The SJWs at Stanford University have put the beloved and holy Saint Junipero Serra in their cross-hairs to appease people who have no understanding of history.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Stanford leaders plan to “strip some prominent campus references to Junipero Serra, the canonized 18th-century priest who established the California mission system that critics now blame for decimating Native American communities.”
The saint will have his name stricken from the dormitory Serra House and the academic building Serra Mall, “one of the most prominent and recognizable features of the campus,” which will be renamed Jane Stanford Way following approval from local and federal agencies. Jane Stanford founded the university along with her husband, Leland.
Canonized by Pope Francis in 2015, the committee alleged that the California Mission system created by Serra “pervasively mistreated and abused California’s Native Americans. His founding and leadership of that system was at the time and remains today a central and inextricable part of his public persona.”
Critics claim that forced labor supported the missions and that Spanish soldiers stationed nearby were responsible for spreading syphilis and other diseases to the Native American population.
Native American students and tribal leaders in Northern California testified to the committee that the sight of Junipero Serra on campus caused “feelings of harm, trauma, emotional damage, and damage to their mental health” while alleging the university failed “to acknowledge the history of the land that it occupies and the groups from whom the lands were taken.”
The Serra Mall, which leads to Serra Street, is frequently trafficked by pedestrians and bicycles, The committee ultimately decided that the street will remain intact but will have an explanatory plaque accompanying it from now on.
Despite all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over Junipero Serra’s canonization, the historical record shows he was a man of great Christian faith who loved the native people. Ruben Mendoza, an archaeology professor at California State University in Monterey, who is a Catholic both of Mexican and Yaqui Indian descent, even hailed him “as a person devoted to native peoples.” In fact, much of the harm inflicted upon the natives came at the hands of the largely secularized U.S. and Mexican governments. From the National Catholic Register:
The anti-clerical Mexican government that overthrew Spanish rule in the 1830s expelled the Franciscans and other religious, took over the missions and robbed the California Indians of their lands and livestock they maintained, turning them over to local settlers for the ranchos, said Mendoza. The worst blow, however, came from the U.S. government, which paid Gold Rush-era settlers more than $1 million in rewards for carrying out an explicit campaign of extermination that would fit the definition of genocide coined during the Second World War.
Within 12 years, Mendoza said, “More than 120,000 Indians out of the more than 150,000 California Indians that still existed at the end of the Mexican period were wiped out.” He and others are asking the California Legislature to establish a permanent day of remembrance to acknowledge the state’s role in “one of the most horrific genocides in the history of California.”
Pope Francis is also not the only one to declare Junipero Serra a saint. That was already being done at the time of his death by the many Native Americans whom he had baptized.
By the time he died in 1784, Father Serra had baptized 6,000 California Indians and founded the first nine of California’s 21 missions.
According to Mendoza, thousands of California Indians mourned the passing of the beloved priest. When the Franciscans tried to stop them from cutting relics of his tunic, saying he was not a saint, the California Indians rebuked them saying he was “Padre bendito, padre santo … the blessed father, the saintly father.”
“From that time onward, people, including his contemporaries, saw him as likely to be a saint,” he said.
Statues dedicated to Junipero Serra have been vandalized all around California, often with Nazi symbols and red paint. One statue at a Santa Barbara mission was even beheaded. With Stanford’s latest ruling, the move to erase his good name and legacy from the state of California has officially moved from the fringe to the mainstream.