St. Junípero Serra

Who they were

Miguel José Serra was a Mallorcan farmer's son who became a university professor of philosophy and then, at thirty five, walked away from the chair to be a missionary in New Spain. He took the name Junípero after one of Francis's first companions. On the long walk inland from Veracruz an insect bite turned into an infection that never healed, and he spent the remaining thirty five years of his life on an ulcerated leg, refusing a mount and walking anyway.

When the Jesuits were expelled in 1767 the Franciscans inherited their missions, and Serra was sent north. From 1769 until his death at Carmel in 1784 he founded nine missions from San Diego to San Buenaventura, the beginning of the chain that became the spine of Spanish California. He fought the military authorities on behalf of the Indigenous people repeatedly and in writing: in 1773 he made the journey to Mexico City on that leg to put thirty two points before the viceroy, several of them aimed at the soldiers' treatment of Indigenous people and at the removal of a commander he judged brutal, and after the killing of a fellow friar at San Diego in 1775 he asked that the men responsible not be executed.

That record is real, and so is the other one. Historians, and many Native scholars and tribal nations in California, hold that the mission system itself did systemic and generational damage: Indigenous people were drawn or pressed into the missions, and once baptized were not free to leave, and were pursued and brought back if they fled. Labour was compelled, corporal punishment was used as discipline and Serra defended its use in his own letters, and Native languages, religions, and social structures were suppressed by design. Mortality in the missions was catastrophic. Serra's canonization in 2015 was opposed by many of the descendant communities, and California is still arguing about his statues. Both of those things are the historical record. A page that reported only the first would not be worth reading.

Why people turn to St. Junípero Serra

Missionaries and those sent somewhere they did not choose. People working with a body that will not cooperate, since he made the whole of California on a leg that never healed. And, for anyone who wants it, the harder intention: the Indigenous peoples of California, and the repair still owed them, asked for through the man whose work is part of why it is owed.

How to ask their intercession

For a missionary by name. And if he is hard for you to pray with, that is a fair response to the record; the honest intention is for the descendants of the people the missions took in, alongside St. Kateri Tekakwitha and St. Juan Diego, rather than a prayer that smooths the history over.