continued…After years of prayers by Catholic nuns and controversy among American Indian groups, Pope Francis has decided that while visiting the United State in September, he will canonize as a saint, Junípero Serra, the Spanish priest who founded nine California missions. His announcement caught virtually everyone by surprise. The Pope told reporters in January 2015; Serra “was the evangelizer of the West in the United States”. Pope Francis said that since Serra has for centuries been considered a holy man, he had waved Church rules that require a second miracle to be attributed to the candidate for sainthood after his beatification. Pope John Paul II beatified Serra in 1987, the second step in the process leading to sainthood. Junipero Serra is a well-known figure in California; he has been hailed the Columbus of California, who wandered beyond the edge of Christendom into a rugged land of “infidels” he sought to convert. He is a virtual icon of the colonial era whose statue stands in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and in the U.S. Capital. He is buried at the Carmel Mission where he died. Pope Francis does not believe in Catholicism confined to the ivory tower. Serra was a kindred spirit
who abandoned a high-profile aca-demic post to take on the dangerous, austere life of a missionary. At the age of thirty-six Serra determined to become a missionary in the New World. In 1749, leaving the island of Majorca, part of the kingdom of Spain, he crossed the ocean in company with a number of Franciscan Monks, among them several who afterward came with him to California. He remained a short time in Mexico City, then was a missionary for 9 years to the Indians in the Sierra Madre, returning then to Mexico City for 7 years. When he was fifty-four years of age, he was appointed to the charge of the Missions to be established in Upper California. He arrived at San Diego in 1769, and, with the exception of one journey to
Mexico, he spent the remainder of his life in Upper California.
Serra established nine missions between San Diego and San Francisco and baptized 6,000 Indians. He viewed the indigenous tribes as heathens who desperately needed the Gospel. They did not practice agriculture, produce pottery or metallurgy, or build substantial structures. But they had a complex way of living off the land, migrating from the coast to the foothills every year to follow the food supply and weaving elaborate baskets to store and carry their goods. They manipulated the chaparral with fire to produce more food to pick and animals to hunt. to be continued…
Sources: KQED News, LA Times, News.VA, Orange County Register, Los Angeles Daily News, SFMuseum.net