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xiii.

A Bishop for New Mexico

THE QUESTION OF ESTABLISHING a bishopric for New Mexico was not a new one—though now as a consequence of the Mexican War it had again come forward, at last to be answered. The matter had been agitated periodically under Spanish rule ever since the 1630s, through two and a quarter centuries. Fray Alonso de Benavides, the early father custodian of the Franciscans in New Mexico, pursued it tirelessly at Madrid and at Rome from 1630 to 1636. In a number of petitions he besought Philip IV to erect the Santa Fe diocese under the power held by the Spanish crown to appoint bishops. He argued skillfully, trying to make the far country he knew so well come alive in the impenetrable royal imagination. How far away from the nearest bishop was the capital of the Rio Grande kingdom—five hundred leagues, for Durango already had its cathedral. It then took almost a year to make the round-trip journey between Durango and Santa Fe, it was not possible to procure the holy oil every year, and sometimes five or six years passed before it was brought to the New Mexican missions, whose people lacked the sacrament of confirmation, which was “so necessary to strengthen the souls of the faithful.” The journey was not only long, it was perilous. But if a bishop were established at Santa Fe—it was “desirable that he remain always at Santa Fe, where the governor and the Spaniards reside permanently”—then what benefits must follow! Beyond the spiritual, what wise economies! For “if there were a bishop to consecrate churches and to ordain priests from among the native Spaniards of that land,” who knew its languages, wrote Fray Alonso, then His Majesty “would be spared the heavy costs in sending friars.” As for supporting a bishop, the discovery of silver mines and the increase of population, with additional farms and cattle to feed the people, would yield enough money in tithes to maintain his lordship without a call upon the royal treasury.

Everything was available locally, even the person of the bishop himself, insisted the father custodian in the seventeenth century: the bishop should be appointed from among the Franciscan friars already at work in the river kingdom. After all, there was precedent for such an appointment among Franciscans. “Your royal predecessors,” wrote Fray Alonso to the King, “gave them the first bishoprics of the Indies, and, assuming that the same reasoning applies … may your Majesty be pleased that the one appointed as bishop in these kingdoms and provinces be of the same order.…” He could readily name four New Mexican friars any one of whom, “though devoid of human ambitions,” would be suitable candidates, and there was a fifth whom in all modesty he would not name, but whose brilliant statement of the case surely would bring him to mind.

In 1631 the father custodian had reason to think the matter was about to be settled, for the King seemed “determined on the erection of a bishopric in these parts and decreed that a brother of St Francis should be nominated to be prelate,” and even seemed ready to ask Pope Urban VIII to confirm the establishment. But a matter of such weight could not travel swiftly through the labyrinths of policy at the Escorial and the Vatican, and nine years later, with the question still unresolved, a bishop of New Spain presented to the King damaging evidence that the New Mexican friars were exceeding their authority as simple priests. The bishop had been told that “the Franciscan friars in New Mexico are using the mitre and crozier,” behaving for all the world like bishops, even “administering the sacrament of confirmation, and also conferring ordinations in minor orders.” Nobody had yet given them authority to do any of these things. Perhaps they were beyond patience at not having been given a proper bishop. When chided, they lamely explained that they had an official paper of some sort granting them authority to “give orders.” This they took to mean holy orders, when all it could have meant even to a child’s intelligence—the complaining bishop was disgusted—was routine authority to exercise priestly discipline over parishioners. Examiners of the case in Madrid found that there was no town in New Mexico great enough to contain a cathedral, and further, that the province was so poor that its tithes would never support a prelate. In any case, the friars made too much of their need, and their father custodian presently received no more than an apostolic grant empowering him to administer confirmation.

The matter was allowed to gather dust in official files for twenty-eight more years, when once again it was looked into, and now again with favor, for the kingdom of New Mexico had prospered until in 1666 it seemed likely that a bishop could be properly supported at Santa Fe. Royal and papal approval gathered strength for the next fourteen years; but then, in 1680, the calamity of the Pueblo revolt swept away the New Mexican colony, its Spaniards, and their parishes, and accordingly all chances for the bishopric. The river kingdom was left under the jurisdiction of the bishop of Durango, in his famous and lamented distance of fifteen hundred miles from Santa Fe. Generations would go by without an episcopal visitation to the exiled north after the Spanish restoration in New Mexico in 1692, while the mission friars struggled to hold their authority against that of the civil governors, and even broke into quarrels with their distant and invisible bishop. When in the last hours of the Spanish dominion in the New World, New Mexico was allowed to send an elected delegate to sit in the Cortes in Spain, he proposed once again, in 1810, but in vain, a bishopric for New Mexico. After the revolutionary secession of Mexico from Spain in 1821, the long process of secularization began, and without a bishop to guide it on the scene, the Church fell upon unhappy days. The absence of a spiritual leader seemed like a symbol of the abandonment of the province. Who cared?—so far, so outlandish, with only a handful of Spaniards (now Mexicans) amidst a diffused population of inscrutable Indians—New Mexico was lost in its golden distance, and the world did not appear to miss it. Without leadership in the affairs of the spirit, the society lost any motive larger than that of simple survival. Without food or purpose for the aggregate mind of the colony, ignorance was the birthright of each new generation. Without education to foster the works of betterment in people’s lives, and to create a sense of a future for the young, the very heart of the society was oppressed. When the last Franciscans were withdrawn in the 1830s, and a mere handful of the secular clergy was left, not only the people, but even many priests forgot the laws of the Church.

Now, in 1849, letters circulated between American chanceries and converged upon the prelate at Baltimore, who would forward to Rome the recommendations from among which the names of the new American bishops would be chosen. It was not a matter for parish priests to enter into; their presiding prelates kept the affair in their own hands. Lamy in Covington went about his modest but demanding labors, as yet knowing nothing of what was coming to a focus.

For each new bishopric, three nominations were drawn up by the conciliar bishops, were discussed by letter, and the names forwarded to Baltimore. Lamy, in his undemanding obscurity, was brought to light on several lists, which presented candidates in preferential order for first, second, and third rank in every case. For the new diocese of St Paul, he was ranked as second choice, with the notation, “Joannes Lamy, a Frenchman, 35 years of age; well versed in the doctrine; especially praiseworthy for his mild character, zeal for the salvation of souls.” For Monterey, California, he was again ranked in second place; but for Santa Fe, he was, by preponderance of recommendations, placed first, with the supporting statement, “Joannes Lamy, Native of France, 35 years old, for many years already working in the Diocese of Cincinnati, well known for his piety, honesty, prudence, and other virtues.” On 16 April 1850, Archbishop Eccleston of Baltimore wrote to Purcell that Lamy was “first on the list for the Vicariate of Santa Fe.” His nomination was submitted to Pius IX, while as summer deepened, Lamy, all unaware, wrote to Purcell on 25 July 1850 on routine matters in Covington, and added that “the cholera is not so bad in my little congregation”—St Mary’s—”I have had only two deaths in this month … but the weather continues excessively hot.”

No one in America yet knew it, but six days earlier, on 19 July, Pius IX, recently returned to Rome from his sanctuary at Gaeta, where he had fled from Garibaldi, had established by decree the vicariate apostolic of New Mexico, and further, on 23 July had issued a papal bull naming as its vicar apostolic Father John Baptist Lamy, of Covington, Kentucky, with the title of bishop of Agathonica, in partibus infidelium.