Lamy of Santa Fe (31 page)

ii
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Rebellion

T
HE DUTIFUL,
clear, firm pastoral message was like a hot coal touched to a fuse, and the explosion was immediate. On reading Lamy's words, Dean Ortiz forthwith ordered him out of his house—the “bishop's palace” into which the rectory had been turned so grandly in August. Where must he go? Lamy had no other house but the “Frenchman's house.” A small corner of it would do for him. But there was a more serious issue—Lamy believed that the principal church should be his cathedral, and this was where Ortiz had presided since the 1830s. Surely the rectory would belong to the cathedral, and the bishop must have a right to residence there?

But no. Ortiz furiously declared that the house was his personal property.

But how could this be? On parish land?

It was his, Ortiz insisted, because he had bought it years ago from Bishop Zubiría, and he had a deed to prove it.

If so, this was inconvenient; for at the same time as he published the explosive pastoral letter, Lamy made known his official decision to divide the parish of Santa Fe, keeping one half to administer himself, and designating the old parish church of St Francis as the cathedral. As a gesture of fairness, he offered Ortiz the other half of the divided parish.

Nursing his rage, Ortiz refused, stating that he was the
parochus proprius
, the established life pastor of the whole parish, and that no one had the right to deprive him of this status. On the same day as Lamy's proposal, he gathered all his close friends in a crowd—”most of them corrupt in every aspect,” as Machebeuf said, for they included the native priests under discipline by the bishop. In a troupe they came to Lamy's house, crying, shouting, threatening to chase him out of town; and only fear of the civil authorities, who were Anglo-American, kept them from outright violence. When Lamy tried to explain to the mob his policy concerning the parish division, Ortiz cried that he would not accept it—he would rather give up everything than accept such an insult. At last the mob dispersed, and Ortiz and
Gallegos spent the next week in composing elaborate complaints against Lamy to be signed by selected citizens and in due time to be forwarded to Pius IX. A general, now open, controversy was ablaze with all the enraged vitality of which the old dean was capable, and countered with all the formidable calm in Lamy's nature.

As for the deed to the rectory, Lamy asked to see it, and when Ortiz complied, it was to show only a very small scrap of paper on which a few lines, supposedly written by “a priest who claimed to be authorized by Mgr of Durango, in 1831 or 1832 … gave everything to Ortiz.” The land—”much land”—attached to the parish church was sold to Ortiz “for 300 sheep” which “he was supposed to give [i.e., return to the church] after his death or his resignation.” By this act there was scarcely enough land left on which to build a new rectory. Consulting local residents, Lamy was told that the people of Santa Fe were witnesses that the property had belonged to the church of St Francis since the foundation of the missions; the dean's present claim “astonished” them all. In the same manner as the affair of the parish church, Ortiz had acquired personal possession of the ancient chapel of San Miguel. Everyone in Santa Fe, said Lamy, considered the whole thing a mystery. He himself assumed that Zubiría at Durango had been misinformed in whatever transaction took place, and that the church properties were lost through misunderstanding.

He did his best to propitiate and recompense Ortiz, now offering him more than half of the parish area for his lifetime, a pension, and one of the houses which he had built on other church land; but instead of accepting any arrangement from Lamy, the dean demanded thirteen thousand dollars of him, which of course was out of the question. Lamy was offered—by whom is not clear, but probably by a Santa Fean who remained loyal to Ortiz—the three hundred sheep which was the [originally] arranged price, but the bishop said, “I have refused to accept them as I do not think the sale was legitimate.” He believed he must finally resort to a lawsuit to regain the disputed properties.

For the moment, however, Lamy thought that patience and belief in the right would serve him better in the end than legal measures, and himself took the lower portion of the parish which he had offered to Ortiz. The
Castrense
was well enough restored for him to use it as his diocesan church. He left St Francis and its properties to Ortiz, and the parish division became, if not satisfying to either, firmly in effect.

