California Missions

Last summer, I was fortunate enough to travel to Austria and visit Mauthousen, a concentration camp that my grandfather helped liberate during the Second World War. That experience contributed infinitely to my understanding of history and the terror that the Mauthousen prisoners endured. I found the expedition to Mission San Luis Rey de Francia equally interesting and enlightening in its own way. While the WWII concentration camp’s horrors were well documented and profusely displayed, the mission’s most revealing qualities were revealed in the opposite manor. Most of the evil deeds of the mission system were omitted, allowing the public to assume the best of the padres. The concentration camp’s historical approach to the material was one of a horrible education that might lead to future peace; the mission’s approach was one of falsehoods and of a utopian institution conducting necessary reforms. The modern Catholic system of power has led to many hidden horrors and tweake...