LOS ANGELES — As the nation’ celebrates its independence on the Fourth of July, Americans should recall the country’s “other founding” by the missionaries who, beginning in the 1500s, came to proclaim “the love of Jesus Christ to Indigenous peoples,” said Los Angeles Archbishop José H. Gomez. While missionaries from Spain were spreading the good news from present-day Georgia and Florida to Texas and lower California, the “French missionaries were consecrating the lands from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico to the Virgin Mary,” he said. “These missionaries had no hand in developing America’s founding documents or institutions,” he said. “But their mission gives witness to the authentic American spirit that runs through our history and finds expression in the ‘letter’ of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution.”
Gomez: On July 4, let’s also honor missionaries’ role in nation’s founding
Gomez: On July 4, let’s also honor missionaries’ role in nation’s founding
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