The changing fortunes of Catholic “Founding Father” in American history

As Catholic Americans prepare to mark Independence Day, we naturally look not only to the well-known “founding fathers” such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington but also to our Catholic forbears who were prominent in the patriot cause: men such as the Maryland signer of the Declaration of Independence Charles Carroll of Carrollton and Casimir Pulaski, the Polish cavalry officer who volunteered for the American forces.

While the Revolution was raging on the eastern seaboard, another founding was underway across the continent, where Franciscan fathers were laboring to build missions and convert natives. On September 23, 2015, in the first canonization to take place on American soil, Pope Francis raised to sainthood the leader of these missionaries, Junípero Serra, whom the pope identified as one of the nation’s “founding fathers.” Pope Francis surely intended this as praise, but it was already an ambivalent term in American culture. One week after the canonization, a statue in Monterey, California—the world’s first public monument to Serra, dating to 1891—was decapitated, initiating a series of acts of vandalism committed against Serra statues across the state, which continued over the next five years. The literal and figurative knocking of Serra off his pedestal is a marker not only of a broader patricidal turn against “founding fathers” of all stripes, but also the latest chapter in a centuries-long evolution of historical assessment of the Franciscan saint and the mission project he represented.

Seen from this long perspective, Serra’s canonization did not inaugurate a new controversy—it reignited an old one. The abundant literature on Serra and the missions encompasses sharply divergent views, with depictions of Serra ranging from saintly hero to genocidal monster. In his 2016 survey of colonial Catholicism, respected historian Kevin Starr cited Serra’s reputation as “an action hero of Catholic history.” In contrast, in 1946 journalist Carey McWilliams likened the Franciscan missions to Nazi “concentration camps,” and a 1987 historical treatment was titled The Missions of California: A Legacy of Genocide.

Historical judgments concerning Serra and the closely related matters of Spanish colonization and Catholic missionary activity are inextricably tied, in every era, to broader cultural and political trends. As a 2015 survey put it, over the course of the past two hundred years, writers from various perspectives “have enlisted Junípero Serra’s participation in a series of controversies.” Recent conflicts are simply a continuation of the custom. The Wikipedia entry for Serra captures the fact that the toppling of Serra statues in 2020 was fallout from the George Floyd killing. On the surface, the eighteenth-century California missionary had little to do with the twenty-first century death of a black man in the custody of Minneapolis police. But to put it this way is to fail to understand how history interacts with contemporary culture. Serra’s canonization only intensified a development long in evidence. While the disparate portrayals of Serra and the missions are rooted in the historical record, their contradiction is ultimately explicable on other grounds. Serra has become a symbol standing in for an array of contested historical phenomena, such as civilization, Christianity, and colonialism.

A brief biography

Miguel Joseph Serra was born into a family of farmers on the Spanish island of Majorca in 1713. He entered the Franciscan order and took the name Junípero, after a saint who had been a companion of St. Francis. A brilliant student, Serra earned a doctorate in theology from the Catholic university on Majorca. During a brief stint teaching philosophy at the Franciscan seminary there, his students included Francisco Palóu, who would be a future companion in the California mission field, and Serra’s first biographer. In 1749, Serra volunteered to join the Franciscan mission effort across the Atlantic in New Spain.

When the Spanish authorities decided to colonize Alta California, Serra was placed at the head of the effort. He oversaw the founding of the first of what would be a chain of twenty-one missions, San Diego de Alcalá in 1769. Nine other missions were founded under the presidency of Serra, who died in 1784.

The purpose of the missions was to evangelize the sizable indigenous population of California, and also to “civilize” them, acculturating them to European ways of life and thereby incorporating them into the Spanish sphere of influence. Each California mission has its own unique history, but the general story is that they flourished for a time, then went into decline when government support was withdrawn as Spain’s empire contracted. Following Mexican independence in the 1820s, the missions were secularized, meaning the Franciscans were ejected; this led almost everywhere to the complete dissipation of mission populations and lands.

After California became part of the United States, mission sites were gradually returned to the Church, mission buildings were restored, and many of the missions today function as active Catholic parishes. The fate of the native converts is one chapter in the often-grim story of indigenous Americans, though there remain today descendants of the mission Indians who continue to practice their ancestors’ Catholic faith.

The historiography on Serra

The magnitude of the historical commentary on Serra is such that a number of summaries of it have already been produced, including Rose Marie Beebe and Robert M. Senkewicz’s introduction to their 2015 Junípero Serra: California, Indians, and the Transformation of a Missionary. The first biography of Serra came early: His confrere Francisco Palóu published his Historical Account of the Life and Apostolic Labors of the Venerable Fray Junípero Serra in Mexico City in 1787, three years after the saint’s death. Palóu’s glowing portrait set the tone for early nineteenth-century histories, even English ones, most notably by Alexander Forbes, who published the first English book about California in 1839.

