The Hidden Legacy of the Missions : A Personal Tour Through Catholic California

POPE JOHN PAUL II was coming to California, and it was expected that the Pope would beatify Father Junipero Serra, a Spanish Franciscan priest of the 18th Century, the founder of the California missions, baptizer of Indians. The Vatican expectation had been that a beatifying gesture would please California.

This summer I decided, apart--but not entirely apart--from the shifting documentary evidence concerning the life of Father Serra, to visit the missions. I was not going looking for saints or for the villains of history. I was looking for shells. I was looking at the way California regards its historical monuments, the way memory survives.

There are 21 missions in California. I begin my pilgrimage at the airport in Orange County. The lady behind the Avis counter says my rental car is over there--”just beyond the John Wayne statue.” So in fact I begin my pilgrimage beneath a monumental fiction that is not perceived as controversial--I don’t think it’s even perceived as comic--and I drive away.

We are accustomed to thinking of California as the West. The Protestant myth of California was constructed by people who came here from the East; they were heading toward the setting sun. Historically, California is more profoundly North. The Spanish Franciscans did not, nor did the plated conquistadores, think of California as the West. Father Junipero Serra thought of California as the northern extension of a mission system connecting Mexico with the reign of Christ, the cross plunged deep into the heart of the southern American (RR) continent and thence, over the sea, to Europe, to Spain, to Rome. The missions were satellites of Christendom. The landscape of California was continuous with the landscape of Mexico. The sky a dome over all. And one could imaginatively navigate a return to civilization by the stars.

In the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Father Junipero Serra, lector of theology, native of Petra in the province of Majorca, is recorded as “swarthy, (with) dark eyes and hair, scant beard.” Father Serra didn’t discover California. Nor did Serra establish the sites of what later became California’s principal coastal cities and towns. Serra may be, however, the true father of California, because he imagined it whole.

In fourth-grade mythology, Serra is the great traveler of the state, staff in hand. He left a trail. In fact, the staff was a cane. Serra’s foot was infected, and it pained him to walk by the time he arrived in California. So much so that his travel here was on mules or by ship.

In fact, Serra covered a greater distance than did Marco Polo. Father Serra was a driven man.

Shaped by a medieval Catholicism, Serra dreamed of one world united by a single faith. He came here to convert the pagan. Whereas the Puritans in New England regarded Indians from a distance, Spanish priests lived in the midst of the Indians. Two impulses--one individualistic, the other communal--would meet in California. The Protestant came west, the Catholic came north.

The collision of cultures is played out in every dry creek I cross and on every freeway exit sign. Anglo names suggest ownership of land--Irvine, Bakersfield--fading contracts in strongboxes, and the force of pioneer personalities. Or else they are plain and descriptive of the way the land looked--Pleasant Hill, Riverbank. Most of the Spanish names are holy names.

The central mystery of the Catholic Church is the mystery of the Incarnation--God became man, the Word took on flesh and dwelt among us. The mystery of the Incarnation is celebrated in the Eucharist with the sacramental transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. The Spanish habit of sacramental conversion in California was directed as well toward the souls of Indians as to the naming of the land. The colonial ceremony of the unfurling of the flag was second, according to Spanish discipline, to the sacred duty of the planting of the cross. Time itself was incarnate, time was measured by a sacred liturgical calendar (in 1987 we still count time as distance from the event of the Incarnation); safe arrivals did not take place on a Tuesday or a Friday, but on the feast days of saints or church holy days. Thus place names became sacred names; thus the map of California mirrors the map of heaven, and California literally becomes a version of the multifoliate rose.

So many newcomers followed the Protestant trail west in the 19th Century hoping to forget, to begin again, to flee inevitability. Newcomers could be grateful that California held so few reminders of the past, and that those reminders seemed to implicate them not at all. The missions, for instance. And the holy names. Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula would become, in 200 years, L.A.

Though in 1987 the bells of the missions are as muffled as the mouths of corpses, living Californians--such was the genius of Spain--must yet compose a litany of sorts to get from one end of town to the other: Take the San Bernardino to the San Gabriel turnoff, for example.

The towheaded teen-agers at the Mobil station near La Jolla do not seem to know what I want when I ask for directions to Mission San Diego. But one of them thinks there is something like that over by the football stadium.

After a while it dawns on me that all I have to do in each city is look for the freeway exit for Mission Boulevard.

