California's Sick Of This Stuff, Pope!

Jules Tavernier, Carmel Mission on San Carlos Day, 1875.
Click for ultra-brief both-sides-do-it ("wide variety of contemporary perspectives") overview.

As the Moors brought Allah to the Iberian Peninsula at the point of a sword, Spain's conquistadores brought Jesus to the people of the portrait-orientation land mass at sword- & gun-point. (All ends in projection, dunnit?)

So bugger Junipero Serra & all who first brought Jesus to the New World. (Including you Portugee bastards!)

In that same speech in Bolivia, a majority indigenous nation, Pope Francis also said: “Many grave sins were committed against the native peoples of America in the name of God.

Despite his apology, Pope Francis moved ahead with his plans to canonize an 18th-century Catholic missionary, Junipero Serra, who built the Catholic missions along the California coast, from Mexico to San Francisco.

Valentin Lopez is the chair of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band. He’s been leading efforts to oppose Pope Francis’ decision to canonize Junipero Serra. “We’ve actually written six letters to Pope Francis,” Lopez told us on the “Democracy Now!” news hour. The Indians, he said, “were a slave labor force for the missions. If they ran away, they would send out the soldiers to capture them and bring them back, and they would be whipped repeatedly, sometimes for up to a month.” Rape, pillage, forced labor and, perhaps above all else, disease transmitted by the Spanish colonizers wreaked genocide. Lopez continued, “At the beginning of the mission period, there were 30,000 Ohlone Indians. That’s Monterey to San Francisco. At the end of the mission period, there were less than 100. In total, over 150,000 California Indians died under this system that Junipero Serra developed.”

[Amy Goodman/Truthdig]

Note: Not that concerned but as a native son of the Golden West & First Amendment enthusiast/loudmouth I felt obligated to add another two cents' worth to the eternal record. And this:

Monument of Junípero Serra (with Juaneño Indian boy)
on the Plaza de San Francisco de Asis in Havana, Cuba

Skin crawling yet? No? Here, then.