UNITED STATES
The Open Tabernacle: Here Comes Everybody
Posted on July 19, 2015 by Betty Clermont
“A measure calling for the statue of Father Junipero Serra in the U.S. Capitol to be replaced with one of NASA astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, was shelved in the Legislature on July 2. [Ride] would be the first woman to represent California in the collection and the first known gay person.” State legislatures have the authority to decide which two statues will represent their state at the U.S. Capitol.
The measure to replace Serra’s statue had already passed the California Senate in April. The Assembly vote was postponed because of the pope’s visit to the U.S. “Our concerns are mostly due to the timing of this legislative debate,” Sandra Palacios, associate director of governmental affairs at the California Catholic Conference, said at an Assembly committee hearing this week.” The U.S. bishops’ paid lobbyists in every state are called “Catholic Conferences.”
Pope Francis called Serra “one of the founding fathers of the United States, a saintly example of the Church’s universality, and special patron of the Hispanic people of the country.” The pope will canonize Serra in September in Washington D.C. The 18th century Spanish Franciscan friar founded the first nine of 21 Spanish missions in California. In a rare display of criticism for this pope, Native Americans and others protested honoring a man who participated in the brutalization of indigenous people. “By 1818 the percentage of Indians who died in the missions reached 86 percent. Over 81,000 Indian ‘converts’ eventually managed to successfully flee the missions.”
The postponement followed “a heavy campaign to save the statue. A Spanish-language website, ‘Salvemos a Serra’, or ‘Let’s Save Serra’, called on Californians to write their legislators in opposition to the resolution. … ‘Salvemos a Serra’ had also asked supporters of Blessed Serra to sign English- and Spanish-language petitions on the website CitizenGo.org. The petitions were posted by Alejandro Bermudez, executive director of Catholic News Agency. More than 47,000 did so.”
Within five days, the Catholic Church “notched [another] prominent win at the California statehouse.” The July 7 decision by a legislative committee to shelve a bill allowing terminally ill patients to legally end their lives “followed weeks of lobbying by competing interest groups over whether to make California the next state to allow physicians to legally prescribe fatal medication, following Oregon, Washington, Montana and Vermont.” “A new poll released by Compassion and Choices, the chief right-to-die advocacy group, suggests that 69 percent of Californians would vote for the bill if put in front of them.”
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