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The saints

St. Junípero Serra

A professor from Mallorca who limped up the California coast founding missions.

Feast: 1 July (feast on the U.S. calendar) · 1713 to 1784 · Reformation and missions · Mallorca, Mexico and California

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Portrait of St. Junípero Serra in a brown Franciscan habit and hood.

Detroit Publishing Company, 1913. Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.

Home / The saints / St. Junípero Serra

San Diego, 1769

Junípero was a Franciscan professor of philosophy on the island of Mallorca.1

He left it all at thirty-six to be a missionary in Mexico.1

In his fifties, with a painfully injured leg, he founded the first of nine missions in California.

Patron of the California missions1

01St. Junípero Serra

The missions

The missions became the roots of many California cities.1

His record with Native peoples is debated today, and the Church canonized him in 2015 for his heroic faith and missionary zeal.1

Live it this week

Keep walking on a bad leg

Serra kept going in pain. This week, do the good thing you’ve been excusing yourself from because you’re tired or hurting, and offer the effort to God.

Notes

How we know · 1 source for this page
  1. Franciscan Media, Saint of the Day: “Saint Junipero Serra”. franciscanmedia.org. franciscanmedia.org

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) is in the public domain; we quote the New Advent edition. Texts of the Holy See are quoted briefly from vatican.va. Scripture: World English Bible, Catholic edition (public domain); Verse numbers are modern, with Douay-Rheims numbers in brackets where they differ. Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, credited under each image; full list on the photo credits page.

Lines in the narrator’s voice, without a note, are our reflection, not a historical claim. Stone & Incense restates Church teaching in plain words; our wording is not an official Church text. Report an errorCorrections.