The History of Father Junipero Serra Serra and Washington

May 25, 2015

This is part of a series on Junipero Serra. To read the full series, click here.

THE handsomely-fashioned bronze likeness of Fray Junípero Serra, located in the Statuary Hall of the nation's capitol, appropriately faces the one depicting George Washington. Surely there was something more than coincidence in the proximity of the two great pioneers, one the "Father of his Country," the other a "Father" of his Church. 

George Washington (1732-1799) and Junípero Serra (17131784) were contemporaries in ideals as well as in time. They worked for a common cause, each in his own sphere. 

In 1776, the year associated with the Declaration of Independence, Fray Junípero Serra established the Mission of San Francisco beside the Golden Gate. By the time of his death, less than a decade later, a new nation had been born. While George Washington and his patriots fought for independence, Fray Junípero introduced Christian civilization into an area that would eventually join forces as the thirty-first member of the American commonwealth. 

At the time there was little more than a vast wilderness and a few French colonies between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Chances are that Washington gave very little thought to California. 

When Spain entered the war with the English, the "perfidious heretics," Serra's sentiments identified immediately with those of Washington. He asked his fellow missionaries, in 1780, to be "most attentive in begging God to grant success to this public cause which is so favorable to our holy Catholic and Roman Church." Personality-wise, Washington and Serra were resourceful innovators, stern disciplinarians and exemplary pacesetters, the one dedicated to his people in the civil realm, the other to serving them in the religious sphere. Both men fit into the category of "charismatic" leaders. Washington and Serra fulfilled their particular commissions, not alone by mandate, but rather by virtue of dynamic personalities which instilled an incredible loyalty and devotion among their respective peoples. 

Though George Washington and Junípero Serra differed considerably in their religious convictions, secular vocations and human endowments, the qualities they shared are exceedingly more impressive than the ones they differed in. "Great places make great men," Oliver Wendell Holmes once observed. Washington and Serra, each in his own way, proved the enduring wisdom of Holmes' aphorism. 

As widely divergent as were their concepts about God, George Washington and Junípero Serra would surely have identified their sentiments in that beautiful prayer subsequently composed by John Henry Newman: 

God created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission - I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created rue for naught. I shall do good; I shall do His work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it - if I do but keep His Commandments. Therefore will I trust Him. Whatever, wherever I am. I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him: in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him; in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends; He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me - still He knows what He is about.