by Paul Horgan
The end of the year did not pass without an impassive reminder to Rome: “I am taking this opportunity to observe to Your Eminence that I have not yet received the decision of the question of Mesilla and the places nearby which I have already mentioned to you.”
As the new year opened, a new start seemed possible for Arizona. Earlier, the parish priest of Mora, John Baptist Salpointe, had volunteered to go when he could be spared in New Mexico; and now Lamy, who had received him from Clermont in 1859, accepted his offer, and added three other volunteers: Fathers Francis Boucart and Patrick Birmingham, and a young Mr Vincent as schoolteacher. The dangers of the journey to Tucson had not abated—they were in everyone’s thoughts. Hardly a week went by without reports of atrocities on travellers’ paths everywhere in the diocese. Lamy asked General Carleton if he could provide military escort for the new mission party, and the general agreed to protect them as far as Camp Bowie—the limit of his military jurisdiction. From that point, Salpointe, the head of the mission with the title of vicar forane, or rural dean, must manage for whatever protection he could find.
Like his prelate, and others before him, Salpointe and his men set out downriver on their assignment. With a four-horse waggon driven by a Mexican, the three priests, mounted on horses, left Santa Fe on the afternoon of 6 January 1866. Along the Rio Grande, they often stayed overnight with ranchers or in the little river towns, for until they reached Fort Selden, where the westward turn would come, they did not feel in need of troop protection, though solicitous, if tactless, friends had assured them that in their general venture, “they were going to certain death.”
Again, the vast land had its surprises. Encamped for the night above Coronado’s old region of Bernalillo, they met a strange electrical storm, during which “long aigrettes of electricity … shone without interruption on the ears of the horses.” Salpointe remarked that this, with the roar of the Rio Grande in flood nearby, and the dense darkness of the night, made all seem “weird and ominous.” The very landscape as they advanced was dotted with the old unpromising place names—Dead Man’s March (where they barely avoided a skirmish with Indians), Dead Man’s Spring, Soldier’s Farewell. But the country was magnificent, and Salpointe took pleasure as an amateur botanist in seeing new flora and identifying them later with their Latin terminology.
From Selden to Bowie they were safely escorted by Carleton’s troops. At Bowie, the commanding officer assumed their safety and brought them to Tucson on 7 February 1866, after they had been a month on the river and desert trails. Their reception was quiet—their arrival while expected had not been scheduled. Not much could have been done about it in any case. Tucson was as poor as ever, with its six hundred inhabitants, its unfinished church still unroofed, its lawless life, and the extremes of poverty and high prices in miserable contrast. Salpointe was happily received, however, and set to work forthwith in conditions far less promising even than those of Santa Fe in 1851 and Denver City in 1860. All his early efforts met discouraging results. An attempt to roof the church with timbers from mountains forty-six miles away failed because of heavy snows which blocked the transport of logs. A school promptly founded at San Xavier del Bac for the Papago Indians and Mexicans there was forced to close in two months for lack of money, and Vincent the teacher and the pastor Father Boucart returned to live at Tucson. The school was reestablished there. An effort to provide a mission at Yuma on the Colorado River under Birmingham and Boucart failed when the two priests, attacked by fever, had to abandon the place, and Salpointe for a time was the only priest left in Arizona.
Yet he held on, aided by new colleagues, and with a barely tenable gain here, another there, Lamy’s pattern of colonization slowly took root: missions first, schools next, amenities of charity next, and in due time, as a result of the combination of these, a slow emergence of civilized life, to match both the needs and contributions of an always increasing population of prospectors, traders, and finally, town-makers.
In Colorado, where he went on a pastoral visit in May, Lamy could see how a colony made its way, even through troubles. Denver had been swept by fire two years before, but in destroying the wooden shacks of the city’s first life the disaster resulted in new, more sightly and permanent buildings of brick and stone. Mountain flood had done its work, too, for soon after the fire, Cherry Creek, usually dry, had risen with a sudden crest of twenty feet which had swept away houses, tents, bridges, in the lower parts of the city. Rebuilding was rapid, and Lamy found Machebeuf busier than ever, though lame, and carrying out his long day’s work by buggy, and rarely able to dispose of his paperwork at night before eleven.
