Lamy of Santa Fe (27 page)

Continuing northward along the Rio Grande, which was entirely dry for much of its course, Lamy was soon on his own ground. Machebeuf expected him home by Christmas.

vi
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Disciplines

I
N FACT,
he reached Santa Fe on 10 January 1852, as inconspicuously as he had set out almost three months before. The round-trip journey of three thousand miles, alone but for his guide, was a hardening experience for the years ahead, when his desert diocese would require much travel of the same kind, often quite alone, across the empty splendors of his dominion. Though ostensibly robust, he would for all his life be subject occasionally to the sudden and unexpected strikes of physical collapse which he had known in youth; but by will alone he overcame these and pursued his far-flung duty.

Machebeuf, eagerly awaiting his news, had some of his own. The contrasting styles of their exchanges can be deduced from their various letters to others. Machebeuf infused his information with a dancing vitality, in which he always saw himself. Lamy never seemed to see himself—only the task before him—an extension of character from the daily to the long view. To Machebeuf every event, most satisfy-ingly, was a
scandale
, while to his bishop, it seemed more like a tile in a pattern. Machebeuf saw with his imagination; Lamy with a sense of recognition. Their friendship, their working partnership, were the stronger for these complementary traits.

Lamy's first act on his return was to circularize to his sullen subordinates the ruling of their former bishop in Mexico. In a body, and officially, they showed a degree of submission; though individually, soon and late, they would act otherwise, in some cases with extreme consequences. Meantime, Machebeuf had both farcical and serious matters to report to Lamy, which would lose nothing in the telling.

Imagine him all alone in Santa Fe, he reported, speaking wretched Spanish to the natives, and conducting, rather better than otherwise, a steady correspondence in Spanish dealing with dispensations, and other parish affairs. The pastor of one of the four chapels in Santa Fe, a Father Lujan, introduced him to the congregation. When it was time
to preach, Machebeuf did his best in Spanish; but nobody understood him. It had to be assumed that he was saying the proper things, while representing the absent Lamy. But after Mass, what a comedy: some of the people, lingering outside, said that since he did not speak as Christians do, he “must be a Jew or a Protestant.” Someone else shrugged—”Who knows?” But there was no doubt that he sang the Mass in Latin, and it was added that he sang better than the local priests. The affair was resolved by a sensible, if simple, woman, who joined the discussion. Why, she asked, was there any doubt about “the religion of this man? Did he not give proof that he is a Catholic by the way he made the sign of the cross before giving his sermon?” The others were silenced. But what an index of the primitive mind and local experience all this revealed!

With both Lamy and Ortiz away, those few native priests still present had been no more amenable than before. There were affairs to report about the pastors of Taos, Albuquerque, Pecos. As Lamy had seen before his departure, the clergy were for the most part “incapable or unworthy.” He had then given such pastors admonitory advice, hoping that they would begin to mend their ways which had so shocked him, and many a newcomer before him. Now it was disturbing to hear that while he was away in Mexico, the “greatest number” of the New Mexican clergy “did all they could to make the people believe” not only that he held no real authority, but that he would never even return from Durango.

Now, however, on seeing Bishop Zubiría's letters which declared that Durango no longer held jurisdiction over Santa Fe, and that Lamy was the true ecclesiastical superior of the New Mexican clergy, and that they must submit to his authority, they had, said Lamy, shown him “good face.” But it began to be clear almost at once that he must bring them to submit by force rather than by good will. Rather than comply, some preferred to leave New Mexico—Machebeuf knew this for sure. Lamy hoped God would speed them, for, he said, “they are more in the way than help.” “But, what shall we do for priests here?”

Then there was the affair of the pastor of Pecos which had reached its finally intolerable state in November, during Lamy's absence. The pastor, an old man of sixty-five, was an addicted gambler and an adulterer, and last November, after mounting his horse while drunk, he was thrown when the horse shied. The old man's leg was broken in three places. Providence, decided Lamy, had punished him in the very act of drunkenness.

