True to the teachings of St. Francis of Assisi, his religious order of the Franciscans thrived for centuries because of their devotion to poverty, chastity, the Great Commission, and agape love. The Franciscans who joined the Spanish on the conquest and colonization of America constantly worked to ameliorate the lust and violence of the soldiers. To achieve this objective involved, in part, the establishment of missions throughout South, Central, and North America. In Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict lauded the Franciscans and other missionaries who brought God’s love to others, serving Him by serving people who had never experienced the intense sacrificial love of Christ and His servants.
Thousands of Franciscans, like the Dominicans and Jesuits, crossed the Atlantic to minister to the people of the New World between Columbus’ second voyage to America in 1493 and the end of the frontier in North America in the late 1800s. Catholic and Protestant missionaries competed, but the Franciscans’ success in missionary work far exceeded what the Baptists, Methodists, Anglicans, and other Protestants could accomplish. The reason for the success of Catholic missionaries was the self-sacrificing love they had for the native inhabitants and colonists of the Spanish, French, and English empires.
In the 21st century, this love has been often forgotten in the shrill voices of condemnation of Christians in America. But to examine the history of Roman Catholic missionaries (as I have during the past years, with the product of my research being American Catholics: An Encyclopedic History [Bloomsbury, 2026]) is to discover their astonishing commitment to live among the Indians, teaching them Christianity as well as farming and handicrafts, and to die among them, often in the protection of their inherent rights.
The examples of Franciscan missionary work among the native Americans are many, beginning with Columbus, who was heavily influenced by St. Francis of Assisi. There is circumstantial evidence that Columbus was a third order Franciscan; his son Ferdinand wrote of his father’s intense love and devotion for Christ and the Virgin. On his second voyage to America in 1493, Columbus had two Franciscans on board, Juan de la Deule and Juan de Tosin. These Franciscans were able to spread their enthusiasm to the Franciscans of Europe so that with each voyage more missionaries arrived to teach and convert the natives and fight against the increasing aggressiveness of the Spanish soldiers.
From this beginning, the work of the Franciscans spread rapidly throughout America. Of note in the early years after the conquest of Mexico were the twelve Franciscan apostles of Mexico, led by Spaniard Martín de Valencia. The twelve were barefoot apostles in brown robes who moved among the Indians, building monasteries and schools. Fray Valencia was a contemplative man given to intense prayer. He once dreamed:
He saw himself on the sea in a boat without oars, and there were great waves, and the boat was about to be swamped, which frightened him greatly, but seeing himself thus in agony, it was told to him in spirit that the sea is the world, and to leave from the cloister and enter into it is to launch oneself in a boat without oars into the dangerous sea, where the boat is easily swamped.
He responded to this divine message by leaving the cloister for the work among the poor and ignorant.
Another of the twelve was Fray Motolinia, who wrote a History of the Indians of New Spain. He was an outstanding advocate of the rights of the Indians, protecting them from violence, and learning their language and ways. He changed their lives so much that, he claimed, the Mexican Indians used the year 1524, the year the Franciscans arrived, to reckon time.
Fray Andrés de Olmos, like so many of the Franciscans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, became a frontier missionary, going to the remote villages of the Mexican region of Tamaulipas, risking his life and health to bring the Great Commission to the natives. Historian Jerónimo de Mendieta wrote of this “friar who learned the Christian doctrine in ten different languages, and preached the holy Catholic faith in each of them, passing through different regions and teaching there.”
At the end of the seventeenth century into the eighteenth, the Franciscans moved further north, into what are today the regions north of the Rio Grande. One of the most forbidding environments into which the Franciscans brought the Good News was the Gulf Coast of Texas, a region inhabited by dozens of indigenous tribes who lived lives of poverty and desperation.
Notable was Franciscan missionary Damián Massanet. In 1690, Fray Massanet journeyed to eastern Texas to minister to the Tejas Indians. He dedicated his missionary work to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Approaching the Tejas village, Massanet and companions were “carrying our staffs, which bore a holy crucifix, and singing the Litany of Our Lady” and carrying “in front a picture on linen of the Blessed Virgin. […] On the feast of Corpus Christi mass was sung, and before mass we had a procession with the holy sacrament exposed, a large concourse of Indians being assembled, for we had notified them the day before.” The Franciscans built a mission church to instruct the impoverished Indians.
At the same time, the Franciscans were building missions along the Pacific coast from Baja to Alta California. One of the most industrious, self-sacrificing of the Franciscans was Fray Junipero Serra, who arrived in Mexico in 1749. He served in central Mexico and, for a time, in one of the outlying missions, San Saba, in Texas. He then journeyed to California as superior to the Franciscans to live the remainder of his life in service.
One of the characteristics of Fray Serra that critics of the Catholic missionaries in America fail to understand is that he and the Franciscans lived in utter privation, traveling everywhere barefoot, going into desolate regions often without protection, going from Indian village to village not thinking of their own suffering but only that of others. Fray Serra was a remarkable man who founded dozens of missions in California before his worthy life ended in 1784.
Catholic missionaries were so devoted to their charges, the Indian tribes of North America, that they frequently died for their sake. Franciscans worked closely with Samuel de Champlain while he was laying the foundations for New France. Fathers Joseph Le Caron, Gabriel Sagard, and Nicholas Viel served the Huron peoples of the region of the Great Lakes, living with, teaching, suffering with them, often dying at their hands. Fr. Sagard wrote that his aim was to:
Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. […] This is the commandment which God gave to His Apostles, and after them to persons of Apostolic functions, to carry the gospel throughout the world in order to expel idolatry, civilize the barbarous manners of the Gentiles, and erect trophies of the victories of the Cross through the gospel and the preaching of His sacred name.
Caron, Sagard, and Viel ministered to the Hurons out of a small hut that they called their chapel. They lived completely with the people, embracing their customs consistent with Catholicism, and learning their language. On one journey to Quebec by means of a birch bark canoe, Hurons disgusted with the missionaries’ pretentions pushed Fray Viel into the white water of the St. Lawrence at Recollect Rapids. He was the first Canadian martyr.
Such was the story of the Franciscans in the New World—men whose goals were not conquest and wealth, but to bring the love of Christ to people who would not otherwise have the solace of Christianity to assuage their sufferings.
Editor’s Note: This article is part of a CE original series on the History of Love, pursuing the meaning of love and our understanding of it throughout time.
Photo by Chris Kofoed on Unsplash
