Close to Home: Assessing successes, sins of Junípero Serra

Does Junípero Serra deserve to be knocked off his pedestal?

As the father of California’s mission system, he’s probably the most widely known figure from the pre-Gold Rush era. Schools, streets, even a freeway and mountain are named after him. He’s credited with helping to lay the foundation for the state’s economy, including agriculture and winemaking.

He’s been both celebrated and condemned — elevated to sainthood by the Catholic Church but criticized for the negative impact the missions had on California’s Indigenous communities.

Critics see the missions, which stretched from San Diego to Sonoma, as part of an oppressive and cruel Spanish colonial system that resulted in large numbers of deaths among once-thriving native populations.

This view of the missions as a legacy of genocide has produced attacks on Serra statues around the state — in downtown Los Angeles, on the grounds of the Capitol in Sacramento and in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The latest was spray painting and toppling of his statue at the San Rafael Mission, resulting in the arrest of five people on charges of vandalism.

Questions about Serra are part of a larger examination of racism in America that has seen Confederate statues taken down, along with collateral statue damage to seemingly irreproachable figures like Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.

In Serra’s case, the most recent act of destruction coincided with Indigenous Peoples Day and the traditional Columbus Day anniversary. It underscored how Serra was entrenched in an often violent Spanish empire that stretched back almost 300 years before him, to when Columbus landed in the Americas.

During the Spanish Colonial period from 1493 to 1822, more than 15,000 priests and members of religious orders left Spain to work in the New World.

In Serra’s defense, biographers note the “deep compassion” he expressed for native people and the genuine belief that he and his fellow missionaries were protecting Indians from unscrupulous and potentially cruel settlers.

Following his death in 1784 at San Carlos Mission in Carmel, Serra was idealized as a dedicated and selfless priest, motivated only by love for all of God’s children and wanting to spread the message of salvation and civilization to all corners of the earth. But subsequently, critics have described this early California icon as a “brutal colonist.”

Over the years, I’ve visited all of California’s 21 missions, some twice or more, from San Diego, founded in 1769 by Serra, to the last mission in Sonoma, established in 1823, nearly 40 years after his death.

The white-washed missions built in an earlier pastoral era, the ancient bells, the religious art, the surrounding adobes and communities that sprang up around them are a window into a centuries-old way of life.

But often there is a sad reminder of the toll the system took, with some adjacent graveyards holding thousands of Indians in unmarked graves, many of them children who died from diseases.

While Serra was alive, more than 1,000 people, mostly Indians, were baptized at Carmel and less than 200 died at the mission. But the ratio of births and baptisms to deaths worsened after Serra’s time. By 1820, Serra’s successor acknowledged “while the Indians procreate easily and are healthy and robust (though errant) in the wilds, in spite of hunger, nakedness, and living outdoors like beasts, as soon as they commit themselves to a sociable and Christian life, they become extremely feeble, lose weight, get sick, and die.”

This comes from an authoritative book that provides insight into Serra and his time, “Junípero Serra: California, Indians and the Transformation of a Missionary,” written by academics Rose Marie Beebe and Robert Senkewicz and published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

With the help of his diaries, sermons and voluminous letters, they trace Serra’s early life in Mallorca, Spain, where he took vows of poverty as a Franciscan priest, followed by his years on the Mexican mainland, including his participation in the Inquisition, investigating rumors of two women involved in demon worship.

Like the Puritans in New England a century earlier, he believed the devil was trying to thwart efforts to form a godly society.

Serra was motivated by a single-minded intensity. On one occasion in Mexico City, he began to scourge himself with a chain in the middle of a sermon. It was part of a long tradition of self-flagellation traced to monasteries during the Middle Ages. Participants were expressing a symbolic identification with the Christ story, in which Jesus was flogged before he was crucified.

After his transfer to Baja California to take over the system of missions established in the late 1600s by the Jesuits, Serra headed north to fulfill his fervent desire to bring the Gospel to the unbaptized. It also coincided with Spain's intent to colonize upper California to counter Russian interests, along with other countries that might try to lay claim to it.

Escorted by soldiers on an overland expedition through the deserts and tortuous terrain of the Baja Peninsula, Serra was convinced by the mostly friendly native people he encountered as he approached San Diego that they were eager to hear the Gospel and would gradually come to accept Christianity.

Many willingly took up the new religion. But Serra would later have Indians flogged if they ran away from the mission or were seen as lax in matters of faith.

According to Serra’s sermons, what might be regarded as punishment can be a gift from God to make people better and bring them closer to eternal salvation. In his view, the Indians would eventually understand priests were like loving parents trying to help their children (even though most of the child-rearing practices of the California Indians did not involve corporal punishment).

Serra’s world was dramatically impacted by the burning down of the San Diego Mission in November 1775 by a large group of Kumeyaay Indians. They also killed one of the priests, who was clubbed and stoned.

But Serra appealed for leniency for the offenders after they were caught, and the governor lifted their death sentences. Serra said he wanted the prisoners freed and the priests given a visible role in their release to make the Indians more receptive to them in the future.

Serra was willing to die for his faith and said as much in writing: “If the Indians were to kill me, whether they be gentiles or Christians, they should be forgiven.”

It’s tricky to judge someone from the 18th century with our modern beliefs and evolving sense of right and wrong. Rather than tearing down statues, there have been suggestions to move them to museums or to add plaques with historical context.

Perhaps a good start would be the summation offered by 19th century California historian Hubert Bancroft. He called Serra “a good and great man,” but also said the effects of the mission system were disastrous:

“Those first pure priests who came hither, devoted ministers of the living God, who really desired the welfare of the aboriginals, desired them to live and not die; these with their comforts and their kindness killed as surely as did Cortés and Pizarro with their gunpowder, steel, and piety.”

Clark Mason is a retired Press Democrat staff writer. He can be reached at clarkmas@sbcglobal.net.

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