Lamy of Santa Fe (13 page)

New Mexico's condition was incredible, as the bishops at Baltimore considered what was needed. Her churches were for the most part in ruins, and all of them had been built of earthen walls and roofs. There were no schools. Most of the parishes made no proper observances. There were only nine active priests in over two hundred thousand square miles. The deportment of most of these was reprehensible.
United States Army officers had often been startled by what they had seen—reverend fathers drinking, gambling, dancing with their most carefree parishioners, and even betraying their vows by living in concubinage, or even open adultery. A soldier wrote in his diary, “I have no respect for the priesthood in this country, and I think it a desecration of God's temple, that a priest of New Mexico should be permitted to officiate in one.” A United States lieutenant paying a call upon the pastor of Albuquerque saw that “a lady graced the apartment” quite openly. The missions of the Pueblos were abandoned, and the town parishes, poor as they were, felt the burden of extortion when certain pastors levied outrageous charges for pastoral services at birth, marriage, baptism, and burial. There was still a pathetic spark of faithful need for the Church among the Latin population, and many families did what they could to pass along to their children the outlines of Christian doctrine and history; but memory played tricks, and truth was lost in local fancy, and where form survived it was often corrupt and without substance. Thousands of men and women lived unbaptized, unmarried though in cohabitation, unconfessed, unconfirmed, and at the end, unshriven for the human errors of a lifetime. The state of affairs, the Council concluded, could hardly be worse.

In Texas, similar conditions prevailed along the Rio Grande frontier, with only the diocese of Galveston to serve the huge territory. After the peace settlement with Mexico in 1848, Bishop Odin of Galveston had written to the Vatican to ask how far his responsibility must reach now that the national status of Texas had been settled as part of the United States. His reply came in the following year, just as he was setting out for the Baltimore Council of 1849. It told him that his diocese must include all of Texas and extend as far in New Mexico as to include all territories east of the Rio Grande—the old political boundary claimed by Texas from the beginning of her moves toward independence and subsequent statehood.

At the synod, Odin reported this ruling to his colleagues. They debated the Roman wisdom in creating a diocese so immense; and in the end, the bishops appealed to the Holy See to revise its vision of the great Southwest, and provide for more manageable units to be administered by added bishops or vicars apostolic.

In the more settled portions of the United States, the annual growth was so astonishing that some estimate could be made of what would be needed there—the synod reported to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith at Lyon that two hundred fifty thousand Catholic immigrants arrived every year, and that to meet this pace, three hundred priests a year must be sent, in order to build annually three hundred churches and three hundred schools. The Charity of Christ, the wants
of society, required no less. It could be assumed that in time the desert West would require its share of support from the world church.

Completing its work through many days, the synod on 13 May 1849 sent its conclusive appeal to Rome.
“Beatissime Pater”
wrote the bishops to Pius IX, “Most Holy Father,” asking that for the states and territories of the United States, there be erected new archbishoprics in New York, Cincinnati and New Orleans, and new episcopal sees in Savannah, Georgia; Wheeling [West Virginia]; St. Paul, Minnesota; Monterey, California; and that a vicariate apostolic be erected to encompass “the territory called
ROCKY MOUNTAINS
which is included neither within the limits of the states of Arkansas, nor Missouri, nor Iowa” (loosely indicating an immense central area of the nation which in time would be occupied and defined as perhaps half a dozen states); and further that “there be elected a Vicar Apostolic, dignified with an episcopal consecration, for the Territory of New Mexico, and its see established in the city of Santa Fe.” Thus the oldest Spanish Catholic lands now within the nation would receive extraordinary attention. Presently, with their deliberations concluded, the prelates returned to their cities and began exchanging lists of candidates for the new bishops whom Rome must appoint to administer whatever new dioceses might be created.

xiii
.

