Why did junipero serra die

A Christian mission is an organized effort to spread Christianity to new converts. Missions involve sending individuals and groups, called missionaries, across boundaries, most commonly geographical boundaries, to carry on evangelism or other activities, such as educational or hospital work.

What did the soldiers do at the missions? This group of soldiers was known as the escolta. Their job was to guard the mission from attack by hostile natives or pirates. They also acted as police, backing up native officials in punishing crimes or enforcing laws at the missions. What is a mission settlement? The Alta California missions, known as reductions reducciones or congregations congregaciones , were settlements founded by the Spanish colonizers of the New World with the purpose of totally assimilating indigenous populations into European culture and the Catholic religion.

How do you win a custody evaluation? How do I reset my key fob after replacing the battery? Co-authors If you've never tasted it, you don't know what you're missing. But once you taste it, you acquire an increasing desire for it. That's how he thought the conversion process was going to work.

The native peoples would gradually be exposed to a Christian community and they would gradually come to see that their deepest desires were being fulfilled as members of this community. Native people entered the missions in California for a variety of reasons. No doubt some were genuinely interested in Catholicism.

Others presented their sick children for baptism in hopes that the priest might be able to cure them. Some came because there was food at the missions. That was important because what was going on in California was that the Spanish military and missionaries brought large numbers of horses, mules, burros, sheep and goats with them.

These animals inevitably and quickly destroyed the plants, acorn and berries that had sustained a traditional way of life for centuries.

They also drove away the game the native peoples had traditionally hunted. The presence of the Spanish colonial enterprise very quickly rendered it almost impossible for the traditional native ways of life to be maintained. So, some people came into the mission system because their traditional ways of life and sustenance was being destroyed by the colonial invaders.

How did this religious aim of the missions square with the other aim, the imperial aim? Serra knew he was part of the Spanish empire, and he believed in the empire. But he and other missionaries thought that an important part of their role was to protect native peoples from the worst tendencies of the empire. So, they generally tried to keep the native people separated from these other groups. In doing so they cut some corners.

Generally speaking, they did not do a thorough job of explaining to the native peoples that baptism was, from their point of view, a lifetime commitment and that entering the mission system was a one-way street -- you were able to go in, but you would not be permitted to leave.

Coercion and force were part of the mission system, but I wouldn't say that they were enslaved. Slavery is a specific legal system.

To use it in an American context equates with the way Africans were treated in the American South, and it was a very different kind of situation. Indians were definitely regarded as inferior.

But they were regarded not as property, but as people. His attitude and behavior were frankly and explicitly paternalistic. Along with probably 99 percent of the people in Europe at the time, he thought that non-Europeans were inferior to Europeans.

There was a big debate in the early Spanish empire about whether or not the native peoples were fully rational beings or not. By the time Serra got to the New World, many Spanish thinkers believed that the native peoples of the Americas were in a state of "natural infancy," that they were children.

Serra shared that view and he basically had a paternalistic attitude towards them. That paternalistic attitude could, at times, result in a behavior which anybody today would find very hard to justify. If people left the mission without permission, they were pursued and hunted by soldiers and other Indians.

If they were brought back, the normal punishment was flogging. What the Spanish military and missionaries thought they were doing was punishing children to make them understand how they should behave. It's pretty clear that at the beginning the native peoples did what Europeans, the so-called "barbarians," had done a millennium earlier. They interpreted Christianity through their own traditional ways, through their own traditional deities and spirituality.

So, what resulted in the missions was a mix, a syncretism, a new melding of traditional indigenous California spirituality and imported Spanish and Mexican Catholic spirituality. Over time, some missionaries understood this and accepted it. Others were very impatient with it. Serra was most likely somewhere in the middle. As we were researching the book, we came to the conclusion that Serra himself was personally a much more complex individual than either his proponents or his detractors acknowledged.

He could be very conflicted. On the one hand, he really enjoyed being with native peoples who were not baptized because that was the reason he had come to the New World. For him, one of the most emotional days of his life was in a place in Baja California where a group of native unbaptized people came out of the woods and presented themselves to the priest.

This was the first time in his life that he had personally encountered a large group of unbaptized Indians. He was overwhelmed. In his diary he said, "I kissed the ground and thanked God for giving me what I have longed for so many years. After 19 years in America, he was finally going to get to do what he came to do: preach to the unbaptized.

I think that some native peoples that he met could pick up that he really wanted to be there. They had him baptized on his first day in the world, giving him the name Miguel Jose. He was later educated by Franciscan monks at a local primary school. Serra was only 15 years old when he decided to join the priesthood. He moved to Palma to pursue his goal. Serra then became a novice at the Convento de Jesus in September There he study theology and philosophy. The following year, Serra officially joined the Franciscans and took the name "Junipero" after a friend and associate of St.

The exact date of his ordination into the priesthood is unknown. Experts estimate it was sometime between and Serra then devoted much of his time to teaching. In , he earned his doctorate in theology from Lullian University. In , Serra took on a new challenge—bringing his faith to the New World as a missionary.

Serra landed in Vera Cruz and walked miles to Mexico City. Along the way, he suffered an injury to his leg, which would cause him pain the rest of his days. He volunteered for the Sierra Gorda missions in , which were located in the lands of Pame Indians.

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Junipero Serra in San Francisco is seen June 19, The Spanish Franciscan founded several missions in what is now California. Pull it! This is for our ancestors," a person shouted.

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