We are accustomed to speak of America as the Puritan country. We are, all of us, cultural Puritans by virtue of our American citizenship. We respect the individual right. Our national virtue is the Protestant virtue of tolerance. We drive separate cars. We look to the future.

But what if, in some comparable way, the Spanish who came to California in the 18th Century exert an influence on us as Californians two centuries later? We speak of the Puritan influence on New England. Is it possible that California is Catholic? To live here is to submit to the names, to the ruins of a Spanish adventure, to live among Spanish. To live here is to become, implicitly, a Catholic, culturally a Catholic. Is it possible that here in California, Protestant individuality meets a Catholic communalism? The future meets the past?

Mission Video. The San Diego Padres. Franciscan Hardware. Mission Valley. Mission Drive. Mission Drive-In. Mission High. Serramonte shopping center. Mission Mart. Taco Bell. Junipero Serra Freeway. Mission Auto Repair. Mission Inn. Mission Wedding Chapel (“WEDDINGS ANYTIME/ANYPLACE”). Mission Baptist Church.

What if, as the psychiatrist and the poet both know, what if the dead have their claim on us?

There is a parking lot, gravel, there is a bank of patulous cactus on which someone has carved his initials. The main door of the church is locked. “ENTER THROUGH GIFT SHOP”--on a placard in what print shops call Lombardic lettering. There is an old lady behind the counter, a volunteer. The admission is one dollar or two dollars. Brochures are free. There is a cat somewhere--asleep in a puddle of sun on a casement or preening himself in a doorway. The “tour” begins with the museum, objects that have fallen through time: Tightly woven baskets with the black tracery we recognize as characteristic of California Indians. Stone mortars. Then come the Spanish and the Mexican rooms: pictures of Spanish generals and governors, documents--usually deeds or letters. The missals and the vestments belonging to the mission priests; monstrances, candelabra. Shards of European crockery. Eyeglasses. Medicine bottles. Quills. Then the American room: The oils of itinerant painters, early photographs of the missions (19th-Century ruins, on the otherwise empty landscape). Photographs of the Irish priests and California civic leaders responsible for rebuilding the missions. Everywhere the smoke-darkened Mexican paintings of Spanish saints.

There is a cloister. There is a glistening Arabic garden. Oranges. Dates. Figs. Or there is a dusty compound bordered by cactus and geraniums, lizards and butterflies. The mission was not only a church, it was a living community. A village. Here a blacksmith shop, there soldiers were garrisoned. The kitchens--plastic chiles, festoons of garlic. There are the rooms where the padres taught the Indians the agriculture of Europe or the music of Europe or the mythology of Europe.

The church is usually empty. The church is dark and cool. There is a used quality to mission churches that seems friendly provided one is on easy terms with Catholic iconography. There are wooden saints--tragic dolls dressed in velvets and laces--imported from 18th-Century Mexico or from Spain. For the most part, missions feature no interior architectural details beyond beamed ceilings and high, recessed windows. They are, however, wonderfully gaudy. The wanted details are painted on the wall: pillars of marble, arches, niches, draperies, swags, balustrades, vines, clouds, shells, suns, stars, the eye of God. What strikes the eye of the beholder is a hybrid of imperfect European memory--the loosening of a rigid perspective--compensated by the exuberance of necessity. The result is delight, which resembles both hypocrisy and nostalgia but is neither.

There is a cemetery in back. The names of Spanish families are carved on middling stone obelisks, whereas a plain wooden tablet must stand for the hundreds of dead Indians “buried at this site.”

A sprinkler clicks the time. The tour circles back to the gift shop where there is pilgrim trash for sale: dashboard saints and glow-in-the-darks, miniature crates of California bubble-gum oranges. Mission place mats. At the counter the old lady has been relieved by two pretty teen-age girls in chiquita blouses who are talking

about their boyfriends.

Twenty-one times.

AT MISSION SANTA BARBARA I meet four Mexican women who say they are on their way north, on pilgrimage, stopping at each of the missions to pray. Outside the church a civic fiesta is in progress and rock music intrudes upon the quiet of the basilica. Tourists come shuffling through the church, their heads mechanically revolving, not talking, but not reverent either. They look bored. They see the Mexican ladies saying the Rosary, and at last there is something real to look at, so they stare.

Momma, what is thi - i-i-s ? One little phenomenon rings a rosy around the pedestal of the baptismal font at La Purisima Mission.

