Some celebrate the 300 anniversary
of Serra’s birth.
by George Monbiot
Nowhere is the Church’s denial
better exemplified than in its drive to canonise the Franciscan missionary
Junípero Serra, whose 300th anniversary falls on Sunday. Serra’s cult epitomises
the Catholic problem with history – as well as the lies that underpin the
founding myths of the United States.
You can find his statue on Capitol
Hill, his face on postage stamps, his name plastered across schools and streets
and trails all over California. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II, after a
nun was apparently cured of lupus, and now awaits a second miracle to become a
saint(9). So what’s the problem? Oh, just that he founded the system of labour
camps that expedited California’s cultural genocide.
Junípero Serra personified the
glitter-eyed fanaticism that blinded Catholic missionaries to the horrors they
inflicted on the native peoples of the Americas. Working first in Mexico, then
in Baja California (now part of Mexico), then Alta California (now the US
state), he presided over a system of astonishing brutality. Through various
bribes and ruses, Native Americans were enticed to join the missions he
founded. Once they had joined, they were forbidden to leave. If they tried to
escape, they were rounded up by soldiers then whipped by the missionaries. Any
disobedience was punished by the stocks or the lash.
They were, according to a written
complaint, forced to work in the fields from sunrise until after dark, and fed
just a fraction of what was required to sustain them(10). Weakened by overwork
and hunger, packed together with little more space than slave ships
provided(11), they died, mostly of European diseases, in their tens of
thousands.
Serra’s missions were an essential
instrument of Spanish and then American colonisation. This is why so many
Californian cities have saints’ names: they were founded as missions. But in
his treatment of the indigenous people, he went beyond even the grim demands of
the Crown. Felipe de Neve, a governor of the Californias, expressed his horror
of Serra’s methods, complaining that the fate of the missionised people was
“worse than that of slaves.”(12) As Steven Hackel documents in his new
biography, Serra sabotaged Neve’s attempts to permit the Native Americans a
measure of self-governance, which threatened his dominion over their lives.
The diverse, sophisticated and
self-reliant people of California were reduced by the missions to desperate
peonage. Between 1769, when Serra arrived in Alta California and 1821, when
Spanish rule ended, the Native American population there fell by one third, to
200,000(13).
Junípero Serra’s claim to sainthood
can be sustained only by erasing the native peoples of California a second
time, and there is a noisy lobby with this purpose. Serra’s hagiographies
explain how he mortified his own flesh; they tell us nothing about how he
mortified other people’s(14).
In reviewing Hackel’s biography a
fortnight ago, the Catholic professor Christopher O. Blum extolled Serra for
his “endless labor of building civilization in the wilderness”(15). He contrasted the missionary to “the Enlightened Spanish
colonial officials who wanted … to leave the Indians to their immoral stew”.
“The Indians there not only went around naked much of the year – with the
predictable consequence of rampant promiscuity – but they were divided into
villages of 250 or fewer inhabitants … ready-made for the brutal petty tyrant
or the manipulative witch doctor”. The centuries of racism, cruelty and
disrespect required to justify the assaults of the Church have not yet come to
an end.
I would love to see the Pope use
the tercentenary on Sunday to announce that he will not canonise Serra, however
many miracles his ghost might perform, and will start to engage with some
uncomfortable histories. Then, perhaps, as Jonathan urges, I’ll put a poster of
Francis on my wall. But not in the bedroom.
www.monbiot.com
References:
2. Eg: “The worship of the golden
calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the
dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly humane
goal.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/the-pope/10061700/Pope-Francis-urges-global-leaders-to-end-tyranny-of-money.html
3. Or his tweet of 15th September:
“Seeking happiness in material things is a sure way of being unhappy.”
7. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/13/vatican-beatifies-martyrs-killed-spanish-civil-war-pope
9. I phoned the Congregation for
the Causes of the Saints last week to confirm this.
10. Agustín Pérez de la Cruz and
Lorenzo de la Cruz, with the assistance of Raphael Mariano de Lima, cited by
Steven W. Hackel, 2013. Junípero Serra: California’s founding father. Farrar,
Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
11. David E Stannard, 1992.
American Holocaust. Oxford University Press.
12. Cited by Steven W. Hackel,
2013. Junípero Serra: California’s founding father. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Kindle Edition.
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