By the late 1870s, however, a discernibly different view was in evidence. While Serra did not suffer personally—yet—the assessment of the Spanish and the mission system more generally turned more negative. John Hittell’s History of San Francisco (1878), John’s brother Theodore Hittell’s four-volume History of California (1885), and Herbert Bancroft’s seven-volume History of California (1884–1890) shared the view that Serra was still fundamentally a decent man, but the emphasis now was on the benighted nature of his religion, the lack of scientific and philosophical sophistication that prevented the missionaries from being a beneficial influence on the Indians, even if their intentions were good. Bancroft wrote, “Those first pure priests who came hither, devoted ministers of the living God, who really desired the welfare of the aboriginals… these with their comforts and their kindness killed as surely as did Cortes and Pizarro with their gunpowder, steel, and piety.” Of Serra, he said, “His faults were those of his cloth, and he was not much more fanatical than others of his time, being like most of his California companions, a brilliant exception in point of morality to friars of some other lands and times.” Serra had become “a good man in service of a flawed system.”

But a markedly different perspective was already being propagated as Bancroft’s volumes were being released. This viewpoint arose out of what became known as the “Spanish Revival” in American culture. It retained the positive assessment of Serra but added to it a romantic view of the missions and Spanish colonization more generally. A major figure in the revival was Helen Hunt Jackson, whose 1883 essay “Father Junípero and His Work,” appeared in Century Magazine. “The picture of life in one of these missions during their period of prosperity is unique and attractive,” she wrote. “The whole place was a hive of industry: trade plying indoors and outdoors; tillers, herders, vintagers by hundreds, going to and fro; children in schools; women spinning; bands of young men practicing on musical instruments; music, the scores of which, in many instances, they had themselves written out; at evening, all sorts of games of running, leaping, and dancing, and all throwing, and the picturesque ceremonies of the religion which always been wise in availing itself of beautiful agencies in color, form, and harmony.” As head of these idyllic missions, Serra “was the main spring and support of it all. There seemed no limit to his endurance, no bound to his desires; nothing daunted his courage or chilled his faith.”

This revival generated widespread popular acclaim for Serra and the missions. Manifestations included the restoration of Mission San Carlos in Carmel in the 1880s; the statue of Serra at Monterey in 1891; another statue in Golden Gate Park in 1907; the Serra Cross on the summit of Mt. Rubidoux in Riverside in 1913; and in that same year, the first complete English translation of Palóu’s biography.

Distinct from the Spanish revival but continuing on the same trajectory, Franciscan historian Zephyrin Engelhardt sought to correct Bancroft’s critical account of the missions in his four-volume Missions and Missionaries of California (1908-1915). Englehardt used documents in the Archive of California in San Francisco, which were destroyed in the fire following the earthquake of 1906, and his work thus provided the raw material for subsequent treatments.

Public admiration for Serra persisted. In 1927, the California legislature selected him as one of the state’s two representatives for the US Capitol’s Statuary Hall. In 1934, the Serra canonization cause opened. This spurred further study, including the work of the man Beebe and Senkewicz call “the modern founder of Serra studies,” Maynard Geiger, OFM. In the course of producing his 1959 two-volume biography of Serra, Geiger retraced Serra’s route on the Camino Real and plumbed archives from Majorca to Vera Cruz to Monterey. According to Beebe and Senkewicz, Geiger “broke little new conceptual ground,” as his volumes “followed the broad outlines of Palóu’s account.” But he “created a picture of Serra and his times that was broader, deeper, and more nuanced than anything that had come before.”

Historiographical surveys depict the 1960s as a watershed in the reversal of fortunes for Serra and the missions, but we should recall that a more negative assessment was already deeply embedded, dating back to Bancroft in the 1880s. Nonetheless, there were new elements in the new departure. The foundation was laid by population studies in the 1940s, which purported to show a precipitous decline in the native population in California during the mission period, a drop even more pronounced among those most closely associated with the missions. These studies are what provoked Carey McWilliams’s 1946 comparison of Franciscan settlements to concentration camps.

The decade that followed saw a “seismic shift in many aspects of the writing of history in the United States,” as scholars refocused on hitherto marginal groups, including Native Americans. Much of this work stressed the harm that had been done to native populations. Generally speaking, Serra was not directly implicated because much of this damage happened after his death, but as the most prominent face of missions, he was indirectly tainted. As Beebe and Senkewicz put it, “Since Junípero Serra had become the preeminent emblem of the mission era, the reevaluation of the missions resulted in a reevaluation of him.”

