Lamy of Santa Fe (58 page)

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 created 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.

The chief difficulties in his mission lay in maintaining connections with the outside world, and of these, the greatest was the passage of the immense plains which isolated the diocese from the rest of the United States. After crossing the ocean, and then travelling six hundred leagues by rail, the most trying and costly part of the journey had yet to be passed. Up to that point, he and his people had been able to make use of the comforts of civilized countries; but from there on, they had to travel nine hundred miles without seeing a hut or even a bridge, all the while being exposed to Indian arrows. The savages
rarely failed to attack caravans, even very large ones. He remembered how in the autumn of 1855 six of his Brothers of the Christian Doctrine, coming to found schools, crossed the plains. As a precaution they joined a train of five hundred open waggons, loaded with provisions and merchandise for New Mexico. The prairie voyage took two and a half months, and the travellers were attacked several times by Indians, despite the defense offered by the twelve hundred men of the caravan, and a number of people were killed or wounded. The expenses of such travel were enormous—one had to buy everything, animals, waggons, provisions, camping equipment. In New Mexico, they had only the most rigorously necessary things to sustain life, and he meant, literally, bread and meat. There were no factories. Most of the inhabitants raised sheep and cattle—at little profit, probably because of the Indians who stole the flocks and herds, and killed the shepherds and cowmen, or took them prisoner. Yet the prairies were vast and beautiful, and Providence had placed countless droves of buffalo upon them, which provided food and hides for half a million people—the Plains Indians.

Three territories comprised the diocese of Santa Fe at present. The Catholics numbered between 130,000 and 140,000, divided between New Mexico (110,000 Mexicans, all Catholic, and 15,000 Catholic Indians), Colorado (8000 Mexicans and Americans), and Arizona (7000 Indians and Mexicans among whom, as on all sides, there were some good and some bad). He had fifty-one active priests where he had come to find nine. Eleven were either retired or deprived of their priestly functions. Fourteen were Mexican, thirty-one French, and six others from different European countries. He expected to take eight or ten back to Santa Fe with him now. With his present number of priests who administered to a Catholic population so spread out, they could hardly make visits to the villages at any great distance from the missionary residence. He could use more than a hundred priests if he could maintain them once they had arrived in the diocese. In New Mexico, besides the enumerated Catholics, there were four to five thousand Americans, more atheist than Protestant, three or four hundred Jews, and thirty thousand unsettled Indians, barbarous and “almost cannibalistic.” There were thirty-one missions or jurisdictions. In seven churches and five chapels the priest was in residence and kept the Blessed Sacrament in the tabernacle.

He had made three pastoral visits to Colorado, only one into Arizona. On that one he travelled over three thousand miles on horseback. In many places, he and his companions had to sleep under the stars, and often had to go sixty or seventy-five miles without water, when he would walk to rest his horse. Despite all such endurances
there was reward in meeting faithful souls in the wilderness who had not seen a priest for many years.

He told of the Christmas Mass on the snow-covered side of that mountain in Arizona, and brought the account of the journey full circle until he came to Tucson and San Xavier del Bac, whose history and condition he described. He noted Aztec ruins, and those left also by Spaniards who had been forced to abandon Arizona in the eighteenth century because of the ferocity of Apache warfare. One of his strongest impressions of Arizona found its way into the report as he described the great saguaro cactus, and recalled that travellers had told how the word “Arizona” was the Indian word for “land of the cactus,” and he thought “the etymology sounds truthful enough.” Anyhow, the gigantic cacti, by their beauty, form, and great height, were the most interesting of their species, often taking the form of a many-branched candelabrum, with the circumference of the trunk measuring a metre. The plant yielded an exquisite fruit, which the Indians gathered by means of a long pole to which a sickle was lashed. At a distance, immense forests of these cacti “appeared like a troop of giants armed for a battle.”

Colorado was much colder than Arizona. Out of its cold heights its great rivers came pounding out into wide valleys to cool the meadows. Thousands of farmers were already in possession of its most beautiful valleys, and the cereals they grew were among the territory's main resources, along with gold and pasture lands. Silver fir and cedars covered the towering mountains up to the timberline.

New Mexico had an older non-Indian population than either of his other two territories. Generations of families had been born there to raise their children, their flocks, and keep their lands. These—the Mexicans of Spanish descent—were well disposed toward religion, wanted the sacraments, revered their clergy, and willingly went about the tasks of building the church whose plan had been drawn and given them by their pastor. If the church building was of “a poor style, nevertheless it is the best monument of the place.” Indians in the pueblos, he said, were very fond of their priests. In one pueblo, when the pastor was to be moved elsewhere, they pleaded with the bishop that he stay in such a way that he could not refuse them. The young priest, alas, was not destined to remain with them much longer—he died of a brain fever soon afterward. In respect of the roving tribes, the government had a plan to maintain them on reservations. He had already sent priest-teachers to one such with some success.

As to general observations—social abuses mainly in the moral sphere would be the hardest to cure. Their main causes arose from the bad
examples which the worshippers of his diocese had witnessed, scandals emerging particularly from the old clergy. A larger number of priests, good priests, would be the best cure for this, as well as for ignorance. He regretted to report that he had neither chapter house nor cathedral canons. Item: no neighboring bishop had interfered in the exercise of his jurisdiction. Item: he had held three diocesan synods in the past twelve years. Item: regular visitations in the diocese could not be made to accord with Canon Law because of the great distances, the conditions of the roads, and the dangers of Indian attacks which often destroyed caravans and killed travellers. Still, as circumstances allowed, episcopal visits were made each year to one or another part of the diocese. Item: some income reached the chancery from the raising of animals which certain parishioners gave instead of actual money in tithes—four thousand dollars, approximately.

Communication was still difficult between New Mexico and the rest of the United States, and transportation was exorbitantly expensive. But looking to the future, the bishop (older now, fifty-two years of age, gray-haired, more gaunt and weathered than ever) felt the excitement of all who built in harmony with the forces of their times. Railroads were advancing from the west in California and from the east in Missouri and Texas; and when they should meet, the condition of things would be entirely changed. Mines could be worked, stock raised and shipped, cultivation of produce increased; laborers would be better paid, they could construct houses and churches as in the East. Factories might well be established—woolen mills to use the product so plentiful in that country. In time his mission would without doubt find extension and a way of sustaining the great, heavy loads which were always found in new undertakings. “Providence will never abandon us”—his conviction was clear.

Through all his report there seemed to show a love of the desert and mountain Southwest which had gradually cast its spell over him. Knowing his immense land in the same terms as any other frontiersman, he loved it the more for seeking out, and surviving, its hazard and its challenge. The report was taken under advisement less for this value than for its hard facts.

While in Rome, in his endless pursuit of new helpers, Lamy asked Barnabo for his influence in recruiting Jesuits for Santa Fe, saying he had without avail been asking the Society of Jesús for men for thirteen years. The cardinal, an administrator, told him to put the request in writing. Undoubtedly it was then forwarded to the current general of the Jesuits, Father Beckx, who, when Lamy called on him a few days later, at once assigned him three priests and two brothers, out of the
province of Naples. They were Fathers L. Vigilante, as superior, Rafael Bianchi, and Donato M. Gasparri; and brothers Prisco Caso and Rafael Vezza. They were to sail for America with the bishop in May.