Lamy of Santa Fe

by Paul Horgan

  But still the days passed in long thought and patience, and finally Lamy came to the hacienda of El Chorro, where there were salt licks for the horses, and lodging. There the news, along with that of vigilance “por las novedades que hay (for the troubles about),” was that Durango lay only twenty-eight miles further, beyond the corn fields where the great sand-hill cranes flew making their strange hoots by day or night.

  v.

  Confrontation in Durango

  LAMY CAME ACROSS the arid plain which surrounded Durango, and, through the formal grid of the streets which were arranged according to the uniform plan for colonial cities issued through the centuries by Madrid, found his way to the bishop’s palace. This was a long, low building with plaster walls washed in pink. The façade had strength and elegance—a cornice, window frames, footing, and a main doorway carved from an ochreous gray stone. The windows and the main entrance were barred with iron grilles. A stone cross surmounted the entrance, whose double doors were made of heavy wood, richly carved, in which a lesser, single door could be opened for inspection and inquiry, and closed for dismissal. Through the little single door a great patio was visible—the palace was built about a grand inner square where trees grew and a running portico hung out from the walls as protection from weather. From without, the building was inscrutable. In its general design it was not unlike the 1610 palace at Santa Fe; but it had an air of greater majesty—spoke of a finished style nearer the center of affairs; and in fact Durango was the northernmost extension of Spanish Mexico proper. All that lay above it on the map might as well have been a colony lost in distance and trifling in value. Lamy, his five-week journey ended, asked to be admitted to the presence of Bishop Zubiría.

  José Antonio Laureano López de Zubiría y Escalante had been bishop of Durango for twenty years. He promptly received his visitor, and confronted a lean young man about half as old as himself—Zubiría was seventy years of age, having been born in Sonora in July 1781. All he knew of Lamy were a certain letter he had received from him months before, and various rumors abroad during the pastoral visit to the northern provinces in the previous year—Zubiría’s third such tour, following the first in 1833, and the second in 1845. He knew well the country across which Lamy had just travelled, though Zubiría himself had not done it alone; had gone, in fact, with a heavy escort, which was wise under the prevailing conditions.

  The old bishop received the younger with every kindness. Zubiría impressed others with his benevolent and intelligent expression. His face was fleshy, his hair dark, his eyebrows strongly marked above black eyes which had a narrow Mongolian slit to them which suggested the typical Mexican admixture of Indian blood, and also a reserved shrewdness. His nose was long and slender, above a wide mouth which in repose was turned down at the corners. In his age, his body was heavy, with a full throat which rolled over the edge of his frilled jabot. He loved to talk, his affability and grace of manner were remembered, and he had the reputation of a conscientious prelate much concerned for his people and his duties. He recalled with gratitude the official courtesies given him in his recent New Mexican visit—the military escorts, the great public reception, crowds unable to obtain entry in the churches where he preached.

  Despite the United States victory in the 1846 war he had never expected what was made known to him first by rumor, then by Lamy’s letter of 10 April 1851 from San Antonio. On the contrary, he, with other bishops of the Mexican North, had been expressly ordered by Rome to continue their jurisdiction over the full extent of their original diocesan limits despite a new political boundary.

  Charm and courtesy were his natural responses, and so, as the years would make plain, was a legalistic stubbornness concerning his responsibilities. He and Lamy had matters of common experience and light courtesies to exchange, but Lamy had really only one mission of immediate importance which had brought him to Durango. If Lamy had come prepared, Zubiría was no less sure of his own ground, and he had one further issue to raise with his visitor—and with Rome. First, however, he saw to the comfort of his guest, establishing him in the bishop’s palace.

  The crucial exchange of information followed. When Lamy’s Spanish was inadequate, they conversed in Latin. Zubiría had written to Lamy on 12 June, in reply to Lamy’s letter of 10 April from San Antonio.

