I am a fan, if that is OK for a Jew, of the current Pope BUT .. There is a big step he needs to take.. accept responsibility for millennia of atrocities! Show by the church’s acts that redemption means more than declaring the Deity has forgiven your institution.
He is canonizing Junípero Serra, a man whose motivations were pure Christianity .. a horrible motivation that led to the deaths and torture of the indigenous peoples — the heathens —of California. Francis church is famous for the guilt, the centrality of sin and redemption, that is central to individual Catholics, but the Church redeems itself.
Between 1846 and 1870, California’s Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000. Diseases, dislocation and starvation caused many of these…
LATIMES.COM