MONUMENT CONTROVERSY DEPT.

Last week we re-Viewed the “historicity” of the bronze Fr. Serras scattered around the state. For years they have been targets of vandalism, and lately, the calls to remove or re-interpret the most inappropriate memorials, are growing louder, and angrier. Statues are being pulled down.

The Catholic Archbishop of San Francisco is taking the challenge seriously, doubling down on his defense of the statues and going so far as to say those who wish to remove them, are tools of the Devil:

The controversial archbishop of San Francisco claimed Father Junipero Serra, the man famed for bringing Catholicism to California in the 1700s, is a “great hero” and “great defender” of Indigenous peoples and partly blamed the removal of Serra’s monument in Golden Gate Park on the devil. Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, head of the archdiocese of San Francisco, held an exorcism and conducted “acts of reparation” in Golden Gate Park Saturday at the site of the statue, which was pulled down by protesters on June 19.This is the activity of the evil one who wants to bring down the church, who wants to bring down all Christian believers,” Cordileone said in a YouTube video of the event.
“So we offer that prayer and bless this ground with holy water so that God might purify it, sanctify it.” He said the statue’s removal was “disparaging of the memory of Serra, who was such a great hero, such a great defender of the Indigenous people of this land.”This is not a characterization shared by most Indigenous peoples. Jonathan Cordero, chairperson of the Ramaytush Ohlone and California Native history expert, told the San Francisco Chronicle he believes up to 80% of the Indigenous population died in Serra’s mission system. Serra is considered by some to be a de facto slave owner who used the labor of Native individuals against their will to build the missions.
“Everywhere they put a mission the majority of Indians are gone,” Ron Andrade, then-executive director of the Los Angeles City/County Native American Indian Commission, told the Guardian at the time of Serra’s canonization in 2015, “and Serra knew what they were doing: They were taking the land, taking the crops, he knew the soldiers were raping women, and he turned his head.” Cordileone further praised the mission system at the weekend ceremony, saying there is “ignorance of the real history.”
“I would ask our people to learn the history of Father Serra, the missions, the whole history of the church, so they can appreciate the great legacy the church has given us, given the world. So much truth, beauty and goodness,” he said. “It’s a wonderful legacy that we should be proud of. There are those that want to make us feel ashamed of it.”

— SF Chronicle report, 7/1/2020

FACT CHECK: While Mr. Andrade of the Ohlone group is on good grounds of evidence in asserting the overall disastrous effect upon the Indians at the Missions, it is an inaccurate rhetorical flourish to assert that Fr. Serra “knew the soldiers were raping women, and he turned his head.” He certainly did NOT turn his head, in fact, the Father President did absolutely everything he could to punish promiscuous soldiers, report them to Mexico City, have them re-assigned or discharged. In fact, out of his ideological imperative to completely separate the corrupting soldiers from the native girls, Serra came up with a system with the most horrifying consequences for the Indians. He arranged the system of monjeros, “women’s houses,” to lock up the nubiles each night in window-less adobe barracks little better than jails. Without access to their own men to defend them or comfort them, the Indian women proved even more vulnerable to attacks by rogue soldiers. And the un-hygienic conditions of the monjeros proved to be perfect spreading grounds for syphillis in practically the whole population of breeding females. This was, in itself, probably the main demographic driver of Indian collapse. But it was not caused by Serra “turning his head” at the Indian rapes. In fact, the opposite.