Illustration of protesters pulling down a statue of St. Junípero Serra, whose missions helped shape cities including San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Clara and Ventura. The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), an atheist group, attacked President Trump this week for praising St. Junípero Serra in his All Saints’ Day message. Serra is the Catholic saint whose statue at the California State Capitol protesters tore down in 2020 and Gov. Gavin Newsom replaced by signing a 2021 law.Serra founded the first nine of California’s 21 Spanish missions between 1769 and 1782. They stand in what are now San Diego, Carmel, the area near Jolon, San Gabriel, San Luis Obispo, San Francisco, San Juan Capistrano, Santa Clara and Ventura. In 1931, California chose Serra as one of two figures to represent the state in National Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol, where his statue has stood ever since. Pope Francis canonized him in Washington, D.C., in 2015.In his Nov. 1 message, Trump pointed to San Francisco and Santa Monica as examples of American cities named for saints. “In the United States, we especially honor Saint Junípero Serra, who carried the Christian faith through the missions of California,” he wrote. Trump also honored St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, St. Katharine Drexel and St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, the Italian-born nun who established schools, orphanages and hospitals. “Death does not have the final word,” Trump wrote.In a statement on its website, FFRF accused Trump of turning his All Saints’ Day message and his Oct. 31 Reformation Day message into Christian sermons. It called his praise for Serra particularly troubling, citing forced conversion and forced labor of Indigenous peoples at California’s missions. FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor said Trump’s constitutional duty is to represent all Americans. The group also argued that the messages ignore Americans who are not Christian, including the roughly three in 10 adults with no religious affiliation. Native American activists also accuse Serra of mistreating the Indigenous people the missions converted.On the night of July 4, 2020, a crowd tore down the Serra statue in Sacramento’s Capitol Park, where it had stood since 1967. One man used an aerosol spray and a flame to scorch the statue’s face. The crowd pulled it from its base with tow straps, then struck it with a sledgehammer. The California Highway Patrol investigated the toppling as vandalism. Bishop Jaime Soto of the Diocese of Sacramento said the next day that the “act of vandalism does little to build the future.”FFRF’s charge against Serra repeats the findings California Democrats wrote into state law after the Sacramento statue came down. Assemblyman James Ramos (D-Highland) wrote Assembly Bill 338, which repealed the state’s requirement for a Serra monument on the State Capitol grounds and authorized Sacramento-area tribes to build a monument to Native Americans in its place. The bill states, “Enslavement of both adults and children, mutilation, genocide, and assault on women were all part of the mission period initiated and overseen by Father Serra.” The Assembly passed the bill 66-2, and the Senate passed it 28-2.Newsom signed it on Sept. 24, 2021, calling it “long overdue legislation.” The same day, he signed Assembly Bill 855, also written by Ramos, which replaced Columbus Day with Native American Day as a state judicial holiday. A statue of Miwok leader William J. Franklin Sr. was unveiled on Serra’s former site on Nov. 7, 2023.The Sacramento toppling followed two others. Crowds pulled down Serra statues in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park on June 19, 2020, and in Los Angeles on June 20. San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone held a prayer service at the base of the toppled San Francisco statue on June 27 and said, “Evil has made itself present here.”In October 2021, weeks after Newsom signed the law, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti removed Serra’s name from Father Serra Park, where the Los Angeles statue had stood. The park is now called La Plaza Park. “Los Angeles is a city of belonging that takes responsibility for the mistakes we’ve made in the past,” Garcetti said.In Ventura, the City Council voted 6-0 in July 2020 to remove a bronze Serra statue from outside City Hall. The statue sat in storage until 2024, when it was installed at Mission San Buenaventura. “We welcome back home the bronze image of St. Junípero Serra,” the mission’s pastor, Father Tom Elewaut, said in February 2024.The effort to replace Serra’s statue at the U.S. Capitol began in 2015, months before his canonization. State Sen. Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens) introduced Senate Joint Resolution 4, which would have replaced Serra’s statue in Statuary Hall with one of astronaut Sally Ride. Lara’s office said the Serra statue would be moved to a place in California where visitors could “be reminded of his significant historical impact upon our state.” The state Senate passed it 22-10 on April 13, 2015, over objections from the California Catholic Conference, which called Serra a founding father of the state. On July 2, 2015, Lara postponed the effort until after Pope Francis’s visit. Republican Sen. Patricia Bates and Assemblyman Bill Brough said that “debating such a bill just before the Pope’s visit would have conveyed a terrible message to him.”Trump closed his All Saints’ Day message with the hope that the lives of the saints would “renew our gratitude for our Nation’s spiritual inheritance.”The post Trump Honors the Catholic Saint Whose Statue Newsom Replaced After Protesters Tore It Down appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.