In , Fr. After months of difficult preliminary exploration, the main expedition left in April of and founded the presidio and mission at Monterey in June. Bernardino de Jesus, 5 year old local Indian boy, was Fr. The Carmel Mission, as it is known today, became the headquarters of mission operations in Alta California. Father Serra argued openly with the Spanish Army leaders over the proper authority of the Franciscans in Alta California, which he thought should be greater than that of military commanders.
In , he convinced the authorities in Mexico City to increase support for expansion of his missions and to expand the authority of the Franciscans over both the army and the baptized mission Indians. He also urged Spanish officials to establish an overland route to Alta California, a suggestion which led to colonizing expeditions led by Juan Bautista de Anza which established civilian settlements at San Francisco in and at Los Angeles in In , difficulties with Capt.
Pedro Fages, the military commander and governor at Monterey, compelled Fr. Bucareli ruled favorably on 30 of the 32 articles and removed Fages from office after which Fr. Serra returned to Carmel. Unfortunately, the relationship with the replacement military governor, Fernando Rivera y Moncada, was not a great improvement. In , Father Serra was given permission to administer the sacrament of Confirmation for the faithful in California.
After he had exercised his privilege for a year, Governor Felipe de Neve, asserting his authority, directed him to suspend administering the sacrament until he could get approval from Rome. For nearly 2 years Fr. Serra had to refrain until the Viceroy proclaimed that he was within his rights. Governor de Neve prevented Fr. He wanted to do direct pastoral work. He was excited and happiest when he was doing that.
It is always extremely difficult to intuit the thoughts, motives and genuine behavior of native peoples through the writings of colonial officials, but I think it is reasonable to surmise that some native people, especially in the area around which he spent most of his time, Carmel, understood and appreciated him.
He was a man who was happiest when he was out there directly engaged in pastoral work. He was most unhappy when he had to deal with soldiers and governors. Serra never met a military governor that he liked. He dealt with three of them and disliked each one more than the previous one. He also tended to be unhappy when he had to deal with his religious superiors back in Mexico City.
He would sometimes think that they didn't understand what he was trying to do. His superiors often thought he was too impatient and too reckless in establishing so many missions so quickly. Maybe that criticism came with the territory. Indeed, the Jesuit missionary in Arizona, Eusebio Kino, experienced similar strictures from his own superiors. At one point, Serra complained about all this: "I'm spending half of my life at a desk writing reports.
What made him happiest was being a missionary among unbaptized people. What made him especially happy was when he could do that directly one-on-one with native peoples. When he described that human interaction, he tended not to acknowledge the fact that he was part of a larger colonial system that could be, at times, very brutal and very bloody. Some of them certainly did. The California native culture was not a written culture. It was an oral culture. So scholars try to infer how the native peoples are reacting through obviously biased reports of Spanish writers.
Even with that, I think that some of them really did like him, and they were fond of him. They kept calling him Padre Viejo, the old priest. He kind of liked that. He was considerably older than most of the other Spaniards or Mexican the natives were encountering.
He was also shorter and more frail than most of them. I think some of them sort of adopted him almost as a mascot. In December , for instance, he was traveling through the Santa Barbara area, and there was a huge rainstorm. So the small party that he was with had to leave the beach where they were traveling and go up to the foothills because the waves were coming in.
They got bogged down in the mud. Suddenly, and out of nowhere, a group of Chumash Indians appeared. They picked Serra up and carried him through the mud so that he could continue his journey. They stayed with him for a couple of days, and he tried to teach them to sing some songs. That was the kind of thing that he just loved. Other native peoples, for instance the Kumeyaay who in led a rebellion in San Diego that destroyed the mission and killed one of the priests, clearly didn't like the mission system at all.
In fact, after that episode, Serra wrote to the viceroy and asked that, if he were to be killed by an Indian, that Indian ought not be executed but forgiven. So, some did like him, and some thought that he was somebody who was destroying their way of life. The native response to the Spanish occupation of California was similar to the native response to many other incursions of European colonialism in the Americas.
Definitely more negative than accepting, and complex and mixed. As the mission system developed over time it became a different kind of place after Serra's death in as a result of a couple of circumstances. If you were the viceroy at the time, you were going to do everything that you could to defeat this insurgency. So the supply ship, which every year had come up from Mexico to California, stopped coming because all resources were being diverted to fighting Hidalgo and Morelos.
All of the sudden, California was not getting its regular replenishment of supplies. The institutions in California that were best equipped to deal with this situation were the missions because by that time, they were pretty skilled at growing food. They also had blacksmiths, carpenters and other skilled personnel.
Some of these skilled laborers were Indians, who had learned from Mexican craftsmen at the missions, and who would pass on those skills to their own children. So the missions became the economic engines of California from about increasingly onward. The result was the missions began to reach farther and farther away from the coast to get more native people to keep up production levels. By the early s, the missionaries were almost ranchers as much as they were missionaries. They were selling their hides and tallow to American and British merchants who were trading up and down the coast.
And ranching concerns and missionary activity did not always coexist well together. For instance, peoples' freedom of movement within the mission compound became more restricted. An example was that young girls and women were locked up at night because the missionaries thought, not without reason, that some soldiers would rape them if they were unprotected. But putting so many individuals together in an enclosed and often cramped space created a very unhealthy environment.
Young girls and women were especially vulnerable to imported diseases to which they had not developed any immunities. For this and other reasons, such as heavy workload, the death rate in the missions was very high and it increased over time. Obviously, the missionaries didn't know about germ theory, or anything like that. But, they knew people were dying in great numbers because they were doing the funerals, and they kept very full records of all sacramental matters.
Some were extremely upset, while others appear to have contented themselves with the assurance that this simply meant that more souls were going to heaven. It is very jarring and infuriating to read those words today. Did the Franciscans or the church get rich through the missions?
Did any of the profits from the missions go back to Mexico or Spain? In the quarter century after , the missions generated considerable income.
But close study of the financial system and of the mission account books indicates pretty clearly that the overwhelming amount of this income, more than 90 percent, went directly back into mission enterprises, especially clothing for the native peoples and liturgical, catechetical and sacramental supplies. Serra in was canonized as a saint by Pope Francis during a trip to the U. While Serra is credited with spreading the Catholic faith across what is now California, critics say Serra was part of an imperial conquest that beat and enslaved Native Americans.
Serra, who was born in Spain, came to the Americas in , and in he founded the first of what would become 21 missions along the California coast. Jeffrey M. Burns We need to do more than topple some statues Massimo Faggioli.
Native Americans brought into the mission to be evangelized were not allowed to leave the grounds. Many labored for no pay. There is evidence of beatings, imprisonment and other abuse at the hands of the missionaries.
Serra defenders say it's unfair to judge him by 21st-century standards. They say he frequently pleaded for more merciful treatment for the Native Americans under their control. The Catholic News Agency detailed how Serra asked Spanish authorities to spare the lives of the California natives who had attacked a San Diego mission. We have recently relaunched the commenting experience at America and are aiming for a more focused commenting experience with better moderation by opening comments on a select number of articles each day.
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