This is a terrible travesty. I believe that this whole dynamic is simply a particular manifestation of the war that our secular culture wages upon anything that pertains to the Christian faith in Jesus Christ. It should not surprise us that there is a campaign to discredit the holiness of a man whom the Church has declared possesses heroic virtue, therefore worthy of imitation in any age. We don't have time here to take up every detail of this controversy. Three things must be said, however.
Love is repaid by love alone.
Second, it is wrong to impose our own expectations on a previous age. We can grant that there were elements in the California mission system that we would not repeat today. On the one hand, the missions could never have been established without the support of the Spanish Crown and its soldiers. But the missionaries were never mere pawns of the Crown. They fought against the bad influence and example of the soldiers upon the natives.