Apart from the Exorcist movie of 1973, exorcism is definitely
not a topic that any of us gives much thought to, but the link below provides a
look at my brush with the topic in 2014, when I lived in Flagstaff.
https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-ghost-of-father-karras.html
Believe it or not, the Vatican actually offers classes in
Satanism and exorcism, but it’s highly unusual to encounter either of them in
our normal lives.
That changed roughly 2 months ago.
Archbishop
Salvatore Cordileone has faced several challenges since he became archbishop of
San Francisco in 2012. They include a Supreme Court decision nullifying the
Defense of Marriage Act that he championed; his failure to extract loyalty
oaths on Catholic doctrine in hiring Catholic high school teachers; heavy
blowback on his views on homosexuality; and his opposition to restrictions on
Catholic worship he calls the work of "secular elites."
But his
latest battle is against Satan, who he calls "the evil one."
Cordileone performed the rite of
exorcism as a response to the removal of statues of Franciscan missionary
Junípero Serra at Golden Gate Park June 19, and later at Mission San Rafael,
north of San Francisco on Oct. 12.
When
the statues toppled, Cordileone sprang into action. Flanked by parishioners,
priests and nuns praying the rosary, he conducted exorcisms at both places.
The prelate
called the acts blasphemous and sacrilegious. He also demanded that the Marin
County district attorney press felony and hate crime charges against the Native
women who felled the statues. The district attorney filed felony vandalism but not hate
crime charges against five people: Melissa Aguilar, Mayorgi
Nadieska Delgadille, Victoria Eva Montano Pena, Moira Van de Walker and Andrew
Lester Mendle.
Cordileone,
the grandson of an immigrant Sicilian fisherman, received a doctorate in canon
law in Rome. He was ordained an auxiliary bishop of his native San Diego in
2002 and later appointed bishop of Oakland in 2009.
The
American Catholic hierarchy's support of the Serra canonization in 2015
provoked strong reactions from
Native Californians who said that Serra admitted to supervising whippings of
their people for minor offenses. They also charge him with founding a mission
system whose policies led to the deaths of 150,000 Natives from 1760 to 1834
though mass incarceration, disease and slave-like labor conditions.
Like Christopher Columbus, Father Junipero Serra is a controversial
figure to some members of our society. He is considered the founder of the
California missions.
Not everyone agrees that the exorcism was a good idea.
"The
exorcism was crazy and misleading," said Jesuit Fr. John Coleman, former Casassa professor of
social values at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, and associate pastor
at St. Ignatius Church in San Francisco. "Serra was not an evil man, but
he allowed a lot of bad things to happen, and this should be recognized."
A
retired priest who ask not to be identified for fear of retaliation from
conservative parishioners wrote in an email to NCR: "The recent
exploitation of the rites of exorcism at sites where statues of Serra have been
desecrated is consummately unwise. More wisdom can be gained from listening to
our Native American brothers and sisters for whom Serra is a stumbling block to
the church's credibility."
I was dismayed to read about the arson fire that severally
damaged the San Gabriel Mission in July, one day before it was scheduled to
reopen after an extensive renovation.
The only California mission that I have been inside of is Mission San Luis Rey, in Oceanside, California. It was founded by the Jesuits in 1798, and is the largest of the California missions. You can take a tour by clicking on the link below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FEXJAWJ7y0&t=18s
As a society, we’ve done a better job of acknowledging the injustices that that were inflicted on Native Americans, but the wrong way to compensate for those injustices is to damage of destroy the other parts of our history – and California missions should be on the top of that list.
It is ridiculous to claim that Mission San Luis Rey was founded by the Jesuits in 1798, if for no other reason than all Jesuits had been expelled from the Spanish territories in the New World in 1763 and (other than in Russia) the entire Jesuit Order had been suppressed worldwide by a Papal decree in 1773. The Jesuits would not be reconstituted until 1814, and returned to the Western Hemisphere about two years later. There were therefore no Jesuits anywhere in North America in 1798. All of the Alta California missions were founded by Franciscan friars, and San Luis Rey is no exception. It was the ninth mission founded Fermín Lasuén, who succeeded as head of the Franciscans in California upon Serra's death.
ReplyDeleteFermín de Francisco Lasuén de Arasqueta (Vitoria (Spain), 7 June 1736 – Mission de San Carlos (California), 26 June 1803) was a Basque[1] Franciscan missionary to Alta California president of the Franciscan missions there, and founder of nine of the twenty-one Spanish missions in California
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferm%C3%ADn_de_Lasu%C3%A9n
The Portuguese crown expelled the Jesuits in 1759, France made them illegal in 1764, and Spain and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies took other repressive action in 1767. Opponents of the Society of Jesus achieved their greatest success when they took their case to Rome. Although Pope Clement XIII refused to act against the Jesuits, his successor, Pope Clement XIV, issued a brief abolishing the order in 1773. The society’s corporate existence was maintained in Russia, where political circumstances—notably the opposition of Catherine II the Great—prevented the canonical execution of the suppression. The demand that the Jesuits take up their former work became so insistent that in 1814 Pope Pius VII reestablished the society.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.britannica.com/topic/Jesuits