandalized, and even on the roads, so I have been told. Surely, as the gentiles themselves state, [Spanish] are committing a thousand evils, particularly those of a sexual nature. The Fathers have petitioned Don Pedro concerning these points, but he has paid very little attention to them.” (Father Jayme, 1772)

“In a 1797 report written by Diego de Borica… Borica described how he entered [a dormitory that housed Native women] at an unidentified mission and was forced to leave the building because of the stench of human feces.” (Jackson & Castillo, 48)

Suffice to say it seems like the only person who didn’t have any sort of qualms about their inhumane mistreatment of Native people in the mission system was… Father Junipero Serra.

And now… Pope Francis.

Pope Francis -- you really should take a Native American Studies Class like stat.

Or read this book.

Or both.

PS. Junipero Serra is not a saint. You can’t credit him with all the good stuff that happened in the missions and then say “all that other stuff, he’s not responsible for, that was OTHER people not him. He knew what was going on. He was okay with what was going on. He was the leader of what was going on. He set up the system. I’ll bet he even knew it was wrong. He just didn’t care. That’s not a saint, that’s an arrogant jerk with no morals.

PPS. Just to be clear, because apparently we have to be clear about these things. Columbus isn’t a saint either.

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