On Making Peace With the Past

Michael Sean Winters had a good article on NCR today.  It touched on the destruction of statues, particularly that of St. Junipero Serra in what is now downtown Los Angeles. He had this to say about Serra:

"Serra came rather late in the spiritual conquest of Mexico, a conquest that was marred by violence from start to finish. If I were an Indigenous person, I would resent Serra and his fellow friars enormously because their arrival marked the beginning of a cultural genocide. There is no denying this. Serra, of course, did not look at it that way, not because he hated the native peoples. He didn't. It is one of the conundrums of evangelization in the Americas that it was benighted and paternalistic in the extreme, but no one who has read anything about the subject can doubt that the friars thought they were helping their Indigenous charges, that they sincerely loved them, and that many of the native peoples at that time loved them in return."
"....I am no expert on the California missions, but from what I know of the missions there, and more broadly about how white Europeans interacted with native peoples, however problematic things got with Catholic missions, things got much worse for the native peoples when English-speaking Americans arrived and secularized the missions. The history of Spanish conquest was often brutal, but only the English took an exterminationist approach."
"Serra evangelized in ways we would never think to do today, but if we had lived when he did, we are fooling ourselves if we think we would have evangelized in ways markedly different from those he employed. We should never examine such cases anachronistically, judging him by the standards of our day, not by the standards of his own time, in order to make him into a bad guy. It is wrong to simply tear down his statue on his own merits, and even more so when you consider the reasons that statue was erected in the first place, to demonstrate that Spaniard Catholics were a part of the American story.
It is an odd fact of Western culture that while we nod when told the victors write history and see that they are the most likely to be memorialized in stone and statuary, nonetheless the most common human image in Western art is not a scene of victory: The crucifix does not portray human victory. Statues of the risen Lord or of the empty tomb are not unknown, but they pale by comparison to the sheer number and variety of crucifixion portrayals. Further, it is a remarkable fact that it is this image of the crucified that has so often moved the hearts of the serfs in Russia and the slaves in Alabama and the Indigenous of Chiapas. Remarkable, too, that images of his mother have found such a prominent place in the spiritual devotion of the poor throughout history. "
"...America's puritanical streak often wears the mask of moral reformation, from the Salem witch trials in the 1690s and Prohibition in the 1920s, but the Gospel points us in a different direction. Those of us who are white Christians have a moral obligation to sympathize with the sadness an Indigenous person feels when he or she sees a statue of Columbus or Serra, but no one is obligated to applaud historical anachronism. The vandalism of the statues should stop. And we should all contemplate this humbling fact: None of us knows what things we do now will, 200 or 300 years hence, be viewed as barbaric or inhumane."

Serra founded the chain of missions along the 600 mile stretch of road known as El Camino Real. Eventually there came to be 21 missions.
The above picture is of the mission church of San Juan Bautista, St. John the Baptist. It was taken when we visited that mission in 2013.  This mission was founded in 1797, not by Fr. Serra personally, but by another Spanish Franciscan, Fermin de Lasuen.  It is, however, one of the 21 missions along El Camino Real.
The picture seemed appropriate today, since June 24th is the feast day of St. John the Baptist.
Today the church is no longer associated with the Franciscans, but is the parish church of the small town, also known as San Juan Bautista.

Here is an interesting article on the phenomenon which happens on the winter solstice, Dec. 21st, in which a shaft of sunlight illuminates the altar of many mission churches, including San Juan Bautista.
Thanks to Donald Davidson, host of the Facebook page of Homeless Commenters from NCR, for the link to that article.