Lamy of Santa Fe (74 page)

By now Lamy must have recognized, very probably had accepted, the condition that much of life inevitably was unfinished business. In any case, he would have no choice now but to accept a certain decision taken by his successor soon after the changeover in authority. “So far,” declared Salpointe, “as the Cathedral is concerned, it would be imprudent to desire its completion, in view of the poverty of this land and the impossibility of finding funds in the diocese to help in this task.” He found the building half completed and the rest almost ready for the permanent joining of the old north transept—in use by the people—to the new portion. What needed to be done at once was to effect the connection to keep out the weather, and to add to the facade enough to give the whole appearance of a church; and all he could ask France for was enough for these modest conclusions. Work on the cathedral was brought to a halt.

In the following year, the towering carved-stone reredos, originally
taken from the
Castrense
and installed in the cathedral sanctuary under Salpointe's supervision in 1859, was now curtained away by a false wall of canvas. Lamy's last bestowal of his powers upon the cathedral he had worked to build, as he had his archdiocese, with troubled care, was to come on 7 March 1886, when he blessed the bells from the old adobe north tower which had been newly hung in the corresponding new stone tower. By then, the architect Michael Machebeuf and his wife, with no more to do, had returned home to France.

A strange summer followed—drought was succeeded by cloudbursts, the dry rivers and dusty arroyos suddenly ran with turbulent brown water, and the pueblo church and
convento
of Santo Domingo—one of the largest pueblo missions, with its Franciscan archives dating back to the founding of the colony in 1598—were crumbled away by the Rio Grande, and nothing remained of church, cloister, and archives.

It was satisfying for Lamy to learn in 1886 that one of his disappointments now turned into a success for Salpointe. The new archbishop, convinced by what he had seen in the pueblos, went to Washington to ask the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, one Oberly, for funds to establish pueblo schools. Commissioner Oberly was persuaded by Salpointe's case, gave him contracts in support of four day schools, with a promise of three more to come, together with a contract for a vocational training school for Indians at Bernalillo. The Pueblo villages which received their schools were Acoma, Laguna, Paguate, Santo Domingo, Jemez, San Juan, and Taos.

Affairs to the north were increasingly complicated during the next year or two. Though Machebeuf had asked for a coadjutor on grounds of his infirmity many years earlier, this was not granted to him at the time; but now Rome reconsidered—but for a different reason. Machebeufs diocesan finances were in disorder, and a younger, abler administrator was needed to salvage the temporal affairs of the diocese which in his optimistic zeal Machebeuf had allowed to run far into debt. The appointment of Father Nicholas Matz as coadjutor in Denver was made without prejudice to Machebeuf; and, in fact, upon a reminder from Lamy in 1887, the Vatican raised Denver from the status of vicariate apostolic to that of episcopal see, and Machebeuf remained as its first bishop; for his lifetime achievements were properly recognized and praised, and on the occasion of his golden jubilee as a priest, in 1886, one of the tributes addressed to him declared that “his history is almost the history of the Catholic church in these mountains,” and that “from the Gulf of California to the Mississippi valley the name of Machebeuf is known,”

Lamy was at peace at the Villa Pintoresca. He had his books, and his telescope, and his far view of the Rio Grande Valley and the blue
Jemez beyond the pale orange hills of Tesuque. Salpointe kept an eye on the old man's health and reported often to Machebeuf—Lamy had brought him “some magnificent peaches” from the
ranchito
, Lamy was “habitually well.”

He had visitors, who saw in him still what an Army captain saw when he had called at the residence in town: “a venerable gentleman, whose finely shaped head, clean-cut features, clear, bright eyes, discover him to be a man of acute intellect and whose gentle smile and modest, courteous manners conceal the great scholar and man of wonderful executive ability he is known to be.” Another caller found him “earnestly studying a folio edition of the Holy Gospels, making himself sensitive to the tones of that language which was so soon to be his proper idiom.…” Collegians from St Michael's liked to go to see him at the Villa Pintoresca; and when they came, they were, he said firmly, to walk all the way out from Santa Fe, just as he used to do for so many years. (He now had to ride to town and back.) Yes, Archbishop, they would say, yes, Archbishop—but as often as not they rode, until they came to the hill immediately to the south of the ranch; and there they would dismount, tether their horses out of sight, and climb over the hill to the lodge, puffing with contrived virtue.

