Junipero Serra as Saint?

It is bad enough that we celebrate Columbus Day here in the United States.  Columbus, while praising and thanking God for the bounty of human cargo, was responsible for the complete and total genocide of the Arawak people on the island of Haiti (and Dominican Republic).  Women and children were raped and murdered while the men were taken as slaves if not murdered and tortured. 

Likewise, His Holiness Pope Francis plans to declare Junipero Serra a Saint.  The Pope has indicated that he "Values Human Life" yet the indigenous people who were dominated by Serra were considered collateral damage by the Church. The canonization of Junipero Serra will glorify and support post Inquisition Doctrine of Discovery; a very dark, and brutal time in the history of the Roman Catholic Church and Civilization.

The domination and genocide of Indigenous Californians from the brutal Mission system does not support this canonization.  Rather than make this man a saint it would be better to recognize the inhumane treatment of the indigenous people of California by openly abandoning the canonization of Junipero Serra.

Pope Francis is coming to Washington, D.C., to canonize Junipero Serra as a Saint and it is imperative he is enlightened to understand that Father Serra was responsible for the deception, exploitation, oppression, enslavement and genocide of thousands of indigenous Californians, ultimately resulting in the largest ethnic cleansing in North America.

The reality of the California Mission system has yet to be accurately taught in California schools or recognized by the Roman Catholic Church. Elementary school children tour mission grounds and are taught that native people were "docile and child-like savage pagans, saved by the kind and benevolent padres."  In reality, the human remains of thousands of indigenous people are scattered beneath the grounds of the Missions that were built by Native American slaves as garrisons for the church and Spanish crown. Indigenous people died of rape, beatings and diseases introduced by the Spanish conquistadors in California. Spanish Priests did little to recognize indigenous people as humans and did not come to their rescue when women and children were raped by soldiers and settlers. With an over 90% indigenous mortality rate, Serra hardly "saved many souls."  This is another great shame of the Roman Catholic Church beneath the banner of Christianity.

Urge the Pope to vacate this plan by writing to him.  Pope Francis does not have a direct mailing address but you can contact the Vatican's press office at av@pccs.va  Alternately you can mail to the pope via usual mail at this address:

His Holiness, Pope Francis
Apostolic Palace
00120 Vatican City  

(Vatican City is its own country so you don't need anything more than that.  While procuring postage, if your postal worker insists you that you need a country or begins to write "Italy" on the envelope, stop him and ask him to look it up)

The Pope's Twitter handle is:
@pontifex

To gleam some ancillary insight into what happened, If you have not yet seen the movie THE MISSION (1986), do so.

Entropy Happens.

Someone asked me if I missed the holidays of my childhood.  Sure, who doesn't remember those halcyon days with melancholy and joy.   The house was decorated, there was a lot of cooking in the days leading up to the holiday and for days after, the smell of home cooking lingered in the air. 

At the time, I didn't enjoy those gatherings very much because the house was packed with about thirty friends and relatives, some I didn't know.  They got in the way (and in my stuff) of my routine, practice and work.  It was difficult for me to take a day off back in those days so holidays were almost traumatic for me, a workaholic.

What I do miss is the joy and care my mother put into the holidays with the decorations and all that cooking.  Both my sisters were married with four kids each and all those people meant more food, more noise, more chaos and long hours.  That was something my mother thrived on.

After my two sisters became Jehovah's Witnesses and my brother married and moved away, it was just my mother and me on those holy days.  At this point she was very ill with COPD.  On her last Thanksgiving, she cooked up a feast as always and it was just my mom and me.  I took the dog for a walk after the meal and clean up and we walked down by the lake and past a neighbor's house where I saw in the window that there were about 20 people inside and it reminded me what our holidays were like.  I wasn't sad that I wasn't embroiled in a sea of relatives but, sad that my mother and all she loved was fading away. 

As I walked around the lake I remembered how when I was about ten, the older kids ruled the lake, the dyke, the dam, the docks and I looked up to them in awe, respect and fear.  Then when I was an older teen, I realized that I along with my friends ruled the lake.  I recently met someone who now lives on the lake and I realized that other young people now rule the lake, maybe.  I have heard that the lake association closed all the swimming holes by dumping rocks on the beaches, putting up barricades so no one can park on the side of the street and fencing off the dyke.  This wondrous place for a kid to grow up is now off limits but I guess that is okay.  Kids today have Facebook and the internet to explore their worlds and interact with people. 

Nothing is so good it lasts eternally.  Perfect situations must go wrong.    There are some facts about life which no one can escape; That life is short and almost always ends messily; that no one thinks as well of you as you do yourself; that in one or two generations from now you will be forgotten entirely and that the world will go on as if you had never existed.  Another fact is that to survive and prosper in this world, you have to do so at someone else's expense or do things that are not pleasant to face. 

One of these gifts that we enjoy is freedom but it comes at the cost of the innocents murdered in the aerial bombing of Europe and the final bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And not just the bombings. It's also an unpleasant fact that we are alive and well because the generation before us killed people with bullets, shells, bayonets, or knives, if not in Germany, Italy, or Japan, then Korea or Vietnam. Our politicians have connived at murder and war, and we enjoy the freedom for it today.  The truth is that if we get what we want, it turns out not to be the thing we wanted, or at least at the cost.

I hope we remember that.

Why does this Christopher Columbus get a holiday named after him?

First, he was a failure.  His expedition was to find a faster route from Spain to China.  He  never completed that task

He never landed on Plymouth Rock but on the shores of Hispaniola.  Today, we call that island the Dominican Republic and Haiti.  Boy, my grade school teachers were stupid.

When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, the indigenous people, the Arawaks, ran to greet them, bringing them food, water and gifts. This first encounter spelled the end for the Arawaks.  He later wrote of this in his log:

"They . . . brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned . . . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features . . . .They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane . . . They would make fine servants . . . .With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."

He later wrote:
"As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts. Thus the eternal God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His way over apparent impossibilities."

His men raped and murdered women and children.  They forced the Arawak men to carry them around the island in litters, chairs or on their shoulders.  There was even a story of two boys who were playing with their pet parrot and Columbus' men beheaded the two boys and took their parrot. 

He then sailed back to Spain where he lied about finding large amounts of gold and  asked the monarchy for more resources to finance a second expedition, telling them that he would bring back scores of gold and slaves.  He got seventeen ships and twelve hundred men for his second expedition. He never found any gold but he did capture several hundred of the natives and caged them up in his ships to return them to Spain.  Most of them died en-route.  Christopher wrote:  "Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold." 

Many of Columbus' men continued to roam the island in gangs taking women and children as slaves for sex and labor.  While trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faced Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. The Spaniards took prisoners, they hanged them, beheaded them or burned them to death. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began by using Cassava poison. Infants were poisoned by their parents in order to save them from Columbus and his men.

So, happy Columbus Day.  Hundreds of thousands of Arawak's died at the hands of Columbus so that you could have this day off.  Do our schools still lie to us?