July 1 Padre Junipero Serra, Apostle of California

 

St. Junipero Serra (1713-1784)

July 1 in the USA, because this is the date of the landing in San Diego in 1769.

            There is one Franciscan in the Hall of Fame in the U.S. Capitol, and that is Junipero Serra, representing the state of California! He has been nicknamed the "Apostle of California."

             Miguel Jose, who later took the name Junipero after Francis’s companion Brother Juniper, was born in Petra on the island of Mallorca in the Mediterranean Sea. His parents, Antonio and Margarita, were farmers. Their son became a Franciscan in 1729 at age 16! Serra’s friend and biographer Francisco Palou tells us that Junipero was then quite interested in the saints. “As a result of this devout exercise of reading the lives of the saints, there arose in him a warm desire from the time of his novitiate to imitate them insofar as it was possible. This type of reading caused in him the same effect as was produced in St. Ignatius of Loyola” (Life of Fray Junipero Serra, p.4).

            After his ordination in 1737, Junipero taught philosophy at the University of Palma. In 1750 he joined the missionary College of San Fernando and went to New Spain, as Mexico was then known, to work. After serving in the Sierra Gorda missions, he became the master of novices in Mexico City.  In 1769 he was named president of the missions in Old California on the Baja Peninsula below the current state of California.

            Junipero soon traveled into the present-day United States and over the years founded nine of the twenty-one Franciscan missions that eventually stretched from San Diego to San Francisco Solano. They are: Mission San Diego and San Carlos Borromeo (1770), San Antonio and San Gabriel (1771), San Luis Obispo (1772), San Francisco and San Juan Capistrano (1776), Santa Clara (1777), and San Buenaventura (1782). Between 1770 and his death in 1784, Serra and his confreres baptized 5,808 native indigenous Californians.

            In all these missions, Junipero and the friars introduced the natives to effective agricultural methods and showed them how to domesticate the animals needed for food and transportation. As the missions prospered, their fields and livestock attracted the envy of Spanish colonists and non-Christian Indians. Most of the missions were seized for personal gain after Mexico won its independence from Spain.

            Junipero Serra died at Mission San Carlos de Carmel on August 28, 1784, and is buried there. On November 25, 1784, the superior of the College of San Fernando in Mexico City wrote about Junipero’s death to the provincial of the Franciscans in Mallorca: “He died like the just, in such circumstances that all those who were present shed tender tears and believed that his happy soul immediately went to heaven to enjoy the reward for his great and unbroken labors of 34 years, sustained for our beloved Jesus, whom he always had in his mind, suffering those inexplicable things for our redemption. So great was the charity he manifested…that it caused wonder not only in the minds of the ordinary people but also in persons of station, all proclaiming that this man was a saint and his actions those of an apostle.”