After the pastoral letter, in which the native clergy had seen their habits, customs, and privileges attacked outright by its every implication of strict reform, they were more than ready to oppose Lamy, and Ortiz in his fury was girded to lead them. Some of them were already
their duties after earnest warnings about their ways of life. One of these was the pastor of Albuquerque, who had continued his inadmissible indulgences while Lamy was in the East. Another was D. B. Salazar, pastor of Santa Clara, who, said Machebeuf, was “so guilty that he did not reply with even one word to charges of almost daily drunkenness and adultery.” The bishop had charitably reinstated him to give him another chance, but Salazar fell at once into “his old vices,” and Machebeuf fully expected him to be struck dead at the foot of the altar “on pronouncing the opening words of the Mass” (
O God, sustain my cause; give me redress against a race that knows no piety; save me from a treacherous foe and cruel
).

Another, the Santa Fe priest José de Jesús Lujan, had long previously received censure from Zubiría. Lamy, in his early months in Santa Fe, learned that Lujan was “living in a most scandalous manner, keeping a very young and beautiful married woman in his house.” Her husband would come and plead with her to come home, and even went to the bishop for help, but Lujan refused to send her back where she belonged, even when Lamy ordered him to do so. Lujan, instead, sneered at Lamy as a hypocrite and worse, and the bishop suspended him for two years. But the great need for curates soon obliged Lamy to send him off to another parish whose pastor had died; yet no sooner there than Lujan sent for his mistress again—though he took the precaution of lodging her next door to his own house. When the pastoral letter reached him, Father Lujan refused to read it to his people. Lamy ordered him directly to do so, sending Machebeuf to hand it to him already “all unfolded” at Mass; but Machebeuf was met with insults. The bishop promptly suspended Lujan. Along with Ortiz, Gallegos, and the famous pastor of Taos, Antonio José Martínez, Lujan signed a letter of protest to Lamy about his division of the cathedral parish. Two other curates—Jesus Baca and Antonio Otero—resigned immediately on receiving the pastoral letter, and went about declaring that they had been deprived of their parishes. Lamy gave them a month to reconsider. Neither did so. With that, Lamy formally suspended them also.

By then, Ortiz had refused his services to the vicar apostolic, and, equipped with the written accusations to send to the Pope, had “departed resentfully” for Durango. He would be absent from Santa Fe for two years.

Since 1839, when Lamy came to Ohio, and 1851, when he went to New Mexico and began to comprehend the daunting dimensions of the land and its astonishing social problems, he had had plenty of experience of obstacles and difficulties; but these were of an impersonai
Kind and in facing them he neither gave nor felt enmity. But now he encountered hatred which was pointed straight at him. As it was induced by his view of his duty under divine and Canon Law, it obliged him to spare none who would oppose that. But the energies released by the enmities which now divided New Mexico represented two ideas of justice, both sincere.

The New Mexicans saw themselves as victims of a complicated set of oppressions—those left in the wake of the 1846 war; the increasing dominance of their lives and ways by the fast-growing commercial power of the plains traders and settlers from the East; the separation of their religious character from its original center in Durango; and now the invasion by still another set of foreigners who respected almost nothing of the local nature and who indeed could scarcely speak its language. What right had anyone—so the passionate New Mexicans felt—to despise their mode of life and impose rigors upon it quite foreign to its habit?

On the other hand, Lamy, in his rectitude deeply rooted in the ancient faith and discipline of provincial Europe, could not condone what made mockery of the very sacraments of matrimony, ordination, and penance. If at first his touch was light, it grew firm as he worked to turn his new people and their priests away from their accustomed path; but it was the new direction he demanded, not its mode, which gave rise to the two images of justice to the territory at the outset of 1853. Both sides inevitably insisted that justice could have only one. The initial clashes led to stubbornly held positions.

With Ortiz gone, the leadership against the bishop fell to others, whether among clergy or laymen. The initiative came from an unexpected quarter, on a surprising pretext.

During Lamy's absence of the previous year, Machebeuf, leaving the capital to the unresponsive local clergy, had spent his time and services among the people of the outlying districts. First of all, he kept an eye on Albuquerque, where Father Gallegos was going his own way; but in general visiting the pueblos of the middle Rio Grande Valley and the
ranchos
and other village settlements of the river country he found so beautiful. He said Mass, preached, administered the sacraments, entered into the territorial life with his simple gaiety and came to know local affairs intimately—so intimately that when these scandalized the Church, he worked to set them straight.

