Welcome back to another episode of five minutes in church history on this episode as well as all of the

episodes this month we will be in California. I was going to call these episodes California Dreaming.

Well, I don't know about that, but what I do know is we'll be looking at some of the

formative moments in American church history and all of them happened on location here and we're

actually on location here as well all month. Well first up is not so much a

place but places and a trail the El Camino

Royal. This is also known as the Royal Road.

It is a 600-mile trail that connects the 21 missions established by Franciscan Missionary Monks in California.

It stretches all the way from San Diego to just north of San Francisco Bay.

These missions were first established in 1769,

constructed all the way up the Royal Road and thrived until 1833.

In fact, four major cities evolved around these missions here in California, San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco, and where we are,

Los Angeles.

The mission in Los Angeles is named Mission San Fernando Ray de Espana. It was number 17 of 21 and it was established in 1784. Like all of these other missions, it has arched walkways and it has beautiful gardens and it has fountains. In fact, we're sitting near a fountain right now.

And this particular mission, we have the burial place of Bob Hope.

But this is not comedy history, it's church history,

so we'll leave that for another podcast.

This mission also has an entire set of the works of our friend from the Middle Ages

Thomas Aquinas. These missions were established by these

Franciscan monk missionaries to convert the Native Americans here to Roman

Catholicism. They were under Spain's governance. Mexico at the

time was under Spain's control and these missionaries came up from Mexico and established one mission after another.

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