The 200^th anniversary of Serra’s death in 1984 spurred renewed efforts to advance his canonization, generating another important document in Serra studies, the Summarium—the summary of life presented to the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints—by Jacinto Fernandez, OFM. At the same time, a confrontational conference session encapsulated the ongoing friction in Serra historiography. While scholars from the American Catholic Historical Association and the Conference of Latin American Historians debated Serra’s merits, some attendees shouted “genocide.” Events such as the beatification of Serra in 1988 and planning for the 1992 Columbus quincentenary stirred up division over the legacies of the Spanish Empire, colonialism, Christianity in general and Serra in particular. Critics became increasingly vocal: the concentration camp analogy and the language of genocide became widespread; 1987 saw the publication of the aforementioned The Missions of California: A Legacy of Genocide, which not only emphasized the destructive result of the missions but also tied Serra to the process. The book contained, for example, testimony from a descendant of the mission Indians, which included the following statements: “Serra believed that Indians were not human beings.” “To make a ‘saint’ out of one of the most vile and malevolent sinners who ever trod the earth, is not believable.”

Meanwhile, the more favorable view of Serra endured. In 1986, the Bishop of Monterey Thaddeus Shubsda organized and published a report on Serra consisting of eight interviews with respected historians and anthropologists; its thrust was to separate Serra personally from the worst aspects of colonization and the mission system. It was therefore a kind of return to the Bancroft consensus: an admission of the harsh realities of the mission system but a defense of Serra’s character as a distinct issue.

Beebe and Senkewicz identify in the 1990s the emergence of a “broader” perspective, less concerned with condemning or defending, more with elucidating historical context. Two prime examples were James Sandos’s Converting California, which focused on the different ways that Franciscans and natives understood practices such as baptism; and Steven Hackel’s Children of Coyote, which stressed the demographic and ecological revolutions wrought by Spanish contact with Americans. In 2013, Hackel published what Beebe and Senkewicz describe as the “first scholarly account of Serra’s entire life since Geiger’s effort sixty years previously.”

A general shift is discernible. Since the 1970s, even positive accounts usually contend with indisputable facts regarding corporal punishment and devastation from disease. In recent years, the focus among even Franciscan and other Catholic historians seems to be on heeding Sandos’s admonition: that is, on placing Serra in context of time rather than on celebrating him as hero. Consider the measured conclusion of Beebe and Senkewicz, for example: “[Serra] profoundly believed that encounters with missionaries would prove more advantageous to eighteenth-century indigenous peoples than the other possibilities that he thought were realistically available to them, specifically domination by soldiers or settlers. In the New Spain of the mid-eighteenth century, this belief was quite reasonable.”

Major issues in Serra studies

Although the topics in Serra studies are complex and wide-ranging, two central matters are at the heart of almost every disagreement over the legacy of Serra and the missions: (1) the treatment of natives at missions, in particular the use of force—forced conversion; restriction of movement; and corporal punishment (I will focus on the last of these); and (2) the overall effect of the missions on the indigenous people—the long-term wellbeing of the natives in particular with respect to deaths from disease and the durability of native culture in the face of increased contact with Europeans and then Anglo-Americans. Examination of these issues leads to the conclusion that, despite substantial (arguably increasing) consensus on the historical facts, fundamental differences of perspective generate conflicting value judgments about Serra and the missions.

The Use of Force: Corporal Punishment

There is no question that corporal punishment was used in the California missions, although there does seem to be some question about whether Serra personally employed it.

Some earlier accounts hardly mention the issue or gloss over it. Omer Englebert’s 1956 characterization of Serra’s relationship with the natives is typical, stressing the friar’s heroic charity and tolerance. “They were infinitely dear to him: he continued to trust them indefinitely; he loved them with that mystic love which God has for the sinner.” Theodore Maynard’s popular account of 1954, acknowledges the use of corporal punishment, but emphasizes its benignity: “It was used so sparingly and mildly that the soldiers were continually complaining that the Fathers were much too lenient.”

Beebe and Senkwicz admit the cruelty of the practice, but also place it in historical context. Flogging was “a very common eighteenth-century form of punishment for a variety of offenses,” and Spanish officials encouraged the friars to use it. Serra’s own writings make clear that he believed the natives would understand that “the priests were like loving parents trying to help their children.” However, “He seemed unaware that the child-rearing practices of most Alta California Indians did not involve this sort of corporal punishment.”

