St. Junipero Serra
1713-1784
July 1 in
the USA, [because this is the date of the landing in San Diego in 1769.]
One
Franciscan is in the Hall of Fame in the U.S. Capitol, and that is Junipero
Serra, representing the state of California.
[Miguel Jose, who later took the
name] Junipero [after Francis’s companion Brother Junipero] 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 Mexico [New Spain] to work.
After serving in the Sierra Gorde missions, he became the master of novices in
Mexico City. In 1769 he was named
president of the missions in Old California (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 21 Franciscan
missions that eventually stretched from San Diego to San Francisco Solano:
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 in what is now California baptized 5,808 Indians.
In all these missions, Junipero and
the friars introduced the Indians 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 on August 28, 1784, and is buried there.
QUOTE: 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 were of the opinion 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.”
COMMENT: Junipero
Serra was physically small—only five feet, two inches—but very influential. He
worked with all his strength to announce the reign of God. Surely his interest
in the saints intensified his missionary ambitions. Holy men and women do make
a difference in the lives of others.
McCloskey,
Patrick. Franciscan Saint of the Day. St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1981.
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