Lamy of Santa Fe (35 page)

Meriwether found Gallegos “to be a shrewd, intelligent man,” whom he agreed to instruct in the political principles of the Democrats, and in a spirit of fairness—Meriwether was a Whig—provided him with an interpreter to translate his campaign speech at Santa Fe, in which the candidate made “a very favorable impression upon the audience.” In fact, Gallegos had so impressed his followers that they hanged straw-stuffed effigies of Meriwether and another Whig—Judge Davenport—from the flag staff in the Santa Fe Plaza. The election was close—the count showed Gallegos ahead by 445 votes out of 9497 cast. On 19 December 1853, Gallegos's credentials were presented to the House of Representatives, and he was duly seated. But Dr Lane contested the election, and the House referred the issue to its Committee on Elections. Extensive debate followed in the House. On further study, it appeared that if “Indian ballots were counted, Lane was the winner.” But Congress disallowed Indian votes, thereby throwing the victory to Gallegos. On 27 February 1854, Gallegos asked that he be allowed to bring an interpreter with him into the House chamber, but the request was denied.

It was another aspect of Gallegos's situation which concerned Lamy, who touched upon it in a letter to Archbishop Francis Patrick Kenrick at Baltimore, identifying Gallegos as “one of those unfortunate priests that I was obliged to suspend.” Lamy believed that the archbishop should be aware of this in case Gallegos should appeal to him in a certain matter. “It may be that he will ask permission to say Mass, and some gentlemen of his party may plead for him, saying that he has been punished unjustly, but he deserves well his suspension, and he cannot show any authentic recommendations.”

But if Gallegos maintained relations with any bishop but Zubiría of Durango, there is no record to say so. Evidently he still considered Zubiría his prelate. From Washington, on 2 June 1854, Gallegos wrote a long and devoted letter to him, which began, “To satisfy the wishes of my countrymen I decided to come to this capital to occupy the place of Delegate,” and he went on to say that he had been well
received by his colleagues, who listened “attentively” to his requests. He had obtained an appropriation of $127,000 for New Mexico. He had made a swift tour of the northeastern states—
terra incognita
to Zubiría—and reported on the benefits of industry and nature to be seen there. Catholics were present, but were greatly outnumbered by Protestants. He was not impressed by the general calibre of the priests—though he excepted the Jesuits, in their “intelligence and zeal.” Indeed, he often visited their college at Georgetown, near Washington. More interestingly: toward the end of March, “His Illustrious Lordship Lamy passed through here on his way to Rome. I assume he is going to justify his behavior before the Holy Father. I am afraid he will discharge upon us the weight of his imputations, so leading the Holy Father to a belief in contradiction of the true facts.” Gallegos held one hope, however. “May it be that the petition of the New Mexico clergy had been expedited before his arrival”—the packet sent by Dean J. F. Ortiz from Durango by way of the apostolic delegate in Mexico. But patience. “I will soon be informed about everything.” wrote Gallegos in an astounding revelation, “by Father Eulógio Ortiz”—a brother of the furious self-exiled dean—”who is accompanying Bishop Lamy; and then I will give Your Illustrious Lordship all the news.” It was plain evidence of a continuing intrigue against Lamy, and it seemed to implicate his priest-secretary, as well as his fellow bishop in Mexico. If so, perhaps patriotism as well as sacerdotal concern held the intriguers together. Gallegos proceeded to declare that his informants in New Mexico told him that “the position of my Catholic countrymen is getting worse every day.” In their resentment against Lamy and his vicar, many had “defected to the Protestants.” He hoped Mexico, whether in part or in entirety, would never be annexed to the United States. “The position of Mexicans would be lamentable if they were in the Union; their character, language, religion and other personal circumstances are diametrically opposite to what the North Americans feel about them.” He perceived fairly a social situation long to endure in the conquered Southwest. He added that he thought the United States would go to war against Spain to annex Cuba—it was true that there was sentiment, even in Congress, and, he said, in the White House, for such an imperialistic move. Public opinion was divided. “God willing,” wrote the delegate, “within two years [i.e., at the end of his term in the House] I'll have the pleasure of visiting Your Illustrious Lordship and receiving your orders.”

