Preserve the missions

The sites of the 21 missions, founded in the late 1700s and early 1800s, stretch 600 miles from San Diego to Sonoma. Two are part of the California park system; 19 are owned by the Catholic Church. All are state or national historic landmarks.

Members of Congress and the courts should look to the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park for a precedent on how to make such arrangements pass constitutional muster. Four Spanish frontier missions are preserved there, as well as the American Indian presence from the archaeological record.

California history didn't begin in 1849 with the Gold Rush. It began long before with American Indians and then the Spanish empire, which relied primarily on a system of Franciscan missions for settlement and frontier defense against British and Russian intrusion. The complex history of Spanish interaction with the American Indian communities deserves to be told. As one historian has written, the missions were "neither heaven on earth nor concentration camps." They represented dynamic clash, confrontation and cooperation between cultures.

Yet this history, key to the development of the American Southwest and the nation, literally is crumbling. Americans wouldn't allow Old North Church in Boston, Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta or the San Antonio missions to crumble. They should feel the same way about these landmarks of California's early history.