“Guardian” of California San Gabriel Mission: “We have too many Saints”

Reader TE kindly sent me the following link a few days ago, regarding the “controversy” in California over the planned canonization of Blessed Junipero Serra.  The opposition comes from amazing sources, including the “museum guardian” of the Church-owned and operated, fully functioning parish of San Gabriel Mission in Los Angeles County, California.  This man’s statement is just bewildering, and reveals an utter lack of right understanding of the Faith and would seem to indicate yet another instance where an individual with beliefs directly counter to the Faith is given a position of influence and responsibility within the Church.  Shame on the Southern California news media for stoking this kind of opposition to a blessed event, and trying a man according to today’s fallen standards rather than the standards of the time:

Pope Francis promises to canonize a missionary who brought Christianity to the Western United States in the 1700s.

Friar Junipero Serra will be proclaimed a saint when the pope visits the U.S. in September.

“I was happy and surprised that the Holy Father Pope Francis announced the canonization of blessed Junipero Serra,” said Archbishop Jose Gomez of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. 

“It’s a great joy for all of us in California, and in the United States, and, for that matter, for the universal church, because [he] was a blessed man.”

The Franciscan friar hailed from Spain and founded missions across California.

“It’s amazing. No words, I can’t describe; it’s beautiful,” said a parishioner at San Gabriel Mission Church………….

Not everyone CBS2/KCAL9 reporter Amy Johnson spoke with was supportive of the decision.“I’m kind of surprised because Father Serra was instrumental in the maltreatment of the Indians,” said John Fantz, Museum Guardian for the San Gabriel Mission, referring to the Native American community. “We have enough saints. We have enough saints.” [And here we have an early entrant in the race for dumbest statement of the year.  The goal of the Church is to produce Saints.  This statement reveals so much.  An utter lack of understanding of the purpose of the Church. Ignorance of what a Saint is, and who is called to be a Saint.  Complete confusion on what the purpose of life is!  It is God’s Will that all be Saints, but many fail due to our fallen nature and the evils that surround us in the world. This is just an incredible statement.]

…… [So why is there opposition to the canonization?  Well, aside from the constant leftist antagonism towards the Church and any of her glories from the past, it is centered on whether the Spaniards spanked Indians]Hackel also confirms Serra was a controversial figure because of the treatment of Native Americans that was permitted at the time.

“Spanking or some sort of physical aggressiveness that was their way of correcting wayward people. And, of course, in today’s world we would consider that to be unacceptable,” the professor said. 

“I also should add that missions were, at their worst, unhealthy places where native peoples died in large numbers. In that, I think those two things, the physical coercion, the diseases introduced by Spaniards that really ran rampant in missions and reduced native peoples, I think that’s probably at the heart of the resistance, or the opposition to Serra and his vision.”

While Serra may not have participated in this kind of aggressive behavior, it appears he didn’t discourage it in others.

There is such a complete disconnect in the thinking of today’s left, and the beliefs dear to the Spaniards who brought the One True Faith to many wallowing in ignorance and death, that it is almost impossible to imagine two more disparate mindsets. Why did the Spaniards do what they did?  Why did they risk life and limb and all manner of suffering we really cannot even imagine in our incredibly soft and pampered existences today to convert savage souls ignorant of the Faith?  And they were savage, the Native Americans of Southern California were among the most backwards and barbarous tribes in the entire North American continent, but even among many more “civilized” tribes immorality and savagery were rampant (read Fr. de Smet’s biography).  They had little concept of morality and existed in a very primitive hunter-gatherer state. The Spaniards, in addition to introducing the Faith that surely saved many souls – an achievement whose greatness is beyond human comprehension – also brought agriculture and many other civilizing influences.  They dramatically curbed very bad behavior on the part of the natives, and maybe they did use occasional “coercion” to do so.

