Lamy of Santa Fe (34 page)

Excessive adulation was to be listened to impassively. If such rhetoric of the period gave more pleasure to those who made use of it (the nuns who, carried away, probably wrote it, and the scholars who spoke it) than to the listener, it was his nature to accept reverence more for the pleasure of those who gave than received it. His plans for the journey were completed. He was taking with him two promising Mexican youths to further their studies in the classics and theology at Rome. They would come back as priests to Santa Fe “to help prune away that portion of the Lord's vineyard so covered with brambles and thorns,” as Machebeuf put it. With him also he took as his trusted chaplain and secretary Father Eulógio Ortiz, the old vicar's brother.
Two days after the farewell party he published another pastoral letter—14 January 1854—admonishing pastors and people about proper preparation for the sacraments, matrimonial conduct, observance of tithing support, and a firm command that “not a single peso of the holy parish fund was to be spent for theatrical comedies, dances, and other profane diversions.”

Soon afterward, Lamy left for the plains, the Atlantic, England, Rome, and France, while Machebeuf remained in charge as vicar general, with the particular charge of consolidating Albuquerque in its recovery from the style, clerical and secular, of Father Gallegos. This, for the past two years, had been largely Machebeuf's to cope with, while under assault from clergy and citizens almost everywhere.

iv
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Trouble at Albuquerque

E
VEN BEFORE HIS JOURNEY
to Durango and back in 1851, Lamy had received petitions against Gallegos from some of the more concerned citizens. These were grave enough to induce Lamy to confront Gallegos with them, who rather wittily replied that any improprieties on his part were “exaggerated”—this despite the public knowledge of his irregular domestic life, his love of gambling, his involvement in private business affairs to the detriment of his duties as pastor of San Felipe de Neri at Albuquerque. Lamy sent him warnings for a year which he more or less appeared to heed; but no sooner had the bishop gone to the Baltimore Council than Gallegos, openly indifferent to the authority of Machebeuf acting for Lamy, resumed his old habits, including his lively involvement in private mercantile ventures. In the late summer of 1852, as Lamy was returning from Baltimore, Gallegos was completing arrangements for a journey to Mexico. A prosperous trader, he would take seven waggon loads of merchandise. Letting it be known that the vicar general had, in the name of the bishop, given him permission to make the trip, he delegated his parish duties to Father José de Jesús Lujan, and was just about to start when he heard that Lamy had returned to Santa Fe. It was too late for Gallegos to abandon his intention. He departed as planned.

But it seemed after all that he had gone without permission, and
Lamy swiftly sent Machebeuf to take charge of the Albuquerque parish, and to publish a decree of suspension against the absent Gallegos. Machebeuf ordered Father Lujan to remove himself from parish affairs, declaring that he himself would henceforth administer them exclusively, even if this must mean intermittently, as he would also have to be absent on service to the lesser towns of the Rio Grande.

The resulting outcry was immediate. Martínez wrote Lamy from Taos making charges of violation of Canon Law and once again animating the old accusations against Machebeuf. Through a spokesman, Ambrosio Armijo, probate judge, nine hundred fifty citizens of Albuquerque sent a petition to Lamy in defense of Gallegos, making their case out of what he had told them, and of what they now suffered. Gallegos, they claimed, had gone to Mexico on “important business” with Bishop Zubiría. He had gone with the permission, he insisted, of the vicar general, leaving Father Lujan to act for him. Imagine their sorrow and misfortune when a few days later Lujan had been removed, leaving them to spiritual abandonment in the “infrequent visitations of Senor Machebeuf,” who “under the fictitious guise of an apostle” neglected everyone, even those needing the last rites for the dying. Think of the many who had died without this consolation. More, in his “boring and annoying preachings,” Machebeuf threatened denial of the sacraments to all who did not pay tithes. If he began his sermons with the Gospel, he ended up with “the private lives of the Faithful.” He was driving Catholics into the arms of the Protestant churches. Disgracefully he appropriated benefices for his own appetites. But two weeks ago—on 1 March 1853—Gallegos had returned from Mexico. They hailed him with joy and love, and they now begged the bishop to restore their pastor to them and to withdraw Machebeuf, and they kissed the hands of His Illustrious Lordship.

