Since its establishment nearly six decades ago, the Academy of American Francis-can History (AAFH) has published more than 40 volumes on the history of the Franciscans in the Americas. Among the most important of these publications are the writings and biographies of Junípero Serra and Fermín Francisco de Lasuén, the missionaries who brought Catholicism to colonial California. As the principal architects of the chain of Franciscan missions that eventually stretched from San Diego to Sonoma, Serra and Lasuén have been memorialized in scores of books and articles. Less well known, however, are the men who worked to preserve the Franciscan legacy in California at the end of the colonial period, after Mexican independence, and during mission secularization and the ascendance of Anglo-American rule. Thus, the AAFH’s publication of Michael Charles Neri’s Hispanic Catholicism in Transitional California is a useful addition to the history of Catholicism in California and the American...
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