“That’s where they cooked their food,” answers Momma.

“PLEASE. “ “THIS IS THE HOUSE OF GOD. “ “PLEASE DRESS ACCORDINGLY. “ “SILENCE PLEASE. “

At Mission San Jose, in Fremont, a blond teen-age boy wanders down the center aisle of the church naked to the waist. “It’s hard praying at a church which is also a historical landmark,” says one woman with red hair and a Spanish surname; Santa Barbara mission is her parish church. Just the other day, at the consecration of the Mass, a tourist next to her started snapping pictures.

Sandy Teller is education coordinator at Mission San Juan Capistrano, and she tells me that her interest in the missions is purely “historical.” She is non-Catholic; she grew up in California “always loving the missions--but not for religious reasons.” I ask the docents at San Juan Capistrano why the tourists come.

“Swallows. They come to feed the birds.” (At the gift shop you can purchase pigeon feed for 25 cents.)

“They come to see the gardens.”

“They come for the history,” all agree.

The Australian tourist says, yes, he saw the historical marker on the freeway and thought he might as well take a look. A woman leading seven children says that she is here for the history lesson.

At a number of missions, the Franciscans have built big parish churches next door. The mission church becomes a kind of annex, a visitors’ parlor. The majority of Masses at San Juan Capistrano take place at the modern parish church. The tiny mission chapel is used less often. At the museum, there are Saturday bread-baking demonstrations and basket-making classes. There is a “living history” program. (A brochure explains: “Volunteers appear in period costume, ready to answer questions that visitors might ask, according to the era that they depict.”)

Mexico gained its independence from Spain in the 1820s. Shortly thereafter the Mexicans chose to “secularize” the missions. Theoretically, secularization was designed to return the land to the Indians. But, in fact, the land, supposedly held in trust for the Indians, got subdivided and ended up in the hands of wealthy Mexican families, the great rancheros of California. The Indians abandoned the missions. The churches and the cloisters fell to ruin. Which is how the Americans found them. In the early American decades, most newcomers paid the missions little heed. They were mounds of rubble. But as California became more settled, the missions became picturesque ruins, places for picnics. By the 1880s, California began to reclaim the old churches. There was a vogue for the “days of the Dons.” The past became an architectural conceit--Spanish Colonial. The past became a hobby--a palomino club for overweight businessmen. The past became a real-estate ploy to lend romance to a vacant land.

In 1884, Helen Hunt Jackson published “Ramona,” a sentimental romance about the twilight of Spanish California. “Ramona” has survived less in its intended kinship with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” than as a California “Gone With the Wind.” In Ramona, the old senora , the proud Spanish lady, defiantly plants crosses on the land so that the arriving gringos will see them and be unable to forget that the Catholic faith, a Spanish world, had preceded them.

The missions we see are reconstructions. Plaques on the wall pay appropriate thanks to Anglo-surnamed benefactors. California historical societies. Corporations. The grandchildren of pioneers who were born or married or buried at this or that mission.

In 1952, the Native Daughters of the Golden West, a non-denominational sorority of California women, began rebuilding tiny Soledad mission in the Salinas Valley. The group has a record of supporting the reconstruction of the missions and promoting the reputation of Father Serra. “Our interest is historical only,” says Kay Kelly, the organization’s executive secretary. “I would be as interested in helping to preserve a log cabin.”

Once Soledad mission was restored, a group of the town’s citizens took on the job of maintaining the mission. Margaret Jacobsen belongs to this committee, and she speaks of Soledad mission with pride. She says her interest is “purely historical.” The mission is the focus of civic cooperation. “A friend on the restoration committee has a friend who knows someone. . . .” For example, “Soil Serv sends out a man to spray the weeds for us.”

All of this is to say nothing of Our Lady of Solitude, in whose honor the mission has been named. The tragic effigy of Nuestra Senora de la Soledad stands over the altar, dressed in the black of a Spanish widow. Bereft, uncompensated, a prisoner of time in her arid little chapel--she is Europe, the prisoner in the tower. She is Eleanor of Aquitaine; she is Mary Queen of Scots. One imagines her pacing. Can it really be an accident, I ask myself, that Soledad state prison was built within the patronage of this tragic queen?