He took Lamy everywhere, principally to Central City, to lay a cornerstone of the new church, to administer confirmations (he found the children “well prepared”), and there, also, to dismiss an Irish priest who was making trouble. The old friends gave a pontifical High Mass together, with Machebeuf as deacon and Raverdy as subdeacon, on Trinity Sunday, the bishop preached, and Lamy admired Machebeuf’s new bell—it weighed two thousand pounds, “very fine,” which had been cast for him in St Louis. Lamy could inform Machebeuf that he had an answer to his restrained inquiry of last December about Durango: the Vatican said it had “repeatedly” asked explanations of Durango for its delay in obeying orders issued earlier to transfer the disputed lands to Santa Fe. But—this after fifteen years—the Secretary of the Propaganda added, “I’ll wait for a while for his reply, and after having received it, I shall present immediately the explanations of both sides to the final judgement of the Sacred Congregation.”
Matters proceeded more swiftly in the New World. Colorado was growing fast in population and capital. The mines “inspired such confidence in the capitalists of New York and Boston that two railroad companies were rivalling each other in activity and energy to reach the foot of the Rocky Mountains.” Machebeuf reported that he was certain it would take only a year or eighteen months until it would be possible to ride to New York by rail in five or six days in the new palace sleeping cars. Days: how many ox and mule trains had they known which took as many weeks simply to cross the plains between the diocese and the Missouri River?
It was plain to see how Colorado was swiftly taking on a character in contrast to that of its parent see. New Mexico remained largely Mexican; Colorado was flooded with an Anglo-American population of wholly different style, energy, and values. Already Denver was richer than its cathedral city of Santa Fe. A change must soon come. Lamy foresaw Colorado as independently a vicariate apostolic; and there would hardly be any doubt that Machebeuf must be its first bishop. The friends discussed the matter frankly; though nothing could be considered settled until after a number of official acts had been promulgated. Nevertheless, in his impetuous way, Machebeuf could not resist writing home to mention the prospect.
On his way home overland to New Mexico after a stimulating Denver visit, Lamy paused halfway to Santa Fe on the River of Las Animas—the Souls, or as French trappers called it, the Purgatoire, and the Americans, corrupting this, the Picketwire. There he inspected a large new church going up, of adobes, and now saw this humble material as durable and suitable, as well as inexpensive. After a brief pause at Santa Fe, he went down the eastern plains of his lands. They were sparsely settled. But there were still Navajos and troops at Fort Sumner, in the Bosque Redondo, and he went there to visit them. He had to travel two hundred and fifty miles without seeing a house, “camping à la belle étoile and exposed to be scalped at every step.” At a water hole, he and his small party came upon “some clothes, camping articles etc with fresh human blood on them,” and were told that four men had been killed there on the night before by Navajos. “This happened,” he said, “within 12 miles of Fort Sumner where there are 5 companies of soldiers.”
Presently he moved on southwestward travelling on a military road which connected Fort Sumner with Fort Stanton in the Capitan Mountains. It was a stretch of a hundred and twenty miles farther. From far away he could see the Capitan ran
ge lying east and west, and at its west end, through a great notch in the mountain profile, called Capitan Gap, where the road ran, the distant crown of the Sierra Blanca showed pale blue against the light. He gave his duties to the garrison at Fort Stanton and then made his way to the old royal road along the Rio Grande. In all, on this great circle trip he travelled over nine hundred miles, gave confirmations in twenty-four settlements, most of them new places, and found seven new churches, on one of which, it having just been completed, he bestowed the episcopal blessing. The open mystery of a handful of human lives working to survive and grow into community in a land so bare, hazardous, and beautiful, held him fast; and he gave back to it the mystery of faith.
IX
ROME AND BATTLE
1867
i.
