by Paul Horgan
But it could not be one whose solution must engage him to any extent personally—though he would often enough be exposed to its perils. He established courteous relations with Calhoun—and with all succeeding civil authorities—but his concern lay with the physical condition of his churches, the spiritual state of his parishes, the social and moral ignorance which flourished in Santa Fe’s isolation from the world, and finally in every aspect of the waywardness all too evident among the local clergy.
Lamy chose the parish church of St Francis as his cathedral. This was adjacent to the dean’s house, where he took up residence at the beginning, and was a walk of two or three minutes from the plaza, at the head of San Francisco street. Rising above all the flat roofs with its twin towers crenellated in mud bricks, it was the largest building in the city. It had transepts lower than the nave—all the churches in Santa Fe, reported Lamy, were in the shape of a cross; and all were built of the same humble material as the houses. It was amazing how old some of these were, and how long the dusty or muddy walls could stand against the weather, even without the annual replastering of earth which it was the local habit to apply. But all were in poor repair, like those he had seen on his journey northward from the Mexican boundary. Dried earth sifting downward by the day between the wooden beams which supported the packed earthen roofs—it was a metaphor for the constant decay and necessary renewal of the Church itself in that land.
And yet among the native families there were seeds of faith and learning which took root where they could grow, however obscurely, in the minds and habits of children. A later churchman saw how the culture of Christianity was transmitted from adult to child, at home. The invisible company of Christ, the Holy Family, the saints, became a reality to those who could not read or write, but who could listen, who could look at the carved and painted wooden household figures of the sacred company of history, and form a second world where the heart and soul could dwell intimately with greater affairs and higher manners than the rude conditions of daily life. “Prayers and catechism,” wrote the churchman, “were taught orally to the young children by some member of the family or by some trusty person of the neighborhood, and repeated word for word, question after question, until some part of the lesson would remain in the memory of the hearers. This was a hard work, but a meritorious one, and one of great value to the missionary, who had only to explain the mysteries and the chief points of our religion to the children thus instructed at home.… Every evening it was customary to make the children say some prayers which always terminated with the words: ‘Bendito y alabado sea el Santísimo Sacramento del Altar (Blessed and hallowed be the most holy Sacrament of the Altar).’ After this, the innocent creatures, still kneeling, had to kiss the hand of their parents and receive their blessing before going to bed,”
Adults used holy ceremony even in casual moments. Visiting, when a door was opened to them, they said “Deo gratias” or “Ave Maria Purissima,” and whoever admitted them replied, “Para siempre bendito sea Dios y la siempre Virgen Maria—pase adelante (Blessed be God and the ever Virgin Mary—come right in).” Simple greetings were invocations—”Buenos dias (or Buenas tardes) le dé Dios (God give you good day [or evening]).” and the reply came, “Que Dios se los dé buenos a Ud. (May they be good to you from God).” In a casual meeting, the first one to say “Ave Maria” could properly expect the other to recite the whole “Hail Mary” for his intention. The most immediate terms of history were those of the passion of Christ, with all its characters. Holy Week was a drama lasting seven days, with the crucifixion and the resurrection as their climaxes.
But the amenities were light-hearted, too, in suitable seasons—at Christmas fandangos, when the roof-lines of houses were traced by rows of farolitos; or candle lights protected from the wind, and bundles of piñon faggots (luminarios) were lighted to outline the plaza, the dancers within, wearing masks, played a famous joke. Young women holding eggshells filled with scented liquids pursued men on whose heads they smashed the eggs, in mixed compliment and mockery. “Another evidence of the Catholic Church in New Mexico,” wryly noted an Easterner who spoke as a United States puritan, “was the attendance at Mass of devout women, of whom not one was supposed to be virtuous”; and other traders and soldiers concluded that the native women were for the most part prostitutes—an unfair assumption based on the newcomers’ lack of acquaintance with the seemly private life of most colonial Spanish and Mexican families. But if a certain class of females was available to invading frontier males, it was not to be wondered at, with the introduction of thousands of newcomers who had money to spend in a society so poor and by temperament so ardent in character and so indolent concerning work. A complacent observer who came with the American occupation thought that he could presently discern, “here in Santa Fe, the diminution of filth in the streets, and the improved dress and personal cleanliness of the people, together with the cloaking of immorality,” which “showed that precept and example [were] not altogether thrown away upon them.”
