Lamy of Santa Fe (4 page)

Every age marked by a distinct historical style is an age of faith. The object of faith may change, but the impulse to define and live life in terms of a system of belief is constant. Great acts have been done in the name of many different beliefs. To understand any such act and the individual who gave it interest for us, it is necessary to take as a given element, regardless of our own relation to what we see as reality, the absolute and sometimes glorious significance of the faith which moved him.

The Catholic form of this view in Lamy's time lay at the foundation of the state, the town, the family, and the person. It was as naturally expressed by believers as life through the act of breathing. Believed in, its formalisms were not burdens but aids to a divine end, through a culture both intensely local and fervently strong because it was by definition universal. Familiarly but awesomely, a life given to the Church brought anyone, whatever his original lot, to take his vocation with a sense of immense privilege and with it a calm assumptiveness of power whose duties embraced all terms of life, death, and eternity. Nothing long-lasting was done without religious conviction. Piety was an energizing force, and a clear gaze into the mystery showed forth in early Auvergne fresco paintings of the saints drawn in formalized conventions which called on the manners of the old Roman, the Byzantine, the Iberian, the Arabic, the Mozarabic, in resemblances not entirely accounted for by historical linkages. Who in the presence of such silent witnesses staring from a painted apse, seeing them from his earliest life, would not retain in imagination something of their suggestive power?

With the turn of the eighteenth century, the age of piety seemed for many to be ended, in the name of reason. But still, for vastly many more, the motive of Christian belief survived, and for them the offering of self in its behalf remained an act of unquestioned reasonableness. Without that, much in any chronicle of a religious life might seem implausible and unmeaningful. With it, achievements in its name
could be recognized, taking for granted that spiritual conviction lay behind them.

It need not be further explained to the broadly skeptical taste of a later time why men and women in religious commitment thought it worthwhile to bring the works of faith, hope, and charity to strange lands and changing societies. Once they have recognized their gods, men have always served them.

From childhood, Jean Baptiste Lamy, gazing from the tilled fields well to the north of Lempdes, across bluing hills, to the farthest line of the land where the solitary profile of the Puy-de-Dôme rose in the distance, could see between near and far the hazy cluster of the city of Clermont-Ferrand. The only constant and distinguishable features which he could pick out were the two spires of the cathedral side by side, there, at the end of the country road leading from Lempdes to the city and the world. At that angle, in certain airs and lights, they might fancifully suggest the twin spires of a mitre, such as worn by a bishop, a lord and teacher.

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The Two Friends

L
AMY'S VOCATION
came alive in his childhood. Equipped with the simple learning of his family, he was enrolled before the age of nine in the Jesuit
collège
at Billom, a short distance from Clermont-Ferrand. Billom, like all the regional towns, was ancient, and its school, older than any in Clermont, was the first which the Jesuits administered in Auvergne. After their order was suppressed in 1773, the school was conducted by secular teachers. In 1814 Jesuits again took charge.

Nine years later, now with study for the priesthood his clear purpose, Lamy was entered at the preparatory seminary of Clermont, where he took the usual classical curriculum and presently, for the long course of theology, he was admitted to the diocesan seminary of Mont-Ferrand, which, administered by the Sulpicians, occupied a mass of seventeenth-century buildings on the outskirts of the city. Later used in turn by the
gendarmerie
as a barracks, and finally by Clermont's Ecole Supérieure de Commerce, the seminary in 1832 was still a closed world of studies and devotions, under strict discipline. In its long
echoing corridors, under its mansard roof, and within its high interiors and general institutional darkness, the seminarian on entering could look forward to six years of separation from the open life to which he would one day be returned as a leader, fixed in purpose and sure of his means. In such an institution, the opportunity for personal affinity remained formal; but in a class two years ahead of Lamy was the seminarian who became his closest friend, then, and for life.

