Pope Francis has made a controversial Spanish missionary a saint in an elaborate ceremony that inspired mass devotion as well as protests branding the new saint a persecutor of Native Americans.
The Pope conducted the canonisation in front of 25,000 people in the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington.
“Junípero sought to defend the dignity of the native community, to protect it from those who had mistreated and abused it,” he said.“Having given mature deliberation and having begged the help of divine grace, and the opinion of many of our brothers, blessed Junípero Serra, we discern and define to be a saint, and we inscribe him in the catalogue of saints, establishing him in the universal church among the saints who should be appealed to with devotion.”
Serra oversaw the whipping, beating, flogging and extermination of Native Americans in what is now California.
From: The Guardian
No comments:
Post a Comment