Everyone told me I would like La Purisima Mission best. You can really feel what it was like, they said. The state of California acquired the property in the 1930s. A few discreet miles from Lompoc, visitors find La Purisima alone on its landscape. The parking lot is hidden behind trees and thickets of scrub, and at a field’s distance from the compound. Perhaps I was expecting too much from history; La Purisima reminds me of nothing so much as one of those Orthodox churches that the Soviet government ridicules by making of them shrines to history. La Purisima is Sutter’s Fort and Williamsburg and worse.

You can imagine the solitude, you can imagine the hardness of the life, you can appreciate the historical achievement of the missions. But the state’s insistence that here are matters of fact is depressing, the triumph of history. The rooms are cold. These aren’t the rooms anything happened in, except perhaps the squabbles of decorators hired to arrange typical or authentic artifacts to suggest that the community living here has been forewarned of our arrival, has made the beds, dropped whatever they were doing and walked over the hill out of sight. In the chapel there is a recorded authentic chant sounding over and over. The church is no longer a church, that is the worst of it--no sanctuary lamp burns at La Purisima.

What I like best at La Purisima are the gardens, real life-sustaining gardens, fruits and vegetables and herbs. There are swallows and big red ants and the sound of the wind in an ancient tree. A Spanish-speaking family is making an interested tour of the kitchen garden. Young fingers pluck herbaceous leaves then hold them up to Granny, Abuelita , who nibbles with the full force of her bony cheeks to tell them what.

By the time I have traveled to about half of the missions, I am growing impatient with the tourists. My favorite missions, I think, are those that are nearly empty. I end up lighting more candles than I expected. I end up dipping my fingers into the holy water and ostentatiously signing myself with the cross.

From the graveyard of Mission Santa Ines I can see the town of Solvang, founded in the 19th Century by Danish farmers and now a skyline of storks’ nests and TV antennas, and windmills, Danish bakeries and Hans Christian Andersen motels. Yet, a few minutes later, driving through Solvang, it occurs to me that the mission priests would be much more patient with the tourists than I am able to be. It was the wisdom of Catholic Spain to insist upon memory. A tiny adobe mission was created in order to remember, as clearly as possible, a faraway Spanish church. The Spanish came to California to connect the future with the past. The Spanish insisted that the past was still durable. Which is what, in a way, the tourists also acknowledge.

They come in cars. In vans. They shop the gift shop for mementos. Near King City, at San Antonio Mission, Betty in the gift shop says that very often non-Catholics come in and buy something for their Catholic friends back home, just to be taking something away with them. An old couple in the gardens of San Antonio says they come every year to have their picture taken here; they have been coming for 20 years. People come because memory is here. People drop coins in the fountain just to be leaving something. They write their names in the guest book by the door, and they are thus remembered. In the side chapel at Santa Barbara there is a visitors’ book that invites petitions. “Pray for my family,” writes one stranger. Below in a childish hand: “Please pray for me and my brother.”

The nice lady who works in the gift shop at Soledad mission sits out by the Coke machine on the patio. She shows me some rosebushes she has planted on the side of the church. She herself is non-Catholic.

There is a cheerful party of archeology students from UCLA working over by the parking lot--dusting with big brushes the broken shapes they hold between thumb and middle finger as wasps malevolently preen themselves on the watery surfaces of sluicing trays. Rock music rises from a portable radio.

“There’s nothing out there anymore,” the lady who works in the gift shop tells me, fanning the air with her fly swatter. “Every year the students come out to do their digging, and now there’s no more past to discover.”

“LOOK AT THE COLORS,” Elizabeth Blake says. She is considering brown paint in a jar. Franciscan brown. Indian brown. She is a woman in her 50s, an anthropologist, an artist; she is spending the year “in service to the church.” The pastor of Mission San Luis Rey, in Oceanside, has granted her permission to repaint the faded walls. Today, on a Tuesday morning, she is painting a lower portion of the wall--where generations of children have run their fingers; where the plaster is scuffed or chipped.

Elizabeth Blake has spent a lot of time thinking about the Indians who first painted this church. She doesn’t buy the idea that the Indians were mere victims of the Spaniards. “As an anthropologist I know that cultures die hard.” In the face of the foreign isn’t it possible to be curious? She imagines the Indians curious. Didn’t the Indians mark the spectacle of the Spanish on the horizon--the shining surfaces, the clanks of metal, the carts, the gear, the jingling bits--as curious? Didn’t the Indians draw near?

