A sad story behind the missions in Baja

San Ignacio, with its luscious groves of date palms, has the most magnificent mission church in all of Baja.

The mission church in San Ignacio.

Of the thirty missions founded between 1697 and 1834, only six remain in good condition.  The ruins and the remaining churches seem to paint a romantic picture of church bells, palms, and industrious converts tilling the fields.  Indeed, that fanciful image can be found on many glossy brochures about Baja.  But the truth is something else.

The original inhabitants of Baja were hunter-gathers, living primarily on shellfish along the coasts.  The missionaries learned their language, tried to convert them, and herded them into settled villages based on agriculture. 

While the aboriginal population of Baja is estimated to have been around 40,000, it quickly declined as a series of epidemics, brought by the Europeans, decimated the tribes.  Revolts added to the misery.  Eventually, the tribes were utterly destroyed and the missions, with no one to work their plantations, disappeared.

Some of the missionaries who served in Baja had nothing but contempt for their "flock."  Father Baegert wrote: "Everything concerning [Lower] California is of such little importance that it is hardly worth the trouble to take a pen and write about it.  Of poor shrubs, useless thorn bushes and bare rocks, of piles of sand without water or wood, of a handful of people who, besides their physical shape and ability to think, have nothing to distinguish them from animals, what shall I or what can I report?"

And what did Father Baegert think about the genocide?  The infants "were lucky enough to perish quickly before they had a chance to sin.  The more than 14,000 young Californians who have been sent to heaven during the last seventy years is reward enough for the effort of the missionaries."   In his own words!

This sad history has something to add to the current debate about sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests.  It seems obvious that the rule of celibacy for priests contributes to this widespread abuse.  Celibacy is not central to church doctrine, but only became a requirement around 1200, in part to prevent the division of church property among the children of a priest.

The missionaries of Baja didn't know the cause of epidemics around them.  Yet could they have been so heartless--thinking that children were "lucky enough to perish quickly"--if the padres had raised children of their own?

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Source for quotes:  Father Johann Jakob Baegert, serving in Baja 1751-1768, in Observations in Lower California, as quoted in The Forgotten Peninsula: A Naturalist in Baja California, by J.W. Krutch, p. 102-104.  While Krutch thinks "the padres meant well," he shares their contempt for the original Lower Californians, repeating uncritically many degrading and probably false anecdotes about the Californians.  Any people who could survive in that harsh environment must have possessed some finely tuned adaptations that Europeans couldn't understand.