| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| SAINTLY | SKETCH |
The Significance of Blessed Junípero Serra
by Gerard Beigel, S.T.D.
In the providence of God, Mission San Carlos Borromeo was destined to hold the remains of the Franciscan priest who planted the Gospel of Jesus Christ in California: Blessed Junípero Serra. It is only a matter of time, please God, before he will be canonized as a saint of the Church. As someone who is already beatified, he is held up to the faithful as a model of heroic Christian virtue. Let us reflect upon the spiritual character of this man who continues to influence the Church.
Even the many tourists who visit this mission are struck by the peace that seems to pervade the grounds, the gardens, the buildings and, of course, the Basilica itself. It is a peace not unlike that which is experienced in other holy places such as Assisi, the home of St. Francis. This abiding peace is actually a spiritual manifestation of the heroic Christian virtue of Serra. We can truly say that he has “left his mark” upon the land itself. The peace that abides here is actually a spiritual presence. This is a holy place. It is hallowed by the prayers of many visitors. But it is hallowed most of all by the relics, the spirit and the intercessory prayer of Blessed Junípero Serra. The peace that rests over this mission is an invitation to all who come here to enter into the living communion with Jesus Christ and the saints that Serra himself experienced. As we reflect upon the significance of Blessed Junípero, our primary goal should be just this—to share in his experience of Jesus Christ, Mary, and all the saints.
The Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, visited Carmel Mission in 1987 and spoke about the significance of Father Serra. If you have the opportunity, you might try to read the full text of the Pope’s speech. I will quote only from a small portion of it in the heart of the talk, where John Paul identifies Serra as “the apostle of California.”
Very often at crucial moments in human affairs God raises up men and women whom he thrusts into roles of decisive importance for the future development of both society and the Church. Although their story unfolds within the ordinary circumstances of daily life, they become larger than life within the perspective of history. We rejoice all the more when their achievement is coupled with a holiness of life that can truly be called heroic. So it is with Junípero Serra, who in the providence of God was destined to be the apostle of California and to have a permanent influence over the spiritual patrimony of this land and its people.… Through Christ’s paschal mystery, [the death of Serra] has become a seed in the soil of this state that continues to bear fruit “thirty- or sixty- or a hundredfold (Mt 13:9).”
In calling Serra “the apostle of California,” the Holy Father identifies one of the most important aspects of the spiritual character of Blessed Junípero. The Church in this state is literally built upon the foundation of his missionary activity. Of course, within the Church foundations are always “living stones.” By contrast, in the perspective of secular history, Serra belongs only to the past—he is a mere footnote in the development of California. The secularization of the missions by the Mexican government and then the influx of greed and materialism with the Gold Rush left almost all the missions in ruins less than a hundred years after Serra died. It seems then that the spiritual foundation laid by Junípero Serra was overwhelmed or even destroyed by the passage of history. But this is an illusion. What is spiritual, what is truly of God, lasts forever. Even though it is hard for us in the twentieth century to grasp, the spiritual foundation laid by Serra continues to bear fruit. As the Pope says, in the providence of God, Blessed Junípero is destined to have a permanent effect upon the spiritual patrimony of this land and its peoples. This could be said in another way: God wants the life of Blessed Junípero to be a continuous source of blessings for Catholics. For us in California, and indeed for all of the Americas, the fullness of the Gospel entails a specific connection to the apostolic foundation laid by Junípero Serra. If we want this blessing to touch our lives, all we have to do is open our hearts to the work of God in Serra’s life.
The Campaign Against Serra
Here we must point out that there are obstacles in the way of our appreciating the witness of Junípero Serra. The biggest obstacle comes from an aggressive ideological campaign to discredit Serra and the whole missionary effort of the Franciscans in this state. They are portrayed as mere agents of an oppressive government that sought to destroy the Native American culture in California. While the scholarship behind these accusations is less than impressive, the campaign to discredit Serra has achieved great results in the public domain. If one tells a lie often enough, many people will come to believe that it is true. The view of the missionaries as oppressors is now taught to children in fourth and fifth grades in many public schools throughout the state. Moreover, Catholics themselves seem to have become indifferent towards Serra, perhaps even embarrassed by him. They are not sure whether these accusations are true, but they feel that Serra ought not to be emphasized as a role model for the faithful today. This is a terrible travesty. I believe that this whole dynamic is simply a particular manifestation of the war that our secular culture wages upon anything that pertains to the Christian faith in Jesus Christ. It should not surprise us that there is a campaign to discredit the holiness of a man whom the Church has declared possesses heroic virtue, therefore worthy of imitation in any age.
