NEW YORK (CNS) — In an op-ed piece published July 29 in the New York Daily News, Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York took issue with the anti-immigrant rhetoric of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump without explicitly naming him.

He recalled teaching college students about nativism — the policy of protecting the interests of native-born inhabitants against those of immigrants — and telling students it was “a continual virulent strain in the American psyche, which would probably sadly show up again.”

The cardinal said the students back then disagreed, telling him: “Who could ever believe now that immigrants are dirty, drunken, irresponsible, dangerous threats to clean, white, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon America?”

“I wish I were in the college classroom again, so I could roll out my ‘Trump card’ to show the students that I was right. Nativism is alive, well — and apparently popular!” the cardinal wrote.

Trump struck a nerve during his presidential campaign announcement when he said “murderers” and “rapists” were among those crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

Cardinal Dolan said American historians describe two approaches to the immigrant: The nativists “who see the unwashed, ignorant, bothersome brood as criminals and misfits who threaten ‘pure America,’ and are toxic to everything decent in the United States” and those “with the more enlightened and patriotic view” who see immigrants “as a gift to our nation, realizing that the only citizens whose ancestors were not immigrants are the Native Americans. All of us here are descendants of newcomers.”

The cardinal also noted that those who support immigrants also realize the “need to control our borders, fairly regulate immigration and be prudent in our policies and laws.”

Cardinal Dolan said he is “not in the business of telling people what candidates they should support or who deserves their vote. But as a Catholic, I take seriously the Bible’s teaching that we are to welcome the stranger, one of the most frequently mentioned moral imperatives in both the Old and New Testament.”

He also wrote that as an American, he takes “equally seriously the great invitation and promise of Lady Liberty,” noting that it’s one of the reasons why he is “so eager to share with Pope Francis the wonderful work being done by our Catholic Charities to assist immigrants who come to New York, and look to the church for assistance and a warm welcome.”

“I guess, as a Catholic American, I’m a bit biased,” he added.

The cardinal also pointed out that the poet Walt Whitman called New York Archbishop John Hughes a “mitered hypocrite,’ because the prelate defended his poor Irish immigrant flock — the Mexicans of his day — from the nativists.”

Cardinal Dolan said Whitman also described immigrants as “dregs of foreign filth, refuse of convents, scullions from monasteries.”

“Thank God Walt Whitman stuck to poetry, and did not run for president,” the cardinal wrote.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (CNS) — People with ties to the California mission system see the canonization of its founder as a moment for reflection and reconciliation with native people.

“The canonization of (Blessed Junipero) Serra has really encouraged us, as well as the diocesan bishops, to seriously look at the place of the California mission Indians and our history and heritage,” said Franciscan Father Ken Laverone, co-postulator in Blessed Serra’s cause. He’s a California-born descendant of Spanish colonizers.

“It’s getting us to look at our relationships with the Native Americans and to reopen the doors of our mission in a greater sense.”

The mission system, Spanish colonial rule and the settlers who came later had profound and lasting effects on native life across the region. Blessed Serra was a highly visible figure inextricably linked to societal changes that led to a 90 percent decrease in the native Indian population in California, even though those effects didn’t fully play out until well after his death in 1784.

Before Spanish colonization, Indians in California numbered more than 300,000. By 1860 there were just 30,000, a consequence of diseases that had been unknown there before Europeans arrived, assimilation, the influx of gold miners and other factors.

Mission Indians were very near extinction by the early 1900s, according to California Lutheran University sociologist Jonathan Cordero, a California Indian who traces his family back to the missions. Cordero’s research has focused on Indian social structures within the missions.

He said mission priests baptized about 80,000 Indians. By 1834, 60,000 had died. By 1900, the number of Indians who had been associated with missions was down to about 800 people, or 1 percent of the number before colonization. Cordero said it would be difficult to pinpoint the number of descendants of mission Indians today.

“Who’s left? We don’t really know. No one’s done a census,” he said.