Elizabeth Blake says the best time for her is early morning, when the doors are still locked and she can hear the sprinklers outside. “There is a special aura in old places of worship.” By and by, the tourists come to watch her paint. They come with their questions about history. Which is the Indian part? She cannot say. The missions don’t belong to any one culture. “Look at that dome. There’s nothing like it in any other mission. You know, it’s not even Spanish. It’s Arabic in design.”

It is at least a historical irony that in California there should be an Arabic dome on a Spanish mission named to the honor of San Luis Rey, a French monarch who led a crusade against the infidel in a far country.

Medieval Spain was just such a tangle of ironies. Spain was the meeting place of bloodlines and blood feuds in the names of God. Africa and the Middle East met Europe in Spain. For centuries Arabs ruled Spain even while Spanish Christians dreamed of cleansing the landscape of the Moor--and of the Jew as well. By the late 15th Century, Christian Spain thought it had expelled the Jew and pushed off the Arab. But by then Spain had changed its blood, changed its complexion and, indeed, had turned a corridor of thought: The Spanish preoccupation with the foreigner left the Spanish, alone of all Europeans, internationalists; they imagined a central place for themselves in a larger world. In 1492, shortly after Spain had applied a dreadful emetic to what was perceived as intolerably foreign within itself, Spain set out to convert the world and to plunder.

Hundreds of years later--the breadth of an ocean, the height of a tree--a Spanish priest in California instructed an Indian, whether in harsh or in yielding tones we know not, to paint decorations on the wall of San Buenaventura Mission (in Ventura) that are unmistakably Moorish.

At San Luis Rey, Elizabeth Blake introduces brown into the channel between two black lines of the dado. She tells me that the other day a Mexican was working up in the Arabic dome. “He said he left his initials up there.” She herself resists a temptation to memorialize herself. “I’ve made my offering. . . . I want to be as much of a nonentity as the Indians who first painted this place.”

Even in ways the Spanish would not have imagined, the embellished line persists through time, curving and flowing, embracing, drawing together Africa and what we now call California.

Elizabeth Blake’s year at San Luis Rey will soon be coming to an end. Already the walls she painted a few months ago need touching up. Just last week she found a replacement for herself--a woman of the parish will carry on the job. “Now, I will be able to leave.”

There is roadwork on the freeway near Oceanside. I get lost looking for the San Bernardino Freeway, so I arrive at San Gabriel Mission at closing time and have to talk a priest into letting me into the darkened church “for a look.” The priest may well be suspicious, but he graciously waits as I look at the ceiling, at the altar--”wonderful light,” I whisper to him. “There,” he says, leading me out, “you’ve seen it.”

The point is never in the unique detail, though the missions are different in size and in grandeur. The point is their linkage, one with another, throughout Latin America, in memory of Spain. On California’s Protestant horizon, the missions offer the odd reminder that time past implicates us, that our generation is implicated in the lives of generations preceding us. That we are not alone.

At Santa Barbara mission I want to see the archives. I introduce myself as a journalist. Father Virgilio Biasiol, the director of the archive library, takes my hand but he is not friendly. “I do not like journalists, I have to tell you that.” Because all summer, journalists have phoned to ask about Father Serra, because Father Biasiol had been misquoted.

“You come in here and you want me to make history easy for you.” He points to a shelf behind me. “Look at those books. They are all books written about Father Serra’s life. Do you expect me to tell you what is inside?”

Journalists! “You come up here from Los Angeles for 30 minutes, you take out your pen, and you say that you want to know about the past. If you really want to know, then study.”

I have not come to ask about Serra. I have come to look at these archives.

I flatter. “How extraordinary your job is. You are the guardian of California’s memory of itself.”

The old man turns away from my voice. What do I want from him? Why have I come? What is there to tell me of his work or his life? He had been asked by his superiors to come here to Santa Barbara, to work in the archives. “That is why I am here.” He mentions the names of the men who had preceded him to this job. (He is merely carrying on the line.)

What else do I want to hear? He was born in Italy, in a house older than any of these California missions. What is 200 years?

There is nothing interested in his voice: “All the important state documents, dating from before the American takeover, are here, not in Sacramento.” So the scholars come to study. And Californians come to look up their ancestors.

He looks at his watch. He has to be at the bank by 3 o’clock. “I’m sorry not to be able to tell you more.”

