Pope Celebrates Mass in Honor of Controversial Missionary

Pope Francis celebrated Mass in Rome on Saturday in honor of an 18th-century Franciscan missionary who established a series of Catholic missions along the Pacific coast of what is now the U.S. state of California. The pope described Father Junipero Serra, a Spaniard who died in 1784, as part of a missionary corps that “went out to all the geographical, social and existential peripheries” to spread the faith among Native Americans. Francis is expected to canonize Serra — that is,...

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