Spanish explorers were the first Europeans known to reach what they called Alta California. Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, on a quest for the legendary Northwest Passage, sailed along the coast from Mexico into San Diego Bay in 1542 and then to San Francisco Bay later the same year.

Spain did little to sustain its claim to the region until the late 18th century, when British, French and Russians were colonizing in the North Pacific.

“In 1765 Visitor General Jose de Galvez arrived in Mexico, and three years later with Viceroy Carlos Francisco de Croix, submitted a plan for the colonization of California,” said a 1978 article in the San Diego Historical Society Quarterly by Robert Heizer, an archaeologist who studied Native American people of the Southwestern U.S. “This in turn was presented to (Blessed) Serra, president of the declining Franciscan missions of Baja California which recently been taken over from the expelled Jesuit order.”

Relatively quickly, Heizer wrote, military expeditions from Mexico, which included Blessed Serra and other Franciscans, left for Alta California. By July 16, 1769, they had founded the first of the California missions, at San Diego.

The missions had a twofold objective, to bring Christianity to the native people and to assimilate them into Spanish culture as citizens of New Spain. The Spanish erected presidios (walled forts) in San Diego, Santa Barbara, Monterey and San Francisco to protect their interests

Although the number of coastal Indian Catholics today are few, Father Laverone said the faith Serra and his friars instilled is still being lived out in the missions, 19 of which are active churches.

“Lives have been changed in these missions, lives have been healed in these missions, lives have been hurt in these missions. … But faith is alive in these places.”

Andrew Galvan, a descendant of mission Indians and curator of Old Mission Dolores in San Francisco, agrees, but said more needs to be done to invite Indians back to the missions and include their voices in mission affairs.

“This is the opportunity for the Roman Catholic Church in the United States of America and the state of California … to reach out to Serra’s Indians and to bring them into the missions, to open the doors wide, to sing that song that we sing everywhere — all are welcome.”

He said he would like to stand on the steps of Mission Dolores, “open the doors and ring the bells like Junipero Serra … and cry out, ‘Love God, my children. Love God. Amor a Dios!”

The difficulty he said is that native people today are saying, “We’re not welcome. We don’t like what we see. We’re uncomfortable.”

Critics charge that the missions were places of forced labor, that Indians were whipped and shackled, and that baptisms and confirmations were coerced.

University of California at Riverside history professor Steven Hackel, who has written a biography of Blessed Serra, told Catholic News Service that the friar was very much a product of his times.

“In his world almost certainly a good father would have punished him with spankings or with blows if he got out of line,” Hackel said. “A good husband punished a wayward spouse. …That was the way in which he believed he should behave with Indians in the missions. The missionaries believe they are the spiritual fathers of Indians, so they take on the responsibility for punishment, with corporal punishment, with blows and various types of beatings.”

One problem was “this was entirely alien to California Indians,” Hackel explained. “It’s not how they lived. It isn’t something they fully understood. So that creates tension in the missions.”

There also was tension between the friars and the soldiers, who believed it was up to them, and only them, Hackel said, to “correct Indians with blows. … But Serra believed he was an apostolic missionary and he and his other Franciscans were somehow exempt from this kind of military oversight. ”

The friar also looked to the example of his favorite saint, St. Francis of Solano, a 16th-century Spanish Franciscan missionary to South America, who talked about “correcting” Indians with corporal punishment. It seemed to Blessed Serra to be “something he has to do to save Indians’ souls. Indians, of course, resent this and the soldiers think Serra has gone rogue, essentially. He has taken their authority from them. So there’s lots and lots of controversy over this. ”

When the military tries to tell the missionaries that they can’t use corporal punishment anymore, the Franciscans complain that “if we can’t discipline Indians, if we can’t punish them, they will drift away … they’ll become libertines. They’ll forget everything we taught them and go back to their savage state. This is always an issue in California. When missionaries lose the ability to correct Indians, they lose the sense that they can control the mission environment.”

