CNA Staff, Jun 29, 2020 / 01:45 pm (CNA).- After a mob tore down statues, including a figure of St. Junípero Serra statue, in a San Francisco park, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone was joined by several dozen Catholics Saturday in prayer and acts of spiritual reparation.
“Evil has made itself present here. So we have gathered together to pray for God, to ask the saints…for their intercession, above all our Blessed Mother, in an act of reparation, asking God’s mercy on us and on the whole city, that we might turn our hearts back towards him,” Cordileone said in a June 27 video.
The St. Junípero Serra statue was torn down in Golden Gate Park the evening of June 19 by a crowd of about 100 people. The crowd also tore down statues of Francis Scott Key, author of the National Anthem, and Ulysses S. Grant, U.S. president and Union Army general who defeated the Confederate States of America.
On Saturday, several dozen people joined the Archbishop of San Francisco to pray.
“The presence of so many wonderful people here was of great comfort for me,” the archbishop said. “I feel such a great wound in my soul when I see these horrendous acts of blasphemy disparaging the memory of Serra who was such a great hero, such a great defender of the indigenous people of this land.”
Cordileone said the statue was “blasphemously torn down”
“An act of sacrilege occurred here. That is an act of the Evil One,” he said in the video.
“We came together to say the prayer of the rosary, and also the prayer of exorcism, the St. Michael Prayer, because evil is here, this is an activity of the evil one, who wants to bring down the Church, who wants to bring down all Christian believers,” he said.
“So we offer that prayer, and bless this ground with holy water so that God might purify it, sanctify it, that we in turn might be sanctified,” he said, encouraging Catholics to pray, to fast and to inform themselves.
“There’s a lot that people don’t know. There’s a lot of ignorance of the real history. I’d ask our people to learn about the history of Father Serra, of the missions, of the whole history of the Church, so that they can appreciate the great legacy the Church has given us.”
The exorcism prayer Cordileone offered, the St. Michael Prayer, invokes the intercession of the Archangel Michael against the power of Satan. It is not the same as those exorcism prayers offered by the Church if a person is believed to be the subject of demonic possession.
During the eighteenth century, the saint founded nine Catholic missions in the area that would later become California, many of those missions would go on to become the centers of major California cities.
Serra helped to convert thousands of native Californians to Christianity and taught them new agricultural technologies. His statue in Golden Gate Park was first placed there in 1907. It was crafted by well-known American sculptor Douglas Tilden.
Critics have lambasted Serra as a symbol of European colonialism and said the missions engaged in the forced labor of Native Americans, sometimes claiming Serra himself was abusive.
But Serra’s defenders say that Serra was actually an advocate for native people and a champion of human rights. They note the many native people he helped during his life, and their outpouring of grief at his death.
Biographers note that Serra frequently intervened for native people when they faced persecution from Spanish authorities. In one case, the priest intervened to spare the lives of several California natives who had attacked a Spanish outpost.
In one letter urging fair treatment of native people, Serra wrote that “if the Indians were to kill me…they should be forgiven.”
Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez said in 2015 that Serra had “deep love for the native peoples he had come to evangelize.”
“In his appeals, he said some truly remarkable things about human dignity, human rights and the mercy of God,” the archbishop added.
In 2017, Gomez praised Serra as an overlooked American founder.
“Remembering St. Junípero and the first missionaries changes how we remember our national story. It reminds us that America’s first beginnings were not political. America’s first beginnings were spiritual,” Gomez said in a 2017 homily.
Pope Francis canonized the Franciscan missionary in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 23, 2015.
“Junípero sought to defend the dignity of the native community, to protect it from those who had mistreated and abused it,” the pope said in his homily at the Mass of canonization. “Mistreatment and wrongs which today still trouble us, especially because of the hurt which they cause in the lives of many people.”
The legacy of the Church, Cordileone said, is “a wonderful legacy that we should be proud of. There are those who want us to be ashamed of it. We have every reason to be proud of it.”
“But also we have to approach living our Christian life with humility and to continue to give goodness to the world, and to give the world beauty and truth, with the help of the grace of God,” he said.
“Our Lady is always asking us to pray the rosary,’” he added. “The rosary has the power even to change history”
Cordileone said Serra had a personal importance for him.
“He was someone who was very much a part of my life growing up,” said the archbishop.
“I grew up very close to the first mission he founded, in San Diego.”
The toppling of the statue made him “very distressed” and “inflicted a great wound in my soul.”
“So the presence of so many people here was of great support to me,” he said.
In a June 20 statement, Cordileone said that important protests over racial injustice have been “hijacked” by a mob bent on violence.
“St. Serra made heroic sacrifices to protect the indigenous people of California from their Spanish conquerors, especially the soldiers,” he said. “Even with his infirm leg which caused him such pain, he walked all the way to Mexico City to obtain special faculties of governance from the Viceroy of Spain in order to discipline the military who were abusing the Indians. And then he walked back to California.”
Cordileone said he did not want to “deny that historical wrongs have occurred, even by people of good will, and healing of memories and reparation is much needed. But just as historical wrongs cannot be righted by keeping them hidden, neither can they be righted by re-writing the history.”
