Pope Francis grants sainthood to Junipero Serra abuser of Native Americans: Why Canonize Genocide?

                      Native American children losing their cultural identity

Pope Francis said last week that he will make the 18th-century Franciscan missionary Junipero Serra, a saint. Making him a saint would honor this brutal colonizer and many Native Americans protest. Ron Andrade, executive director of the Los Angeles City/County Native American Indian Commission, compared Serra to Hitler. Andrade, a Luiseño, said Serra “decimated 90% of the Indian population.”  More than 90% of the children born in the missions died before the age of ten: expectancy for the children was 7.4 years for the seven Baja California missions, and 4.5 years for 20 Alta California establishments.”

“Everywhere they put a mission the majority of Indians are gone,” Andrade said, “and Serra knew what they were doing: they were taking the land, taking the crops, he knew the soldiers were raping women, and he turned his head.” Sounds like the bishops today who cover up for priests that rape children.

Serra wrote: "That spiritual fathers, the priests should be able to punish their sons, the Indians with blows appears to be as old as the conquest of (the Americas)."

Native Americans were made to convert and live in restricted communities totally different from their lives of hunting and foraging. They were whipped for disobedience, captured if they tried to flee, and raped by soldiers. The missions were run like slave plantations and the people were treated like children -- and we have seen how the Catholic Church treats children – the way they treated me.

Steven Newcomb writing for IndianCountryTodayMediaNetwork.com says the Catholic Church’s policy of domination was created by Pope Alexander VI in 1493 who said that non-Christian “barbarous nations” should become Christian. He said the “mission” of the church was to dominate the land belonging to Native nations throughout “the Americas.” By granting sainthood to Serra, Pope Francis is approving of genocide. “It is a cruel irony that Pope Francis will finalize his canonization of Father Serra during the World Meeting of Families, in “the city of Brotherly love,” in the territory of our Lenape Nation,” said Newcomb, of Shawnee and Lenape Native American descent.

Is it coincidence that Adolf Hitler got his ideas about how to run a concentration camp (like Auschwitz) from what was done to Native Americans? According to the Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer John Toland, Hitler was inspired in part by the Indian reservation system. Is it another coincidence that Hitler also said, “There has never been anything more grandiose on the earth than the hierarchical organization of the Catholic Church. I transferred much of this organization into my own party.” As I reported in my book “Smothered” that Hitler was supported by the Catholic Church and that was how he was able to fool so many people and commit genocide.  So now we have Pope Francis from a church with a history of supporting mass murderers bestowing sainthood on an enabler of genocide. He isn’t the first pope to make a saint out of a sinner.