CNS STORY: Missions are dear to Californians, but should they get U.S. funds?

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WASHINGTON LETTER Dec-17-2004 (1,040 words) Backgrounder and analysis. With photos and graphic. xxxn

Missions are dear to Californians, but should they get U.S. funds?

By Patricia Zapor
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Just about every fourth-grader in California takes a class trip to a Catholic church, as part of the required curriculum on state history.

When you live in a place where Europeans arrived in the form of Spanish missionaries who built a string of church-centered enclaves stretching from San Diego to Sonoma, it is a rite of passage for students in both public and private schools to visit one of the 21 historic Spanish missions.

As a matter of course, "you do have to talk about religion," said Tom Adams, executive director of curriculum frameworks and instructional resources for the state department of education.

Though California also is home to the parent who argued in the U.S. Supreme Court that the words "under God" do not belong in the Pledge of Allegiance, Adams said few advocates of church-state separation make a fuss about children being exposed to religion in the process of studying missions.

Nor are there complaints about tax money being used by schools to explain how Franciscan missionaries taught indigenous people about Christianity along with developing an agricultural economy, building walled European-style settlements and sometimes mistreating natives, according to the director of curriculum for the state.

The missions are so broadly accepted as an integral part of California's history and culture that a bill to spend $10 million of federal money for their restoration over five years easily passed in Congress and was signed into law by President George W. Bush Nov. 30. Sens. Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein, and Rep. Sam Farr, all California Democrats and none of whom is Catholic, were the bill's primary sponsors.

In 1998 the costs of restoring the missions was estimated at $50 million. The legislation calls for a current study of restoration needs.

But in the view of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the law is taking things too far. The Washington-based organization filed suit in federal court Dec. 2 challenging the constitutionality of the California Missions Preservation Act.

Joe Conn of Americans United said while it is appropriate for California students to study and even visit the missions using tax money to pay for their restoration is out of bounds.

"While there may be a public interest in maintaining the missions, can't we do it without public funds?" Conn said. He pointed out that Los Angeles' new Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral was built with $189 million in private donations and said the same kind of effort should be put toward fixing the missions.

"I refuse to believe that in as wealthy a state as California it is not possible to raise the money privately," Conn said.

Americans United also disputed a 2003 change in Interior Department policy that opened up federal restoration grants to historic religious buildings, such as Boston's Old North Church.

Apparently there has been no lawsuit filed against that policy, but Conn said the missions' funding is a more blatant constitutional conflict, because it directly designates federal money for churches with active religious functions. The Interior Department's policy simply permits applications to be filed; it does not guarantee any advantage in getting grants to restore religious buildings ahead of other types of historic structures, he explained.

The new legislation covered 21 missions, 19 of which are still owned by the Catholic Church and hold Mass on a regular basis. Conn said the dioceses and religious orders that own the missions ought to be wary of accepting federal funds because of the strings it could carry.

"What kind of legal morass will they get into if they accept the funds?" he asked, adding that the constitutional objections to federal funds would be less clear if the missions were not owned by the church and not used for religious purposes.

Knox Mellon, executive director for the California Missions Foundation, a secular organization, told the Catholic San Francisco archdiocesan newspaper that the mission bill is "not funding religious services. What we are funding is the stabilization and rehabilitation of California and national historic landmarks."

The legislation requires the attorney general to certify that any money spent by the government at the missions does not conflict with the First Amendment, the basis for laws dealing with the separation of church and state. The bill also requires matching funds for every dollar the federal government contributes.

Bill Deverell, director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West at the University of Southern California, said the Catholic missions' role in the settlement and development of California has a niche in people's hearts and minds that is not found in other parts of the country, not even in areas of the Southwest with similar missionary history.

"In some respects it's akin to the place the Civil War battlefields have for Southerners," he said. "They represent a mixture of sadness and beauty, of secular and sacredness."

There has been an organized, secular effort to maintain and restore the missions for more than100 years, Deverell said. At its start, that interest came in part from settlers who saw in the missions evidence that the West had its own significant historic art and architecture, like the East Coast and Europe.

In the early part of the 20th century, John Steven McGroarty's "The Mission Play" celebrated the work of the Franciscan missionaries in a spectacular combination of music, drama and pageant, wrote state librarian Kevin Starr in a 1985 book titled "Inventing the Dream." The production was seen by more than 2.5 million people between 1912 and 1929 and helped develop an appreciation for the missions particularly among Protestants.

Deverell said Californians today think of the missions in a way that is "oddly secularized."

"People tend to look beyond their use as places of worship," he said. Instead, their appeal comes from their value as monuments to the past and as places to study everything from classic iconography to the styles of manual labor used in the 18th century, he said.

"It's very hard in California to find buildings of the late 18th century. They've become our Mount Vernon," he said.

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Contributing to this story was Patrick Joyce in San Francisco.

END

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