There also were conflicts with the soldiers over Indian labor, which the military needed to build the presidios. Blessed Serra told them no. “We are baptizing Indians to save their souls and to teach them to be good Catholics, not to be your peons,” Hackel said the priest responded.

Despite the contemporary criticism, the Spaniards’ records of his time suggest Blessed Serra was thought of as a man of mercy and forgiveness.

He pleaded for leniency for the Kumeyaay Indians who murdered Franciscan Father Luis Jayme in at San Diego de Alcala Mission during an uprising. Later, he would bestow the sacrament of confirmation on three of the five Indians who took part in the killing.

He also wrangled with Spanish authorities about how soldiers assigned to missions were mistreating Indians. In one case, an unrestrained soldier killed the principal chief of a tribe, “cut off his head and brought it to the mission in triumph,” Hackel wrote in “Junipero Serra: California’s Founding Father.” “Serra was horrified by the soldiers’ violence.”

The Spanish missionaries also made little effort to understand the culture and beliefs of the California Indians. Hackel said this was typical of the evangelists of the 18th century. Although their 16th-century predecessors made a point of learning about local beliefs “so they could overturn them,” he said, Serra and his contemporaries didn’t think the Indians had complicated cultures or full-blown religious beliefs.

“What they have, according to Serra and others, are inherited superstitions from their parents and grandparents,” Hackel said. “Things that aren’t rooted in real spirituality, they’re just naive customs about how the world works. So Serra does not spend much time at all trying to investigate native religion. He’s aware of it. He believes they pray to birds, or in some instances, idols. … He essentially dismisses it as childish superstition and he doesn’t really respect their beliefs.”

It actually wasn’t the case that the missionaries wanted to sweep aside all Indian culture, according to Hackel. Even Blessed Serra thought some aspects of Indian culture — notably its music, singing and dancing — could be incorporated into Catholic practices, he said.

“I humbly ask forgiveness, not only for the offenses of the church herself, but also for crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called conquest of America,” Pope Francis told a crowd in Bolivia in July.

Also of lasting impact on the tribes was the secularization period that followed Mexico’s independence in 1821, further separating mission Indians from their culture and also from the church.

The Mexican government that then controlled California removed mission lands from Franciscan oversight. Territory that had been intended for Indians was divvied up among Mexican ranchers. The Franciscan missionaries returned to Mexico and mission Indians worked on the ranches or went out to fend for themselves.

Some mission Indians mixed in with Spanish colonists. In some cases the Catholic faith survived among the mission Indians. Such was the situation for Galvan and his family.

The Spanish intention that missions would become parishes did not come to pass until much later. Several of the missions fell into ruin following secularization. After California became a state in 1850, mission properties were returned to the church following an appeal by Joseph S. Alemany, the first archbishop of San Francisco.

Both Pope John Paul II, who beatified Blessed Serra, and Pope Francis, who will canonize him, have spoken of the difficulties and the harm colonization and church’s evangelization efforts had upon native lives and culture.

“I humbly ask forgiveness, not only for the offenses of the church herself, but also for crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called conquest of America,” Pope Francis told a crowd in Bolivia in July.

It was an unexpected preface to his September visit to the U.S. The canonization will take place in Washington Sept. 23 as the pope hopscotches to events in the nation’s capital, New York and Philadelphia.

Father Laverone said sainthood recognizes a man who, despite all odds, spread the Gospel message where it had not been heard before. And he did so in a “radical” way.

“Serra, with all his limitations, with all his physical ailments, saw the good news as something that had to be proclaimed, and he went to the extreme ends to do that,” said the priest.

He said people may think that was a good thing or a bad thing, but that was his commitment, to bring people who had never known Christ to the Redeemer.

“He was a man of perseverance without a doubt. And maybe sometimes a little bit too much perseverance,” he said.

The Spanish missionary’s own motto, “Siempre adelante, nunca atras” (“Always forward, never back”), speaks to that spirit.