And yet others felt the “kindness of the people—they loaded us with presents,” tobacco, food, and always showed politeness. There was true poverty in a land of potential riches. As Lamy wrote to Paris, twenty days after his entry, “it is a mistake to think the country is rich …” Perhaps it was so in agriculture, “but gold mines and copper mines are in the hands of Indian tribes, who are ferocious and spread throughout the country,” and he concluded that the country had “suffered greatly since the declaration of [Mexican] Independence. Franciscans [had been] obliged to abandon their posts. To replace them, secular priests were sent from Mexico, but in insufficient number—there were 15, 6 of whom are now old—But these priests, under any respect, could not replace their predecessors; even now they are either incapable or unworthy …” There was scarcely anything which Lamy met which might encourage him. “Almost everything needed to be created,” except the touching and curious grace kept by the annexed Mexicans despite their poverty and the new ways to which they were subject after the war which their country had lost, and which had brought their new bishop among them.
iii.
The First Needs
SO IN HIS FIRST WEEKS at Santa Fe, Lamy learned of conditions and needs which would compel his acts in the years ahead. In a sense, his work in the Middle West had been a rehearsal for what now faced him—but on what a different scale, and under what different responsibilities. Where he used to appeal to his Ohio neighbor, Bishop Purcell, he must now work directly with Rome, Paris, and Lyon, and now not as a missioner priest, concerned with a county or two, but as a missioner bishop charged with duties in an area six times as large as Ohio. In the summer of 1851 all he knew of it as yet was Santa Fe—but this was the place to begin; and he wrote to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith at Lyon to say what he had found, and to Paris, what he needed, and—the habit was strong and the response certain to be sympathetic—to Purcell at Cincinnati.
His first concern was education, not only in book knowledge, but in Christian amenity. “The state of immorality in matters of sex is so deplorable that the most urgent need is to open schools for girls under the direction of Sisters of Charity.” He had already begun to look for a site on which to establish a convent, and he declared the need for a school for boys in every parish, “since the Mexican national vice” was ignorance. He must have money—fifteen thousand francs—for he could not repeat too often that riches were not to be had locally. He made his own census of his people—sixty-eight thousand Catholics, two thousand “heretics,” thirty to forty thousand “infidels,” eighteen missions (in the pueblos), twelve native priests, twenty-six churches, forty chapels. There were eight or nine thousand Catholic Indians, and perhaps thirty thousand in want of conversion. If only he had some zealous French missioners, he said to Lyon, to meet their needs—and indeed, those of another six thousand Indians wholly abandoned only a hundred leagues from the capital (possibly referring to the Navajos in the west). Schools and religious wo
rkers—these were his first responsibilities there, as he said long later. The next concern was the state of the local clergy, which would bring him exasperation and regret for years.
The first Franciscans in the old kingdom to preach the Gospel had been men of God, he said, but they were gone long before his arrival, and the bishop of Durango had come to Santa Fe only three times in twenty years, which no doubt explained what Lamy found. “On my arrival in N. Mexico I found frightful abuses among the clergy.” Of these there were many kinds. “What,” he asked Purcell, “would you think of a priest who does not preach to his congregation but only once a year, and then at the condition that he will receive $18? Such is the case here, and it grieves me to tell that this is not the worse yet.…” Another contemporary witness—a layman—observed that “the priests of New Mexico were noted for their corruption and profligacy, and instead of being teachers in morals they were leaders in vice. Their lascivious pleasures were quite as public and notorious as their priestly duties, and there was hardly a priest in the country who did not rear a family of illegitimate children, in direct violation of his holy vows and the laws of religion and morality.”