Rome—An Accounting
FIVE MONTHS AFTERWARD the bishop was in Rome to make his postponed visit ad limina to Pius IX, and to carry out a commission given to him by the hierarchy of the United States assembled in their second plenary council at Baltimore. Travelling toward the council, which convened on 7 October 1866, and bringing Coudert with him again as his secretary, Lamy paused at Mt St Vincent in Ohio to ask for additional Sisters of Charity. His little hospital staff were “doing well” but the need would grow; and, further, he wanted to found an “industrial home” in which native girls could learn proper trades by which to support themselves.
At the sessions in Baltimore, the bishops surveyed the state of the Church in the United States. Among the matters discussed were new dioceses in the rapidly developing lands of the West. Proposals for creating apostolic vicariates for Colorado and Arizona came up. Lamy spoke several times on these and other subjects. His hard-gained experience, his weathered dignity, came strongly through his simple discourses; and his fellow bishops, much impressed by him, voted to name him as the courier who would carry to the Pope the record of their meetings. Though it was not specified, the expenses of his journey must have been paid by the council, even though he was already planning on going to Rome in his own duty. Such aid was welcome to an administrator who had to count every dollar.
While the conciliar documents were being given proper form to submit to the Pope, Lamy was in New York; and at last, when they were ready, he sailed, with Coudert, in a French steamer on 17 November, and was given his passage without charge. Crossing to Brest in nine days, he found the voyage pleasant, and proceeded at once to Paris, where he stayed three days in preliminary talks with the Society concerning his needs for the return journey homeward. His next stop was in Auvergne, where he spent a few days in old familiar places. When he told of his experiences, he seemed in a somber mood because of the weight of his debts.
Meantime, at Rome, his arrival was anxiously awaited by Cardinal Barnabo, who, said the American Father McCloskey, who was Rector of the North American College in the Via dell’Umiltà, “doubtless has nightly visions of the Venerable Bishop of Santa Fe wending his way too slowly to Rome with Baltimore’s ‘big book’ and its interpretation under his arm. Woe be to him if he has lost the precious documents for if he has, he need never again show his face in Baltimore.” But before this letter went off to Purcell in America, a postscript was crowded in—Lamy had arrived on 16 December.
Rome, as ever, was a city of grand contradictions of circumstance. In the intricate struggles of the Italian kingdoms to be united under Victor Emmanuel, Rome and the papal dominions were still under the threat of the King’s armies and Garibaldi’s genius. Until a few weeks before, the troops of Napoleon III had been in Rome to protect the papal position; but they had been withdrawn in early December, and Pius was left with only his own mercenaries—largely Frenchmen. But uncertainty reigned, an invasion was possibly imminent, and if it came, the Pope was calmly resolved to escape; though some hoped he would resort to defiance and artillery, even as the people rejoiced that the French emperor’s army had gone, and that their liberty was restored, as they believed. A great majority were in favor of the revolutionary movement of the King and his supporters; but meanwhile, as Lamy saw, everyone proceeded with preparations for the great Christmas festivals quite as though “all Italy was humbly submissive at the Feet of the Holy Father.”
Lamy was given rooms at the North American College. Early in the day after his arrival, he heard of a ceremony which was about to take place at St Peter’s—the beatification of a certain Benedictine, and hurried to find a place in the crowd, as Pius IX officiated. The Pope gave a short allocution in Italian which Lamy “understood well,” and which “left us all electrified and cheerful.” Later, Lamy, dressed not in prelatic violet but in “a plain black cassock,” managed after “some difficulties, to be admitted to the Kissing of the feet,” when all who passed by the Pope received the pontifical benediction. As Pius was in the act of blessing Lamy, he said to him, smiling warmly,
“But you are a bishop!”
Lamy told him his name and diocese.
“Oh!” Pius went on. “You were at the great council of Baltimore—forty-five bishops and archbishops. I received your telegraphic dispatch, and I hope you bring us the decrees of that Council.”