“The Gospel is so important you have to move forward,” said Father Laverone.”We have something to share, we have the good news. People need to learn about God’s mercy and God’s love and the salvation that Jesus brings to us.”

— By Nancy Wiechec and Patricia Zapor, Catholic News Service.

SAN FRANCISCO (CNS) — To Andrew Galvan, Blessed Junipero Serra is a stalwart of faith and mission worthy of the title “saint.”

“He was all wood and nails. He was a tough dude. He fought, he defended, he wrangled, he was frustrated and he was frustrating,” Galvan told Catholic News Service.

A descendant of tribal members from the San Francisco Bay region, Galvan traces his family roots to California’s first Christians, thousands of whom were baptized and confirmed by the 18th-century Spanish missionary.

Pope Francis will canonize Blessed Junipero Sept. 23 in Washington. Galvan said he hopes to be there.

Long a promoter of Blessed Serra, Galvan is the museum director and curator of Old Mission Dolores, the sixth-oldest of California’s 21 historical missions.

He said Blessed Serra was “on fire” to heed Christ’s call to witness, like Jesus’s apostles and St. Francis of Assisi.

“His goal in life, from the time he was a novice … was to be a missionary to Indians in the Americas, to bring the Gospel message where it had never gone before.”

Galvan said the friar, who was beatified in 1988 by St. John Paul II, never veered from that objective and went about it tirelessly, foregoing any convenience for himself.

According to his biographers, he slept little, traveled thousands of miles by foot, quietly endured injury and pain, ate modestly and spent long hours in prayer. When Blessed Serra thought he was failing in his efforts to evangelize, he blamed such defeat on his own sins.

“My God, I couldn’t live the life he lived,” Galvan said.

Miquel Joseph Serra took the Franciscan habit at age 17. He chose the name Junipero, after a companion of St. Francis known for his holy simplicity.

Junipero Serra became an adept student of philosophy and theology and was inspired by the stories of saints and missionaries. Always looking outward, the friar left a successful and comfortable life as a professor to embark on a missionary journey to America, knowing he would never return to Spain.

In Mexico, he spent 17 years building up Indian missions in the Sierra Gorda and traveling far and wide, preaching popular missions. In fervent sermons, he called on those who had fallen from faith to return to God’s mercy.

Blessed Junipero did not reach upper California until he was 55. And when he did, said Galvan, he jumped from his donkey and kissed the ground.

“He’s on sacred ground, because in his mind, being a student of (John Duns) Scotus, he is now entering this world that is completely innocent,” he said referring to the famed Franciscan priest-philospher of the Middle Ages. “And he (Serra) is the one bringing the Gospel where it has never been brought before.”

Galvan has studied Blessed Serra for 37 years and has a unique connection to the soon-to-be saint. He can point directly to him as the person who brought Christ to his family.

“That’s a momentous event,” said Galvan. “I can go into Mission Dolores right here and say, ‘It is in this very room … that my family first became Christian.’ How many people have that joy and pleasure?”

Galvan, though, does not look back with rose-colored glasses. He is acutely aware of the toll upon the California native peoples by the missions, the colonial era and the times that followed.

He calls the encounter between Europeans and Indians an “unmitigated disaster.”

“The colonization destroyed the native people along the California coast because of the destruction of the native environment, the changing of lifestyle and the unfortunate introduction of European diseases.”

After Blessed Serra’s death in 1784, mission populations rose and then sharply dropped. Closely knit mission communities only worsened the spread of illness. Disease was rampant and deadly.

An interpretive sign in the graveyard of Old Mission Santa Barbara gives an idea of the loss: “More than 4,000 Chumash Indians are buried in this cemetery.”

Despite the harsh history, Galvan said Blessed Serra deserves his devotion.

“He loved my ancestors. He loved Indians, He was in love with the idea of being a missionary here. His descriptions of my ancestors are fantastic,” he said. “I’m in love with him and I’m devoted to him.”

But not everyone shares that enthusiasm.

