A two-page letter written in 1776 from St. Junipero Serra to the military governor of the Spanish territory of Las Californias, Captain Commandant Don Fernando de Rivera y Moncada, failed to sell at a New York auction in late September. The Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries declined an offer of $70,000 for the letter, significantly below the hoped-for $100,000. In the letter, the Franciscan priest laid out his vision for the Roman Catholic missions he founded.
The lack of interest in the handwritten letter from the Apostle of California—one of the few remaining in private hands—comes at a difficult time for those who appreciate this great Catholic saint. In 2020, two prominent statues of Serra were toppled, one located in downtown Los Angeles’ Father Serra Park and another in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, both by wild-eyed mobs making the tired claims that he was a symbol of colonialism and oppression. Only days after these atrocities, the City Council of Ventura voted to remove a statue of Serra from its long-standing place in front of City Hall, the city’s specialized art transportation crew snatching the 3,000-pound bronze work in the middle of the night to avoid detection. There were problems before 2020. In 2018, Stanford University removed Serra’s name from a campus dormitory and renamed Serra Mall, a prominent pedestrian and bicycle mall, after the school’s co-founder, Jane Stanford, wife of Gilded Age industrialist and politician Leland. The university claimed Serra’s missions, directed toward the salvation of the souls of the pagan native tribes, had “harmful impacts” that they did not wish to honor.
This uneasiness with Western Christian history, and with Serra in particular, can hardly be surprising at this, the western-most edge of the New World, where Hollywood sells of-the-moment celebrity and Silicon Valley develops the digital future. Of course, the United States itself was arguably founded as a rejection of old Europe and its monarchies and state churches, just as the Industrial Revolution took hold and wiped away much of the rhythms and patterns of the pre-industrial world. California since the Gold Rush has been imagined as a dreamland of material riches, and, since the end of World War II, as the most forward-looking, future-obsessed region of the U.S., where jets and rockets were being built by Douglas Aircraft and Northrop, where the Jet Propulsion Laboratory designed spacecraft for NASA, where even fast food first took hold with ‘restaurants’ designed for jet-fast service like McDonald’s (founded in San Bernardino in 1940), Carl’s, Jr. (Anaheim in 1956), and Taco Bell (Downey in 1962).
Yet there’s something ironic about the 21 missions, built by Serra and his successors from 1769 to 1823, stretching along the length of the Golden State from San Diego through San Francisco and representing some of the oldest churches in the nation. They provide a spiritual and artistic spine of sorts to this most secular and untraditional of societies. But they also represent the last reach of the Old Order, of Christian Monarchism, built under the authority of the Spanish Crown, then held by the House of Bourbon, before the Age of Reason and all it wrought had spread over the whole continent. Indeed, much of American art and architecture was created in the wake of the Enlightenment, with its glorification of cold reason and dreary disdain for the holy and sacred. Noted Deist Thomas Jefferson (who, aside from writing the Declaration of Independence, serving as the third president of the U.S., and inventing the swivel chair, was also a student of architecture) set much of the style for the new republic’s aesthetics in his design for his Monticello estate, with its devotion to classical Greek and Roman forms. Jefferson would also greatly influence much of the design for the new Capitol of Washington, D.C., likewise dominated by these same pagan, yet still stately, forms. And for those early English settlers who recognized a spiritual realm, many were Puritans, with an austere emphasis on plainness and simplicity, and against what they viewed as prideful ornamentation. Cathedrals and basilicas adorned with sculptures, stained glass, frescoes, or other sacred artworks had a limited place in the Republic.
Roman Catholics had always shown a greater appreciation for the worth of artistic beauty (a view that was at the heart of the Puritan rebellion). Centuries of using art to tell its story had created a vast assemblage of artistic masterpieces, constituting a significant share of Western Civilization’s cultural heritage. But in the colonial days of the protestant English, Catholic numbers were too few to much influence American sacred art or architecture. And what Catholics there were kept a low profile in a still-largely anti-Papist land. Instead, often they would incorporate the ‘American aesthetic’ into traditionally more expressive tableaux. The Roman Catholic Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Philadelphia, for example, completed in 1864, features a Greek- and Roman-influenced Palladian façade, complete with pediment and columns and somewhat incongruously topped with a cross. Similarly, the Cathedral of the Blessed Virgin of the Seven Sorrows, built in Nashville in 1845, boasts a Greek Revival-style pediment and Ionic columns, topped by a belfry and cross. The United States’ first cathedral, Baltimore’s Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, begun in 1806, likewise features Ionic columns and Greek portico and was designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the same architect who designed the U.S. Capitol.
As the American Catholic population grew, a Gothic Revival took hold, and by 1858 reached its peak with the breaking of ground for Manhattan’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, featuring a design inspired by a Gothic masterpiece, the Cologne Cathedral, begun 600 years before. But for all its splendor, St. Patrick’s Cathedral still feels, in some way, like an imitation. Gothic architecture especially feels like a relic of the Old World, an Old World that had disappeared hundreds of years before. Its place in the United States seems borrowed—even more so considering the central role the great Gothic cathedrals once held in European city life, a role that never took hold in the U.S. Instead, cathedrals most often merely occupy a city block like any other city building.
