Are missionaries missionaries, part 2. The Atlantic:

From 1769 until his death in 1784, Serra was the head of the missions in the northern portion of California, helping to establish nine communities where natives lived under the supervision of priests in a life of prayer and work. “One of their major goals was to assimilate the native peoples and eventually make them productive peoples of the Spanish empire,” said Senkewicz. “The mission was to contribute to that assimilation in two ways: by making the native people Catholic, and by teaching them European-style agriculture.”

All of which applies a lot of assumptions – that the Spanish got to make California (and Mexico and all points south) part of the Spanish empire; that they got to come in and take over; that they were the bosses of the native peoples; that the native peoples were there for their convenience; that they were entitled to shape the native peoples to make them more useful to themselves, the interlopers.

Historians have found that this wasn’t a net gain for the native peoples, at least in terms of numbers – more died than were born. Also, they lost a lot of freedom.

“With the missions came terrible diseases and population decline in two ways: elevated mortality … and a reduction in fertility among women because of STDs, most likely, and poor health in general,” said Steven Hackel, a professor of history at the University of California, Riverside, and the author ofJunípero Serra: California’s Founding Father. There were cultural effects, too, he said: Living year-round in the missions was a big adjustment from the tribes’ normal custom of moving periodically around the countryside. Once Indians were baptized, they were expected to live a Catholic lifestyle, including going to mass, not having pre-marital sex, and marrying the spouses chosen for them by the priests.

Not to mention working in the fields all day.

In the six decades following Serra’s arrival in northern California, more than 80,000 Indians were baptized, Hackel said. But “they were not driven into missions by soldiers on horseback with guns or lances into the arms of waiting Franciscans, who then baptized them.” It was more that the missions represented a way to survive. “California Indians were under terrible pressure to find a new lifestyle,” he said. “Spain essentially colonized the region, bringing in plants and animals and horses and sheep and goats and pigs that really wreaked havoc on the countryside and made Indian lifestyles simply unmanageable.” The priests offered food and stability; Catholic life was the price of entry.

It always is, isn’t it. The priests offered a roof and a bare minimum of bad food to the children they imprisoned in industrial “schools,” but the price of forced entry was abuse and cruelty and even slave-work in rosary bead factories. The priests offered a roof and a bare minimum of bad food to the women they imprisoned in laundries, but the price of forced entry was slavery, sometimes for the rest of their lives.

That’s not the only way to perform altruism, we now know. Look at MSF – they don’t make people convert to anything before giving them medical assistance. The better organizations help people because they need help, and that’s the end of it – they don’t pay themselves back by enslaving the people they help.

“What’s missing in a lot of this stuff is that it’s no accident that the pope who’s canonizing Serra and the major supporter of that canonization in the American bishops, [Archbishop José Gomez of L.A.], were both born in Latin America,” said Senkewicz. There, “missions were regarded as places which genuinely did protect native peoples from brutal exploitation by conquistadors, who pressed native peoples to work to death on sugar plantations in the Caribbean, who forced them to work in the silver mines in Mexico and Bolivia.”

Ok, but again, they could have just protected native peoples from brutal exploitation by conquistadors without charging a price.

Throughout his papacy, Francis has encouraged evangelization. This was a major topic of his first big apostolic letter, Evangelii Gaudium, in which he writes whole sections about the joy of proclaiming the gospel. Even though Catholics’ approach to mission work today is arguably different than it was in the past, there’s still an awkward truth in its premise: the Church, and Pope Francis, believe Christianity holds the definitive truth about existence and salvation.

Yes, and they’re wrong. However well-meaning they are, they’re wrong.