  San Francisco street, Santa Fe, much as Lamy first saw it in 1851. At the end of the street is the old adobe parish church of St Francis, which became Lamy’s first cathedral,

  A sketch of Santa Fe by an anonymous soldier in a company morning report, c. 1846–1850. The crenellated towers of the old parish church are indicated to the right of center Lamy had never received the answer—the mails were notoriously inefficient.

  The south of the Santa Fe plaza, looking east on San Francisco street, with parked caravan waggons attended by traders and citizens

  Characteristic nineteenth-century adobe houses in Santa Fe, with haystack, bare ground, conttonwoods and poplars and a faint line of moutains beyond—the pastoral look within the city

  The plaza at La Mesilla, with its church and famous twin bells, trader waggons on the Santa Fe–Chihuahua Trail, and a woodsman with his burro-load of wood. From an anonymous painting of the period, c. 1860s

  The plaza at Santa Fe, showing its soldier’s monument, a concert in progress by the 9th U.S. Cavalry band, cavaliers, the fountain playing. From an anonymous painting of the period

  The stone reredos carved in Santa Fe originally for the Spanish garrison chapel (castrense) in the plaza, seen here as later installed in the old cathedral in 1859. It is now the altarpiece in the noble modern church of Cristo Rey, designed by John Gaw Meem.

  The chapel of Our Lady of Light in the convent of the Sisters of Loretto, completed in 1881. Its French architect had in mind the Sainte-Chapelle of Paris. To the left is a glimpse of the sisters' academy, to the right a corner of their convent

  The exterior of Villa Pintoresca, Lamy’s retreat in the Tesuque Canyon, about three miles north of Santa Fe. It was one of two places he loved best (the other was his famous garden in twon) and there he lived when he retired.

  Villa Pintoresca consisted of only two rooms—a bedroom-study, and this very small chapel where Lamy said his daily Mass, often served by students from St Michael’s College whom he would invite for a day in the country

  Panorama showing the stone cathedral of St Francis under construction. Lamy laid the cornerstone (which was stolen a week later) in 1869. The north tower is shown rising. The old adobe transept of the previous cathedral can be seen, and to its left the early St Vincent’s hospital, and a portion of the convent and orphanage of the Sisters of Charity, c. 1880s.

  Lamy did not live to see the new cathedral completed; but he brought to it his inherited style of the Romanesque, with its Moorish echoes, and he had the satisfaction of seeing installed in the finished north tower the bells of the old cathedral

  Lamy’s letter was the first notice he, Zubiría, had had concerning Lamy’s new mission.

  Rome had never notified him?

  Never. The only word Durango had received of his supersession was Lamy’s letter from San Antonio, and, in fact, as a Vatican memorandum noted, Zubiría had written in protest to the Pope, declaring that such notification from another bishop instead of from the Holy See, and, in fact, from a council of the North American bishops acting as though they had the authority to do what was Rome’s to do, was hardly to be regarded as official. If the Holy Father had answered this protest, Zubiría had never received the answer. There was, to be sure, always the possibility that one had been sent, and that it had been lost in transit. Moreover, Zubiría had, however mistakenly, assumed that Lamy would have gone to Rome to make his duty to the Pope before proceeding to New Mexico. Out of such a visit, official notification might have come, in case none had already been sent. Again, if bulls had been sent to Durango, they, too, might have been lost in the mails.

  Lamy, of course, had gone direct to Santa Fe, where his recept
ion by Zubiría’s vicar, with the refusal to recognize him as the new ecclesiastical authority of New Mexico, had made the present visit to Durango necessary.

  Quite necessary; but Zubiría insisted that without specific orders from himself to his clergy in New Mexico to transfer their allegiance, they were entirely within their rights to withhold such allegiance.

  Lamy agreed that this was so, even though he had shown them his papal document to attest to his appointment. He now laid it before Zubiría.

  “I knew nothing about it officially,” said Zubiría, “but this document is sufficient authority for me and I submit to it.”

  It was what Lamy had come fifteen hundred miles to hear.