Outwardly, the two could not have been less alike. Lamy was taller than average, with a long-boned frame and a large head with dark hair, a tall wide brow, and a strongly modelled square-jawed face. Photographs later showed him as a gravely handsome man. His temperament reflected the country life he came from—orderly if not rapid in thought, mild in expression, strong and patient in a mind made up. He was so gentle with his early school companions that they nicknamed him “the Lamb.” If he generally looked serious, he could be robustly humorous. Behind his eyes lay emotions which could be powerfully stirred and at times become exhausting. He knew what hard physical work was, and when necessary he expended reserves in effort which sometimes left him ill. Strong as he looked, he was peculiarly subject to periodic bad health, which was not always entirely physical in origin, but arose from a nervous fragility which he came to ignore through hard work. He seemed all simplicity, but he was woven of many strands—warm intelligence, charm, modesty, with a certain hardnesss veiled by habitual patience. Slow-moving, he went about his days with long strides at the pace of a countryman who thought in seasons rather than in days or hours.

By contrast, his fellow seminarian, Machebeuf, born in Riom south of Vichy on 11 August 1812, the elder by two years, was conspicuous for his small size, his pale hair and eyelashes (his nickname was “Whitey”), and his liveliness. His mind darted from notion to notion. Mischief played about in his gaiety; his small, plain, clever face was animated by a venturesome spirit; his little body hated to be still. He had come to his priestly studies despite early distractions—at one time, seeing a grand military review, he was all for a soldier's life; but ever after his mother's death during his ninth year, the priesthood held a powerful call, and despite the trials of his youth,
“pleins de chasmes et illusions”
as someone wrote of him, it took him all the way to Mont-Ferrand. But even there, the confining regimen soon threatened his health and he was forced to spend a brief time away from the seminary to restore himself in free action. His resolve held, he returned, and like Lamy after him, completed his course.

It was a time of the religious revival under Louis Philippe, after the iconoclasms of the first Revolution, followed by Napoleon's self-serving
rapprochement with the Roman Church. Religious orders and education had been secularized, the Papacy had been bent to the parvenu emperor's will, and the energy of the new politics was still animated by doctrinaire idealism. Alexis de Tocqueville was examining for the Old World how democracy was working in the New. America was becoming a world factor, calling to the religious mind as well as to the political hopes of the increasing tide of colonists who went to be free and rich—partners to the open promise of the new republic overseas.

Taking his “course of philosophy and theology” at Mont-Ferrand, where he distinguished himself “by his talents and above all by his exemplary life,” Lamy spent much time reading of the missioners abroad in the
“Lettres Edifiantes”
of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, and the heroic endurances which at times were required of them.

He was not alone in his thoughts of far places. Machebeuf had also thought of missionary life, always with America as its imaginary scene. France had already partaken of America in determining ways—early exploration, support for the ideal and act of the American Revolution, and more lately the religious colonization of the new states by clergy who had fled revolutionary France.

French missioners returning from across the Atlantic reported news and marvels of the sort to challenge youth. The seminarians at Mont-Ferrand heard a certain Lazarist, John Mary Odin, who first became bishop of Galveston and later archbishop of New Orleans, tell of hardships and needs on the barbaric coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Begging for money and men, he was rewarded also with stirred imaginations. In 1833 an old bishop—Benedict Joseph Flaget, who long ago was a seminarian at Mont-Ferrand—came back to his native Auvergne from Kentucky and spoke to his young successors of how he had spent his forty years in America. In his time, the Appalachians had been breached, the westward map was slowly unfolding. He was consecrated bishop of Bardstown, Kentucky, by Archbishop Carroll in Baltimore in 1810, and his first cathedral—in a Roman and Gothic town they heard him tell of this—was an open log cabin, and his diocesan parishioners consisted of four families in an area half a dozen times as large as Italy. He was at times companioned by Algonquins, and slept in the open air or in the conical hide tents of the Indians. His work in Auvergne while Lamy and Machebeuf were still seminarians was to give zest to others who would follow such a path as he had walked in all weathers—the exhausting prairie summer heat, the blizzard of prairie winter, the slow progress through vast pathless woods. The old bishop looked frail but was hardy as dried rawhide, and his seamed old face suggested gem-hard wits mixed with Latin gaiety, rather like
traits seen in such faces as those of Voltaire and Leo XIII. During the early 1830s, at the express wish of Pope Gregory XVI, he worked for two years in France and Sardinia, stirring alive America and her needs in the aspirations of the new generation of clergy and religious. His authority was that of the survivor of far and dangerous enterprise; his vision was of that sort which kindled youth. Lamy and Machebeuf often talked together of the appeal of that distant life, and not only they—other seminarians were drawn toward it, until their priesthood converged with the needs of history. Their ordeal of preparation must be so solemn, under ancient ways, as to be an irrevocable source of strength.