As to cases, they could be cited. Machebeuf wrote Rome about the “guilty indulgence” of Ortiz, the rural dean, and went on to report about a certain Father Lujan, who had had a succession of mistresses. Upon the death of the last one, he scandalized all by giving her a “funeral ceremony as solemn as possible,” to which he invited all the dignitaries of government and Army, “while he followed without his surplice and crying.… It is quite certain there was no piety in all this.”
In Albuquerque the pastor, José Manuel Gallegos (a New Mexican born), was famous for his convivial ways and was regarded as highly intelligent and able, though also as vain and pretentious. He dispensed grape brandy and cakes and changed gold pieces for the rare currency of the province for friends, was a convivial crony of the leading traders and politicians, and had for his housemate a married Mexican woman who had been the mistress of two Mexican officers in turn, by whom she had three children. To her alliance with him she brought four thousand piastres and together they ran a general store, which they kept open all day Sunday.
“It was,” said Machebeuf, “a great scandal for the people to see a woman such as that in the rectory, travelling alone with the priest in his coach, and active in his business.… The parish administered by a priest so scandalous and so given to business and politics finds itself plunged in the most profound ignominy and corruption.” Even many local residents were appalled by his conduct. As for his intellectual brilliance, aside from what Machebeuf called “son amour pour les plaisirs du monde” Gallegos illustrated this moderately enough in the presence of an American officer. “The priest asked us if we knew anything of astronomy and mathematics. I answered, ‘A little.’ He drew forth paper and pencil, and I expected some astounding problem, when he drew some of the simplest figures and asked their names. His questions answered, we were at once looked upon as astronomers and mathematicians.”
But even such poor learning as Gallegos could show was unusual in New Mexico, and was perhaps exceeded only by that of the pastor of Taos—Father Antonio José Martínez—a much older man under whom he had studied before being further educated in Durango and ordained by Bishop Zubiría. Martínez was in fact one of the most gifted and interesting men in the territory. He was fifty-eight years old when Lamy came to Santa Fe, and he had long occupied a position of eminence in churchly and political affairs in New Mexico. This he deserved through the incessant activity of his career and the general enlightenment of his mind. Born in the village of Abiquiu on the Chama River of a respectable provincial family (a grandfather was a Mexican general), he was taken to settle at Taos at the age of twelve by his parents. From the first he was interested in learning, and was largely self-taught, reading whatever he could find. In 1812, when he was nineteen, he married; was widowed the next year, and left with a daughter, who lived only a few years. In 1817, he went to study for the priesthood at Durango and was ordained there in 1822—his twenty-ninth year. In the following year he returned to New Mexico, first to Tomé. Later he moved to Abiquiu, then Taos, then Abiquiu again, and finally to Taos, where he spent the rest of his life.
In that village surrounded by ranches on the great Taos plain, he managed to find useful outlets for his energetic intelligence. He opened a school for boys and girls, with emphasis on preparing the boys for the priesthood. Twenty of his students became potential seminarians. Books were needed. He bought a printing press—the first in New Mexico—from its owner at Santa Fe, moved it to Taos, and produced his own textbooks, catechisms, and missals. For fifty subscribers, he established the first newspaper west of the Mississippi—El Crepúsculo de la Libertad (The Dawn of Liberty), a name which directly expressed his own strongly libertarian and independent nature. The newspaper, for lack of wider support, died out after a few issues.
But in any case, Father Martínez’s most powerful organ was his personality, and it took him into public affairs as strongly as it moved him in affairs of the Church. He urged separation of Church and State for Mexico, which almost brought him censure from his Mexican bishop. He was said to have been active in the minor rebellions of 1837 and 1847 in New Mexico—the first a bloody riot over a court case in the remote town of Santa Cruz which resulted in the execution of the New Mexican governor by a mob which marched on Santa Fe; the second a conspiracy at Taos a year after the American occupation which led to the massacre of the United States governor, Charles Bent, and eleven others, in an effort to upset American rule. Martínez was known to be hostile, like a great number of New Mexican natives, to the United States regime, and yet during the Taos Massacre he gave refuge in his house to many fleeing its violence. He eventually entered the American territorial legislature—earlier he had served as an alternate legislator of the national Mexican congress.