  Now, if the affair of the episcopal title to Santa Fe was settled, neither of the bishops knew what had caused the confusion in the first place. But in the Vatican archives lay evidence of a bureaucratic misconception central to more than one aspect of the transfer of churchly authority across the emerging national boundary after the 1846 war. When Pius IX granted the request of the Baltimore Council of 1849 to create the vicariate apostolic for Santa Fe out of certain Mexican territories, and gave it to a new bishop, the Vatican duly sent notice of the change to Mexico—but to the wrong Mexican bishop. Not Durango, but Sonora, was notified. Rome was far away, maps were imprecise, lordships grandly but loosely defined. The fact was that a great portion of the western half of New Mexico then embracing modern Arizona) did belong to Sonora, but without precise demarcation. If New Mexico was to be the new vicariate, then Santa Fe as its ancient capital must surely be the seat of the bishop (thus the Vatican) since northern Sonora had no town above the border, but only a few missions long abandoned. If Santa Fe implied New Mexico, and if New Mexico had reached deep into Sonora, then to a Vatican official who did not know that for centuries Durango had controlled the great eastern half of New Mexico while only the western half had come under Sonora, it might seem a satisfactory disposal of the whole adjustment to notify the Sonoran bishop, Pedro Loza, at Hermosillo or Culiacán. If Loza received the decree, he did not, beset as he was by Yaqui Indian troubles, make any reply to Rome; nor did he communicate to Zubiría at Durango any word of the error of the Roman bureaucracy. But at last, “in reality,” said the Vatican’s internal review of the confusion, His Holiness, “through the sacred Congregation of Extraordinary Affairs, ordered that the Bishop of Durango be clearly informed …” And so he was, in a decree dated 12 November 1851. But by then Lamy was already returning northward to Santa Fe, having himself settled matters with Durango.

  With Lamy’s position at Santa Fe now firmly recognized, he and Zubiría had two other affairs to discuss. One touched on that southern area of New Mexico and its poor settlements—Doñana, Las Cruces, and the Mesilla valley—which Lamy had seen on his way to Mexico. The other concerned the little river villages in far western Texas which Bishop Odin of Galveston had given into Lamy’s charge.

  The state of Chihuahua (which under the Spaniards had been known as New Biscay) had by tradition extended to the Mesilla-Doñana area forty-odd miles north of El Paso del Norte; and accordingly this area had always belonged to the see of Durango. Yet everything Lamy had understood from the deliberations of the Baltimore Council and his papal bulls of appointment concerning the extent of his vicariate stated his responsibility as fixed by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which indicated all of New Mexico to the Rio Grande near El Paso.

  But Zubiría did not hold the same view—and with some reason. For a later map correction and a revised international boundary had actually assigned the lower east-west New Mexico area to Chihuahua in exchange for an agreement by which the United States could retain within a new north-south line the region of Santa Rita, formerly in Mexico, and its rich silver and copper mines a hundred miles west of the Rio Grande. Durango therefore had real claim territorially to “Mesilla-Doñana,” and Zubiría considered himself still its bishop. He and Lamy each assumed that his own interpretation of territorial limits was correct.

  But what would be served just now by making a change in their jurisdiction? Were not the populations too meagre and too impoverished to form a new parish? If formed, how could it support a pastor? Zubiría knew the places also—had passed through them on his visits to New Mexico.

  Lamy could rely on only two priests in his entire diocese. He must admit that he had no one to send to Doñana for priestly work. What was more, Socorro, the nearest New Mexican town to those villages, was a hundred miles away across the desert—the Jornada del Muerto—and no travelling vicar could visit them without a long passage through that extremely dangerous Indian country. El Paso, across the Rio Grande to the south, was less than fifty miles away from the settlement. If any priest could serve those remote settlements now and then, it was surely more feasible to send him from El Paso rather than from the north.

  In the face of such facts, common sense urged that Lamy and Zubiría should decide to leave the southern villages of New Mexico under Durango rather than transfer them to the authority of Santa Fe. The two bishops so agreed. But in agreeing to this point, Lamy unwittingly established the basis for a legalistic wrangle which would exasperate him for decades, as populations would shift, local resources would be differently evaluated, and finally, new treaty boundaries would soon alter local sovereignties.

