Thom Nickels: Junipero Serra and the new iconoclasts

In early September, I participated in a “Feast of Reason” dinner at Carpenters’ Hall. The model for the dinner was Thomas Jefferson’s own “Feast of Reason” dinners where guests gathered at Monticello to discuss controversial issues of the day in a polite manner. Potential guests were asked to state where they stood on the political spectrum: Right, left, or somewhere in the middle. Twenty-four people would then be selected to participate in the ‘Jeffersonian’ meal, a moderately priced ticketed event. The topic of the dinner I was chosen to attend was: How should communities decide what monuments should stand and what should be taken down? An official briefing included the following reminder: “In the mid-2010s, there was a growing movement to tear down monuments to Confederate heroes. Many of these monuments had been erected in the early twentieth century to commemorate the ‘lost cause’ of the Civil War. Debates continue about monuments to people with controversial legacies, i.e., Columbus and Jefferson. ‘ To my surprise, the conversations around monuments at the meal were not very contentious. Many attendees seemed to agree that the emotions surrounding controversial monuments are time and issue-bound. This implies that monuments should not be destroyed or moved based on the revolutionary heat of the moment.

The 24 diners broke up into small groups of four or five. This tranquilized and “hid” disagreement to some degree. In my own group there was little disagreement. Overall, a lot of time was also wasted on Monument Lab’s somewhat didactic presentation. The event was heavily structured; at times it had the feel of an eighth-grade classroom. There was not enough time for general discussion, but that’s another story. The Virginia wine served by the Carpenters’ Hall staff was terrific. A few days following the dinner, I had thoughts of the statue of St. Junipero Serra, the 18th-century Catholic saint canonized by Pope Francis in 2015. The social justice warriors who defaced and then pulled down a statue of Serra (who believed in self-mortification) at Mission San Rafael Arcangel in San Rafael, California on October 12, 2020, would have a hard time understanding the concepts of “harsh asceticism” and the mortifying of the flesh in the name of a Supreme Being. Leftists, after all, don’t do things for God; they do things to advance a revolutionary social agenda. Serra, the first saint of the Catholic Church to be canonized on American soil, was a professor of philosophy before taking up the crusade of evangelization (“Go ye into the whole world and preach the gospel to every creature”) and founding five (Franciscan) Catholic missions in southern California. The Philadelphia essayist Agnes Repplier, in her biography of Serra, wrote that the missionary had “the qualities of those emotional, penitential, and migratory years, when endurance was the keynote of existence, and when the love of life was balanced by the honor paid to death. His harsh asceticism, the boards on which he slept, his meager diet, the cruel mortifying of his flesh, all savored of the Middle Ages; and so, too, did his habit of putting his mind and soul into his work.” The San Rafael statue wasn’t the only image of Serra that was destroyed in 2020.

On June 19, a statue of Serra was torn down in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Then on July 4, rioters dismantled a statue of Serra in Sacramento. Serra’s “crime” was “imperialistic colonialism” or “cultural genocide,” both labels for the “forced” imposition of Catholicism and European culture on Native Americans. That imposition, rioters claimed, involved the “problematic” introduction of foreign animals and plants by European conquerors into the southern California ecosystem, an activist analysis that has more to do with a contemporary understanding of science than what was known in the 18th century. The Serra statue destroyers also condemned the saint’s method of dealing with Roman Catholic converts/natives who may have changed their minds about their conversion and then made attempts to leave the missions. Serra, the extreme ascetic who slept on boards and denied himself food, might be described as someone who was as hard on himself as he was on the natives under his charge. Leftist critics like to point out how he once worked as a field agent for the Spanish Inquisition, an association that looks worse on paper than how it played out in reality. While Serra’s halo in the leftist media is referred to as a “halo stained with blood,” the saint’s strictness never involved outright cruelty. In fact, his “medieval” way of dealing with issues like runaway convert natives was considered normal by 18th century standards, yet when viewed through a contemporary lens that behavior appears skewed, unreasonable, and “bloodstained.” Maureen Tilley, Professor of Theology at Fordham University (known as a Catholic woke thinktank), writes that once the natives were baptized, they were confined to mission territory, even though their families may have lived outside the mission. “If they tried to run away, they were brought back and punished. Serra tried to mitigate punishments, tried to keep the Spanish soldiers from preying on Native Americans.” Again, by 18th-century standards, the habit of restricting newly baptized natives to a confined territory implies a catechumen-like state that may have had more to do with ongoing religious instruction, a protection against the influence of pagan families (Pachamama) on the outside. While this “lockdown missionary mentality” would never fly in the 21st century, it still does not merit the scorn and contempt that has been heaped on this saint as if he alone were responsible for the multiple atrocities that occurred in the missions after his death in 1784. Of course, the notion that a newly baptized person should be sheltered against persuasive outside pagan sources may appear to be quite insane to secular leftists who are clueless when it comes to the concept of souls being saved for eternity. “Saved from what?” they would surely ask.

Tilley and other Serra scholars also agree that what abuses did occur in the California missions happened post-Serra and were government-imposed penalties unrelated to Serra’s original mission to bring the natives to Christ. The leftists’ real beef with Serra comes down to the saint’s zeal for evangelization, or his daring to presume that the jimsonweed-hallucinogenic cult practiced by the Gabrielino-Tongva tribes of southern California was inferior to Christianity. When Pope Francis canonized Serra in 2015, the leftist media reported that many Native Americans felt his canonization was an affront to their culture and history. “Their culture” in this case means a pagan culture since Christianity is viewed by leftists as a European import item on a par with foreign animals and plants. “Who’s a Saint, anyway?” The Atlantic magazine asked in 2015, while Vox upped the ante and declared that Serra was a “brutal colonialist,” and then went on to ask, “So why did the Pope make him a saint?” These 2015 progressive media hits against Serra made the soil ripe for the string of Serra statue attacks in 2020. First, you print distortions and lies, then you double down on character smears, and then you go out and tear his statue down. Thom Nickels