We don’t have time here to take up every detail of this controversy. Three things must be said, however. First, the Indians themselves loved Serra and wept at his death; if Serra were an oppressor, the spontaneous outpouring of grief would be hard to explain. Love is repaid by love alone. Second, it is wrong to impose our own expectations on a previous age. For example, today we would not be in favor of “holy wars,” but St. Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the greatest saints in the Church, spent many years advocating the necessity of Crusades to the Holy Land. We can grant that there were elements in the California mission system that we would not repeat today. One of the biggest problems was the close connection between the spiritual power and the civil power—between “the Cross and the Sword.” On the one hand, the missions could never have been established without the support of the Spanish Crown and its soldiers. But the missionaries were never mere pawns of the Crown. They fought against the bad influence and example of the soldiers upon the natives.
Another problem was that the law of the Spanish Crown did allow for corporal punishment of the natives. But the same Law also guaranteed certain rights to the natives. Serra himself made a long and hazardous journey to Mexico City to protest the treatment the Indians were receiving from the civil authorities. His efforts resulted in a so-called “Bill of Rights” for the Indians. There is no credible evidence that Serra himself ever beat or tortured Indians. The third point to remember is that the process leading to beatification within the Church (and the declaration of “heroic virtue”) is quite demanding. In effect, the Church has subjected Serra to a far more demanding (and honest!) scrutiny than the slipshod efforts of the camp of revisionist historians. We need to educate ourselves about the controversy surrounding Serra, but the judgment of the Church about his holiness and heroic virtue is trustworthy.
Besides the negative criticisms of Serra, there is another obstacle that hinders our appreciation of him. The holiness of Blessed Junípero was achieved in the life of a missionary. He was not a spiritual writer. As Americans who are routinely impressed with external accomplishments, we are disposed to identify Serra’s greatness with what he did—the number of missions he built, the constant pastoral journeys to oversee such a large territory. This is certainly an aspect of Serra’s greatness, but we have to get beyond externals to touch the spiritual heart of the man. In that regard the best source to consult is still the biography of Serra written by his beloved student, disciple and co-missionary, Friar Francisco Palóu. Palóu’s Life of Serra is the only biography of Blessed Junípero written by an eye-witness. (After being out of print for over forty years, Palóu’s biography is now being serialized in The California Mission.)
One of the things that Palóu points out about Serra early in his biography is the fact that Junípero lived in obvious communion with the saints of the Church. Palóu remarks on how Serra did not need to look up the feast days in the calendar. He carried it all in his heart and was able to recite events from the lives of many, many saints as if he had known them personally.
Serra and the Catholic Tradition
These observations of Palóu bring us to the spiritual heart of Blessed Junípero Serra. In him the Catholic tradition was alive and incarnate. By “tradition” I mean not simply the doctrinal deposit of faith, but the living tradition of the Church—a spiritual reality that is enfleshed in the lives of saints and can be experienced as an intense communion not only with the Holy Trinity and the Virgin Mary, but with all the saints throughout the ages. Blessed Junípero experienced this depth of communion in the Church’s tradition. In him the Catholic tradition was alive and therefore “communicable.”
There are three ways in which Serra mediates the Church’s tradition to us. First, he mediates the tradition of Spanish Catholicism—a tradition of great devotion and heroism. When we think of Spanish Catholicism we think of the persistent struggle for the faith against domination by the Moors—a struggle that lasted over seven centuries. We think, too, of the Church’s great love for Mary and of the spiritual protection of the Spanish Church by the Apostle St. James. The shrine of St. James at Compestela was one of the three great centers of pilgrimage for the medieval Church. The Spanish Church was always ready to undertake the most heroic sacrifices for the defense and spread of the Catholic faith. This zeal was carried by Serra and other missionaries to Mexico and the American southwest. This tradition of zeal, of sacrifice, and of suffering is depicted in the vivid realism of Spanish portrayals of the Crucifix. The event in Serra’s life that most expresses this heroic quality of Spanish Catholicism is when he made the overland journey from Baja, California to establish the first mission at San Diego—he walked a couple hundred miles through desert terrain with an ulcerous wound on his leg. It was his own “Via Dolorosa,” and the direct fruit of this suffering was the very establishment of the missions in California.