Machebeuf could report that he was already at work restoring the
Castrense
with the fund raised by Lamy after the rout of the chief
justice in August, and stood ready to serve as its pastor, at least for the present, unless the bishop decided to use it as his own church, in which case Machebeuf could administer the old parish church of St Francis, which had become the cathedral. It was still true that religion, whatever its local peculiarities, played a great part in the whole life of the people. What Lamy and Machebeuf both could see now was what had persisted for generations. When the Americans came six years before, the natives were promised by President Polk and General Kearny, the conqueror, that their practices of faith would rest undisturbed.

But certain practices were alarming—those which survived in the village chapels of the Rio Arriba, the upper Rio Grande district. In one form or another these had persisted since the days of the Spanish colonists of 1598 in the cult of the Third Order of Penitence, patterned after the laymen's Third Order of St Francis, but not identical with it. Even now, the Brothers of Penance, or “Penitentes,” as they were conveniently called, observed Holy Week each year in the snowy, juniper-speckled foothills of northern New Mexico, by flagellation, even to the bloodied use of scourges, upon each other and themselves, and rituals of terror, and initiations by mutilation, and, it was believed, on Good Friday the actual crucifixion of a chosen victim as the Christ—a great honor bestowed upon a man adjudged worthy of the role. It was said that he was tied rather than nailed to the cross; but even so, if a village Christ died under the ordeal (as tradition insisted was the case now and then) his family, mourning him, were yet consoled by the thought that through his mimic sacrifice, he and they both would go to heaven, when their time came, without passing through purgatory. How to end these cruel observances, even though they were inspired by piety?

In his first pastoral visit in 1833, Bishop Zubiría had been horrified by the penitence of blood and its sanction by the New Mexican churches; and he had forbidden it in a sermon before the people and a letter to his priests: “We command, and lay it strictly upon the conscience of our parish priest in this Villa, the present one and those to come, that in future such assemblies of Penitentes shall not be allowed under any pretext whatsoever.… I forbid for all time to come those brotherhoods of penance—or, better still, of Butchery—which have been growing under the shelter of an inexcusable toleration …” But his orders never took full effect. The penitential abuses which had been lodged within the church buildings were simply transferred to non-sanctified chapels called
moradas
where the rituals of the cult were carried out. Zubiría protested again in his second visitation some years later, again in vain; for after the Franciscans had been
withdrawn in the early nineteenth century, the Penitentes, in the absence of enough parish or mission priests, often administered services of blessing and prayer, though no sacraments; and so deeply rooted were the penitential savageries that these, too, persisted. The discovery of all this by Machebeuf and Lamy presented a problem never resolved, for the Penitentes began to take refuge in self-protection as an almost secret society.

Beyond all this, Machebeuf was able to report that he had been working hard—had given a retreat in a chapel “30 leagues from Santa Fe” which seemed to produce “an immense good,” Finally, as Lamy himself would learn, “the most savage Indians, the Navajos,” were at peace, and it seemed “a fine time to establish missions among them.”

This conclusion was more ideal than real—who would serve the missions? And how long could those Indians be expected to keep the peace? Lamy, if he looked for satisfactions, could find at least one small one, for his school for boys was doing “pretty well,” and he wrote Purcell—he continued to write Purcell for years, to share experience with him, and often to ask for help—”We have ten little boys who sing Mass with the organ most every Sunday.”

For the rest, he must go to work. One of his first pastoral visits took him to Pecos, where the large mission church of the seventeenth century served eighteen villages in the upper Pecos Valley. On this visit, Lamy suspended the broken-legged old pastor from all his functions; but as he was the
parochus proprius
—the permanent pastor of Pecos, to whom local revenues were due for life—Lamy permitted him to keep one third of these.

