Angelus News | August 2-9, 2019 | Vol. 4 No. 27

Statues of Confederate generals
brought down or repositioned.
McSherry Hall at Georgetown
University renamed because Father
William McSherry sold slaves.
What’s in a name? What’s in a statue?
Are California’s 585 mission bells along
the road next in this flurry of reassessment
of representational history that
includes aggrieved people, questions
about the nature of art, and a selective
rendering of what took place long ago?
What, exactly, is a symbol and what
force — moral, spiritual, or otherwise
— does it have?
Californians take pride in the weathered
old bells on their staffs spaced
along U.S. Route 101 and offshoot
roads taken by original padres. When
I was a child, my heart quickened at
their sight, for it meant my parents and
us kids were on the road and would
soon be taking in a mission or two on
our way to the mountains, the beach,
the desert, or Lake Tahoe.
Spotting the road bells meant inner
joy, as it did later for my wife and our
kids. Even as we age, I hear those bells
inside when I pass and my heart is
glad.
But for some, that bell on the road is
an insult, and echoes with something
akin to Julius Caesar’s infamous summary
of laying waste to Gaul: “I came.
I saw. I conquered.”
To Valentin Lopez, chairman of
the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band near
Gilroy, those bells mean, as he put it,
“We conquered you, we controlled
you, we destroyed you.” And since the
missions and their bells were erected
by the Spanish Franciscans, there’s no
mistaking who Lopez accuses: the followers
of St. Francis of Assisi. So much
for talking to animals, right?
After many years of trying, in June
of this year Lopez was able to get one
bell removed from the University of
California Santa Cruz campus.
But what of Mission San Luis Rey,
where several hundred Luiseno Indians
ran into the water off Oceanside
to beg Father Antonio Peyri not to go
back to Spain as he boarded a ship, but
to stay with them where he had served
them for three prosperous and peaceful
decades?
What of St. Junípero Serra’s death at
Mission San Carlos Borromeo in Carmel,
where 600 Esselen and Rumsen
Costanoan Indians fell weeping, many
cutting off talismans from his robe and
even his hair?
What of that all-Indian orchestra
at Mission San Antonio that played
original works? Were those performed
without pride or joy? Were the Indian
singers at Carmel whom the celebrated
author Robert Louis Stevenson said
sang in 1879 with such profundity
merely faking it? Was there no music
in those bells?
In a June ceremony, California Gov.
Gavin Newsom apologized to the
state’s 600,000 Native Americans at a
June ceremony, calling what happened
to their ancestors in the takeover by
Europeans “genocide.” Undoubtedly
it was. And shameful. But who was
responsible for it — the Spaniards or
the Americans?
To understand the legacy of the bells,
that and other questions need to be
answered. The role that microbes of
infection played in this tragedy, for
example, must be understood.
The treatment of Indians by the
Franciscans, a source of many accusations
against the Spaniards, must be
examined with context and a careful
attention to statistics. And the good
works, especially those of radical mercy,
of Serra and the Franciscans cannot
be ignored.
Who committed genocide?
On the question of genocide there is
no less an authority than James Sandos,
Ph.D., Farquhar Professor of the
American Southwest at the University
of Redlands. In 2010, he told a large
gathering of mostly Native Americans
at the California Indian Conference in
Irvine that the “comparison [of Franciscan
acts] to genocide is totally false.”
The true culprit? “The U.S. government
paying people to slaughter others,
that’s genocide,” Sandos said at the
event. On the same panel with Sandos
was reputable mission-era historian
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
One of California’s many historic El Camino Real bells.
August 2-9, 2019 • ANGELUS • 11