CALIFORNIA
Los Angeles Times
By GALE HOLLAND
Hoisting a sign depicting Archbishop Jose Gomez with a toothbrush mustache and a swastika medallion, a dozen people gathered outside Sunday Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels downtown to protest the proposed canonization of Father Junipero Serra.
Olin Tezcatlipoca, director of the Mexica Movement, an indigenous-rights group, said Serra and the California mission system he founded were responsible for the Spanish “genocide” of native peoples. Gomez, who heads the Los Angeles Archdiocese and has called Serra one of his “spiritual heroes,” refused to meet to discuss the group’s objections, Tezcatlipoca said.
“Serra set up forced labor camps, death camps,” Tezcatlipoca said as the group gathered in front of the Father Serra statue across from Olvera Street for the short march to the gates of the cathedral. “Women and children were raped the same way as the pedophile priests, and the church has hidden that.”
A spokeswoman for the archdiocese said she didn’t know of the Mexica Movement, which has taken part in local immigration and other protests since the 1990s, and would have no comment.
Serra’s complex legacy has sharply divided people in and out of the Catholic Church since the Pope Francis’ surprise announcement last month saying that he planned to grant the missionary’s long-sought sainthood.
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