Two days later Lamy, addressing Judge Armijo, replied curtly. “The rehabilitation of Father Gallegos will be very difficult indeed, at least for now, because he did not obey my orders during my absence, and furthermore, he left his parish without the permission of his superiors. As for the removal … of the Vicar Machebeuf; let me tell you this: that this is my business alone, and I myself will decide what is to be done about the errors of which you accuse him. At the same time, let me give you some advice in all charity: that you ought to adhere closely to Ecclesiastical Authority; otherwise, you place yourselves in the gravest of difficulties.”

After a hiatus of six weeks, the correspondence was resumed with Armijo protesting that his petitioners recognized the bishop's authority “as such,” but they were surprised that the Ecclesiastical Authority now worked so hard “thus to intimidate them with threats of future
difficulties, in order that they should now begin to keep the necessary silence.” To this Lamy replied, “I don't want to threaten anybody, even though I have been threatened myself; and he dismissed complaints against Machebeuf by declaring that the vast majority of the people gave him their support—they went to confession in such numbers that they kept him in the confessional “until very late at night,” which they surely would not do if they feared for any betrayal of the secrecy of the confessional.

But Gallegos and those who believed in him were not done with measures of resistance. One day Machebeuf, on a visit to Indian parishes seventy-five miles from Albuquerque, had it on good authority that on the following Sunday—it was sometime in early spring 1853—Gallegos, under a claim that he was not legally subject to removal as pastor, intended to dispute Lamy from the altar for possession of the parish of Albuquerque. What was more, Gallegos had returned to take up his residence again in the rectory to which he no longer had any right. It was the most direct of challenges, and it fired Machebeuf to the most energetic of responses.

He instantly sent by swift courier—so he said with delighted animation in reporting to his sister all that followed—to Lamy at Santa Fe, asking for a paper to confirm the suspension of Gallegos, and once again, and most clearly, to state his own authority to govern the parish. Machebeuf arrived at Albuquerque from the country on Saturday night. On Sunday morning, an hour before the usual time, he went to the church on the Albuquerque plaza to be ready for whatever might come, and found to his astonishment that Gallegos was already there in the pulpit.

Gallegos in his middle years was a spare man with a bald head, tall brow, dark side-hair and sparse side-whiskers and eyebrows. His eyes were pale, pouched with suggestions of fleshly comforts. Below a rather flattened nose, his mouth was wide, with downturned full lips, framed with creases in his narrow cheeks. In repose his face had a sad, rather used look, mixed with an expression of shrewdness, and a hint of a suppressed skeptical smile. Taken altogether, it was a rather amusing face and it was not hard to understand his reputation as a good companion and a man of superior wits.

The church was almost full with the adherents whom Gallegos had secretly notified, and whom he was stirring up to rebellion, or at least to resistance. They barred Machebeuf from entering the sacristy by which the rectory and the church were joined, so that he was obliged to go around to the front of the church to enter by the main door. “Armed by courage,” he ordered all, like the rightful master, to stand aside and make way for him. He went forward through the crowd with
a commanding air, and passed beneath the pulpit just as Gallegos was a commanding air, and passed beneath the pulpit just as Gallegos was uttering his name and Lamy's with the “most atrocious of accusations and the most insulting of insinuations.” Coming to the altar level of the sanctuary, Machebeuf stood there giving conspicuous attention to these.

When Gallegos fell silent, the people turned to Machebeuf for his reply.

With the utmost exactness, he refuted “all of the alleged accusations and with supporting facts proved that Gallegos was guilty of the scandals which had caused him to be punished”; and to settle all with a single stroke, Machebeuf drew from his pocket the letter from Lamy which his courier had delivered to him at midnight. Now he read it in a loud voice. When he was done, he called upon Gallegos to defend himself, or at least to reply, if he had anything to say.

Silence. Without a word, Gallegos, ignominiously, could do nothing but “slink away like a fox,” leaving Machebeuf in undisturbed possession of all. Like a proper pastor, then, Machebeuf celebrated the Mass and preached upon the Gospel of the day, making no reference to what had happened.