Now, suddenly, in January 1853, these works of his became the means through which certain powerful laymen decided to assail the bishop. The first onslaught, significantly enough, was led by a brother-in-law of the vanished rural dean. This was Francisco Tomás Baca,
of Peña Blanca, who bacome the spokesman of the ranchers downriver from Santa Fe in a savage attack upon Machebeuf.

Citizens of the parish of Cochiti/Santo Domingo—an area which included the Indian villages so named, and principally the settlement of Peña Blanca, which contained important families—sent Lamy a bill of complaints against Machebeuf accusing him of neglect. How they suffered for want of a regular pastor since the death of the previous one! Machebeuf came, stayed only briefly, and went; and “since he is such a wide traveller,” the spiritual needs of the people were neglected. “He is no sooner here, than he is already at Taos, Mora, San Miguel, Albuquerque, or elsewhere,” Worse, even when he tarried in Peña Blanca, he seemed to think his only duty was to harangue his hearers on the Fifth Commandment, that was, to dwell on money matters, “as if this was the only obligation for the faithful.” Then came the most shocking accusation—that if Machebeuf touched on “other matters it was to reveal the secrets of the confessional,”

No graver charge could be brought, and the petitioners made more of it than of their other complaints, such as that he compared them to “all kinds of savage animals, who work only for their temporal life and not for spiritual ends.” They had been forced to tolerate his actions only by their respect for the priesthood, and certainly not for any personal respect “for the man,” who used his “hurried visits” chiefly to “amass” levies, “harvests, really,” of tithes, within the space of twenty-four hours before dashing on elsewhere. Unless they were granted a resident pastor, they predicted a great falling away of the faithful, and they asked Lamy for one, saying “we do expect Your Lordship seriously to consider this, our just application, even though the information might possibly be disagreeable” to him.

Lamy instantly responded. His letter in reply was both frigidly correct and wrathful. Before speaking to the presentation and accusation “against the Vicar Don José P. Machebeuf,” he wrote on 14 January, “it is necessary to see what kind of defense he can make in his own behalf, since such matters are of themselves so very grave that they would seem to require juridical proof; and until such time as I am given proofs of what lies behind your demands, I shall consider the presentation as a calumny of the most malicious kind that could ever be made against the character of any priest; and accordingly, it shall be my duty to punish such persons who have made such accusations,” and he signed himself, omitting the usual blessing, with “Adiós! Your friend and Vicar Apostolic, Juan Lamy.”

His anger brought a change in tone in the correspondence, for two days later, Baca, now revealed as the principal spokesman, hurried to say that Lamy had “not quite understood the petition,” which was
nut meant as a “direct accusation” against Machebeuf but only as “a request for a resident pastor.” Calling on all the Hispanic talent for legalistic niceties and obfuscations, Baca hastened to add that as soon as the bishop gave him opportunity prescribed by Canon Law, “and counting on the obvious intelligence” of His Lordship, if he required proofs, he was prepared to proceed, if only to prevent “the slandering of any priest,” and further “to prevent the threatened punishment upon those who subscribed to the letter.” He therefore would ask only that the bishop address himself solely to “the said two points in question”—presumably the request for a pastor, and opportunity under Canon Law to testify further.

To this Lamy replied promptly, demanding answers “to the following questions: first, when and where was the violation of the seal of the confessional made?; second: to whom was it made?; third: what things were revealed?; fourth: the name of the person whose sins were thus revealed? Send me the answers, with proofs, as soon as possible. Adiós.”

A few days later, Lamy wrote again to Baca, stating that his vicar general could justify himself in the face of the accusations made against him, once proofs were submitted. “Then we will have finished with this business!” Lamy then attempted to close the correspondence: “Now permit me to inform you that when it will be necessary to write me, I will so advise you. I will have great pleasure in receiving any of your letters,” but, he could not forbear to add in the face of Baca's wrangling rhetoric, “please write in easier style.” Yet more, and now sternly, “And please do not interfere with or meddle with the operation of my administration but say and write only what pertains to the case in point.”