In his isolated world, he was famous. His birthday was celebrated by the people, the bishop of Durango had empowered him with the faculty of giving confirmation, and as a man of learning he was revered by the less enlightened. His library, for its time, was distinguished if unavoidably meagre—it included a Latin copy of Thomas Aquinas printed in 1750 and bound in vellum. Martínez had even served as Chaplain of Dragoons in the 1837 uprising, and before the brutal execution of the governor had heard his confession. He was a strong friend to Bishop Zubiría and in regretting Lamy’s appointment and arrival in his letter to Durango on 28 August 1851, Martínez gave direct notice of his feeling against the new authority in New Mexico—a portent of exhausting struggles which would last through years to come.
In the Paroissien romain, published in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, Lamy could find in the epistle for the first Sunday of Advent (Romans 13) august support in all the troubles which lay ahead: La nuit est déjà fort avancée, et le jour approche. Renonçons done aux oeuvres de ténèbres, et revêtons-nous des armes de lumière. (Already the night is almost done, the day is near. Then let us renounce the works of darkness, and vest ourselves in the armor of light.) If the spirit against which Lamy must cast his powers was all too worldly, the means he must use were all too pathetically material. A historian of the conquest of New Mexico who had come with the colonists in 1598, and was soon afterward dean of a Spanish church in Rome, published a history of New Mexico in 1602. Referring to the ancient cosmographers and their proved errors, he said of the early Franciscans, “we are not to ridicule those learned men as ignorant, since it was their chief purpose to reveal to men not the secrets of the earth, but the path to heaven.” It could have been a motto for Lamy as he went about his immediate tasks.
One of these was to make a brief tour, with Machebeuf, of the villages and settlements scattered in the open country about Santa Fe—some of them at considerable distance. Coming up the river the first time, he had seen typical pueblos. Now he used back roads and trails, across plains, into arroyos, and the foothills, which lay below mountains
visible in mystery wherever he looked. The people living in such places had need of almost everything which was generally thought of as civilized. There were chapels, yes; but who served them? There was no school anywhere. If the people turned toward Santa Fe the capital, there was scarcely anything there, either, to make a fabric of society for them. Remote for centuries, ignored for decades since the loss of the Franciscans, the people of the removed ranches and haciendas and the citizens of Santa Fe alike made demands, merely by existing, which Lamy in conscience must meet.
In early September 1851, he wrote to Purcell, begging him to help in a search for commitment by teaching nuns who would be willing to come to Santa Fe—Sisters of Notre Dame, Sisters of Charity—with all their expenses paid and a good house with pleasant grounds provided near the principal church, as he called what would become his earthen cathedral. He must also have new priests. If only such persons could come to help, he was sure there would soon be a change for the better, “as the people seem so mild and docile,” and he had already seen “good dispositions.” He was confident that citizens of every kind in Santa Fe would give their support to the establishment of new schools. He had already written to Lyon for aid, but his report was evidently not sufficient—they asked for “a true statement of these missions.” He promptly sent more information in the hope of receiving help “next year.” Purcell had spoken up in his interest, he was as ever grateful. Surely Lyon would listen.
Nothing could come too soon for his purposes from either Europe or the eastern states; but the most pressing of matters could not wait. As no religious teachers were available, he engaged one E. Noel as a schoolmaster, set up a boys’ school in his own residence, gave it in charge of Machebeuf, to whom he also assigned the repair of the Castrense until it should be ready for use again as a church; and, with his own vicar general left behind to continue to do what could be done in the face of the disobliging attitudes of the rural dean and the other native clergy, in the third week of September 1851, Lamy set out on horseback, with one lay attendant, down the Rio Grande to El Paso and across unknown mountains and deserts in Mexico, for Durango, fifteen hundred miles away, to confront Bishop Zubiría, from whom he had heard nothing.