A Bishop for New Mexico

T
HE QUESTION OF ESTABLISHING
a bishopric for New Mexico was not a new one—though now as a consequence of the Mexican War it had again come forward, at last to be answered. The matter had been agitated periodically under Spanish rule ever since the 1630s, through two and a quarter centuries. Fray Alonso de Benavides, the early father custodian of the Franciscans in New Mexico, pursued it tirelessly at Madrid and at Rome from 1630 to 1636. In a number of petitions he besought Philip IV to erect the Santa Fe diocese under the power held by the Spanish crown to appoint bishops. He argued skillfully, trying to make the far country he knew so well come alive in the impenetrable royal imagination. How far away from the nearest bishop was the capital of the Rio Grande kingdom—five hundred leagues,
for Durango already had its cathedral. It then took almost a year to make the round-trip journey between Durango and Santa Fe, it was not possible to procure the holy oil every year, and sometimes five or six years passed before it was brought to the New Mexican missions, whose people lacked the sacrament of confirmation, which was “so necessary to strengthen the souls of the faithful.” The journey was not only long, it was perilous. But if a bishop were established at Santa Fe—it was “desirable that he remain always at Santa Fe, where the governor and the Spaniards reside permanently”—then what benefits must follow! Beyond the spiritual, what wise economies! For “if there were a bishop to consecrate churches and to ordain priests from among the native Spaniards of that land,” who knew its languages, wrote Fray Alonso, then His Majesty “would be spared the heavy costs in sending friars.” As for supporting a bishop, the discovery of silver mines and the increase of population, with additional farms and cattle to feed the people, would yield enough money in tithes to maintain his lordship without a call upon the royal treasury.

Everything was available locally, even the person of the bishop himself, insisted the father custodian in the seventeenth century: the bishop should be appointed from among the Franciscan friars already at work in the river kingdom. After all, there was precedent for such an appointment among Franciscans. “Your royal predecessors,” wrote Fray Alonso to the King, “gave them the first bishoprics of the Indies, and, assuming that the same reasoning applies … may your Majesty be pleased that the one appointed as bishop in these kingdoms and provinces be of the same order.…” He could readily name four New Mexican friars any one of whom, “though devoid of human ambitions,” would be suitable candidates, and there was a fifth whom in all modesty he would not name, but whose brilliant statement of the case surely would bring him to mind.

In 1631 the father custodian had reason to think the matter was about to be settled, for the King seemed “determined on the erection of a bishopric in these parts and decreed that a brother of St Francis should be nominated to be prelate,” and even seemed ready to ask Pope Urban VIII to confirm the establishment. But a matter of such weight could not travel swiftly through the labyrinths of policy at the Escorial and the Vatican, and nine years later, with the question still unresolved, a bishop of New Spain presented to the King damaging evidence that the New Mexican friars were exceeding their authority as simple priests. The bishop had been told that “the Franciscan friars in New Mexico are using the mitre and crozier,” behaving for all the world like bishops, even “administering the sacrament of confirmation, and also conferring ordinations in minor orders.” Nobody had yet
given them authority to do any of these things. Perhaps they were beyond patience at not having been given a proper bishop. When chided, they lamely explained that they had an official paper of some sort granting them authority to “give orders.” This they took to mean
holy orders
, when all it could have meant even to a child's intelligence—the complaining bishop was disgusted—was routine authority to exercise priestly discipline over parishioners. Examiners of the case in Madrid found that there was no town in New Mexico great enough to contain a cathedral, and further, that the province was so poor that its tithes would never support a prelate. In any case, the friars made too much of their need, and their father custodian presently received no more than an apostolic grant empowering him to administer confirmation.