But Zubiría heard also from another quarter concerning the affairs of Gallegos. Connected to the rear of the Albuquerque church stood the long, one-storey adobe building with its many rooms and its spacious patio which served as the rectory, and was loosely called the
“convento”
as it contained also the sacristy. It had a certain spacious elegance, despite its primitive materials. The main door and the street-side windows were topped by Palladian pediments of wood. Panelled shutters adorned the windows. The slightly peaked roof was topped by a little open cupola ending in a pyramid. The great room, or
sala
, within had square-cut wooden beams. The walls were washed with a neutral distemper, and the dado, running around the room above the adobe banquette, was of pink muslin printed in a pattern of bluish squares. The banquette and floor were covered with another material in varied stripes. A panelled double door, decorated with a valance and heavy curtains, opened into a room beyond. Paintings hung on the walls of both rooms.

This was the residence of Gallegos, and despite what had happened to him at home, and what required his presence in Washington, he refused to abandon it. Upon his suspension he was asked several times to vacate the church property by Lamy, who even offered to pay him a certain sum to do so. Gallegos insisted that the property had been deeded to him personally by Zubiría.

Machebeuf now wrote to ask Zubiría in May 1854 if this were so. He had already filed suit against Gallegos to recover it. Gallegos had asked for a postponement of the legal action to enable him to “look for his documents,” which the court granted. He produced his papers in April, at the same time asking for a change of venue, which seemed odd to Machebeuf. Moreover, Gallegos had originally applied to the municipal town authorities of Albuquerque for a permit to build his house on the church lot, and had been given it. How, if he had had Zubiría's deed, would he need also a municipal title to the place? What Machebeuf asked was Durango's answer to all this, after, in his turn, “by various pretexts,” having secured another postponement of the trial, now to give him time to write to Mexico and obtain a reply. He wrote a second letter in June, in case the first had been lost.

In due course the reply came. In the “most clear and satisfactory manner possible,” Bishop Zubiría officially declared that he had never sold the house to Gallegos. “Behold the impostor unveiled!” exulted Machebeuf, and promptly moved into the rectory. The claim to the place was eventually settled out of court, with Lamy making a certain payment to Gallegos to reimburse his personal investment in the property.

Now Machebeuf was free to rehabilitate his parish, repairing and redecorating the church. Now the people were proudly helping him in his work of renewing their temple. What was yet to be improved was the execrable native music at the services. One of the parishioners heard from Machebeuf what proper liturgical music must be like; and
because he was so moved by Machebeuf s labors to bring seemliness into all possible aspects of the church's conduct, this citizen now offered to present a pipe organ to the parish. Machebeuf gratefully accepted—but who would play the sacred instrument? No one in Albuquerque could do so. At just the right moment, a letter came from the old organist who had played in church for two years in Machebeuf s Sandusky parish, saying he wished he might come to New Mexico to be with his former pastor. Might he come? Machebeuf said that he must. Organ and organist arrived simultaneously in Albuquerque and soon in church “the music fairly enraptured the Mexicans.”

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Disputed Boundaries

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, going eastward in January 1854, Lamy and his party joined up with a waggon train setting out for the plains. By March he was in St Louis, visiting Archbishop Peter Richard Kenrick, who wrote to Purcell as Lamy left for Cincinnati, “He is a truly Apostolic Prelate, nor could a happier selection have been made for Santa Fe,” and he added that Dr Lane, the former New Mexican territorial governor now living in St Louis, “has the highest esteem for the Bishop to whom he refers as belonging to the class of heroes.”

The journey continued to Ohio and Kentucky. Once again he was at Bardstown, and this time he went on to the Loretto motherhouse at Nerinckx, where he reported to the members on what their sisters were accomplishing at Santa Fe, and where he asked for others of the community, now, to be ready to go back with him to Santa Fe on his return from Europe in the late summer. With the promises of several, he made his way to Boston, and sailed on 29 March. “We had a short and good passage,” he wrote to Purcell. “We were on the sea only nine days and one night.”

