Sainthood for Father Junipero Serra? Wait a minute…!

Author Michael Llewellyn Questions the Latest Vatican Canonization

Interview by Richard Sutton, September 22, 2015

An interview with author Michael Llewellyn…

When I was a 4th-Grade Student in San Diego, California; my favorite part of the week’s lessons was always the California History segment Miss Wells taught. She told us the story of a tiny, frail priest, who walked from Vera Cruz, Mexico all the way up the coast, reaching eventually the location for his Mission Church which eventually became a line of churches set a day’s march apart along the Camino Real — the Spanish Royal Highway connecting their colony together in a network of commerce and soul-saving. My mental image of Father Junipero Serra as a kindly little padre in his brown Franciscan robes dispensing mercy and goodness to the California Native people, persisted until I began to learn the actual history of the Spanish Conquest of the Southwest including California as an adult.

Almost completely at odds with the carefully curated, vacation-brochure story of the peaceful Missions was the brutal truth. The chain of missions including churches and working ranches and farms were actually sites where monstrous cruelty, slavery, starvation, kidnapping and torture were doled out to the Native parishioners for generations. All carefully overseen or ignored by the Franciscan Friars and priests, including Father Serra. All men of their times, serving Cross and King.

Today, we’re discussing the controversial record of the Missions with author Michael Llewellyn. A gifted writer of meticulously researched historic fiction whose 2014 mystery novel, Communion of Sinners, uncovers this well-hidden past.

Good Morning, Michael. With sainthood almost a fait accompli for Father Serra, your book struck a strong chord with me. I was mostly acquainted with your Historic Novels set in New Orleans before reading this book. What brought you to uncover the truth about a priest so revered he’s called the Father of California?

A: Good morning, Richard, and thank you for asking me to talk about my book, Communion of Sinners. When I first visited the California missions, like most tourists I was seduced by their beauty and charmed by the history, at least how it was presented on-site. When I visited the Carmel Mission, I saw a woman in the courtyard reading a book I hadn’t seen in the gift shop. It was Life in a California Mission, the journal of Jean Francoise De La Peyrouse*, a French explorer who visited Monterey in 1786. The woman said such books were never sold at the missions because they told the truth, not what the Catholic Church wanted visitors to believe. Of course I was intrigued enough to read the book and was horrified by what I found, there and also in Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians by Robert H. Jackson. Both books were eye-openers, real revelations if you will. Instead of more mythologizing about the “child-like Indians and pious padres,” I found a world of oppression and outright cruelty. Rather than coming voluntarily to the missions, the Indians were more often herded there by Spanish soldiers, punished if they resisted forced labor and forbidden to leave. If they escaped, they were re-captured, returned and punished. Father Serra himself said, and I’m quoting here, “That spiritual fathers should punish their sons, the Indians, with blows appears to be as old as the conquest of the Americas.” In 1783, three years after he made that remark, no less than the Governor of California, Pedro Fages, filed a complaint against Serra for excessive punishment of the Indians. Not just punishment, mind you. Excessive punishment! And this is the man the Vatican wants to canonize!

It certainly was a surprise when I heard there was a huge push to complete the process when the new Pope visits. When important decisions that affect millions of people are made without consideration of the direct past, it always seems less like omission and more like subterfuge. But then, I’ve always been an ardent student of history.   I understand you grew up in Tennessee, a state with a long and honored past. Did your childhood experiences bring you to write historic subjects or were you drawn to it from another direction?

A: When you grow up in the South, history is omnipresent and, for me anyway, it seemed a natural thing to write about. I was taught from an early age to respect my history, heritage and traditions. I’m old enough to remember a South that has all but disappeared and, while it was deeply flawed by racial segregation, it nevertheless had a magical, indefinable something that burrowed under your skin and stayed there. Harper Lee and Truman Capote captured the Southerner’s childhood best. As far as the Native Americans are concerned, I knew from an early age about the Cherokees and the Trail of Tears ripping them from their homeland in east Tennessee and western North Carolina and sending them to Oklahoma. Their story has been told many times, which is not the case for the Mission Indians. What little voice they had needed to be turned way up and I tried to help with Communion of Sinners. One of my main characters, Javier Chamales, is a modern-day Chumash with links taking the reader from contemporary Santa Cruz to the past when the missions held sway.

The Catholic Church has recently made attempts through Papal decrees, to distance themselves from their own past. I remember an apology made to many indigenous Nations of South America and the Caribbean for excesses and cruelty committed in the process of bringing the Word of God to them. Did writing Communion of Sinners provide a pulpit for you to try and share the truth of the Missions? It has been a seriously controversial subject in California for many years, I understand.

A: I’m not sure I like the word “pulpit” because I don’t want to sound preachy. But, yes, it’s high time the truth about the missions is told. It’s the responsibility of historical fiction authors, at least those who take our work seriously, to educate and enlighten and not perpetuate myths and hearsay. Father Serra and his ilk presented a serious challenge because it’s so very difficult to wrap our 21^st century mindsets around 18^th century behavior. Here’s what I wrote in my Author’s Notes for Communion of Sinners. “I believe most Franciscan missionaries were sincere, devoted men and that Serra fought hard to protect his neophytes from the soldiers, but he and his fellow friars were ill-prepared to grasp the radically different world of the Indians or how the imposition of European standards would annihilate the very souls they sought to save. The results were attitudes ranging from avuncular affection to vicious disgust, and there’s no denying the missions were akin to Nazi forced labor camps.” Serra’s punishment hardly emulated the famously gentle and compassionate St. Francis, who founded the Franciscan order. If a California governor and other friars were appalled by his behavior, how could Serra himself be so unaware and unbending? For that matter, how can the Vatican not be aware in 2015? I’m not Catholic so I won’t judge the veracity of Serra’s supposedly miraculous cure for that nun with lupus centuries after his death, but I do find it bemusing that the church has dispensed with the second requisite miracle in order to fast-track Serra to sainthood. If the Vatican is really so desperate for saints, can’t they do better than this guy?

