Junípero Serra's brutal story in spotlight as pope prepares for canonisation

Who the hell was Junípero Serra? He was the Franciscan priest who established Franciscan missions up and down the California Coast to convert Native Americans to Christianity and to 'civilize' them.
Pope Francis intends to make him a Catholic Saint, a process called "canonisation." Does he deserve that honor? Read this fascinating story in The Guardian magazine about the pros and cons of canonisation for Padre Serra.

The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/23/pope-francis-junipero-serra-sainthood-washington-california

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Generations of American schoolchildren have been taught to think of Father Junípero Serra as California’s benevolent founding father, a humble Franciscan monk who left a life of comfort and plenty on the island of Mallorca to travel to the farthest reaches of the New World and protect the natives from the worst abuses of the Spanish imperial army.

Under Serra’s leadership, tens of thousands of Native Americans across Alta California, as the region was then known, were absorbed into Catholic missions – places said by one particularly rapturous myth-maker in the 19th century to be filled with “song, laughter, good food, beautiful languor, and mystical adoration of the Christ”.

What this rosy-eyed view omits is that these natives were brutalized – beaten, pressed into forced labour and infected with diseases to which they had no resistance – and the attempt to integrate them into the empire was a miserable failure. The journalist and historian Carey McWilliams wrote almost 70 years ago the missions could be better conceived as “a series of picturesque charnel houses”.

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