Deo volente, and if air traffic disruptions spare me, I’ll be home this morning following a late pilgrimage in America after an overcommitted summer. I planned to follow El Camino Real (“The Royal Road”) in California starting from San Diego and heading up north, stopping at several missions mostly founded by Spanish Franciscans, all the way to San Francisco and the final two locations across the bay, San Rafael and Sonoma. The faith is dogma and worship, but it’s also a lived experience of what is still sacred history. Our bishops would have done well to remind us a lot more about the significant, continuing, but now often forgotten, Catholic presence in this land as the nation celebrates its 250th anniversary.
California’s coastal highways and walkways began as 18th-century footpaths, mostly forged by Franciscan friars (a “royal” road only in aspiration back then). Today, California 101 basically traces out what the missionaries carved out on foot. All those saint names up and down the Pacific – and a capital named Sacramento – reflect the long and storied history of the Church’s missionary work in the Americas.
It’s fitting that we started in San Diego because Diego is a variant of the Spanish name for James. That first of the missions recalls the Camino of St. James in Compostela, the most famous of Christian pilgrimages. The missionary friars, though, weren’t on spiritual pilgrimage, but were relentless and intrepid in pursuing the dominical injunction to preach the Gospel to all nations.
Revisionist histories these days often reduce their efforts to mere collaboration in colonization – even the saintly acts of the great St. Junipero Serra. The missions did have to rely on some backing from Spanish soldiers. But the California of the 18th century was beautiful, yet rugged territory, not a place that lent itself to exploitation. Pairs of Franciscans and a handful of soldiers at each mission carried out exploration, development, and – most of all – evangelization.
The best way to learn about all this is, of course, to make the effort physically to visit some sites yourself. But we also have the works of the great American Catholic historian, Kevin Starr, who taught at several universities and was for a decade the official Librarian of California. In California, and especially Continental Ambitions: Roman Catholics in North America, Starr tells a fascinating and stirring Catholic story.
I’d visited some of the missions before, but never in a deliberate way. San Juan Capistrano is one of my favorites both because of its sheer beauty and because the California wine industry got its start there. Our Lord’s first miracle, at the wedding feast in Cana, turned water into wine of great quality and abundance. And at the Last Supper, He gave us both bread and wine as His body and blood. So let no teetotaler or grape-juice fundamentalist deny the Christian gift.
Several missions were damaged by earthquakes – and rebuilt – over the years. Parts of Capistrano, for instance, remind you of the kind of evocative ruins you see in Rome. But some are still functioning – there were funerals at Capistrano and Santa Barbara these past days, and a wedding at Carmel.
The Carmel Mission (more properly San Carlo Borromeo) is the most striking. There is a deeply contemplative Carmelite church along the ocean in Carmel-by-the-Sea, which gave the town its name. But in the Carmel “mission” lie the mortal remains of St. Junipero Serra in a church lovingly restored by local artisans. Serra is mostly forgotten, even by Catholics these days, but his contributions to the state of California and America almost pass belief.
He was born in Mallorca to poor farmers, but knew early that he had a vocation. At seminary, he excelled academically and became a professor of theology. At age 35, he felt the call to missionary work. He left a comfortable university life, took the 70-day sail to Vera Cruz, studied at the missionary school in Mexico City, and worked in Mexico itself before setting out for California where he founded seven missions and baptized thousands.
The whole question of “missions” raises worries these days about imperialism, colonialism, cultural domination, and all the current self-doubts of our Western culture – sadly, even in the Church. The truth is that no interaction between native peoples and Europeans could have been perfectly harmonious. But if you look dispassionately at what the friars did, it was heroically charitable.
They were the ones who most protected native peoples – who at the time were nomadic hunter-gatherers – from figures far less charitable, taught them skills like agriculture, raising cattle, weaving, the catechism, and much more. The son of farmers, Fr. Serra did physical labor himself alongside the Indians and Spaniards.
In fact, when newly independent Mexico and then the U.S. sold off the missions to ranchers, it produced the worst disruption of native lives. The Church asked President Lincoln in 1865 to return the properties: the government gave back the buildings but refused to return the lands to the natives.
It’s only our current doubts about ourselves that cause us to believe that it would have been better to have left the nomadic hunter-gatherers of those days as they were, rather than integrating them in as kind a way as possible into a larger world – including Christendom.
It’s a form of infidelity in our time to believe that welcoming the “marginalized” means not introducing them to what God Himself has revealed to us. Or that going out to the “peripheries” means somehow not bringing people in, but departing from our own Christian heritage.
After daily contact with this inspiring American Catholic heritage, it’s a bit of a shock to return to the usual crises – Iran, Ukraine, Gaza, gas prices, inflation, synodality, liturgy wars – which don’t seem to have changed much over days away. Those have to be confronted, of course, but maybe there’s something to be learned from the sheer daring, and persistence, and bravery, and fidelity of those Franciscan padres in difficulties at least as bad as any we face. And maybe their example sheds some different – and much–needed– light on how to deal with our own challenges.
