Native American Devotion at Mission Carmel Ruins
What Robert Louis Stevenson Saw on the Feast of St. Charles Borromeo November 4, 1879
In 1879, Robert Louis Stevenson, the often-ailing but determined much-traveled young Scottish writer, who was later to become world famous for Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, among many other works, made his way to California and sojourned in Monterey County for a few months. Stevenson later wrote an essay called “The Old Pacific Capital,” in which he described with great sympathy the plight and deep Catholic faith of native converts who had been turned out after the Mexican government secularized the missions—which he had witnessed for himself when he attended a Mass at the old stone church at Mission Carmel, which was then roofless with walls that were barely standing.
Mission Carmel had been the second mission founded by St. Junipero Serra in Alta California, in 1770 (some sources say 1771), initially located in Monterey. Serra named it Misión de San Carlos Borromeo in honor of St. Charles Borromeo (a great 16th-century archbishop of Milan, who was renowned for both his learning and his great charity; for example, he had supported up to 3,000 people a day at his own expense during a plague and personally tended to plague sufferers' needs).
The mission was moved soon after its founding to a better location about six miles south of Montery Bay at the Carmel River and was given the full name of Misión de San Carlos Borromeo del Rio Carmel. The river itself had originally been named Rio del Nuestra Senora del Monte Carmelo after Our Lady of Mount Carmel in 1603, about 150 years before the mission was established, probably because three friars of the Carmelite Order were members of the Vizcaíno expedition that discovered it.
The river's name was eventually shortened to Rio Carmelo, and it is now known in English as the Carmel River, and similarly the mission's name came to be shortened to Mission Carmel.
St. Junipero Serra died in 1784, and it is said his last wish was for a new stone church to replace the original adobe chapel. Serra’s successor Father Fermín Lasuén directed the skilled work of Native American converts (conversos) in the building of the current stone church, which was finished in 1797.
The conversos were proud of their contributions to the beauty of the mission, and it is recorded that mothers would vie for their children have the honor be taught to sing and play instruments for the Masses.
In the following snippets from Stevenson's essay, we can glimpse how strong the faith was among the remaining former natives of the Carmel Mission and how much they loved and treasured the Gregorian chant they had learned, and also how badly the mission had decayed after secularization. In his essay, Stevenson also deplored the lack of civic interest in preserving the historically significant mission. His description led to the first restoration of the mission in 1884, when a roof was put over the church to save it from further ruin.
Stevenson had rejected the Scotch Presbyterian faith in which he was raised, and he might have been expected to share the prejudices against popery that were common in those days, but from what he wrote about the Mass at the Mission, it is clear he held in high estimation the work of the Catholic missionaries and the gifts of faith and culture they had given to the native peoples they had served.
Stephenson saw the converted natives who held onto their faith as orphaned and impoverished by the expulsion of the Franciscan missionaries from the missions, who had been exploited first by the Mexicans who tricked most of the conversos out of the mission’s former lands that should have belonged to them and had established ranches and then by mannerless Americans who exploited both the conversos and the Mexican land holders, until neither natives or Mexican former-ranch owners owned any land any more. He certainly did not see the abandoned Native American converts as freed slaves, as slanderers of the Franciscan missionaries like to portray them.
I saved the following quote from a Facebook post defending St. Junipero Serra, but I didn't remember to record who wrote the comment or note the actual post it's from. It's an appropriate end to this essay.