Lamy of Santa Fe (45 page)

But an era of sorts had suddenly come to an end when the Very Reverend Juan Felipe Ortiz, the displaced old rural dean, and brother to the pastor of Taos who had gone to Rome with Lamy in 1854, died suddenly of apoplexy late in the morning of 20 January, at the age of sixty-one, after receiving the last rites. “Some Friends of the Deceased” signed a necrology which made no mention of his intrigues and disgraces, but recounted how for three days a great crowd paid respects to his body in state at his own residence, and thronged to his requiem Mass in the cathedral, where he was buried. The governor, the United States military commander, and the entire legislative assembly (in which he had served in his time), were in attendance, and the “Friends” were at pains to note that since “the year by ecclesiastic authority he was elected Vicar of this territory,” he had given “special satisfaction to the wise and virtuous Bishop the Right Revd. Dr. Zubiría”—quite as though Lamy had never been heard of.

ii
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The Poisoned Chalice

I
N MID-SUMMER
1858 a provincial council under Archbishop Kenrick was to be held at St Louis. Lamy must attend. It would mean another long absence during his round trip on the plains, and also another visit to Kentucky to enlist more Loretto nuns for his ever-increasing school. Further, he was devoting more and more time to travels in the diocese; and the still untouched question of Arizona to the west and Colorado to the north would call for journeys in the field. To act for him in Santa Fe, he sent for Machebeuf to return from Albuquerque to preside as rector of the old adobe cathedral of St Francis.

While Machebeuf made ready for his transfer, he could report a series of loving protests by his parishioners—the very ones who had once reviled him. There was “
un
meeting
monstre”
at which plans were made to demand that he remain. A petition signed by two thousand persons was addressed to the bishop pleading that the pastor not be removed. Not a delegation, but a great crowd descended upon Machebeuf, rich and poor, children and elders. Hearing that he must leave within two days, they commanded him to remain long enough for a committee to carry the petition to the bishop at Santa Fe. When he laughingly replied that he knew every inch of the way to Santa Fe and could escape at will, despite their command, the women cried that they, they alone, would guard the Santa Fe road, as sentinels all the way. He was obliged to grant three more days' delay, while two successive letters were sent to Lamy pleading for a change of orders. In vain. Lamy was immovable, Machebeuf departed with a mounted escort through ardent farewells far out along the highways, while his heart swelled with feeling. Arriving in Santa Fe, he was further swept by emotion when he was received with the usual delegation of officials, religious, priests, pupils, as the four bells of St Francis, and all those of the four other churches of Santa Fe, rang out to announce his arrival as rector of the cathedral. His triumphal entry made him feel “as Napoleon III must have felt in the Boulevard Sébastopol.” After the reception at the cathedral attended by an immense crowd, Lamy crowned the event with a collation of little cakes and “a good
of wine to settle the dust.… You will see,” wrote Machebeuf to his brother Marius, “how we do things in style in New Mexico.…”

There was more ceremony to mark Lamy's departure for St Louis, to be gone all summer and well into the autumn. The convent study was “prepared and adorned” as only nuns could do it, and, seated under a canopy, Lamy listened to addresses of occasion in Spanish and English by convent girls, who demonstrated not only sentiment but scholastic progress. In return, he granted the students a holiday “on the longest day of the year” soon to fall due, and then cut two large cakes “with his own hands presenting a slice to each person in the room,” along with a small portion of wine, joining all in taking the refreshments. When it was time for him to depart a day later, on 12 June, he passed the convent, where all the nuns and pupils were standing in line. He blessed them; and, said the Reverend Mother, “our eyes followed him until he was lost from our sight.” The longest day of the year turned out to be the feast of St Aloysius Gonzaga and the students duly had their “recreation.” The day afterward was the bishop's name day—the feast of St John the Baptist—which reminded all “forcibly” of their “dear absent Father.” Set down in a private letter, such sentiments spoke for more than perfunctory respect.

