25000 attend historic Mass with Pope Francis

Chanting and songs from a choir, and organ music filled the air and thousands of seminarians and women entering sisterhood packed the pews.

The 18th-century Spanish monk came to the New World to spread Catholicism and established nine of the 21 missions along California’s coastline. There were numerous protests leading up to Serra’s canonization.

“Junípero sought to defend the dignity of the native community, to protect it from those who had mistreated and abused it”, Francis said.

“Let us go forth and offer everyone the life of Jesus Christ”.

“Most of the cities along the coast in California and the missions were his brain child”, she said.

Several onlookers at the Basilica on Wednesday hailed the pope as a religious leader for a new generation – Hispanic and otherwise – inspired by his message of tolerance and focus on poverty.

Many in the crowd were Hispanics who made it a point to see Pope Francis, the first Latin American pope, give his homily in Spanish as he turned Serra’s long-planned sainthood into a reality.

“I think the reason Pope Francis picked Serra from history, sort of lifted him out of 300 years of history, dusted him off and made him a saint, [is] Serra is just an fantastic figure for our times, our complicated, difficult, morally fraught times, where people have difficulty acting where they’re afraid of doing the wrong thing or the opposite – they don’t care at all“, said Gregory Orfalea, writer-in-residence at Westmont College in Santa Barbara and author of “Journey to the Sun”, a 2014 book about Serra and the California missions. “Serra did a lot to intercede” for the native population, he said, and it was “a blessing he was there to buffer the consequences of colonization”.

MCEVERS: I mean, of course, there has been some controversy about Serra.

Pope Francis had fast-tracked Serra for sainthood. The other two were Pope John Paul II in 1979 and Pope Benedict XVI in 2008.

Native American activists decried the move.

Elias Castillo, author of “A Cross of Thorns: the Enslavement of California’s Indians by the Spanish Missions”, said the Catholic outposts were veritable “death camps”.

By the Catholic church’s account, Serra displayed exemplary character as he learned the Otomí language, brought the Pame people into the faith, introduced domestic animals and agriculture to improve life in those settlements and defended Indian rights. But critics, including many Native Americans, bristle at such statements, noting that their ancestors never asked to be forcefully converted to worship the “god” of the very people who were enslaving, sickening, and exterminating them.

“We believe that this canonization is going to backfire”, said Valentin Lopez, chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band.

Although the California missions curriculum is specific to fourth-grade students, St. Edward Principal Leilani L. Lister said it was important that all St. Edward students tune into the Mass.

The pope warned against being “anesthetized”: “Our daily routine can often lead us to a kind of glum apathy which gradually becomes a habit, with a fatal outcome: our hearts grow numb”.

Francis canonized Junipero Serra during a Mass outside the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the largest Catholic church in North America.