But Gallegos was not quite ready to accept defeat. A few days later, to salvage what he could out of his humiliation, he went about the countryside beating the drum to stir up the people and managed to collect twenty or thirty of the most influential of the well-to-do ranchers and his intimates who were “followers of the Devil.” Taking advantage of the absence of the local prefect of the peace, who was on Machebeuf's side, Gallegos sent his crowd to Machebeuf's residence and there, insolently and brutally, ordered him to get out of the parish, and if he refused, declared that they would “have recourse to other measures.”

Wonderful, exclaimed Machebeuf: at one and the same moment, God gave him both power and patience quite foreign to his nature. He replied resolutely that he was there by order of the supreme authority to take possession of the parish, and that in the absence of other orders from the same supreme authority, they were at liberty to take whatever “measures” they deemed suitable, but being, as it were, on sentry duty, he would never quit his post, and as shepherd of souls, he was ready to give his life for his flock before he would abandon them. “This brief but energetic response,” he reported unselfconsciously, disconcerted the little mob. They had not a word to say, but left in a body to serve notice upon Gallegos of the failure of his “embassy.” “The poor creatures!” exclaimed Machebeuf. “They didn't know I was
an Auvergnat
…
Latsin pas!”

They had hardly dispersed when the municipal prefect, who had
been sent for, arrived in a furious state. He had already ordered the arrest of the demonstrators, but Machebeuf persuaded him to drop the whole matter, assuring him that further action would do more harm than otherwise for him; and actually, this magnanimous gesture worked so well in his favor that soon from all the outlying villages came deputations offering to defend Machebeuf in case of need. All of that happened on a Saturday, and on the following day, Machebeuf, with only his sexton, went to the church, and everywhere the people greeted him with much more respect than before. It turned out that of those who chose to take part in the “mutiny” only three men belonged to Albuquerque proper; the rest were from the largest and richest outlying district which was known as Ranchos de Albuquerque.

Observing the customs of the Mexicans, Machebeuf deplored nothing so much as the style of their Christmastime celebrations. It was a local habit to hold a novena in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the days just before Christmas; but instead of an occasion for piety, this period had been one of carnival—”dances, orgies,” every sort of license. He felt strongly the basically good dispositions of the people, even in their ignorance, corruption, and superstition; he knew they hungered for the word of God. Like Lamy, he exclaimed over what could be accomplished if only there were enough missionary priests available. Still, alone, one did what one could. Now, after his survival at Albuquerque, he proclaimed the usual novena before the next Christmastide, and was overjoyed to see, instead of hordes of merrymakers, throngs of the faithful coming to confession, who kept him in his latticed stall till long after midnight every night. Even the rebels of Ranchos de Albuquerque came, and many another who had been among the most fierce opponents of Lamy and himself. He could only invoke the father and the prodigal son as he thought of them. So complete was the union of the people with him that when, in due time, he would have to leave them for Santa Fe because his duties must keep him nearer to the bishop, the Albuquerque parishioners would come in crowds, weeping and begging him not to desert them. He would vow to come to them for one Sunday a month all year and how he would rejoice to be with his
rancheros
again!—the very men who had come insulting and menacing him in his own room. Until he must leave, he delighted in his pastorate at San Felipe de Neri.

Gallegos, however, had no part in the grand reconciliation. Instead, he moved suddenly into another venture. He threw himself into politics, and, as he “did not lack ability,” observed Machebeuf, he managed through “every kind of fraud and intrigue” to get himself elected as delegate from New Mexico to the Congress of the United States. As a territory, New Mexico, until proclaimed a state (an event which
would not occur until long after Lamy's time), had a single non-voting delegate in the House of Representatives. In the summer of 1853, soon after his expulsion from the Albuquerque parish, Gallegos declared himself a candidate, running against Dr William Carr Lane, the former territorial governor. Lane's successor, Governor Meriwether, noted that “the Nominee of the Democratic Party is a Mexican. Some object to him because he does not speak the English language, and charge that he has been suspended by the Catholic bishop … on account of licentious conduct. Ex-Governor Lane is the opposing Whig candidate, and he is generally popular with the American residents.”