Once again to cross the plains: “indeed I am used to such travelling,” wrote Lamy to Purcell, adding in his understated way, “and I think I enjoy it.” He was a man to whom eloquence did not come naturally; but his perception ran deep, like his convictions, and his responses in action were firm and patient with something of the rhythms of the seasons about them—the peasant's ancient knowledge of the cycle from seed to harvest. The moment meant less than the years, and the years than eternity. In the solitude and wilderness of his vast empire, perhaps he found a vision of his particular spirituality and grace; and an affinity for the dimensions of the deserts which in the end led him to his mastery, so often alone, of the great lands in his charge.

Increasingly he was off in the grand distances. In the spring of 1858 he made his first trip to Colorado, and there, in its southern plains, he found intimate little passages reminiscent of Auvergne. The little streams ran shallowly over pale gravel, bordered by willows and cotton woods, and in and out of cooling shadow the water was slate blue or diamond white, and beyond lay the tawny sweeps of the great San Luis Valley, and still beyond, the mysterious, and beckoning, visions of the Colorado Rockies, where cloud shadows played and weather and rivers were immensely formed in the union of sky and land. On the Conejos River, Lamy erected the first Colorado parish with a chapel built as a
jacal
—open to the sky, an enclosure of walls
from slim cottonwood stakes with bindings of salt-cedar branches. It was the first move of the spiritual colonization of Colorado which would soon proceed from Santa Fe.

Now in the summer of 1858 he moved on eastward to Kentucky, reaching there toward the middle of July after a journey of about four weeks. Bishop Spalding of Louisville told Purcell, “Bp Lamy, in fact all these missionary bishops, are never at rest, only this be
in mortem
. He stayed in and about Louisville for some days, but we saw little of him. He had to make an excursion to Loretto and back in the interim”—where actually he found more Loretto nuns willing to go West with him for the rest of their lives.

In September he was again in St Louis for the second provincial council, and celebrated the Mass at the opening of one of the sessions. Of the matters discussed by his colleagues, the one which interested him most was his old boundary dispute. He set forth all the arguments which he knew so well, with the result that his colleagues voted to petition Pius IX to issue a decree settling the matter once and for all by ordering the disputed lands politically under the United States to be assigned to Santa Fe. What they did not know was that the Vatican, on 10 June, had written Zubiría, complimenting him on his “brilliance of mind and right judgement,” and declaring it expedient “that the Holy Father through the Apostolic Authority officially incorporated the county of Doñana and the parish of Las Cruces into the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Santa Fe.” A copy of the papal decree was sent with the letter—and another went to Lamy at Santa Fe, which he would see on his return home.

When he finally saw it in the autumn all might have seemed in order. Rome had finally acted on his many requests, and also had accepted the graceful capitulation of Zubiría in reversing his previous claims—but there was still a nice technicality to which the bishop of Durango would now cling: his earlier and handsome decision to give up Doñana and Las Cruces, and Rome's decree requiring this, had made no mention of the word, and the locality of, La Mesilla. Therefore, at that moment, and for years to come, Zubiría held that this village (or the long pastoral valley of the same name in which it was situated on the Rio Grande) still belonged to Durango; so the pretext was splendidly laid for another triangular contention between Santa Fe, Durango, and Rome, while the familiar confusions about what the very names designated remained unresolved. The village of Doñana lay ten miles north of Las Cruces, the village of La Mesilla five miles south of Las Cruces. Doñana was often taken to mean the whole vast district north of Mexico from the Rio Grande west—but so was La Mesilla. The Vatican had granted “the county of Doñana and
parish of Las Cruces” to Lamy. He inevitably understood this to include the town of La Mesilla. Zubiría chose to except, and to retain, the town of La Mesilla because it was not specifically mentioned. But Lamy did not know of this view as yet.

On this return home he had to hear of another event—strange and tragic—which had happened in his absence.

“Last August third,” he told Barnabo, “while I was at the council in St. Louis, one of my priests was poisoned at the altar.”

He was the young Father Antoine Avel, who had come with Lamy from France in 1854, had served on the cathedral staff for four years, and then had been assigned as pastor in the village of Mora, to replace a certain priest who gave scandal. In the village was a woman who lived outside of marriage with a man named Noel. One day she fell ill, was in fact dying, and sent for the priest to administer the last rites. This was Father Munnecom, who though replaced as pastor by Avel was still in Mora. By chance, Father Avel was absent on a mission visit. Munnecom would go to her only on condition that she renounce her lover. At death's door, she consented, sent Noel away, was given absolution, and died. Noel, the lover, was distracted with grief and rage, and threatened revenge against Munnecom.