This first act of discipline had its risks—the old pastor was a powerful member of the territorial legislature; but Lamy hoped that it would be seen as a warning to the other unworthy priests. There were several other cases he knew of which also deserved “the same severity”; but, so he wrote Purcell, “as they have not been caught in the very act, I must wait with patience, and try at least to keep them under fear, perhaps that some of them will change.” He felt “obliged to go very slow, and to be very prudent,” for the local clergy had “not only a great influence,” they had actually been “the rulers of the people.”

He must come to know the people himself, and let them see him as their father and servant. On 5 February he left Santa Fe for a journey through some pueblos and towns of the north which he had not yet seen. Again he came upon isolated villages with their crumbling earthen chapels, in some of which he found statues, paintings, and wall decorations done by native artists. To his eye these were touching evidence of the need of the faithful for saints—but what he preferred were the
Gothic and Romanesque treasures of his youth. Here were pieces of cottonwood carved and painted, with staring eyes and raw colors, and flat entablatures of holy figures whose features looked like those of the people themselves in the dark mountain villages of the north. Such religious art had been fabricated by saint-makers, the first of whom had been taught by Franciscans how to carve and to use color, and what they created was needed to replace the European works which had been destroyed by the Indians of the Pueblo rebellion of 1680, when the Spanish colonists had been driven all the way south to El Paso, their churches profaned, their signs of faith obliterated, their civil order and its symbols either abandoned or used in mockery.

To Lamy and Machebeuf the native Mexican attempts to bring back the saints after the Spaniards recovered the kingdom in 1692 must have seemed as pathetically primitive as the very houses of the local style. Later times have seen them differently. As works of art the native paintings and carvings of sacred presences—the
santos
—were a victory over technical limitations; for the passion that begot them had more power to express than the technical ignorance of their creators had to constrain. Yet, however different in style, the
santos
were closer in spirit to the earliest medieval Romanesque than the Frenchmen could have recognized. As for chapels and houses of mud, as Lamy and Machebeuf so often called them in letters to Europe, they were less failures than triumphs, given the only materials at hand, and the prime necessities they met. But all newcomers brought their definitions of propriety with them; and the bishop was no exception. It was no wonder that his ideal was to create, if he could, a little of France in this wilderness of neglect. In any case, it was his task to visualize and make manifest for people what they addressed inwardly. Such a purpose lay at the heart of his problems, with their material urgencies all too plain.

In the parishes where he came on this journey, he would see the adobe chapels, some of which tapered like coffins in form, prefiguring that death whose promise was so large in the Mexican awareness, and he would discover that all too often the poverty of the priests was less than that of the parishioners. The people were called on by the local pastor to bring him a great part of their produce—seeds, animals, whatever commodities they had, but of course no money, as hardly any was circulated in the territory outside the major towns. Much of such tribute stayed in the hands of the local pastors. The rest, converted into money through bills of exchange, went, up through the year 1851, to the bishop of Durango. None of such tribute was used for the good of the whole province of New Mexico. One parish simply might be less poor than another, which in turn might be almost destitute. Recent
times had been hard—harder than usual. The year 1850 was plagued by locusts which destroyed field crops almost entirely, and the general drought (temporarily broken on Lamy's day of arrival at Santa Fe) reduced the crops to a tenth of the expected yield. Collections were next to impossible—though, as Father Martínez wrote Zubiría from Taos, in the previous August he had “on two holidays” obeyed Durango's command to read to the people “the official order” on the collection of tithes, and the dreadful penalties, spiritual and temporal, which would fall upon those who failed to pay. It was a system long-established and expected by the congregations—but the degree of its demands amounted to extortion and every parish suffered under it.

Lamy, coming upon such conditions again and again, concluded that he must devise a system of maintaining the Church by which each parish would help to support all, at much lower levies, with the common resources deposited at the bishop's office. Moreover, he found that the local pastors charged fees for sacred ministrations far greater than people could afford for marriages, baptisms, burials. The more he thought about what such fees were ultimately used for in gaming, drinking, and worse, the firmer he became in his intention to establish an orderly and more equitable means of support for the clergy, and services to the people, across the whole vast vicariate.