By DEXTER DUGGAN
Hundreds of feet above the streets, the urban northern California reader at the breakfast table opened her San Francisco Chronicle the morning of January 23 to see an opinion column, including a photo of a stern-looking friar’s face, that covered a half-page and was headlined, “Serra an oppressor — not a saint.”
Eighteenth century Franciscan friar Junipero Serra, it said, had imposed “devastating losses” on the land’s indigenous peoples due to his colonial system. “Under Serra’s leadership, a first generation of mission Indians began to create the vast wealth of California through forced residence and labor in the mission,” wrote Lisbeth Haas, a history professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Santa Cruz is Spanish for Holy Cross, that object Serra often is depicted holding high in his hand. Why, even enduring place names carry his stain onto professors’ schools.
As for those who sit high up in their urban condos to read the Chronicle, they may thank their comfortable presence to the creation of “the vast wealth of California.”
On the facing page that same day was the Chronicle’s own editorial celebrating the further expansion of modern commerce, under the page-wide headline, “California’s free-trade future.” Along with the newspaper’s logotype and staff list, this editorial covered the top one-third of the broadsheet page.
Starting off with some impressive figures about the Bay Area’s exports, the Chronicle editorial said the “numbers underscore a financial reality that too many take for granted. Global trade is an enormous chunk of California’s present and future,” a “thriving financial lifeline.”
Rather like a millionaire’s spoiled university son who derides his father’s wealth while not divesting himself of one cent of it, this condemnation of Serra and his system is indulged as self-gratification, not personal penance.
How good it feels to castigate someone politically out of favor — and long dead and thereby defenseless — without making any serious adjustment to one’s way of living.
The Catholic cleric Serra, long celebrated as one of the great pioneer builders of California and the West, is seen as a shame out on today’s wild frontier of ever-agitated progressivism and Alinskyism. The scary-eyed 21st-century inhabitants of this emerging territory have their own medicine dance to drive Christianity away.
Honoring Serra used to be part of the celebration of the creation of this nation, and an acknowledgment of a Catholic-citizen constituency, along with the accomplishments of all the ethnic and racial groups that blended here, E pluribus unum.
However, today’s holders of traditional religious and cultural beliefs are being sent off to tread their own Trail of Tears, to who knows what kind of big-government-designed reservation. They may even make the trip without having to walk anywhere. It’s just that their surroundings are becoming completely different.
The 19th-century Trail of Tears was an egregious injustice to southeastern Indian tribes who were resettled. Their treatment was a betrayal of Christian ideals, not their fulfillment.
Serra’s own mission system in California strikes us as imperfect in ways he and his contemporaries may not have comprehended. But the penance being recommended for us, even after society has made significant strides in awareness, is to replace some current elements in the social structure with decidedly less healthy ones.
Can Serra’s foes comprehend this?
The rise of academic multiculturalism has meant the beginning of the diminishment of figures like Serra. Now the attack is being stepped up.
Statuary Hall in the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., has two historic figures represented from each state. California’s statues are of President Ronald Reagan and Serra. On April 13 the Democrat-majority California Senate voted to replace Serra with a statue of California lesbian astronaut Sally Ride. The replacement question then moved to the Democratic-majority State Assembly.
This is trekking deep into the thickets of political correctness. Who could be in the dark about how Democrat politicians would decide? In favor of an old Catholic missionary and exploiter or a rocket-riding homosexual?
In a story posted April 13, the Los Angeles Times reported that Democrat State Sen. Ricardo Lara, a sponsor of the resolution, “called Ride a role model for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community. ‘For the first time ever, LGBT youths will see themselves in Statuary Hall,’ Lara said during the [Senate] debate.”
Ah, the icing on the gay-wedding cake. Not only removing a Catholic missionary in favor of a lesbian, but also being able to hold up the lesbian as a role model.
Other Californians are aghast that Serra could be dishonored this way, even as Pope Francis prepares to canonize him later this very year during a papal trip to the U.S.
But the politically correct go so far as to suggest that the Pope should drop plans for the canonization itself.
Names Celebrate Saints
California hasn’t exactly been in harmony with nature since Serra. Think of its engineering marvels that defy Mother Earth, starting with the Golden Gate Bridge, San Diego’s Coronado Bridge, and tens of millions of urban dwellers including liberals amid soaring freeway interchanges and high rises that ride the back of tremendous earthquake faults.
Moreover, many of California’s Spanish place names simply celebrate some Catholic saint. How is this tolerable in a society whose leadership can’t abide the missionary who helped start its modern development? Renaming the geography is probably the next step. San Diego can become Bay City. San Francisco can be Milktropolis, for murdered San Francisco homosexual supervisor Harvey Milk, and so on.
Just think how well that worked in the Soviet Union, where for instance St. Petersburg became the politically correct Leningrad. Oh, it got changed back to St. Petersburg when the Soviet Union fell? You mean political correctness maybe doesn’t last forever? Maybe we better not bolt Sally Ride’s statue to the floor in Statuary Hall.
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I asked veteran San Francisco conservative commentator Barbara Simpson for her view on the Serra situation. What follows are Simpson’s thoughts:
The rumble of controversy over the upcoming canonization of Junipero Serra continues to grow in California. Knowing California as I do, it’s not surprising.
It not only feeds the liberal view of victimhood but also is part of the belief that every event of the past must be judged by today’s standards. Anything that crosses that line must be called to task and, if possible, someone must be punished.
It goes without saying that if the accused is the Roman Catholic Church, all the better.
Whether the opposition comes from tribe members or from political liberals, nothing the Church does or has done is acceptable, and deserved a massive push-back.
On top of it, it provides the opportunity for anti-Catholics to intrude into Church workings, loudly criticize, and try to force change.
The media love it — great visuals and controversial sound bites.
Pope Francis has stated that he plans to canonize the Franciscan missionary, and founder of the chain of Catholic missions in California, while he is in the United States in September.
The negative reaction, and the media coverage of it, is to be expected. Native American groups accuse Serra and the missionaries of cruelty, enslavement, and brutalizing treatment of the various tribe members along the California coast as they founded the missions.
In addition, Serra is accused of allowing those people to be stripped of their native religions, their language and, on top of that, allowing the spread of diseases, which decimated the population.
One can argue and debate the methods used by the missionaries and the soldiers who accompanied them, but there is no debate about the diseases.
The natives had no resistance to European diseases and so suffered the consequences. The only way to have avoided them would have been for the missionaries to have stayed home — the same arguments are made against Columbus.
Demonstrations do not change history, and we need to deal with what we have now.
There are also arguments that the land still belongs to the tribes and not California and not to the United States. This matches the ongoing litany of complaints from Mexicans who demand the land of our Southwest be returned.
I suspect the dispute will only grow louder and more visible as the Pope’s trip draws closer. I can only pray that he does not cave in to the politically motivated objections to the canonization.
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