The second way in which Blessed Junípero Serra mediates the Church’s tradition to us is as a spiritual son of St. Francis of Assisi. The Franciscan tradition is a rich expression of the evangelical life, an expression that particularly highlights the value of humility, simplicity and poverty. The simplicity of Serra can be seen by walking back into the mission museum of Carmel and looking at the cell where he spent the last days of his life. He was a deeply humble man. We think of him primarily as a missionary, but his first ministry as a priest was as a professor of theology in Mallorca. He was an intellectual and gave up the life of books and university orations in order to live in simplicity and poverty among native peoples. Palóu’s account of Serra’s journey from Vera Cruz to Mexico City just after his arrival in the New World is a wonderful revelation of the Franciscan charism that animated Serra. On that journey, Blessed Junípero chose to forgo the use of a horse and traveled with no provisions. These and other acts of self-denial were not primarily signs of heroic self-effort on the part of Serra, but rather the fruit of a very deep spiritual life based upon the evangelical vision that animated St. Francis. The original rule of the Franciscans consisted of three words from the gospels. “If you wish to be perfect sell what you have and give to the poor.” “Take nothing with you on your journey.” And, “whoever wishes to come after me must take up His cross and follow me.”
Serra and the Grace of Guadalupe
Finally, the third way in which Blessed Junípero mediates the Church’s tradition to us is especially important for us in the New World: Serra is a bearer of the grace of Guadalupe. There is actually an icon of Serra that shows him carrying an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. When Serra arrived in Mexico City after the journey from Vera Cruz, the first thing he did—before even joining the Franciscan brethren at the College of San Fernando—was to stop at the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe and offer a Mass of thanksgiving.
It is no exaggeration to say that the intervention of Our Lady of Guadalupe is responsible for the conversion of the Mexican people to the Catholic faith. She literally ignited a fire of conversion, of faith and of devotion that to this day runs very deep in the Mexican soul. Before the appearance of Our Lady to Juan Diego in 1531, the Spanish missionaries had had only meager success in evangelizing the native peoples in Mexico after the conquest by Cortez. But in the seven years after the Virgin’s appearances to Juan Diego, there were around eight million conversions and baptisms among the natives. Someone has worked out the math of this astonishing spiritual transformation, comparing it to the conversion of 5,000 people on the day of Pentecost after the preaching by the Apostle St. Peter. The eight million conversions in seven years is equivalent to a Pentecost a day for seven years.
In the two thousand-year history of the Church, the grace of Guadalupe stands in a class by itself. Again, it is a grace that is not confined to the past, but one that endures to this day, bringing glory to God and bearing enormous fruit for the Church. For three hundred years after Our Lady’s intervention at Guadalupe, Mexico City was the hub for a far flung missionary enterprise that covered an enormous territory—Baja and Alta California, northern Mexico, southern Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Everywhere the missionaries went they carried the grace of Guadalupe, rooting all their missionary efforts in the fruitful womb of Mary. In the 1580s, there was even a Spanish mission in southern Georgia devoted to Our Lady of Guadalupe. The first college established in California, in the 1830s at Santa Inez Mission, was named Our Lady of Guadalupe College. Without the grace of Guadalupe, it is hard for us to imagine the existence of much of North American Catholicism. Rightly, therefore, has Pope John Paul II called Our Lady of Guadalupe “the star of the first and the new evangelization” for the Catholics in this hemisphere. Junípero Serra was one of many missionaries who was a bearer of this grace of Guadalupe. He recognized and served the plan of God for this hemisphere that was unfolding within the maternal embrace of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
For most people, Junípero Serra is known and appreciated as the builder of the California missions. On a purely human level, this accomplishment would make him a significant figure in history. But behind the work lies the spiritual sources that animated the heart of Blessed Junípero. He had a great heart for God. His dream was to establish missions from Baja, California all the way to Alaska. This evangelical zeal was the fruit of his abiding in the Church’s tradition—particularly in the tradition of Spanish Catholicism, in the tradition of the Franciscan order, and in the tradition of the grace of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Serra’s greatness was not the external work of the individual, but his openness to these three streams of grace that are part of the living tradition of the Church. We give thanks to God for Serra’s holiness, which is an incentive for us to make our own the living tradition of the Church.
As we close, it is appropriate to look forward, with Pope John Paul II, to the dawn of the third millennium of the Church’s life. For Catholics in this hemisphere, the Holy Father held up Our Lady of Guadalupe as “the star of the first and new evangelization”—the new evangelization of the world in our day. In his letter on the Advent of the Third Millenium, the Pope also declares “as the third millenium of the redemption draws near, God is preparing a great springtime for Christianity; and we can already see its first signs.” I invite you all to contemplate the truth that the holiness and witness of Blessed Junípero Serra is a grace that continues to abide for Catholics in the Americas. The abiding spiritual influence of Blessed Junípero Serra upon this land is itself one of the first signs of the new springtime for the Church for which we are all praying.
Rev. Gerard Beigel is a parochial vicar at St. Francis Cabrini Parish in Littleton, Colorado. He helps produce The California Mission, a bimonthly magazine. He can be reached at editor@msjc.org.
Back to Catholic Information Center on Internet's Periodical Page