THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

That is a question that the Catholic Church should examine closely as they consider sainthood for Father Junipero Serra. On the one hand, the good Father is celebrated for establishing the early missions in California and converting thousands of Native Americans. On the other hand he is reviled for the devastation he brought, with the help of Spanish soldiers, to those tribes.

Tribal chairwoman Louise Miranda Ramirez of the Ohlone Costanoan Esselen Nation joined members of several Native American groups in a protest on Easter Sunday at the historic Carmel Mission in Northern California, once the headquarters of the mission system founded by Franciscan priest Junipero Serra, who is buried there.

The gathering sought to honor their ancestors buried at the landmark mission and protest plans to canonize Serra, the devout Franciscan priest who converted thousands of previously uncontacted Indians to Catholicism, forcibly stripping them of their kinship ties, culture and languages in the process.

“We lost everything” because of Serra, said Miranda Ramirez, who traces her ancestors directly to the Carmel Mission. “We were not allowed to be with our people. … We lost contact with cousins … We lost the family ties … Our language was gone.”

She is now among hundreds of tribal activists the length of California stepping up opposition to the decision by Pope Francis to canonize the Mallorca-born priest as the centerpiece of his first visit to the United States as pontiff in September.

Dubbed by Francis the “evangelizer of the West,” Serra arrived in what was then Alta California from Mexico (then New Spain) in 1769, and founded the first of 21 missions that would reach from San Diego to San Francisco.

The missions sought to spread the Catholic faith and played a key role in the push to colonize the territory for the Spanish crown. By the time of Serra’s death in 1784, the missions he founded had baptized about 6,000 Indians, rising to 80,000 for the mission system as a whole in the five decades before they were secularized in the 1830s.

In a homily earlier this month, Pope Francis hailed Serra as one of the “founding fathers of the United States” who “defended the indigenous peoples against abuses by the colonizers.” He plans to make Serra the first Hispanic U.S. saint during a September visit to Washington in a gesture that is seen by the Catholic Church as key to strengthening ties with U.S. Latinos...

But descendants of tribes converted by Serra and his Franciscan missionaries are crying foul. They charge that the Spanish friar decimated the population of the state's Indians, who were forced to live and work in disease-ridden missions. They were made to adopt Catholicism as well as the Spanish language and customs, while Serra himself condoned the whipping and shackling of those who resisted.

“Native people were a thriving people before Serra reached these shores. They had their own culture, their own life ways. They were able to produce food for themselves,” said Theresa Harlan, an independent curator of Native American art who took part in a recent protest at Mission Dolores in San Francisco. “The mission system dehumanized and destroyed those life ways.”

There is no question that he established the Church in California, but there is also no question that dogs were treated better that the indigenous population in Spanish California. So what really makes someone a saint? Is it just ecclesiastical politics?