Sometimes he would go into town, to take his pleasure of the day by greeting people in the plaza, where there were benches under the trees within the white picket fence along the four sides of the little park. If he stayed overnight, he said Mass at six o'clock the next morning, either in the convent chapel, or at St Michael's, or in the chapel at St Vincent's Hospital.

On 4 October 1887, he appeared in Santa Fe to keep the feast of St Francis of Assisi. There was a procession that evening. The traditional stacks of piñon wood burned along the streets, throwing firelight like banners across adobe buildings. The marchers carried lighted candles through the sharp autumn air. In the procession walked the retired archbishop, and it was a wonder to see him again—so thin and white, so frail and faithful—passing through his streets to the cathedral for vespers at the end of the feast.

He was back again on 12 December to dedicate the chapel of Our Lady of Light at the Loretto convent, now at last completed. The unfinished cathedral was in continuous use, and the choir of St Michael's College sang the midnight Mass there at Christmas.

A few weeks later on 7 February 1888, a message came from the Villa Pintoresca. The old archbishop had been taken sick in the country, and asked to be brought into town, where his cold—he said he had a cold—could be treated properly. A carriage was sent at once.

iii
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Day's End

H
E WAS BROUGHT
to his old, high, square room in Archbishop's House where the white walls were finished at the ceiling with plaster cherubim. Doctors were called—Santa Fe's leading medical men, Symington and Lindell. They diagnosed pneumonia. Lamy's condition gave reason for encouragement. There was some improvement—no call for serious fears. But a few days passed, the pneumonia grew worse, and his strength did not seem to return.

After the first days, then, Lamy, knowing better than anyone what drew near, sent for Salpointe and asked him to administer the last sacraments; and asked him further to give him the indulgence
in articulo mortis
. Lamy said to Salpointe, later,

“Thank you. I was able to follow every word of the prayers you came to say for me. Keep praying for me, for I feel that I am going.”

Twice in the following week, Salpointe brought him the viaticum. Two nuns kept watch day and night—one of them was his niece Marie, Mother Francesca. When her hours of vigil were over each time, and she returned to the convent for a little sleep, the students, looking out the windows at Loretto, saw her coming from the bishop's house with her veil dropped over her face.

Early on the night of 12 February Lamy seemed to fall into a restorative sleep, and Salpointe, who had urgent matters to attend to in Las Vegas, felt it safe to go there by the train which left Santa Fe at two in the morning.

But Lamy coughed “considerably” during the night, and toward morning he was restless. At half past five, Mother Francesca called the gardener, Louis Mora, who slept in the adjoining room in case of need. He came and together they turned the archbishop in his bed, for he could not do this for himself, nor even make his wants known. They did what they could to make him comfortable.

At seven o'clock, Louis suddenly said to Mother Francesca that he thought it would be well to send for a priest. Archbishop Salpointe was away, all the other priests nearby were saying their Masses. But a quarter of an hour later, one of them came, and saw what must be
done at once, and began to recite the prayers for the dying. Within the half hour, the archbishop came to himself, saw them all, and his niece said he smiled as though he saw a heavenly sight, and died without pain or distress. It was February thirteenth, 1888. In a little while all the bells of Santa Fe began to toll, and soon everyone in the old mountain capital knew for whom.

Humble proprieties followed. Lamy's nephew and namesake, and Father Jouvenceau of the cathedral, and other priests, washed the corpse. The undertaker came to take it away for embalming. At six in the evening the archbishop was brought to the Loretto chapel to lie on a bier in the sanctuary while the members of the community kept vigil all night. He was robed in red dalmatic and chasuble and on his hands were purple gloves. The pallium lay upon his shoulders and breast. A white mitre emblazoned with the Holy Ghost in gold was on his head. His hands held a crucifix. His large amethyst ring gleamed on his right hand. His feet were encased in purple slippers. The altar was fronted in black and silver. Thirty candlesticks were wrapped in black cloth and their candles nickered in the sanctuary. His face was diminished to the size of the skull, but its integument, so close to the bone, held an expression of peace in mortal sleep.

