#260 Who Was Fr. Junipero Serra? - Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone

Was Fr. Junipero Serra a dark part of history, deserving of his statues and memorials’ desecration, or was he a holy man of God who directly resisted the mistreatment and enslavement of the native peoples he evangelized? Find out here, with Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone.

CK:
Hello, and welcome to Catholic Answers Focus. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. Thank you so much for being with us. Strange times continue that we’re living through. Very, very odd and, in some ways, maybe a bit obsessive ideological times. That reality has expressed itself here in the state of California and other places in the tearing down of statues. Here to talk about the tearing down of the statues and, in some places, the kind of preventive peaceful removing of the statues, I suppose, of the man who is … I guess from the time we’re at about fourth grade here in California, we learn he’s more or less the guy who made California, Father Junipero Serra, a Franciscan priest and missionary. Here to tell us about what’s happening in San Francisco and also to talk about the man Serra himself, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, the Archbishop of San Francisco. Archbishop, thank you for being with us.
ASC:
You’re welcome. Good to be on the show.
CK:
So I know in Ventura, they’re going to take a statue down. Some of the missions are taking the statues down just so that nobody hurts the statues, I guess.
ASC:
Yes.
CK:
But in San Francisco, it got out of hand. What happened there?
ASC:
Last Friday night, basically a mob went into Golden Gate Park and tore down three statues for some form of protest. One must wonder what they were protesting, because Junipero Serra was one of them, but they also pulled down a statue of Francis Scott Key and another one of Ulysses S Grant. We’re seeing these protests against racism, but Grant, of course, was an abolitionist and went to war to free the slaves. Junipero Serra, the real story isn’t known, so he’s associated with something that he actually stood against for in his life.
CK:
Well, you can see why Francis Scott Key, though. He did write the national anthem, and I suppose somebody will find a way to make the national anthem a racist document of some sort, but okay, so Father Serra, and I gathered, too, that in the statue, he’s holding up a crucifix. He has Christ crucified in his hand.
ASC:
Yes.
CK:
So this mania for destroying these things, I don’t want to read too much into it, but Father Serra is the target, but there’s also a sense in which any representative of the past is a target, and I think actually Christ Himself, in a way, is a target, because people don’t see the coming of the good news to the Americas as a good thing.
ASC:
It seems to me it’s a rebellion against our Western civilization-
CK:
[crosstalk 00:02:45].
ASC:
… the legacy of Western civilization, which the Church built. The Church built on her Christian faith and her Christian principles. So I agree with you totally. Ultimately, it’s a rebellion against Christ, and I hate to say this. I would not be surprised if the defacing of statues would go that far.
CK:
Yeah, would go down to just tearing down statues of Christ himself, wherever they are.
ASC:
Yes.
CK:
Yeah. Well, eventually, your city will have to be renamed, won’t it? Ours will, too, here in San Diego. St. Francis, a Catholic saint. I mean, you just get the sense of there’s almost a French Revolution mentality about it, of just get us to year zero. Get rid of all of this.
ASC:
It is exactly that. It is exactly that. They want to erase the Christian heritage, our two millennia, millennium and a half of Christian heritage here in the West. You’re right. I mean, at the time of those revolutions in Europe led by the French revolution and others, there was a literal renaming of streets and of town squares, not so much of cities, but of many place names were changed.
CK:
S…