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To Go

I
N THE MONT-FERRAND SEMINARY
chapel Machebeuf was ordained by Bishop Féron of Clermont on the Ember Saturday of Christmas week in 1836, Lamy two years later on the same feast. They were assigned to small parishes in the diocese of Clermont, Lamy at Chapdes, Machebeuf at Le Cendre.

Presently, in 1838, a letter reached the Sulpician rector of Mont-Ferrand, Father Comfé, from a former student who had worked under him in Paris years ago. It came from the bishop of Cincinnati, Ohio, John Baptist Purcell, who wrote from Rome. Returning now to Ohio, he would come to France on the way, where he hoped the Father Rector, his old spiritual counsellor, could help him to recruit a party of young priests to go with him to work in America. He stood in great need of more missioners.

The Father Rector lost no time. He spoke to Lamy, Machebeuf, and other young priests of their classes, whose interest in America was known to him. Their response was eager. Machebeuf evidently led the enthusiasm. Along with three others, Lamy and he resolved to go, and readily obtained approval of Bishop Fèron of Clermont-Ferrand. Even before the arrival of Bishop Purcell in Paris, their plans and conjectures for departure were taking form. They were soon, as Machebeuf said, “notified to be ready to go in the spring with Bishop Purcell to Cincinnati.” Gathering their few belongings, they thought of the
furious winters of America, and took the precaution of buying lengths of heavy cloth of the sort from which the Auvergnat mountaineers made their cloaks.

Their arrangements went forward with a certain secrecy. The seminary rector feared that Machebeuf's father might under parental authority forbid his son to go so far from home, and when it was time to go, he put Machebeuf under obedience to depart without taking leave of his family in Riom. Matters stood differently in Lempdes—there Lamy was able to disclose his intentions without meeting obstacles. Even so, saying a final goodbye was hard in his weakened state after the recent illness which had followed upon his great decision. But affairs had been set in train, there was no time either to grieve, or to ease what must be done, for the date had been set when the young Auvergnats were to meet their new bishop at the Sulpician Seminary in Paris.

So it was that they were northbound in the Paris diligence before word of their flight became general. Friends were astounded, and Machebeuf's father, the leading baker of Riom, was enraged as well as hurt when the young priest who had seen the fugitives waiting for the coach before dawn hurried about town with his news. But by then nothing could be done to reverse matters. Lamy and Machebeuf reached Paris safely, reported to the seminary at number 120 rue du Bac, where they were received with “paternal and affectionate cordiality,” and settled down to await the bishop of Cincinnati.

They found a remarkable population of missioners on the alert—eight priests preparing to depart for China, Cochinchina, and Tong-King in Siam. Other parties had already gone to the Orient, and still others would follow. According to seminary gossip, the endurances awaiting in China made those expected by the Auvergnats destined for America seem less formidable. It appeared that priests going to the Asian kingdoms would be obliged, in order not to be noticed, to wear Chinese garb, and smoke a pipe four feet long all day, and never be seen to read the breviary, and use a small stick of ivory for a fork, and sleep on the floor with a simple mat for a bed—all this in addition to the chance of persecutions rumored to be far worse than any elsewhere. It was comforting news, of a sort, to send to the home villages left behind near Clermont. Meantime, Lamy and Machebeuf took from their bundles their supply of heavy Auvergnat mountain cloth. They first had it dyed black, and then ordered cloaks made from it, with extra linings of black cashmere for warmth in unknown America.