Wednesday, September 23, 2015

I am proud of my country. We have made it easy to be Pope Francis. He is age 76 and the Secret Service has been wonderful to him and the people that have come to see him. There are people from all over the Western Hemisphere that have come to this country to be near him. We are a great people for hosting his time in the USA without worry.

...The cause (click here) for Serra’s beatification began in the Diocese of Monterey-Fresno in 1934, and the diocesan process was finished in 1949. On September 25, 1988 he was beatified by Pope John Paul II. Pope Francis has announced that he will be canonized on September 23, 2015 during a Mass in Washington, DC....

The Blessed Junipero Serra is about to be canonized as a saint. This process started some time ago.

An 18th century Spanish Franciscan (click here) who founded a string of missions across Mexico and California will be canonized Pope Francis announced on January 15th.

Blessed Serra is credited with directly founding 9 missions in California, one in Baja California in Mexico and with reinvigorating established missions in Mexico.

The announcement came when Pope Francis, aboard a flight from Sri Lanka to the Philippines, explained to reporters his decision to canonize St. Joseph Vaz, a 17th- and 18th-century missionary to Sri Lanka, bypassing the usual process, including verification of a second miracle attributed to the saint's intercession. Pope Francis said St. Joseph was among great evangelists whom he planned to canonize without such preliminaries, in an effort to celebrate the practice of evangelization.

"Now in September, God willing, I will canonize Junipero Serra in the United States. He was the evangelizer of the West in the United States," the pope said. He did not specify when or where the canonization might take place.

Father Vaughn said he had heard that Pope Francis considered Blessed Serra to have already met the sainthood criteria because of the way he brought the Catholic faith to California and the native populations. But that the pope was ready to move on canonizing the friar came as a total surprise, he said....

I realize there is a controversy surrounding this saint, however, he had no control over colonization. He no different than other religious men or women come to serve the people; at least in the Catholic faith. I can understand how Native Americans may think about him, but, their argument is not with him, it is with the federal government. I suppose it is unfortunate there are treaties that limit the reclamation of the USA by the original inhabitants of the land. Blessed Serra had little to do with any of that.

Catholics are attacked with remarkable regularity (click here) for supposed crimes against the native peoples of the New World. Much has been written, for example, about the demolition of the Meso-American cultures such as the Aztecs and the South American Andean civilization of the Incas by the Spanish Conquistadors, the severe oppression of the indigenous peoples, and the devastation delivered upon the Indian tribes across the Americas from displacement, disease, war, and slavery.... 

Let me put it this way. Blessed Serra had to get along with the white man, too.