St. Junipero Serra’s optional memorial falls on July 1, remembering the Franciscan priest who founded nine of California’s twenty-one missions between 1769 and his death in 1784. For anyone who’s driven Highway 101 or visited San Diego, his legacy is the chain of mission churches that became California’s first European settlements.
Who St. Junipero Serra was
Born Miguel Jose Serra in 1713 on the Spanish island of Majorca, he joined the Franciscans at sixteen and took the name Junipero after St. Francis’s companion. He taught philosophy at the University of Palma for fifteen years before volunteering for the missions of New Spain in 1749, at age thirty-six.
He spent his first two decades in Mexico, working among the indigenous peoples of the Sierra Gorda. In 1769, at fifty-five and with a chronically infected leg, he walked from Baja California to San Diego to begin the evangelization of Alta California. Over the next fifteen years, he established nine missions from San Diego to San Francisco, traveling thousands of miles on foot despite his injury.
He died at Mission San Carlos Borromeo in Carmel on August 28, 1784. Pope Francis canonized him in 2015, making him the first saint canonized on American soil.
What he’s known for
Serra is inseparable from the California mission system, the twenty-one Franciscan foundations that stretched up the coast and became the infrastructure of Spanish California. Each mission was a day’s walk from the next. Each had a church, workshops, gardens, and housing for the Franciscan friars and the indigenous converts.
He baptized over six thousand Native Americans and confirmed nearly five thousand. He walked with a walking staff, his leg never healing, and often insisted on walking when horses were available. The cross he carried and the missions he built remain his iconographic attributes because they define what he spent his life doing: planting the Church in places where it had never been.
For today
If you live in California, look up which mission is closest to you and consider visiting it this summer. If you don’t, find one thing in your own parish or neighborhood that needs planting: a Bible study, a meal ministry, a garden. Start small, but start.
St. Junipero Serra walked thousands of miles at fifty-five with an infected leg. You can walk to one place today.
St. Junipero Serra, pray for us.