Galvan’s cousin and apprentice, Vincent Medina, is of a younger generation of California native people promoting and teaching their language and culture. He is one of only a handful of people who can speak and understand Chochenyo, the nearly lost tongue of the East Bay Ohlone.

After studying his people from before and after Spanish colonization, Medina said he doesn’t believe Father Serra should be among those the church names saints.

“Society for Ohlone people before colonization was good,” he said. “The world before us was full of richness. It was full of complexity, it was full of beauty, the language speaks to that, the songs speak to that.

“There was ethnocide in the missions, there was a destruction of language, there was a destruction of culture.”

Medina told CNS Blessed Serra’s canonization will only further the resentment many Indians have toward the church.

Additionally, Medina said he views saints as people who rise above the iniquities of their time. He thinks Blessed Serra might have had better forethought and a gentler approach to sharing his faith.

“He saw death, but he still kept moving forward. To me, that’s not somebody who lived outside of their era. To me, that’s somebody who’s going with the status quo of their time.”

— By Nancy Wiechec, Catholic News Service.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (CNS) — It’s difficult to miss the mark that the missions have had on the Golden State. Evidence of their influence is seen in places and people throughout California.

The missions provided the “beginnings of who we are today” as Californians, said Franciscan Father Ken Laverone, who is five generations removed from a Spanish soldier assigned to the pueblo of San Juan Bautista.

“I was baptized in the mission,” he said. “I made my first Communion there. I was ordained a priest there. All my family has been buried there, so it’s home for us.

“Most of California as we know it — names of cities, mountains, rivers — they all came from (Blessed Junipero) Serra, the Spanish and the missionaries. So our heritage in a sense, our patrimony in terms of our identity, comes from that.”

Father Laverone, who is a co-postulator in Blessed Junipero’s sainthood cause, admits that not all of the results were good.

“Obviously, the colonization and the effects of colonization brought terrible tragedy into the native country,” he told Catholic News Service.

Spanish colonization, European diseases that ran rampant in missions and the gold rush, during which Indians were enslaved and killed, nearly eradicated California Indian populations.

California mission history is so profound that it has been required study for all fourth-graders in the state. On mission field trips, students find museum displays, artwork and old artifacts, but also parishes that are very much alive.

“I think some people are surprised by that,” said Father Tom Elewaut, pastor of San Buenaventura Mission in Ventura.

Today, all but two of the 21 historical missions are active churches, and most of those are parishes that continue to serve local communities.

“We have 1,800 active parishioners that attend, participate in Sunday worship,” said Father Elewaut, adding that at every Mass there also are people visiting from across the United States, Canada, Europe or other parts of the world.

Father Elewaut estimates that about half of his parish is Latino. Some families have been with the parish for generations, including the Ortega family, who began the Ortega Chile Packing Co. about three blocks from the mission. It was among the first commercial food operations in the state.

The priest said mission parishes have a unique responsibility to be caretakers of history and mission outreach.

“There’s a certain reverence from the parishioners to preserve the legacy and the spiritual center that has been entrusted to us, to continue to evangelize today.”

San Gabriel Mission is considered the mother church of Los Angeles, a city which is the seat of the largest Catholic archdiocese in the country in terms of Catholic population.

Xavier Vargas and his family are longtime parishioners of San Gabriel. His children and grandchildren were all baptized in the mission, some with the same silver shell used by its first missionaries.

He said he has a high regard for the missions and Blessed Junipero, whom he views as an intelligent, hard-working man who helped educate as well as evangelize native Californians.

When asked what intercession he might pray for from the soon-to-be St. Junipero, Vargas is quick to answer.

“Keep our missions going. Definitely keep our missions going, because there’s a great deal of pride and also a lot of history here that people don’t realize and we take for granted.”

Pope Francis will canonize Blessed Junipero Sept. 23 in Washington. The friar was beatified in 1988 by St. John Paul II.