In contrast, the mission churches that Serra and his successor Franciscans built—in large part using the forced labor of local tribes such as the Kumeyaay, Tongva, Chumash, and Acjachemen—offer a perhaps richer experience, imbued with greater authenticity. The missions’ smooth, white clay adobe walls, topped by iconic red terra cotta tiles and secured by beams of pine or oak, feel of their place. The distinctive arches that grace the mission doorways, colonnades, and porticos complement the rolling, chaparral-covered hills that mark so much of the California landscape. Indeed, it’s hard to even imagine California without the iconic shape of mission-style arches and bell towers immediately springing to mind, images of which also adorn the official seals of the cities of Los Angeles, San Diego, Ventura, and San Juan Capistrano, among others.
It is, of course, these local tribes, and how the missionaries, especially St. Junipero, treated them, that is the source of any controversy today. The missions’ reason for being was to propagate the Roman Catholic faith, which meant converting the local tribes. Moreover, the relative primitivity of the tribes’ ways of life—pagan hunter-gatherers centered on subsistence living—struck the Spaniards as childlike and uncivilized. The missionaries sought to convert them spiritually and culturally and thus improve their lives, both in the material world—with the introduction of advanced farming techniques—and in the hereafter. In present-day discourse, the actions of the missionaries and the Spanish soldiers are often conflated, but the missionaries’ paternalistic attitude toward the tribes actually often led them to protect the tribes from the more rapacious and unsavory behavior of the soldiers. It’s true enough that the tribes were sometimes forced to labor in the fields, and their freedom of movement was restricted once they converted to Catholicism. The missions themselves were often built in part, at least, by the tribesmen, sometimes under duress. But the harsh treatment, while striking the modern observer as cruel and tortuous, was seen by the missionaries as essential to the natives’ spiritual salvation. Today, many of their descendants remain Catholic. The value of the missionaries’ actions can never be recognized by a modern world that doesn’t allow for spiritual effects.
Along with the salvation of souls, the missions also transformed the region’s economy and way of life. Mission San Diego Alcalá cultivated the first olives, Mission San Gabriel Arcángel introduced the first citrus orchard, and Mission San Juan Capistrano produced California’s first wine. The missions also introduced pears, apples, and peaches to the region, as well as cattle ranching and sheep herding. The foundry at Capistrano brought nails, hinges, locks and other appurtenances of the Iron Age to the tribes, and its kilns introduced bricks, tiles, and ceramics.
In 1833, eleven years after Mexico broke free of the Spanish Empire, its anticlerical government secularized the missions, which soon fell into disuse and abandonment. Ironically, it was the Protestant-dominated United States that eventually rescued the missions from ruin. The Americans annexed what is now its Southwest—including California—following its war victory over Mexico in 1848. In 1851, Bishop Joseph Alemany y Conill of the Diocese of Monterey, California petitioned the U.S. government to return possession of the missions to the Church and in 1855 the U.S. Land Commission issued a decision in support of the return of the missions. But the status of withering Catholic missions on the far west coast gained little attention in antebellum Washington, D.C., consumed with rising tensions and then outright war between North and South. Finally, on March 18, 1865, just four weeks before his assassination, President Abraham Lincoln signed what is now known as the Lincoln Document, upholding the Land Commission’s decision of ten years before. The missions once again were in the hands of the Church.
Spurred in part by the popularity of American writer Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 southern California-set novel, Ramona, the missions soon themselves became the subject of an architectural trend: the Mission Revival movement that continues to dominate much of the design aesthetic of California, including significant elements of structures like San Diego’s Santa Fe Depot (1887), Riverside’s Mission Inn (1902), and Los Angeles’s Union Station (1939), not to mention the legions of terra cotta-roofed suburban tract homes that dot the California landscape. And prominent citizens like the publisher William Randolph Hearst and journalist Charles Fletcher Lummis raised funds to repair and restore the missions to their former glory. But in the 21st century, a growing anti-Western civilization movement has sought to cast the missions as relics of oppression, and the Saint himself as the chief transgressor. They’ve had some success; as one example: the California mission project was, until recently, a state-wide fourth grade school assignment, in which all California students create a model of one of the missions to display in class (your author himself created a miniature replica of San Juan Capistrano way back in 1976). But the California Department of Education recommended in 2017 that schools discontinue using the mission project in class, claiming these graceful buildings are “offensive” (though some schools ignore the recommendations of these faceless bureaucrats and continue to enable their students to engage with these priceless architectural gems). It’s little surprise, then, given such attitude from its own government, that certain of the state’s citizens would then topple statutes of St. Junipero. Who could expect those who don’t know beauty, to recognize it?
Yet, over this last summer, a small victory for those who still believe in Western civilization was won. The same statue of St. Junipero that had been removed from Ventura’s City Hall in the dark of night four years before was re-erected in a place of honor at the Mission San Buenaventura, the last mission Serra personally founded. Even the local Chumash representatives supported the move. Though perhaps a retreat from its place in the public sphere it previously held, the statue might yet inspire mission visitors to continue St. Junipero’s work in spreading the Word of the Church to that same public.
