A California Confessionario: Reckoning with the Sins of the Church in the California Missions

This paper is a collaboratively written California Indian Amah Mutsun response to an early 19th century confessional manual written in Mutsun, an Ohlone language from northern California, by the missionary friar Felipe Arroyo de la Cuesta OFM. In the long colonial period, Spanish missionaries to the Americas published and disseminated confessionarios, confessional guides or handbooks that priests used to instruct Indigenous people through the sacrament, including in Alta California. Scholar Jorge Klor de Alva makes the point that the Spanish manipulated the Catholic sacrament of confession as a form of surveillance and social control.

In California, priests violated their own standards for the sacrament of confession. They reported minor crimes shared in confession to Spanish ranchers and authorities.  The sacrament of confession was also related to the Papal Bulls.  Those that did not convert and practice confession were to be “vanquished”.  What does it mean to be ‘vanquished” in the California Indian context?  At Mission San Juan Bautista 19,421 Indigenous people died between 1797-1823.  This is vanquished, the result of “non believing”.  3,200 were buried in a tiny graveyard, a mass grave, at San Juan Bautista. This is vanquished.  The California missions were not about conversion but about punishing a resistant population.  They were about domination and control, and enforced by brutality. 

The major questions that emerge are: How can the Church come to see itself as sinful, culpable in relation to past histories of mission, especially in its violent treatment of Native American communities and peoples, as it shaped itself into a global imperial church?  The working definition of sin is problematic because it centers the Spanish view.  We need to develop a definition of sin that works for the Amah Mutsun, that reflects community values.  The California Indian voice should become the moral standard.