To comprehend the criticisms above, we have to understand that to the secular pagan modernist, there is no absolute truth.  There is no truth at all.  Everything is relative.  And so the behavior of extremely primitive peoples, raping and pillaging other tribes, practicing polygamy, bashing heads in, stealing, thieving, and all the rest, were just equally valid modes of existence compared to that of most pious, virtuous Spaniard.  Thus, the Spaniard had no right to impose his system of belief on the “noble savage.” Even if that “noble savage” objectively existed in a very fallen state and practiced all manner of immorality, up to and including human sacrifice (which, of course, leftists today endorse in the form of abortion on demand), post-modern secular paganism demands “no judgment” – except of course for the Spanish or other Europeans, who can be judged to death.

All of this criticism of Christianity, the Church, the mission activities of Spaniards, or the English colonies at the other end of the continent, the introduction of Christianity to previously lost souls, in short, the entire settling of the Americas, is all just a means to practice cultural marxism, to undermine the dominant culture (if it is even dominant anymore) by assaulting the proudest and noblest elements of its historical heritage.  It’s just one of a million fronts in the war waged by marxists and their progressive allies against Christendom.  Calumniating the reputation of a great man who brought tens of thousands of souls to the Faith and likely salvation and eternal joy, while also dramatically improving the human aspects of their lives in many respects, is part and parcel of what they do everyday, day in and day out.

One does wonder why a person of such a disposition, and who openly laments the Church’s “excess” of Saints, would be employed by the Church in a position of even minor influence.  Unfortunately, we know that the Church is rife with such saboteurs from minor posts as “museum guardians” to priests, bishops, and cardinals.  And yes, I’m looking at you, Germany.

I haven’t studied the life of Blessed Junipero Serra nor the evangelization of Upper California to any great extent, though I have read a bit on it, and I seem to recall that there were extremely few Spaniards involved in the project, that to the extent there were any military forces involved they were scant and completely insufficient to pacify the enormous territory they operated in, and that thus claims that the “noble” savages were herded into the missions by military force is somewhere between highly unlikely and laughable. As I recall, and as occurred in Texas (about which I know a great deal more), the vast majority of Native Americans who entered the mission system and accepted Christianity did so most willingly.  There were many reasons for this: sometimes they did so because they were starving and the Spaniards had agriculture and a regular food supply, sometimes they did so in order to gain protection from hostile tribes, and often they did so out of a true desire to accept the religion of the “black robes.”  In Texas, at least, the Spaniards barely had enough military force to protect the scattered and few missions from indian attacks – and often not even enough for that, because some missions like the one at San Saba were entirely wiped out, and more than once, by such attacks.  So the idea that there were mass armies of Spaniards forcing poor peaceful indians onto “cruel and coercive” Spanish missions is, I think, just another left wing fantasy, a rather severe (if not total) falsification of history.  Perhaps things were somewhat different in California, but I don’t think they were to any great degree.  Even then, a major conceit of the left is that the human living in a state of “pristine” nature, in communion with his natural surroundings and enjoying all that libertine, amoral lifestyles can provide (the left wing wet dream) could never, ever want to be converted to a Faith as stultifying, hidebound, and moralistic as Christianity.  This is simply another instance of leftist projection onto others of their own biases and hatreds – they simply cannot imagine souls voluntarily submitting themselves to such a no-fun system of religion – and so they simply must have been coerced.

And then again, we have to understand the mentality of the time, which is one I which we had just a bit more of today.  The mentality of the Faith then was that it was no real disservice to a soul or group of souls to use some degree of coercion to convert them to the Faith and dramatically increase, if not assure, their likelihood of salvation.  That may make some gasp in horror today and clutch their collectivist pearls, but when one considers that this life is short and full of misery, whereas salvation is forever, there was more than a little to commend even a coercive approach.  We have simply lost the Faith and the idea of the absolute paramount need for salvation as a culture.  That’s why such an attitude seems so alien, or even “evil,” to many today, because they have no faith (save leftism) and cannot imagine anyone who does. They have also created a false construct of Christianity in the cultural mindset as a weak, worldly, materialist, and pacifist religion that can never be muscular or martial, the better to control and direct such Christianity as remains into innocuous, unthreatening (to leftism) ends.

Didn’t plan on this post going to so long!  I hate this kind of garbage, because it is so revealing of how the left has managed to marginalize and neuter the Church.