I sure hope so. Hypocrisy doesn’t go very well with faith. I grew up all over the Western States and always had a deep interest in American Indian culture. It seems the arts, traditions and stories of many of the indigenous cultures are taught and explored in literature really frequently, but that there is very little out there about the California Native cultures. I’ve learned that there was more diversity of culture and tradition in California than in any other Mainland region. Is there a reason or reasons why their stories and traditions have been so neglected?

A: That remains a mystery, Richard. I can only speculate that they were eclipsed by more famous tribes because they weren’t as glamorous or sexy. Most everyone knows about Pueblo pottery and Tlingit totem poles and Sioux beadwork, about Geronimo and Sitting Bull and Wounded Knee. What history and culture the Mission Indians had was pretty quickly erased by the Spanish and the padres, and California school children, as you say, were taught only what the State and the Catholics deemed appropriate. What monstrous conceit! I should mention here that the Indians were themselves almost erased by Mission rule. In that period, 1769-1832, the population plummeted from 130,000 to 73,000. Many deaths came from European diseases the Indians could not fight, but plenty died of starvation, neglect and brutality.

It’s incredible to think that in its day, that kind of destruction and death were just accepted as inevitable things that occurred with Colonialism and swept under the carpet. At the very least least today we can acknowledge the truth and its lingering effects all these years later and try to do the right thing for those victim’s descendants who still survive.

You’ve been a very prolific author, with some seventeen titles available. I’ve read a few of your other books and have seen one common thread is a fascination with the interplay of diverse cultures. You’ve lived in a few places where this is very evident, haven’t you? We even share a couple of them.

A: I’ve been fortunate to live in Greenwich Village, the French Quarter and Santa Fe, all of which boast overlapping cultures. My favorite is New Orleans with its exotic French/Spanish/African roots, later watered by English, Irish, Italian, German and, after Katrina, Mexican arrivals. This polyglot mix is reflected in the food and music which is, happily, ever-evolving and makes living there a real pleasure. In 1967, I was lucky enough to live in the house where Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone with the Wind, but believe me that’s another story.

Upper West Side of NYC for me, but I really understand the overlaps. They sure keep your mind working. Have you found that spending time in a place where a project is set helps the writing? I know my own experiences out on the road and as a newcomer in many places has influenced my own work a great deal.

A: Absolutely. New Orleans is again the best example. I set several books there because the history is almost palpable. Once during carnival season I was standing on my 1833 French Quarter gallery in a twilight fog so dense I could barely see across the street. While listening to the riverboats, carriage harnesses and hooves, and cathedral bells, I saw a group of revelers dressed in hooded capes, swirling through the fog down below. I realized everything I saw and heard belonged to another century, as did the buildings around me. That, of course was the perfect location and inspiration for my first time travel book, Still Time.

Your most recent novel Past Time, is the second in a Time-Travel historic series. It places your characters in the Winter Court of the Romanovs in Saint Petersburg just before the revolution. What specifically brought your interest to bear on a subject that has intrigued writers for so long?

A: Some places in time simply speak to you. Venice in the 16^th century, Tudor London and Paris in the twenties come to mind. I’d always had an interest in the Romanovs and will never forget seeing the Amber Room of the Catherine Palace in St. Petersburg. It trumped any excess I’d ever seen and drove me to learn more about the Romanovs. When I read about Marie Pavlovna, the feisty and fiery Grand Duchess who dared tell the Russian parliament that she wanted the Tsarina Alexandra annihilated, I wanted my time traveling heroine, Madeleine, to meet her. Their encounter is what drives the plot of Past Time.

As one of your loyal readers, I’m always wondering where you’ll take us next. Any clues as to a project currently in the works?

A: Sure. The third book, Over Time, catapults Madeleine to Haiti in 1820 where she meets the black King Henry I and his Queen Marie-Louise. She also meets the Duke of Marmelade and, no, I did not make that up. There’s a reason for that old adage that truth is stranger than fiction.

That it is. I’ll be looking forward to news of its release. Thanks Michael, for your insights on the truth of the California Missions. I hope the truth is considered before the Pope makes his final decision and shows the California Mission Indians the respect they have so long deserved.

I’m glad to introduce my readers to Michael Llewellyn’s work. I’ve read many of them and always found myself absorbed and carried along on a great story line with real fleshed-out characters I care about. They’ve also made my brain work a bit and I always leave them with questions and ideas spinning out from that point.  For more information about the writer and his work, be sure to visit his

Facebook Page athttps://www.facebook.com/MichaelKLlewellyn

Amazon Author Page at http://www.amazon.com/Michael-Llewellyn/e/B000APJFP6

*Jean Francoise De La Peyrouse biographical information is available on the French Language Wikipedia which you can translate by pasting the url into Google Translate.https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_de_La_P%C3%A9rouse