Statue of Catholic Saint in California is Vandalized

Statue of Father Junipero Serra at Mission San Carlos Borromeo del Rio Carmelo; Carmel, California. (Credit Image: © Greg Vaughn/VW Pics via ZUMA Wire)

It was the second attack on a Junipero Serra statue since the movement to remove, destroy or deface any public image of the Confederacy began.  In August, a statue of Serra in Mission Hills was covered in red paint and the word “Murder” written in white down the saint’s cassock.

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Santa Barbara Police are investigating the vandalism, but as yet have no suspects, even though there is an unconfirmed report that video footage of the crime may exist.

Local Santa Barbara online news source Edhat explains Serra’s significance to the region:

Junípero Serra was a Roman Catholic Spanish priest and friar of the Franciscan Order who founded a mission in Baja California and the first nine of 21 Spanish missions in California from San Diego to San Francisco. Santa Barbara’s Mission was founded on December 4th, 1786, two years after Serra died.

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Serra was beatified in 1988 and canonized in 2015.

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In spite of the fact that Serra spent his life serving the less fortunate and protecting them from the exploitation and abuse of the Spanish, according to Thomas White’s opinion piece in the Washington Examiner, leftist “[a]ctivists see the Franciscan friar as an emblem of Spanish colonialism and thus a potent symbol of the sins of imperialism — the “Saint of Genocide.”

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