  As for the other question—the Texas river villages—these were only a few miles from the Mexican El Paso, where the rural dean of Chihuahua lived. Granted that Odin, almost nine hundred miles away in Galveston, could hardly service them; but could Santa Fe, almost four hundred miles to the north, do much better? The villages had been Mexican until the Rio Grande’s change of course had left them within the United States boundary. But in a practical sense, they were still Mexican and pendant to Durango. Let the matter rest there—so Zubiría would argue; and again, limited by his resources, Lamy must agree for the time being.

  If, for a few days, Lamy presumably enjoyed an interlude of rest and content after his journey southward and his long debates with his host, and went to see something of the city of Durango, Bishop Zubiría was not idle. He was a responsible man, and if his benevolence was admired, the experience of his long episcopate had prepared him for the exercise of all his imaginative shrewdness. He put it to work now.

  While Lamy was still his visitor, and after the joint resolutions of their common problems, Zubiría threw himself into the composition of a most carefully worded letter to Rome which must have cost him and his reverend secretary Doctor Luis Rúbio hours of cautionary debate to insure that all concessions of the present would not cloud certain vital reservations for the future. Beginning with ceremonial rhetoric, Zubiría soon enough put more plainly what concerned him.

  I, the present Bishop of Durango, José Antonio de Zubiría-Escalante, as hereafter subscribed [he began profusely], owing to the honor of my having as the guest of my house the Illustrious Lordship Don Juan Lamy, Bishop of Agathonica in partibus infidelium and Vicar Apostolic appointed for the Territory of New Mexico, by our reigning Pontiff, the Supreme Bishop Pius IX, may whose reign be long and filled with God’s blessings, for, since God possesses all power and facility to do so, may he so deign; and, since, assuredly, God will so do: and whereas such concepts being clothed as they are with mere words, and these are so susceptible to change and variance within the human intelligence of mankind: obviously, then, despite this frailty of human communication, I have no choice accordingly but to accept this medium through which to express my message, and it is thus written, as follows …

  Then, in points here much simplified, he set forth in six sections his positions on several matters.

  To begin with, he stated that Lamy’s letter from San Antonio had first told him informally what he now knew officially—though he admitted that the San Antonio letter had left no doubt that he was being “legitimately relieved” of his responsibilities in New Mexico.

  Second, though he had never received the “special mandate” for which he had ask
ed Rome, Zubiría now felt that Lamy’s documents were enough to permit him “licitly” to await it, but he would cease to depend upon the “long-awaited letter,” and would “recognize, as of now, as Vicar Apostolic of New Mexico, the said Illustrious Lordship, Senor Don Juan Lamy.” But Zubiría cautiously added that he was “only reserving for myself actually seeing the answer which should arrive soon from Rome,” for this, he thought, might possibly contain details or modifications yet unknown.

  Third, he would personally instruct his former dean, Señor Don Juan Felipe Ortiz, the established pastor of Santa Fe, that Zubiría by his will now required him to submit to Lamy and to lead all others to submit with him.

  Fourth—and here arose the matter which it would take years to resolve—he asked that the precise limits of his diocese be defined. They should, he urged, reach as far north as the present—the treaty—boundary between Chihuahua and New Mexico; and no civil decision like that of the treaty, made before the Baltimore Council’s creation of the new vicariate apostolic of New Mexico, should be altered to extend the limits of New Mexico, “even for a Vicariate.”

  Fifth—he had learned in conversation with Lamy that Odin, the bishop of Texas, had allotted to Lamy’s care those three small towns along the Rio Grande southeast of the “Villa de El Paso.” Political acts had given these towns to the state of Texas; but in ecclesiam they belonged to the diocese of Durango; Zubiría had never had from Rome any letter or notice taking them from him; the Texas bishop had been appointed to his see long before those towns had come under the civil authority of Texas and hence Odin had no claim to them; and moreover, the diocese of Texas could not now be enlarged.