The matter was allowed to gather dust in official files for twenty-eight more years, when once again it was looked into, and now again with favor, for the kingdom of New Mexico had prospered until in 1666 it seemed likely that a bishop could be properly supported at Santa Fe. Royal and papal approval gathered strength for the next fourteen years; but then, in 1680, the calamity of the Pueblo revolt swept away the New Mexican colony, its Spaniards, and their parishes, and accordingly all chances for the bishopric. The river kingdom was left under the jurisdiction of the bishop of Durango, in his famous and lamented distance of fifteen hundred miles from Santa Fe. Generations would go by without an episcopal visitation to the exiled north after the Spanish restoration in New Mexico in 1692, while the mission friars struggled to hold their authority against that of the civil governors, and even broke into quarrels with their distant and invisible bishop. When in the last hours of the Spanish dominion in the New World, New Mexico was allowed to send an elected delegate to sit in the
Cortes
in Spain, he proposed once again, in 1810, but in vain, a bishopric for New Mexico. After the revolutionary secession of Mexico from Spain in 1821, the long process of secularization began, and without a bishop to guide it on the scene, the Church fell upon unhappy days. The absence of a spiritual leader seemed like a symbol of the abandonment of the province. Who cared?—so far, so outlandish, with only a handful of Spaniards (now Mexicans) amidst a diffused population of inscrutable Indians—New Mexico was lost in its golden distance, and the world did not appear to miss it. Without leadership in the affairs of the spirit, the society lost any motive larger than that of simple survival. Without food or purpose for the aggregate mind of the colony, ignorance was the birthright of each new generation. Without education to foster the works of betterment in people's lives, and to create a sense of a future for the young, the very heart
of the society was oppressed. When the last Franciscans were withdrawn in the 1830s, and a mere handful of the secular clergy was left, not only the people, but even many priests forgot the laws of the Church.

Now, in 1849, letters circulated between American chanceries and converged upon the prelate at Baltimore, who would forward to Rome the recommendations from among which the names of the new American bishops would be chosen. It was not a matter for parish priests to enter into; their presiding prelates kept the affair in their own hands. Lamy in Covington went about his modest but demanding labors, as yet knowing nothing of what was coming to a focus.

For each new bishopric, three nominations were drawn up by the conciliar bishops, were discussed by letter, and the names forwarded to Baltimore. Lamy, in his undemanding obscurity, was brought to light on several lists, which presented candidates in preferential order for first, second, and third rank in every case. For the new diocese of St Paul, he was ranked as second choice, with the notation, “Joannes Lamy, a Frenchman, 35 years of age; well versed in the doctrine; especially praiseworthy for his mild character, zeal for the salvation of souls.” For Monterey, California, he was again ranked in second place; but for Santa Fe, he was, by preponderance of recommendations, placed first, with the supporting statement, “Joannes Lamy, Native of France, 35 years old, for many years already working in the Diocese of Cincinnati, well known for his piety, honesty, prudence, and other virtues.” On 16 April 1850, Archbishop Eccleston of Baltimore wrote to Purcell that Lamy was “first on the list for the Vicariate of Santa Fe.” His nomination was submitted to Pius IX, while as summer deepened, Lamy, all unaware, wrote to Purcell on 25 July 1850 on routine matters in Covington, and added that “the cholera is not so bad in my little congregation”—St Mary's—”I have had only two deaths in this month … but the weather continues excessively hot.”

No one in America yet knew it, but six days earlier, on 19 July, Pius IX, recently returned to Rome from his sanctuary at Gaeta, where he had fled from Garibaldi, had established by decree the vicariate apostolic of New Mexico, and further, on 23 July had issued a papal bull naming as its vicar apostolic Father John Baptist Lamy, of Covington, Kentucky, with the title of bishop of Agathonica,
in partibus infidelium
.

xiv
.

These Two Vicars

L
AMY WAS AMAZED
when first the suggestion came his way, probably from his friend and superior Purcell, that he had been nominated for the mitre; but it was best to put thoughts of all that aside and get on with parish duties until the official bulls should arrive from Rome during the summer. His elevation then became a certainty which the self-doubts he felt could not affect. Of one thing he was immediately sure—to a place so far away, so outlandish, of which so little was known and that little discouraging enough—he could not go alone. He had communicated to Machebeuf what might be coming to pass, and they were keeping it between themselves. But when the “great news” finally arrived, he wrote to his old friend at Sandusky asking him to go West with him “not only as a missionary, but as an intimate friend on whom he could count and upon whom he could lay a part of his burden—in short, as his Vicar General”—a post which would place Machebeuf next in authority to the bishop. In his usual “simplicity and humility,” Lamy wrote to him, “They want me to be a Vicar Apostolic, very well, I will make you my Vicar General, and from these two Vicars we'll try to make one good pastor.”