On the extreme end of negative judgment are figures such as Ward Churchill and David Stannard. Churchill, drawing on Stannard, called Serra “a man whose personal brutality was noteworthy,” who “appears to have delighted in the torture of his victims,” and “had to be restrained from hanging Indians in lots.” In a postscript to his popular account of Serra published in 2000, Maurice Couve de Murville unearthed the shoddy foundations of these claims. Tracing Churchill’s citations through Stannard to a work by Francisco Palóu, Murville finds that the passage cited by Stannard did not refer to Serra but to Bernardo de Galvez, a Spanish official, who in the original passage, had to be restrained by “the fathers”—that is, the Franciscan missionaries—from hanging natives who had stolen his possessions.¹ In other words, the primary source shows the opposite of what Serra’s detractors purport it to show.

The Overall Effect of the Missions

The extraordinary amount of documentation available for study of the missions has permitted historians to analyze every aspect—economy, agriculture, disease, diet—and thereby document the impact of the missions on the native populations.

Those who argue for a positive impact tend to emphasize the deplorable state of Indian life prior to European contact. On the positive extreme, there is Fr. Zephryn Engelhardt: “The savages went naked, abhorred labor, raised nothing, and therefore lived upon whatever the earth of itself produced, or upon whatever crawled and roved over the soil. Their ideas, as their scanty vocabulary indicated, were not above the material. They had no conception of a Creator as a pure Spirit dearly loving the children of men.” For their part, “The Franciscans mingled with the natives, weaned them from a brutish life, and collected them into orderly communities with the avowed purpose of converting the Indians to Christianity.”

In the 1950s, Kenneth King’s treatment of Serra and the missions displayed more sensitivity, devoting an entire chapter to pre-Conquest culture. Yet, the basics of the older account remained in place: Indians “were living still in the Stone Age. They had no metal implements; they had no domestic animals; and they had not even discovered so necessary and useful invention as the wheel.” “If they were lazy and unambitious, they were also without the barbaric cruelty which marked many of the Indian tribes,” he writes. “The missions in California marked for that time,” he stresses, “a very definite advance in the white man’s treatment of the native Indian.” King concedes that “It would be idle to imagine that there was not a darker side to the life of the missions, too,” noting the practice of corporal punishment and the devastation of disease. Overall, however, “The Indians seemed to have fared pretty well under the loving despotism of the padres.”

James Sandos defends the missions against their worst detractors, dismissing the charge of genocide, especially when compared to the fate of non-mission Indians after the American gold rush, when race war—including a government reward for killing Indians—actually did provoke genocide. In this conclusion, he echoes that of Theodore Maynard fifty years earlier, who stressed that, whatever the failings of the missions, the subsequent secularization and Americanization periods were far worse for the welfare of the natives. Gregory Orfalea’s 2014 Journey to the Sun largely takes this line as well, giving a new twist to the older population studies by pointing out that today there are about 600,000 people of indigenous California blood, twice the number at the time of Spanish contact.

Leaning more definitely negative is George Tinker’s 1993 account. Tinker believes that the missionaries were “genuine” and that Serra was “pious and courageous.” But the result was the perpetration of “cultural genocide.” He leads the discussion with a litany of deplorable aspects of the missions, including “a living environment that was akin to a concentration camp.”

Conclusion

Will the “Serra wars” ever conclude in an armistice of historical consensus? Reasons for both optimism and pessimism can be found. As already noted, progress toward agreement on many historical facts has been made. Some contemporary historians see further promise in the rigorous use of historical method.

At the same time, there are limits to what historical research—no matter how thorough, impartial, or theoretically sophisticated—can accomplish. Gregory Orfalea captures the intractability of the problem. “Would the Indians have been better off if the Spaniards had never come to California?” he asks, and then supplies his own reply: “Such a question is impossible to answer.”

Much of the Serra controversy revolves around such questions. Would the encounter have been less damaging if the Franciscans had not been the leading edge of the Spanish invasion? Would the missions have been more benign if someone other than Serra had been at their head? These counterfactual questions are, strictly speaking, unanswerable, yet the human mind is naturally drawn to them.

Through more than two centuries of Serra historiography, those who have been inclined to distrust or dislike Catholicism or the mission project—for reasons indifferent to any historical data concerning Junípero Serra specifically—have tended to be more critical of Serra and his confreres; while those inclined to be friendlier toward the same phenomena have tended to be more generous in their treatment of the Franciscan saint. Persistent uncertainty over the historical record, disagreement over the interpretation of that record, and the intrusion of personal biases portend continuing conflict over Serra and his legacy.

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