The Pope’s suite—cardinals and lesser prelates—were, said Lamy, “surprised and at the same time pleased at the familiarity of the H. Father toward a missionary Bishop just arrived, sans ceremony, from the wild territories of the W.S. [S.W.] of America.…”
Three days later he had his private audience with the Pope, accompanied by Coudert. Pius was “extremely cheerful,” and on receiving the richly bound copy of the Baltimore decrees from Lamy, exclaimed, “What beautiful things they make in America!” turning the volume over, looking at it, opening it. Lamy thought him full of confidence in the face of the political dangers which threatened the Papacy. On a later day Lamy “had the honor of serving the Holy Father’s Mass and of assisting him at the altar.…”
In himself, Lamy was a living link between the “wild territories” of the Great American Desert and the sumptuous masterpieces of liturgical art, architecture, protocol, and ritual which gave papal Rome its character. He was now at the center and source of his belief, which had given him his share of responsibility, and his image of the expression of human community at the summit of its style. For centuries great imaginations had served, through all the arts, as in all civilizations, man’s explanation, through his received idea of God, of the central design of life. The magnificence of papal Rome was essentially no more than homage to the invisible glory of the eternal. The arts of man reached toward God and in return a spirit akin to the divine entered into their masters. Christian Rome was faith made manifest and superb—while faith itself remained as simple and life-sustaining as water in the desert. Amidst domes and colonnades, and vistas of worked travertine, corridors of saints and vaults of miracles painted by genius, pageants of splendor to delight the eye and edify the conscience, great chambers whose volumes and proportions exalted not man but God, Lamy, belonging to all this as a bishop, made his initial report to the Vatican of his first fifteen years of effort in a land where dimension was measured by deserts and mountains, and man’s works were largely the result of mixing water, earth, straw, and the heat of the sun, shaped by the palm of the hand, whether to become shelter, chapel, or cathedral.
The substance of the report was much the same as that which he had submitted also to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith at Paris. He let facts speak for themselves, but the bloom of growth was over all he described. Civilization was emerging under his touch. It might have done so under another leader, representing another system of values; but the fact was that there was no other, and it was left to him to lead the way. The spirit of growth in religion created the model of growth in all other beneficial expressions of society. For the bishop was not content to preach charity—he must enact it, and lead others to enact it, using all the daily materials of life, however poor. By a simple extension of his own character, Lamy, in expressing his own faith and carrying out his charge, also create
d for the old Spanish kingdom a sense of enlightenment through which for the first time in all her three centuries her people could advance their condition and so become masters instead of victims of their environment. What he had to tell Rome on 16 January 1867, as he had already told Paris, was a simple chronicle with here and there an unconscious note of eloquence.
He said his diocese was very much spread out, being about three hundred leagues from north to south, and almost as much from east to west. He had been able to repair most of the old churches, and build eighty-five new ones, all of adobes. The cathedral at Santa Fe was nothing more than an old mud church, slightly repaired. It was very poor, as was the episcopal residence. None of them had any “architectural character,” but “thanks to God” were well frequented. The total number of churches and chapels was one hundred thirty-five.
He had three schools directed by the Christian Brothers in full prosperity. Those of Santa Fe never had fewer than two or three hundred pupils, who were taught English, Spanish, reading, writing, geography, Latin, history, music, and arithmetic. All the missions had schools, at least during the winters. The Loretto Sisters maintained five schools. Their first novitiate for postulants was numerous, many novices belonging to the first families. Another school was run by the Sisters of Charity. In addition to elementary subjects taught in English and Spanish, the sisters gave lessons in painting, music, and embroidery. There was the beginning of a seminary at Santa Fe under the direction of a priest. The number of students had never surpassed six and so far only four had been ordained as priests.
The diocese already had six convents of nuns. They supported themselves from the income of their schools. The nuns lived under religious rule and were bound by vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. They were not cloistered. A year ago a hospital and orphanage had been opened by four sisters of St Vincent de Paul.