A few Sundays later, when Munnecom was scheduled, as usual, to say the nine o'clock Mass, he was absent, and Father Avel unexpectedly took his place. He heard a few confessions, began the Mass, and on swallowing some of the wine at communion, knew it had been polluted. He sent the acolyte to the sacristy for fresh wine, and was barely able to complete the Mass; by now he knew he was poisoned. In tremors, he returned to the altar to pray. A few people were still present, and he said to them, “Pray for me, I am dying poisoned.”

Noel came forward to take Avel to the sacristy, where he tried to administer an antidote, at the same time telling Avel that Father Munnecom must have poisoned the wine, in revenge for having been displaced. Avel knew his end was near. Someone proposed to find Munnecom to give him the last sacraments, but Avel replied that he could not confess to a priest who had poisoned him. A priest at Las Vegas was sent for, but arrived too late. Avel wrote his will, leaving his library to Bishop Lamy, and a sum of money to help found a hospital at Santa Fe, and, forgiving his murderer, died.

Then, abandoning his sheep and pasture, Noel left in haste for Las Vegas, where he met Machebeuf, who was hurrying to Mora to investigate the case. There Noel told the vicar general of Munnecom's jealousy, made a mystery of Munnecom's absence from his usual Sunday Mass, and then disappeared, to be unheard of for years, until news came that he was murdered in southern New Mexico. “We suspect,
with good reason,” wrote Lamy before the case was resolved, “not a Mexican priest, but an unfortunate Dutch priest …” In the end, Munnecom was cleared by the chancery and by the courts, served many years as a worthy pastor elsewhere, and finally retired to his native Holland.

But it was still the larger, and crucial, matter of territory which concerned Lamy above all; for not only had the Vatican decree granting him the Gadsden Purchase areas of New Mexico (which the decree called “La Mesilla”) arrived in August—another in the same month placed the immense and empty lands of Arizona under his jurisdiction. There was no established boundary between New Mexico and Arizona, and the Gadsden territory ran westward across both as far as California.

But there was a complicated parallel to that presented by the claims of Durango; for Arizona, until the war with Mexico, and even now, in 1858, was under the authority of the bishop of Sonora and Sinaloa in Mexico, whose proper see was in the ancient city of Culiacán over seven hundred miles south of the all but abandoned shack settlement of Tucson in Arizona. If Lamy was to assume the administration for Arizona, the bishop of Sonora, Don Pedro Loza, must concur in the transfer. It would be 1851 all over again—months of agonizingly slow progress across thousands of miles of desert wilderness to consolidate a new dimension of responsibility.

Lamy moved promptly. He relieved Machebeuf of the post of vicar general, for he had a new duty for him, and appointed in his place Father Eguillon, who had been pastor of Socorro on the Rio Grande. Concerning the Vatican decree awarding him his southern lands at last, he wrote—not to Zubiría as usual, whose competence he had already doubted on account of old age—but to the vicar general of Durango, to say that the “political troubles of the unfortunate Republic of Mexico” were a great obstacle of communication, for the revolution led by Benito Juarez was interrupting even the most random of Mexican affairs, and the Church was under open persecution. It was possible that papal briefs might never reach their destination there. Lamy hoped there would be “no difficulties” in the matter.

Now the decision must be ratified locally. Lamy lost no time in sending Machebeuf to annex officially the parishes in the Gadsden Purchase. In El Paso, Zubiría's rural dean was the same pastor Don Ramón Ortiz, who, with his fine looks, delightful charm, and open-hearted hospitality had shown the Mexican style at its best to the captives of the disastrous Texan-Santa Fe expedition of 1841 as they were marched from northern New Mexico through El Paso to the wretched life of Mexican jails far to the south. He had also
entertained Doniphan's Missouri troops who had gone by on their way to Chihuahua in 1846, and he had received Lamy and Machebeuf with every kindness in 1851 on their way to Santa Fe.