“Let me give you a tour,” he says to get me moving. Letters here. Baptismal records (on computer sheets)--Indians baptized throughout the California missions. Marriages. First Holy Communions. Then he points to the shelves of books--small books, dark leather. “These books belonged to the missionaries, the books they brought with them from Spain and from Mexico.”

Spanish dictionaries, histories, Latin hymnals, books on architecture, agriculture. These were Europe. Seeds. I think of the men who carried books with them so many miles.

Father Biasiol pushes me forward. “I am so sorry there isn’t more time, Mr. Rodriguez.”

SAN ANTONIO DE PALA is not one of the 21 missions. It is a sub-mission, the only sub-mission remaining. Founded in 1815, in the village of Pala (about 25 miles inland from Oceanside), San Antonio still serves the Indian tribe for which it was built. There is a gift shop; I am the only tourist. There are a couple of kids playing in the schoolyard. The chapel is dark, an old woman sits in the front pew. Here the scent of the missions is redoubled--a smell of the absence of light, a cellar smell. Outside the chapel is a small legend recording how, in 1903, after a priest had whitewashed the interior walls, the Indians repainted the original decorations from memory.

The Indians have gone from the other missions--fled, or the tribes died out. There are only the plaques indicating the mass burial sites. European diseases spread among the natives, killing thousands. And who knows how many died of broken hearts, stunned by a contaminated world they no longer understood.

Only a few miles from San Antonio de Pala, on Interstate 15, heading north, three lanes narrow to a single lane of passage. A young officer of the U.S. Border Patrol holds his hand up to stop me--he peers through the window to study my face for a minute, my Indian face; he is looking for illegals--then, perhaps because I am driving an Avis car, he waves me on.

Though California is considered to have been firmly settled from the east, the north-south movement has not subsided. The story of the Indian is the story of the future as much as it is the story of the past. It is the story of two hemispheres united by an Indian face--the face of Alaska and the face of Peru.

Near King City on a talk-radio station, an American Indian activist is accusing Father Junipero Serra of “cultural genocide.” On another station Lt. Col. Oliver L. North is testifying before a congressional committee. His subject, his controversy, is memory. By week’s end, North will be a national hero. By August, the Vatican will be governed by latent discretion and decide, in the absence of popular acclamation, to postpone proceedings to beatify Father Serra.

Advocates of Father Serra do not necessarily deny what his accusers say. Defenders, however, speak of “historical context.” If Father Serra was paternalistic, if Father Serra inflicted punishment on the Indians, consider the times, they say. Franciscan priests were ordained to a militaristic Christianity. Physical punishment was, moreover, not simply meant as punishment but as discipline for the soul. The soul is embedded in flesh. The soul’s only approach is corporeal.

The story survives of Serra preaching to the Indians. And as he spoke, Father Serra beat upon his chest with a rock. What must the Indians have made of this Spaniard, preaching to them in Latin, preaching of a loving God even as he bloodied his flesh?

Outside the rectory of Santa Ines mission there is a sign, no better and no worse than many another such sign: “THE INDIANS HAD TO COME TO THE MISSIONS OF THEIR OWN FREE CHOICE. THEY CAME, TOO, BECAUSE IT WAS A BETTER LIFE THAN THEY HAD EVER KNOWN. “ The complacency of the formulation leaves one uneasy on the site of historical ambiguities. But as I visit mission after mission, it occurs to me that what the Spanish brought to California was not rationality so much as the full heart. The Spanish priests imported astonishing images of Spanish piety. Cherubs with eyes rolled back in ecstasy; the Virgin parting her velvet cloak to disclose a sugar-pink heart pierced by five swords. Christ hangs bloodied on the cross, or Christ wears the red cape of martyrdom, a nest of thorns on his head, his glass eyes fathomless in pain.

The easy European version of history is that the European brought enlightenment to the New World. But consider these statues.

The renowned Indian civilizations, the Aztecs and the Incas, had grown decadent by the 15th Century. But Indian civilizations were great, rational societies, governed by straight lines, symmetrical in agriculture as in the raising of temples to quizzical gods. The Spanish came in handfuls and they overtook the stone cities. Could it have been because the Indians were too rational to comprehend the Spanish purpose?

In California there were no pyramids; the Indians were nomadic. But in California, the Indians reasoned nature. The lakes were full, the sky was full, the trees were full, the shrubs were full. The Indians moved often, taking each season’s rewards. How could such pacific tribes not have been fascinated by the passionate travelers from across the world?

