Junipero Serra was a Franciscan priest who founded nine missions in what is today the state of California.

Miguel Serra y Abram was born in Spain in 1713. When he was sixteen, he joined the Franciscan Order and took the name Junipero, after the colorful companion of St. Francis of Assisi. In 1749, he felt called to leave his professorship of philosophy in Spain -- a comfortable life that brought him no little honor -- to become a missionary in what is now Mexico.

The  Jesuits were banned from Spanish territories in 1767, and Bl. Junipero was chosen to take over their missions in Baja California. Two years later, he was appointed padre president of the whole of California. He founded his first mission on what would be United States soil in San Diego on July 16, 1769, effectively beginning the European colonization of California.

His second mission, San Carlos Borromeo in Monterey (later moved to Carmel), was established in 1770. Subsequent missions, around which grew up cities that still exist, included San Gabriel Arcangel (1771), San Luis Obispo de Tolosa (1772), San Francisco de Asis (1776), San Juan Capistrano (1776), Santa Clara (1777), and San Buenaventura (1782, now in the city of Ventura).

Estimates are that Bl. Junipero traveled more than 5,500 miles between the missions he founded along the California coast. In keeping with his vow of poverty, and despite chronic pain in one leg, he always traveled on foot. He was passionately devoted to the care of the Indians, which often put him in conflict with the Spanish government. By virtue of his commitment to evangelization over domination, he baptized some 6,000 Indians, or about ten percent of the entire native population.

Bl. Junipero is the one man most responsible for bringing the Spanish culture and the Catholic faith 500 miles deep into the Californian frontier. He died peacefully in Carmel on August 28, 1784, and was beatified in 1988.