Lamy of Santa Fe (26 page)

Lamy, of course, had gone direct to Santa Fe, where his reception 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 asked 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.

And sixth and last—he avowed that points four and five (those concerning churchly dominion over certain territories) were really the important points in his letter, yet (by his vehemence he made this clear) he would nevertheless, in the sight of God, submit to and obey any contrary decisions issued by the Holy See; and, he wrote, “should there come to me, by some legal way, other information referring to the said cession of the above-mentioned places, be it for the authority of the Bishop of Texas, or be it to the Illustrious Lordship, the Lord Vicar of New Mexico, it shall be so done,”

Dating his letter “Durango, November Ist, 1851,” he stated also that he was informing Lamy of all which it contained, “so as to save me in this way from any further responsibility of conscience.”

So, from the beginning, the question not only of Lamy's recognition, but the matter of definition of territorial limits arose out of Lamy's journey of 1851 to the former ecclesiastical capital of all New Mexico.

Durango itself, he saw, like others before him, had its curious aspects. Out of a population of nearly twenty thousand, all but a thousand or so were “rogues and rascals.” The city was further celebrated as “the headquarters, as it were, of the whole scorpion family,” and it was odd that when these poisonous arachnids were removed a few miles from the city, their venom seemed to lose strength. A local society paid youths of the town three cents for every one of the creatures they killed. The churches were handsome outside, filthy within, though the case was just the opposite with the houses, which if they were dirty outside were cleanly kept inside—though from a distance their white or ochre plaster showed handsomely under the hot sun. Lamy could see the great profile of the Sierra Madre to the west of town, across barren hills from which rose a curtain of dust. The iron mines of the district were in those mountains. From them came much of the city's commerce, and perhaps many of its rogues and rascals. The great native drink, derived from the maguey cactus, was pulque, which,
taken temperately, raised the spirits and induced nausea, and, more freely, changed the temperament suddenly and for the worse.

At the center of one side of the main plaza stood the cathedral, several squares away from the bishop's palace. It was a towering block plastered in pale yellow, with twin towers rising to a great height through three diminishing arched, square elements to identical domes and lanterns. In the façade between the towers was a three-storey entablature of pale stone carved in the Churrigueresque style. Above its center rose a wrought-iron cross. The great center double doorway was of timber with rows of iron studdings. The nave, lighted by the sky through plain glass, rose to a noble height, and rose again in the dome over the sanctuary. Square pillars supported arches which upheld the dome and its pendentives frescoed with sacred images. Over the main altar was a baldachin on tall slender white columns, decorated with sunbursts of gold leaf. There was nothing remotely so splendid in Santa Fe. Europe, through Spain, and modified by Mexico, spoke to Lamy again.

If he wondered what was happening so far away in Santa Fe, there may have been grudging items of news when the rural dean and established pastor Ortiz arrived in Durango on his own, to argue his position with Zubiría, to whom he still held allegiance. The bishop of Durango decisively instructed him—possibly in Lamy's presence—to make his religious duty henceforth to Lamy, and to require all others in New Mexico, clergy and laity alike, to do the same in good faith.

Armed with the knowledge of this, and with a written decree from Zubiría yielding to him what he had come to receive, Lamy in early November took to the return trail. Knowing something of the country now, he must have found that the northerly journey seemed to go more rapidly than his trip south—though of course it did not do so. When he reached El Paso, he came upon the camp of Major William H. Emory, the chief astronomer (and later the leader) of the United States section of the international boundary commission set up to survey and correct what should become the official borderline between Mexico and the States. Lamy impressed Emory as an “excellent” man. They talked shop, and Emory was left with the notion that “the Bishop's purpose on his trip was to see the Bishop of Durango and adjust the territorial limits of their respective dioceses to make them conform to the altered boundaries of New Mexico and Texas”—an incomplete conclusion. What was Durango like? “The Bishop stated that the wealthy State of Durango must soon be depopulated by the Indians. Haciendas within a few leagues of the city that once numbered one hundred thousand animals were now abandoned …”