Terrible idea to canonize him.

The only silver lining is that he isn't coming out here to do it.

Also brought nonsensical paternalistic Middle Eastern Jesus mythology to a people who sensibly revered nature.

No, thanks.

Has he done his homework?

so not me.

What he did was certainly good for the Spanish settlers, but not good at all for the local indigenous - whom he and his successors treated like halfway-intelligent pack animals since they arrived through the early 19th century. This seems rather like canonizing Vasco de Gama or Hernando De Soto. Not as bad as Cortez, but...

(As a side, the indigenous were not treated any better by the Americans when they took over, either.)

I also have not heard anything about any actual "Miracles" he might have done, either contemporary or later. Converting the natives is not a miracle.

The missions were pretty, but that's not miraculous in iteslf.

Haele

OMG - why wasn't this guy a saint? i asked priest after priest - saving all the heathens and all that.

Now like so much of the history I learned as a kid I find that this too was a pack of lies. Makes me think that most of the "saints" were probably mostly some kind of an 'us vs. them" hero and no more worthy of worship than St. Ronny of Reagan.

and a young Native American guy was dashing from campsite to campsite raising hell about this land belonging to his ancestors. I don't know if it had anything to do with Serra but sounds like it might since the Carmel mission isn't too far north of there.

The very fact that this concept even continues to exist in the 21st fucking century just boggles the mind.

Well, it does give people something to argue about--in this case, the merit or evil in conferring heroism upon one man in a very long list of point men for genocide.

by you while Mother Teresa and the Pope are trashed.

Oooookay.

I trashed the RCC, deservedly so. Big difference. In fact, I rather like him, as Popes go.

And I disagree with Hitch on the Iraq war. But he was correct about that evil Albanian nun, Mother Teresa. She was a horrible person and did next to nothing for the poor except let them die in filth and pain. Meanwhile she was taking in millions to build more convents in honor of herself. She even took big bucks from the fucking Duvaliers in Haiti! And Charles "fucking" Keating who bilked people for hundreds of millions in the savings and loan meltdown.

Hitch got that right. But got Iraq wrong.

Here is the Wiki, not as good as the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Missionary_Position

The book is a short read, but well sourced, as one would expect from Hitchens.

Santa Fe railroad and other California developers were selling the "Spanish Romance" of California.

Entire cities grew up believing the advertising myths, rebuilding the Missions, and going so far as to mimic "Spanish" architecture.

Of course all this was big business, so nobody wanted to be 'dissing Father Serra, especially not in the fourth grade California history texts.

Nobody cared what the original Native Americans thought. Most of them were dead, the rest forcibly relocated to out of the way places.

In many ways the white Protestant U.S. Americans who followed the Spanish and the Mexicans could be even crueler to the few Indians remaining than the Catholics had been, treating them as costumed carnival attractions, raping women and children, and hunting them down like animals for the slightest offense, real or imagined; similar to the way African Americans were treated in the U.S. South.

Yes, I'm willing to do that.

I don't believe in it, so it can't offend or bother me.

If that's what the Pope decided to do, cool.

It's not something I worry about.

Who cares? It's all bullshit anyway.

And pacified the indigenous population by genocide, which was the popular method at the time.

If you've ever been to a Mission there's always a part of the grounds where they buried the Native Americans, unmarked of course. The vibes around it are just incredibly strong with negative power.

As a museum, it is pretty honest about Father Serra's role there and the things he did, for better or worse. We didn't think it was worthy of canonization, however.

Really, this bullshit is par for the fucking course, but let's all join in for the Big Leftist Papal Handjob that DU seems intent on delivering to this medieval POS.