Father Serra may not have liked the hokus pokus but he sported a stylin doo.
Father Serra may not have liked the hokus pokus but he sported a stylin doo.

Father Junipero Serra’s work for the Spanish Inquisition

(you may not have expected this)

“FLYING THROUGH THE AIR AT NIGHT”

So it looks like tomorrow Pope Francis will canonize Junipero Serra (born Miquel Joseph Serre, November 24, 1713, Petra, Majorca, Spain) and make him a “saint”. Father Junipero Serra founded many many many Catholic missions in California and Baja. He was HUGE for his time. He was the Donald Trump of the Eighteenth Century. He will soon me elevated to the near-godlike status of Saint by Pope Francis in the neo-pagan ritual of canonization. When I was an altar-boy at Saint Michael’s in the mid-1970’s “canonized” sounded like they’d take your ashes or something and shoot them out of a canon. I was always like, “Oh, cool. I’d like to see that! The following is culled from the internet, lamentably, mostly from Wikipedia. ~Editor

During his 1752 visit to Mexico City, Serra sent a request from the college of San Fernando to the local headquarters of the Spanish Inquisition. He asked that an inquisitor be appointed to preside over the Sierra Gorda. The next day, Inquisition officials appointed Serra himself as inquisitor for the whole region — adding that he could exercise his powers anywhere he did missionary work in New Spain, as long as there was no regular Inquisition official in the region.

In September 1752, Serra filed a report to the Inquisition in Mexico City from Jalpan, on “evidences of witchcraft in the Sierra Gorda missions.” He denounced several Christian non-Indians who lived in and around the mission for “the most detestable and horrible crimes of sorcery, witchcraft and devil worship… If it is necessary to specify one of the persons guilty of such crimes, I accuse by name a certain Melchora de los Reyes Acosta, a married mulattress, an inhabitant of the said mission… In these last days a certain Cayetana, a very clever Mexican woman of said mission, married to one Pérez, a mulatto, has confessed — she, being observed and accused of similar crimes, having been held under arrest by us for some days past — that in the mission there is a large congregation of [Christian non-Indians], although some Indians also join them, and that these persons,…flying through the air at night, are in the habit of meeting in a cave on a hill near a ranch called El Saucillo, in the center of said missions, where they worship and make sacrifice to the demons who appear visibly there in the guise of young goats and various other things of that nature… If such evil is not attacked, the horrible corruption will spread among these poor [Indian] neophytes who are in our charge.”

Junipero Serra founded many Missions in California.
Junipero Serra founded many Missions in California.

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