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Serra statue defaced days after canonization

In one of his first acts in Washington, Pope Francis stood beneath the great dome of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and made Junipero Serra a saint.

With thousands in attendance, Francis tried to set aside controversy over Serra’s treatment of Native Americans to instead focus on the 18th century Franciscan friar’s role in spreading the Gospel in the Americas.

“Siempre adelante,” the pope said, quoting Serra’s motto in Spanish. “Keep moving forward.”

Last weekend, as Francis was still greeting crowds on the East Coast, vandals in California made a statement of their own by defacing the newly christened saint’s grave.

“Saint of Genocide” they wrote on a headstone at the Carmel Mission in Carmel, California, where Serra is buried. They also poured green paint on a statue of Serra and splashed headstones with blood-red paint.

The incident is being investigated as a hate crime because the vandals targeted “specifically the headstones of people of European descent, and not Native American descent,” Carmel police Sgt. Luke Powell told the Los Angeles Times.

The act of vandalism came just days after Francis made Serra a saint.

The canonization was the first on American soil, but it was also highly controversial. Some Native Americans and scholars argue that Serra was complicit in the brutal and dehumanizing conquest of tribes in California, where the Spanish priest founded the state’s first Catholic missions.

“This pope doesn’t really care what we think,” Ron Andrade, the director of the Los Angeles City/County Native American Indian Commission and an Indian from the Lajolla Indian Reservation, told The Washington Post ahead of Francis’s visit to the United States. “I don’t know what he is hoping to accomplish with canonizing Serra. There were better people.”

Francis, whose five-day trip to the United States was, in many ways, a tight-wire act of balancing competing demands and constituencies, appeared to address the controversy during the canonization ceremony.

In a short homily delivered in Spanish, the pope praised Serra as someone who “sought to defend the dignity of the native community, to protect it from those who had mistreated and abused it. Mistreatment and wrongs which today still trouble us, especially because of the hurt which they cause in the lives of many people.”

“He was the embodiment of ‘a Church which goes forth,’ a Church which sets out to bring everywhere the reconciling tenderness of God,” Francis said. “Junipero Serra left his native land and its way of life. He was excited about blazing trails, going forth to meet many people, learning and valuing their particular customs and ways of life. He learned how to bring to birth and nurture God’s life in the faces of everyone he met; he made them his brothers and sisters.”



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