Many people point to the missions for planting the seeds that eventually grew into California’s multibillion-dollar agricultural industry.

The Franciscans taught Indians to plant and harvest Spanish wine grapes, oranges, almonds, olive trees and other produce. From Mexico the padres brought grazing animals. Today, California remains a top producer of dairy products, almonds and grapes.

A large number of people populating the pews of the missions today are immigrants and the descendants of immigrants from Mexico who came to work California ranches and fields.

Caretakers at Mission Soledad still tend a small grove of Spanish olive trees and sells oil pressed from its fruit in the mission’s tiny gift shop.

Two missions, La Purisima Concepcion in Lompoc and San Francisco Solano in Sonoma, are state parks with exhibits detailing early life of the missions, and the periods of secularization and abandonment and also restoration and revival.

Other missions are parishes as well as centers of city life.

Outside Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa, where its steps lead to San Luis Obispo’s Mission Plaza, people often congregate for festivals and concerts.

In the seaside city of Carmel, San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo Mission hosts a popular classic auto show and festival that draws people from across the county. The Carmel Mission Classic held in August benefits mission restoration efforts and Knights of Columbus charities and includes a “blessing of the cars.”

As tourists wander Carmel mission taking in its beauty and history and getting a glimpse of the final resting place of Blessed Junipero, they often interact with parishioners or typical parish activities like first Communion services and pancake breakfasts.

In Southern California, Mission San Juan Capistrano attracts tens of thousands of students and visitors each year. Its Serra Chapel from 1782 is the oldest extant building in California and the only remaining church where Blessed Serra celebrated Mass.

On the campus of Santa Clara University in California’s Silicon Valley, sits Mission Santa Clara de Asis. The Jesuit university has the distinction of being the first institution of high learning in the state as well as the only California college to be the successor of a Spanish mission. Students, faculty and alumni often celebrate their marriages in the finely restored mission church.

— By Nancy Wiechec, Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Francis was the first pilgrim to sign up for World Youth Day to be held in Krakow, Poland, launching the opening of registration.

Accompanied by two Polish teenagers who wore World Youth Day 2016 T-shirts, the pope had to make a couple of attempts pressing the screen of a tablet before his online registration went through.

“There. With this electronic device I have signed up for the day as a pilgrim,” he told thousands of people gathered in St. Peter’s Square July 26 for his Angelus address.

The pope said, “I wanted to be the one to open registration” in front of everyone gathered for the Angelus and in the company of two teens on the day sign-ups began July 26.

The celebrations July 26-31, 2016, will come during the Holy Year of Mercy, which Pope Francis proclaimed to invite people to follow the merciful example of God, the Father.

World Youth Day “will be, in a certain sense, a jubilee of youth” during the holy year, as its theme is also about being merciful toward others, the pope said.

God’s merciful power through Jesus “heals every ill of body and spirit,” the pope said before praying the Angelus.

Reflecting on the day’s Gospel reading, St. John’s account of the multiplication of loaves and fish, Pope Francis said the story shows how the disciples tried to find a “market”-based solution by calculating how much money they would need to feed the large, hungry crowd that had gathered by the Sea of Galilee.

“But Jesus substitutes the logic of buying with another logic, the logic of giving” when he points to the generous gift offered by the boy, Andrew, who offered to give all that he had: five small loaves and two fish.

Even though people could not see how such a small contribution could make a difference, “God is able to multiply our tiny gestures of solidarity and let us participate in his gift,” the pope said.

Jesus offers “fullness of life for those who hunger. He satisfies not only material hunger, but also that deeper hunger — the hunger for meaning in life, the hunger for God,” Pope Francis said.

Complaining does nothing to solve the many problems in life, “but we can offer that little we have like the boy in the Gospel,” he said.

Everyone has some kind of talent or skill as well as time, he said. “If we are willing to put them in the Lord’s hands they will be enough so that there will be a little bit more love, peace, justice and above all joy in the world.”

— By Carol Glatz, Catholic News Service.