In 2018, San Francisco’s city government removed a statue of the saint from a prominent location outside City Hall. Stanford University’s Board of Trustees recommended to rename some, but not all, features on campus named for the priest. The student government had said the Catholic missions had a harmful impact on Native Americans.
A statue of the saint remains displayed in the U.S. Capitol.
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Prayer and fasting. Always good. Thousands of roses? I am sure. It did make the florists very happy.
Archbishop Cordileone asks us to pray and fast. I ask him to actually DO something. He has indicated that he is still in dialog (I hate that word) with Speaker Pelosi. If he has been doing this for all the years he has been bishop of San Francisco, it apparently has not done much good. She just pushed through the House the most drastic abortion bill ever – 218 democrats for and 210 republicans against. To solve a problem you have to accurately identify it. Those voting numbers show where the problem is in eliminating abortion. I don’t recall seeing that addressed by the bishops.
Archbishop Cordileone *is* doing something. Instead of privately begging NP to change her support of abortion, in utter defiance of Church teaching, as his predecessors have done to no avail, he is putting this out in the public. He gives no doubt as to his defense of Catholic teaching and his desire to save her soul from hell, and for attempting to prevent her from leading others into scandal and mortal sin. I’m not sure what else he can possibly do to get through to NP. It is certainly an Act of Mercy for him to ask for prayers and fasting for her soul and for the end of all abortion in the USA. I admire him for his courage and especially for his service to the Church.
In the history of biblical interpretation, the Book of Revelation’s 666 and antichrist has been wrongly and notoriously read to mean one’s enemy or anybody one detests: the Pope, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Saddam, Obama, or Trump, etc. Similarly, Archbishop Cordileone here grotesquely implies by association that those who uphold abortion rights are Satanic.
Are you attempting to grotesquely imply that those who support infanticide are sanctified?
It certainly violates the 10 commandments, and the two commandments He gave us while here.
He is not “implying” it. He is openly suggesting it. And he is correct, Those who uphold infanticide are in the grip of Satan, whom they willingly serve.
I would also note that Satan has achieved the goal of convincing these poor dullards that he does not exist and thereby condones a belief that any action of hums that fulfills their desires is permissible.
Every now and then a statement such as yours causes me to bring up one of my favorite comebacks from about 50+ years ago in the Chicago Tribune by either Dear Abby or Ann Landers in response to an unusually moronic statement from one of her readers:
“You may have a point but if you keep your hat on maybe no one will notice.”
Pope Francis granted Nancy a private audience yesterday. That would be encouraging, if one actually believed that he confronted her about her support for abortion, which he recently termed as “murder.” It is more likely that he was “pastoral” rather than “political,” which would leave her with the impression that she is doing just fine. I think Jesus would have been “pastoral” and told her that she was endangering her eternal soul with her stance. That would be the most pastoral thing to do, as “pastoral” is not a synonym of “being nice.”
First, it is important that we are passionate to stop the murder of the innocent – especially defenseless children in the womb – is grounded in our love of God and His commandments (all of His commandments), including “Thou shalt not kill.” I fear too much of the time the passion of the Pro-Life movement is more about the movement, more about the cause, than the reason for the movement and cause – the eternal God and His commandments. We should be as passionate to change other evils in society as we are to change the evil practice of abortion (murder of innocent children in the womb). I know this will ruffle feathers of some, but it is intended to cause reflection on the real motivation behind the passion, and to ask for that same passion in defending the laws of God in every area of life and society.
Second, Moloch (also known as Molech, Milcom, Milkim, Malcham, Malik) was the name of the national god of the Ammonites, to whom children were sacrificed by fire. While those who support and/or practice the evil of abortion, which is nothing less than child sacrifice, may not believe they are worshiping Moloch (in effect worshiping demonic forces and even Satan), their beliefs in and practice of abortion is evidence they are submitting to the rule of Satan and demonic forces, in effect worshiping Moloch.
I would like to make some follow-up comments addressing Susan K.’s statement that Archbishop Cordileone is doing something. We have different concepts of what “doing” something is. He has been Pelosi’s bishop for nine years. I by no means think that Archbishop Cordileone is stupid. But there is an old saying that the definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Obviously what he has been doing for nine years has not worked. Pelosi is more pro-abortion now than she was nine years ago.
Doing something would be enforcing Canon 915 of Canon Law – that she cold not receive the Eucharist. Doing something would be saying that being pro-abortion is a disqualifying issue for being elected to any office. These types of actions may have some positive effect on her. Even if not, it may have some effect on the 50% of Catholics who vote for pro-abortion politicians. As it stands, there seem to be many Catholics who believe that since nothing happens to the pro abortionists, then it must be OK to vote for them.
I would also like to see a little outrage in the bishops’ statements regarding the murder of millions of unborn babies. A little “Woe to you pharisees (pro-abortionists) might go a long way.
This doesn’t have to do with Archbishop Cordileone, but I just saw today that Pelosi had a meeting with the pope over the weekend. Several smiling pictures of the two together. But there was also a news item that she attended mass in Rome on Sunday, and the heckling made her leave church. There is a video of the priest saying that he was sorry she had to leave, as she was going to do the second reading. Good Grief!
To be fair, let’s keep in mind that the president and Speaker of the House both claim that they are opposed to abortion, but they do not think that it is helpful to use government power to stop it.
good