Mission Trail Of Tears.

For those of you who weren't required to do the Missions project in the 6th grade, Junipero Serra was the 18th-century Spanish Franciscan priest who created the first Catholic missions in California. The Pope called Serra "the embodiment of a Church which goes forth..." many Native Americans call him something different.

Today Pope Francis canonized Junipero Serra.

His sainthood was actually fast-tracked, no lie. Serra was beatified in 1988, and while the world waited for his canonization, Pope Francis raced through the usual process for saints, which requires the Vatican to certify two miracles attributed to them. Serra's got only one miracle to his credit: a nun who prayed to him in 1960 said she was cured of lupus. For the record, I had a neighbor once who prayed to me, then later he found a cassette behind a freezer that he'd been looking for all summer, so, y'know... whenever you're ready, Pope Francis.

Before a group of strangers from a distant church decided California's Native Americans oughta' be Catholic (one assumes the church just really needed the dues),  these (estimated) 60,000 free people spoke 64 to 80 distinct languages and were part of the most diverse and densely populated region of indigenous peoples in North America. Thanks to their subjugation by the church, they were decimated by disease, war and the conditions in the missions, where they were worked and starved to death.

By 1910, after a century and a half of welcoming strangers to a land that didn't belong to anyone, there were fewer than 16,000 California Indians left. On the plus side, California had 21 brand-new missions, and I won a "Best of Show" award for my rendering of one of them in crayon in a 2nd-Grade art show.

Though the missions were actually considered temporary, the pain they caused still lingers. If there's any hope for enlightenment and true atonement here, it's this: not that long ago I happened across the mission a friend's daughter's had constructed for her class project. She'd chosen Mission San Gabriel, which is a long, boxy mission featuring a 6-bell bell wall. I was drawn to the functioning bell wall, but had to ask about the large, uneven open area opposite that bell wall. It was an uncultivated area, shaded by trees she'd fashioned from pipe cleaners and yarn. "What's up with the clearing," I asked. She said "It's not a clearing... it's a cemetery." I looked closer, and saw she'd created a couple dozen mounds in the "dirt." Straightening, I noted that there weren't any markers... and she sighed "They didn't let them have markers."