This monument notes the landing spot in Monterey of the expedition of Junipero Serra and Gaspar de Portola in It can be found at the intersection of Artillery and Pacific at one of the entrances of the Presidio of Monterey. Presidios were the military foundations of the Spanish empire. Their purpose was to provide protection for the settlers and missions.
However, young soldiers far from home sometimes tend to be "rambunctious". Father Serra, wanting to lessen this bad influence on his native converts, moved this mission from Monterey to its present location in Carmel. This plaque and the statue shown at Mission San Miguel, can be found at locations throughout the state of California.
Real estate developer William H. Hannon, to commemorate the founder of the California Missions, placed identical statues at all the missions, schools and other places of historic interest. More information here. The statues are life sized and show the small stature of Serra - he was only 5 feet 2 inches tall. Early on after arriving in the New World in , he suffered some sort of injury to his leg which continued to plague him throughout his life for the next 35 years.
Father Serra also suffered from asthma which ultimately led to his death. I'm not sure about the artistic merits of this particular statue in San Mateo County, but it does exhibit two notable truths about Padre Serra. His life motto was "Siempre adelante y nunca atras", which is "Always go forward and never turn back".
He did show remarkable determination in accomplishing his life's work, both in the Old and New worlds. The second is that the main north-south roadway in Central California and beyond, Highway , is the same route that Junipero Serra and his companions blazed, The El Camino Real. In , California chose Junipero Serra as one of the two subjects that each state is allowed in the statuary hall in the US Capitol building. Political correctness might dictate a different choice today, but nonetheless, it attests to the undisputed impact that Serra had on the state.
Serra has been credited with only one. The cause of his sainthood, which was first proposed in , was long ago assumed to have stalled because of the controversies surrounding his legacy. But Francis, as the first Latin American pope, has an obvious interest in creating a role model for Latinos in the United States and the rest of the American continent — an interest echoed by the state of California, which can now look forward to a global wave of Serra-related tourism.
Nobody is perfect. Sanctity is just another mode of imperfection. In other words, it is enough to state that the good outweighs the bad. The mission system he set up was based on coercion, punishment and indifference to Indian suffering, against which his expressions of piety were no more than window-dressing. The only reason this is not treated as a black and white issue is because of the lies that the church and the state of California have perpetuated from the time of the missions.
Even the most ardent Catholic historians now accept this is flat-out wrong. As KPIX reports , the San Francisco Unified School District is now considering stripping Serra's name from the elementary school named for him in Bernal Heights, along with the names of Francis Scott Key, who was a known slave owner and has an elementary school named for him, and George Washington, whose namesake high school in the Richmond is among dozens if not hundreds of schools around the country named for the first president of the United States.
The Berkeley Unified School District, similarly, voted a week ago to strip the names of Washington and Thomas Jefferson from two of its elementary schools, and to rename them in honor of the Black Lives Matter movement. San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone, himself a controversial figure for many because of his anti-gay and anti-trans views , decided to throw his outrage into the mix over the weekend about the toppling of the Serra statue.
In a statement, Cordileone said, "St. Serra made heroic sacrifices to protect the indigenous people of California from their Spanish conquerors, especially the soldiers. All of this is not to deny that historical wrongs have occurred, even by people of good will, and healing of memories and reparation is much needed.
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