In the morning Lamy was carried on his bier by six priests, led by Salpointe, through the city and its throngs of witnesses. The procession moved from the chapel in College street to Cathedral Place, then across to Palace avenue, around the plaza, and back up San Francisco street to enter the cathedral which Lamy was never to leave again. He lay in state there for twenty-four hours, and they said six thousand people came by to see him, and many kissed his purple slipper. Machebeuf had hurried by train from Denver, Salpointe from Las Vegas. Each of them, and Monsignor Eguillon, the vicar general, said a Mass during the morning. It was Ash Wednesday. All day delegations of priests and religious and laity arrived from the outlying diocese.

On Thursday, 16 February, at nine o'clock, the obsequies began in a solemn pontifical Mass, with Salpointe, Machebeuf, and Eguillon at the high altar before which lay the dead archbishop. The Collect was intoned:

Grant us, Lord, that the soul of thy servant Bishop Juan whom Thou hast withdrawn from earthly toil and strife, may be admitted into the company of thy saints …

And at the Secret:

Grant, we entreat thee, Lord, that the soul of thy Bishop Juan, may profit by this sacrifice, the offering of which, under thy ordinance, earns pardon for the sins of all mankind …

It was the last occasion to draw together the two friends who together had made their escape into their lives half a century ago. At a certain moment, Machebeuf limped forward to speak—”if speaking it could be called,” said the rector of the Denver cathedral, who was present; for Machebeuf was all but inarticulate through tears and sobs. His face was runnelled like that of an ancient of days. He remembered what they had passed through together, the two seminarians, the two curates, the two missioners, “these two vicars”; and what together they had transformed in the immense land which they had loved for its very hardness, where they had spent themselves for the lives, mortal and immortal, of others. Of the two friends, the younger was now gone. Over his corpse the older said that his time would come next, and soon.

Presently the tremendous liturgy of the dead was resumed which by its impersonality brought a sense of triumph over death. After communion, Eguillon, the celebrant, sang:

Almighty God, we pray that the soul of thy servant Bishop Juan may be cleansed by this sacrifice, and that in all time to come he may deserve the remission of sins and respite for his soul …

When Mass was over, Salpointe spoke a eulogy in English, Eguillon one in Spanish. At noon the congregation was dismissed. The ring and the crucifix were taken from Lamy's hands, the one to be kept by his niece and eventually to go down through his family, the other to be given to a friend. On the evening of the funeral, the corpse was enclosed in a plain wooden coffin, four days later it was removed to a metallic casket, and then lowered into the narrow crypt before the high altar of the church which the generations have made into the monument over his grave. Dead in his seventy-fifth year, he had been a priest for fifty years, a bishop for thirty-eight.

The next day, when in his memory, his niece, as was her duty, began to lead her people in the
De Profundis
at the end of a meal in the refectory, she began to cry and could not proceed. At St Michael's, his collegians in a resolution described him as “a second Saint Paul” and decreed the wearing of mourning bands for thirty days. Writing to Europe, Salpointe told how Lamy had lived so long, and was so identified with the desert and the mountain West, that all its people, regardless of their religious beliefs, were attached to him, and prided themselves on belonging to him.

Affirmation was the theme of his life. Who knew how much spiritual energy was thoughtlessly inherited, absorbed, and reactivated in later inheritors? Lamy's unquestioning manner of spiritual commitment could seem as natural to him as all the other simply accepted aspects
of his daily life and time. What John Henry Newman wrote of St John Chrysostom could be as true of Lamy—”his intimate sympathy and compassionateness for the whole world, not only in its strength, but in its weakness; in the lively regard with which he views everything that comes before him, taken in the concrete, whether as made after its own kind or as gifted with a nature higher than its own. I speak.' Cardinal Newman said, “of the discriminating affectionateness with which he accepts every one for what is personal in him and unlike others. I speak of his versatile recognition of men, one by one, for the sake of that portion of good, be it more or less, of a lower order or a higher, which has severally been lodged in them.… I speak of the kindly spirit and the genial temper with which he looks around at all things which this wonderful world contains.