Several people suggested that I call Father Michael Galvan, one of two Indian priests in California. On the phone Father Galvan tells me that his Ohlone Indian ancestors were converted to Catholicism at Mission San Jose.

Father Galvan says he will meet me. But he refuses my invitation to come to Mission San Jose to talk. “It’s all fake, you know, a reconstruction.” We agree to meet at his office in Oakland.

He is 36 years old. He could be my cousin. We are of the same height, same color. He is polite but makes a show of being besieged by reporters--”Everyone wants to talk about Father Serra.”

Father Galvan claims no interest in the Serra debate. “In no way did the image or the name or the life of Father Serra touch me or my family.” And yet, of course, our subject is the Indian--ourselves as Roman Catholics. He is, on the one hand, “grateful that the mission priests shared their faith with my ancestors.” But he is also blunt in his criticism of the way the mission priests converted the Indians--”preaching down to them,” ignoring native culture, languages, myth. It was, he says, a case of “cultural imperialism,” and Father Galvan reminds me that in 1983 the Pope’s legate apologized to American Indian tribes for the mistakes of the past.

Father Galvan sees the European phase of the church coming to an end. “For 2,000 years the church had moved from Jerusalem to Europe.” Now the church is finding a new heart in Latin America. “By the end of this century more than half of the world’s Catholics will be brown.”

“You mean Spanish-speaking?”

“ Brown ,” he replies. “The world church will be brown. Indian.”

In all of the mission churches, amid the gallery of Spanish saints, you will find the Indian Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, a flat image, never a statue.

The Virgin astride a half-moon, gowned in rose-pink, with a mantel of blue, obscures the cactus-like rays of the sun. Anyone who has lived in California will recognize the Guadalupe--a decal on a taxicab window; a tattoo on a teen-ager’s arm; a mural on the side of a Mexican market. Mexicans believe that she belongs to them, but in fact she reflects the devotion of a hemisphere.

In the 16th Century, when the Indians of New Spain were demoralized by the invasion of Europe, when death was abroad and the sky was dark before a December dawn, the Virgin Mary appeared on a cloud of bird song to an Indian peasant named Juan Diego. She spoke an Indian dialect. She was dressed in the robes of an Aztec princess. She was brown.

The miraculous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe survives in the basilica of Mexico City as the prophetic image of the changing complexion of the Church. In faraway Mission San Juan Bautista, near Hollister, her image is surrounded by votive candles. People leave notes of petition and of thanks to her, as to a trusted relation.

There is no Sunday Mass at Mission San Jose. Sunday Mass is next door at St. Joseph’s--a large, makeshift church--where a discreetly punk blond priest who looks like a lifeguard challenges his suburban congregation to take their faith seriously. Religion, he reminds them, is a mortal thing. “If you want to see dead churches, go to Europe.”

Ninety minutes away by freeway, there is Mission San Rafael Arcangel, in Marin County. The new church on the hill is for the gringo Mass. In the smaller, reconstructed mission church the Mass is in Spanish. The celebrant is a priest from San Salvador. His sermon is about Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, who was assassinated by terrorists while he was saying Mass in 1980. The priest in Marin County describes the murder for his congregation--he was there, on the altar, in San Salvador that day. He was one who rushed to the archbishop’s side. He was one who held the archbishop as he died.

I am sitting in a room full of Mexicans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans--I don’t know what. Indians. Most are poor; you can tell. We might be sitting in the 18th Century, though outside there are Versateler machines, Sunday papers, department stores and Marin County restaurants serving blueberry waffles to a public in shorts. According to the Western version of history--where time can be spliced, where gold is discovered, you can lose weight, give up drinking, become a movie star--in the Western, the Protestant version of history, we of this room are the remnant. Victims in a monument.

Seen from the Southern perspective, the Catholic, we are at the edge of time. We are not tragic figments within the guilty memory of a liberal European--he the actor, we the passive victims. We have endured. We have done more than endure; we have found our way north, over land, to a mission chapel in San Rafael, California, created by accidents and by tragedies, by ambition and holiness, by Jews, by Arabs, by Spanish priests, by Irish pastors, and by gringo nostalgia. A mission created by the missions. The past meets the future. The Indians stand to proclaim the creed.