He disembarked first in England. In Birmingham, where he hoped to see Father John Henry Newman, he was disappointed, as Newman, briefly home from his troubles in attempting to found a university in Dublin against the opposition of the Irish bishops and clergy, was spending the whole day in Bishop Ullathorne's retreat house. But
Ullathorne, regretting that he could not release any priests for Santa Fe, was hospitable, and showed Lamy “through the city of Birmingham to see some of their Catholic institutions.” Lamy noted that the diocese of Birmingham was making “immense progress,”

Coming next to France, he landed at Boulogne and at once paid a call upon the Ursulines there, whose community had invested so richly in Kentucky a few years ago: how long ago all that seemed now, and how much had happened since to the two young French missionaries who had persuaded them earlier. Now Lamy found that the Ursulines “were pressing upon me so much to stay with them, that I was near missing the cars that day for Paris.” Finally away, he sent messages to the Ursulines of Brown County, in Ohio, of his visit, and arriving in Paris, went to stay once again with the Sulpicians in the rue du Bac. In the Paris headquarters of foreign missions, he thought it advisable to leave his two young New Mexican seminarians for their schooling, and he hoped Purcell might be able to pay their tuition. Perhaps later Lamy could reimburse him for the account of one of them, if the seminary at Clermont should also be able to contribute. He was sorry to presume on his old friendship. Where else to turn? As for other news, it seemed that the new Emperor was very popular, often went through the streets alone, and it was professionally reassuring that Napoleon III kept at court a bishop and chaplains, and that recently they gave a retreat there.

By early June, Lamy was in Rome for his first visit
ad limina
to the Pontiff, and for his own recognition in person by the Vatican offices with which for so long he would have so much business from so far away.

The Eternal City was a meld of three elements—the ancient pagan imperial Rome, much of whose remains had been half-buried by the risen earth of centuries; the domed and palatial Christian city of the popes; and the very countryside itself. Groves of trees and open fields and much bare land were mingled with the works of man. Hillocks of earth rose gently upon the exposed upper portions, in marble or tawny brick, of ancient ruins; and everywhere he looked Lamy could see rising above the dirt streets the great baroque domes and tiled roofs, palace façades, and square stuccoed towers of the later city, while the open Campagna lay in view from any hilltop or at the end of any straight way. The via del Babuino leading from the Porta del Popolo to the Piazza di Spagna had country airs proper to a village street.

Lamy's affairs were focussed in the great bureaux of the Sacred Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith whose immense offices were housed in a brown sandstone palace designed by Bernini at the end of the Piazza di Spagna where the street divided to flow past its walls. Its
shallow stairways were wide and sweeping, taking the visitor from one pale vista of grand vaulted corridors to another, until he came to the reception rooms and finally the great inner office of the Vatican official who directed world-wide the Catholic mission activities. These continued in countries (of which until 1908 the United States was one) where the local Church was unable to sustain itself materially or to find itself so securely a part of national life as to justify separation from Rome in routine administration. Rome remained the fount of spiritual powers and hierarchical dispositions; and in her Christian history and the visible splendor by which she celebrated it, lay weighty confirmation of her authority for all her servants to see. Lamy, coming from his all but hidden diocese of towns and chapels built of the humblest dust, could be seen as a minister of the faith which bound the simplest of human situations to the might and glory of Christian Rome evolved through its own centuries from its underground beginnings to the universal Papacy of his own day.

His duties now began in the office of Alessandro Cardinal Barnabo, Prefect of the Propaganda Fide, with whom he would exchange a voluminous correspondence of increasing warmth and good feeling for many years. The Vatican palace and St Peter's lay far across Rome from the offices of the Propaganda Fide, where in rank upon rank of shelves, through vast, lofty open chambers, the archives of all the foreign missions, including his own, were kept in folios of heavy sheepskin tied with rawhide thongs and lettered and dated on their thick spines by quills holding brown ink. Until his period of brief exile, ending in 1850, Pius IX had lived in the Lateran Palace. Since his return from Gaeta he had occupied the Vatican, and at the proper moment, Lamy would be conducted there for his first audience with the pontiff who had decreed him bishop. The Cardinal Prefect of the Propaganda was received twice a month by the Holy Father. Perhaps Bishop Lamy would be presented on one such occasion.