Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 25, 2025
In compliance with our promise not to forget the friends of the missionaries and of their compatriots, of today, we will first speak of California's wonderful enthusiasm in the celebration of the Bi-centenary of Junipero Serra's birth.
The Bells of the Past throw their spells over the mossy church at once triumph, tomb, and monument of Padre Junipero. Scattered over the coast of California, the padres now sleep in the Lethe of death. Fathers Kino, Salvatierra, Ugarte, and sainted Serra left their beautiful works of mercy from San Diego to Sonoma.
Greatly chafing under the delay, he was none the less obliged to postpone his start for several weeks. At length, on the 28th of March, in company with two soldiers and a servant, he mounted his mule and set out. But of this Junipero would not hear, for he regarded himself as specially chosen and called by God for the work to which he stood, body and soul, committed.
The average person would think Junipero Serra and his companions had surely satiated their thirst for missionary labors during the nine long toilsome years they spent in Mexico, far, far away from loving home, affectionate kindred and the Old World culture to which they bade farewell when the last glistening silhouette of the Spanish Coast vanished from their view in 1759, but not so!
But every year on the eve of the feast of Saint Charles just before midnight a ghostly procession wended its way to San Carlos Mission, for all the missionaries, Spaniards, or their descendants who had ever lived in California would arise from their graves and with them all the Christian Indians of the mission towns joined the "ghostly throng" to San Carlos where Junipero Serra would arise from his tomb and celebrate mass while the spirits sang their ancient hymns, after which all the scene vanished like silver fumes of smoke, and this continued for one hundred years.
They live on a rancheria near by and are making adobe bricks, hoping soon to build a church like the old Mission long since crumbled away. The last of the Missions was built in 1823 at Sonoma, and proved very active in church work, some fifteen hundred Indians having been there baptized. Father Junipero Serra died at more than seventy years of age, at San Carlos.
So she dismissed the offer and the man from her mind, and went back to her painting, a fancy portrait of the good Padre Junipero Serra, a great missionary, who, haply for the integrity of his bones and character, died some hundred years before the Americans took possession of California.
In 1813, with its graceful arched front and two towers, San Carlos was a noble-looking building, but since that time one tower has fallen. We are reminded, as we look, of the scene when Junipero lay dying. Ever since morning the grief-stricken people had been waiting, listening for the news from the sick room.
Unbiased, careful of detail and true to history, while not wanting in artistic setting "Fray Junipero" carries the audience in Act I back to the College of Fernando, when Junipero Serra received his commission to come to California as Father President of the Missionaries who were to christianize that "mysterious vineyard." Act II is a typical picture of California Indian Life.
And to this College, Father Junipero Serra and his companions came after a perilous voyage of nearly one year; for the date of their arrival was January 1, 1760; and here they began their labor! Of the nine years which Junipero Serra toiled in Mexico, six were spent in Sierra Gorda, some distance north of San Fernando, and one of the wildest and roughest of those half explored regions.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking