Lamy of Santa Fe

by Paul Horgan

  vii.

  Triumphal Entry

  EARLY ON SUNDAY, 9 AUGUST 1851, they were drawing near enough to be able to see the city. Lamy had thought it probable that “some of the faithful” would come out to meet his party, but he was astounded to see many thousands advancing at a point five or six miles from the first houses, and his first assumption was that the local garrison was leading a welcome to the troop detachment which accompanied him. In another moment he must accept the welcome on his own account. Most conspicuous in a magnificent carriage was the United States Territorial Governor James Calhoun. He greeted the bishop warmly. The resident Mexican rural dean came forward—Very Reverend Mon-signor Juan Felipe Ortiz—”a large, fat-looking man” with reddish hair —to pay his respects to Lamy, and the governor took the two into his own carriage. All the civil and military authorities were on hand, and leading citizens, riding in the finest carriages gathered from the city and the country for miles around. Among the festive thousands were ranks of Indian dancers, each group in its own characteristic costume, who “performed their evolutions” along the way.

  As the elated procession came to the city, the American artillery at Fort Marcy on its height commanding the plaza fired cannonades in salute. The road of the bishop’s entry—evidently San Francisco street leading directly to the parish church of St Francis, which would become the cathedral—was superbly transformed into a lane of “beautiful cedar trees, which the day before had been brought in and planted for the occasion.” All the houses were decorated with their best fabrics—silks and carpets hung from the windows, doors, and balconies—while the animated populace attended the progress up the earthen street.

  Going direct to the church of St Francis, the bishop entered the sacristy to change from his dusty travel clothes. The church was filled, the women kneeling on the floor, with black shawls over their heads, while the men stood at the rear. The principal church, it was in poor repair. There was no floor but the packed earth. Particles of the adobe ceiling and walls flaked down. Whenever at rare intervals there should be rain, mud puddles gathered on the floor. The nave was long and narrow, with dim transepts establishing the shape of the cross. On each side of the main chamber were life-sized wax figures left behind from the time when Franciscans administered the province. These were effigies of painted friars with tonsured heads, one group wearing white habits, the other blue, all cinctured with the knotted Franciscan girdles. The altar was a garish bower of ornate mirrors, paintings or colored prints, and brightly colored hangings. Colored glass high up in the walls cast a reddish glow over the interior. A Mexican string orchestra waited for the bishop’s entrance, with all the available clergy, for the singing of the Te Deum. He was now robed in his purple cassock, surplice, mozzeta, and a heavy white stole embroidered in gold bullion. Machebeuf, as his vicar general, accompanied him.

  Looking upon him clearly now, the people saw Lamy in his early middle age, with the signs of ten years of hard, maturing work on him. Gaunt and sparely built, he was weathered from his travels. His manner was mild but when he met their gaze, his dark eyes sparkled. His head was broadly modelled, with deeply porched eyes and strongly shadowed cheeks, outlined by his long, dark, curly hair. In repose his wide mouth wore a melancholy expression, but when he smiled people felt the illumination of his nature. Patience, civility, and intelligence marked his face. His jaw was bony and square, and his chin was resolute. He seemed young—and in fact was, at thirty-seven—to be a bishop. His vicar general looked older than he. They saw that Machebeuf was shorter, and how his thin little frame seemed to quiver with controlled animation. His hair, long and brushed straight back from his spacious brow, was light. His face was as plain as the bishop’s was handsome. Over his deep-set little eyes he wore small spectacles rimmed in metal. His face was lean, with marked cheekbones, and his mouth was a trifle protuberant, with a thick lower lip. A large mole made a lump on his right jaw. His collar was too large for his thin neck. Through all this, his witty and compassionate nature charmed people’s spirits when they looked at him. However curious a pair they were to come before strangers whose ways and wants were so different, the Santa Feans paid respect to their offices now.

  The Te Deum was sung, and in the liturgical intervals, the music of the fandangos—for it was the only music available—twanged forth from the string players. Lamy at the end gave his triple blessing, and was then conducted to the adjacent rector’s house of Monsignor Ortiz. What Lamy found there amazed him. The house, as both he and Machebeuf remarked, was transformed into a veritable “Episcopal palace”—presumably with rich furniture, hangings, and rugs. Ortiz had moved out in order to accommodate the bishop, and had taken up residence under his mother’s roof. The rectory looked like a suitable lodgement and Lamy resolved to live there.

  Now followed a “magnificent dinner” to which came all the leading authorities and citizens of the town, including Mexicans and immigrant Americans, Protestants and Catholics alike, military and civil. It was such a feast, declared Machebeuf, as to cause Lamy and himself to forget entirely their long journey across the Texas deserts.

  The day needed only one more blessing to make it memorable. As at El Paso, and all the length of New Mexico, the drought over Santa Fe had been ruinous. Fields and ranges were scorched, cattle and sheep were dying of starvation, the hardest of times faced the people. Like everyone in New Mexico, the guests at the ceremonial dinner were all concerned at the disaster which threatened. And then, on the very day of the bishop’s arrival, clouds appeared from across the mountains, and rain fell in torrents until the earthen streets ran like brown rivers. The downpour was general. Crops would revive, the grass ranges be saved. The year would be one of plenty after all. In the common thought, could it be anything but an omen?

  The day’s welcome could hardly have been more joyful, and, in terms of what was to be had in Santa Fe, extravagant. But if Lamy thought it an auspicious beginning for his new labors, he was wrong.

  IV

  THE DESERT DIOCESE

  1851–1852

  i.

  Defiance

  A LEADER IN THE JUBILANT WELCOME given to Lamy, Juan Felipe Ortiz, the rural dean (or vicar forane) at Santa Fe, reserved until later the most unexpected news he had for the new bishop. Having paid all proper respect to mitre and crozier—Lamy was undoubtedly a bishop—Ortiz, and the local clergy over whom he presided, suddenly maintained that Lamy was not the bishop for Santa Fe, and refused to recognize him as such.

  It was astonishing to be told this after all the triumphal arches, the episcopal palace of mud placed at his disposal, the public excitement. How could this be?

  Ortiz stood his ground, believing he had good reason to do so. Only a few months ago, his own bishop, Zubiría of Durango, had been in Santa Fe, when the two discussed the ruling given to Durango by Rome—that Mexican bishops should “continue to exercise their episcopal authority north of the border.” What else (as Bishop Blanc had noted earlier) could have taken Zubiría to New Mexico after the 1846 war?

  But the papal bulls, the faculties vested in Lamy, all set forth in the documents which he carried with him?

  Well and good, conceded Ortiz; but he had had no word from Durango that the episcopal power was to be transferred, and lacking such direct authority, the dean would continue to disavow Lamy as his ordinary. His local clergy would do the same, for it was to him that they looked as the representative of Bishop Zubiría. As rural dean since 1832, Ortiz had been responsible for the entire administration of the Church in New Mexico—the duties of the clergy, the upkeep of the churches, the keeping of parish records, the strict observance of the liturgy, the care of sick priests, continuous visits to his parishes, and the making of annual reports to his bishop. Ortiz had shown no zeal for his duties, and under his regime his clergy had lost theirs. But in the matter of a change of bishops, he was suddenly zealous, legalistic, and rudely stubborn.

  Lamy, in his amazement, yet considered the matter from the dean�
��s point of view and patiently concluded that the dean was technically justified in his position. Conferring with Machebeuf, he wrote to Zubiría in Durango asking for a swift confirmation by letter of Rome’s new appointment.

  The news of Lamy’s presence and pretensions went to Zubiría from another source—the pastor of Taos, Father Antonio José Martínez. “Your illustrious lordship,” he wrote, “perhaps knows that New Mexico has been erected as a bishopric [actually vicariate apostolic], and Fr. Juan Lamy was appointed to be its bishop.… I have regretted a great deal the separation of New Mexico from the diocese of your Illustrious Lordship,” and he hinted that a “superior authority”—evidently referring to the territorial United States governor—was behind the move.

  Durango lay five hundred leagues to the south in Mexico. A letter from there must take time to arrive. Meantime, Lamy could not remain idle. His documents made one matter binding—he had in them a legal claim to the Church properties of New Mexico; and even the dean must bow before this. The new bishop moved swiftly to take custody of Church buildings, chapels, and other properties, and succeeded in all but one case. This instance, before it was resolved, was a scandal, a farce, an occasion for the public passion for which the citizens of Santa Fe have always been famous. The case had to do with the Chapel of Our Lady of Light on the south side of the earthen plaza of the old city. This was popularly called the “Castrense”—a word signifying that which belonged to the military.

  It had been the old military chapel of the Spanish/Mexican garrison of Santa Fe, and, in much disrepair, it had been appropriated by the United States territorial government after the 1846 war, evidently without protest by the rural dean. A United States lieutenant in 1846 noted it as “the richest church in Santa Fe,” though it was then in ruins, the roof fallen in, and bones of parishioners once interred below the earth floor lying about in random exposure. He saw the carved stone reredos, dated 1761, with its panels of saints and a central bas-relief of Our Lady of Light “rescuing a human being from the jaws of Satan whilst angels are crowning her.” He fancifully detected Egyptian influence in the ornamental carved columns which enclosed the central panels. By 1849, the roof had been repaired, and the building was in use as a storehouse by the United States authorities.

  Within a few days of his arrival, Lamy had already taken steps to bring the chapel into his possession. Writing to Purcell, he said, “It is not very large but admirably proportioned, and the sanctuary is enriched with a great deal of fine work in stone. The military authority seems to allege a claim to this property, though the territorial legislature has relinquished all right to interfere. I hope I shall not have much trouble in its recovery.…”

  But on a Sunday night soon afterward, while Lamy was still awaiting a reply from Zubiría, the presiding judge of the Supreme Court of New Mexico, Chief Justice Grafton Baker, ruminating drunkenly over Lamy’s campaign to take the Castrense from United States jurisdiction, declared that he would never yield the chapel to Lamy and Machebeuf; on the contrary, he would have them both hanged from the same gallows.

  It was the wrong thing to say in the presence of a few Mexican Americans who with others were drinking with him that evening; for like their fellow Latins of the time, they held the Church and its priests in reverence. They repeated abroad what the chief justice had threatened to do. On Monday morning a petition was swiftly circulated which demanded the return of the chapel to the Church. Over a thousand citizens signed it—Catholic, Protestant, civilian, military; and a great crowd came together out of nowhere and marched on the profaned chapel where the chief justice had taken refuge. “Fearing for his life,” wrote Machebeuf to his sister much later (she had heard of the episode even in France, which astonished him), the judge demanded military protection from the American commandant at Fort Marcy, the United States fortification. His plea was disdainfully refused, and an officer came to the bishop to assure him that if he should need protection (presumably from the court) the entire garrison would be at his disposal. Feeling ran so high during the day that Machebeuf and a Catholic officer of Fort Marcy took up a position at the door of the church to protect Chief Justice Baker until he asked for safety and vowed to yield to the bishop. That Monday evening, “the poor judge, wholly humiliated and abashed, went to make reparation to the bishop, and proposed to return the church to him with all possible solemnity.”

  So it was that on Tuesday morning, in the presence of the governor and all the military and civil authorities, “they surrendered the building,” declared Lamy, “according to all the formalities of the law; the court itself sitting in the church, myself being present, they gave me the keys. I said few words in Spanish and English, and right on the spot I got up a subscription to repair the church in a decent manner, the governor and the chief justice liberally subscribed the first ones and in a short time, we had upwards of thousand dollars our list is increasing every day … I hope to say mass in it in three month, when I come back from Durango…”

  For there had been no word from Zubiría and Lamy began to see that he must go himself to show his documents of appointment to the old bishop and try to bring him to cede what had so far been denied in Santa Fe.

  ii.

  The Society

  AT STAKE WAS HIS AUTHORITY over a diocese larger than France. New Mexico still loosely included all of present-day Arizona, and other areas imprecisely defined, which were part of the Mexican cession after the war. Lamy had already seen much of his new diocese, whose overall size was about two hundred and thirty-six thousand square miles, and if the desert seemed to predominate in its character, the country around Santa Fe had great variety. It lay at an altitude of seven thousand feet in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo range, which rose nearby in the east—wooded mountains which took the sunset light in such color that the early Spaniards named them for the Blood of Christ. To the south were rolling hills dotted with piñon and juniper trees. Sixty miles away across a vast plain rose the superb arc of the Sandia Mountains at Albuquerque, and on the northern horizon was the grand line of the Jemez Mountains, beyond great barrancas of sandstone and earth, the color of rosy flesh, through which ran the Rio Grande on its two-thousand-mile course from the Colorado Rockies to the Gulf of Mexico. Overall was a light so clear by day that prehistoric Indians named the place of Santa Fe “the dancing ground of the sun.” The air was pungent with the exhalations of mountain forest and desert bush; and every play of mountain sky, with light and cloud, and every gradation of blue in the mountains from near to far, and the rustling cool under cottonwood groves in summer, and the warm sunlight of even the coldest winter day, when the smoke from hearth fires of piñon wood gave a resinous perfume over the town, brought a sense of thoughtless well-being to most people, and an awareness of unique beauty. The bishop found some four thousand residents in Santa Fe, out of a total of 65,984 as reckoned in a census taken for New Mexico five months before his arrival.

  The city seemed humbly like a very element of its natural surroundings. From a little distance, its houses merged into a likeness of some eroded earth outcropping, for they were all made of earth itself, in the form of adobes, or large shallow bricks moulded from a mixture of mud and straw which when dried were strong and durable. To soldiers and traders from the East, the buildings seemed like wretched hovels, and Lamy himself said that his Mexicans had no other architecture but that of their mud houses, which used no boarding, and had almost no windows, and as for the churches, of which Santa Fe had five, they reminded him of nothing so much as “the stable of Bethlehem,” (There was only one house in town with a peaked roof and shingles; it was put up during the war and was known as “la casa Americana.”) Streets and houses both were of earth material, and met the weather in the same way, wet or dry, muddy or dusty.

  Yet there were graces and strengths in the local building style, for once off the street and through a blind door, which might be richly panelled and weathered to a silvery gray, the visitor saw a patio within, with trees rising
above the flat-topped one-storey rooms, and covered walks leading outdoors from one room to the others, for the rooms rarely opened into each other; and in the plaza of the town, the whole square was lined with such covered walks, or portales, for protection from sun, rain, or snow.

  The plaza, a rectangular park in the center of the city, was once the parade ground, or plaza de armas, of the Spanish garrison. In 1610 the government palace was built along its north side, and remained the official residence of governors for over three centuries, under three regimes. As Lamy arrived, it housed also the chambers of legislation, the post office, the territorial library, and the ruins of a jail. The palace was a greatly enlarged version of the typical Santa Fe house. Its outer portal measured over three hundred feet in length, along one whole side of the plaza. It was the most impressive structure in the capital, and history had made it oddly beautiful. Always called the Governor’s Palace, or the Old Palace, it would become in later times the historical branch of the Museum of New Mexico. High cottonwood trees towered within the patio gardens to shade the flat, low rooms. The whole town looked like those through which the bishop had come after reaching the Rio Grande at El Paso del Norte. If there was a prevailing character to those places, it was the appearance of untended poverty—the color of dust over all, the crumble of dried mud between the annual seasons of replastering with new, wet earth, the straggle of animals loose in the earthen alleys, the meagre and flyblown markets.