Visitors to downtown Santa Fe are drawn to two majestic buildings, the Cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi and the Chapel of the Loretto Sisters. Little would one suspect today that the founder of these two buildings, indeed the father of American Catholicism in the southwestern states of New Mexico and Arizona, was a Frenchman who came to America for the express intent of following the Great Commission, that command by Christ to “Go into the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation.”

When Jean Baptiste Lamy arrived at Santa Fe in 1851 the city was an old Spanish capitol, founded 242 years before. Only recently at the end of the Mexican War the U.S. had taken control of the region politically and militarily, which necessitated commensurate ecclesiastical changes. The Vatican appointed the thirty-five-year-old Lamy Bishop Apostolic of the Diocese of New Mexico, a vast region of thousands of square miles encompassing the states of New Mexico, Arizona, western Texas, southern parts of Colorado and Nevada—in short, much of the vast borderland between Mexico and the United States. The land was sparsely settled, the farmers and ranchers harassed by aggressive Plains Indian tribes. The appointment was a surprise and an immense challenge for Lamy, who had only recently been a frontier parish priest in northern Kentucky and Ohio. Lamy had been ordained in Mont-Ferrand; recruited by Bishop Jean Purcell of Cincinnati, Lamy arrived in the United States in 1839. Twelve years later he journeyed down the Ohio to the Mississippi River, on to New Orleans, from there to Galveston by steamer followed by another sea journey to Matagorda Bay, then overland to San Antonio, eventually arriving at Santa Fe. He assumed control of a small town of mostly Mexicans served by a few priests who were basically on their own, the Bishop of Durango, Mexico, being fifteen hundred miles away. The sacraments in Lamy’s new diocese were rarely administered and the morals of the priests were not befitting the heritage and magisterium of the Catholic Church.

Lamy discovered that he was to be a missionary bishop on horseback. He took to the road, over and over, sometimes accompanied by soldiers, traders, guides, sometimes alone, in a forbidding country of vast deserts, few settlements, and Indian tribes discontented with the new authority of the United States. One of his first journeys was to take his Vatican credentials and travel to and from Durango over six months and three thousand miles to apprise Bishop José Antonio Laureano de Zubiría y Escalante of the change. In 1852 he journeyed to and from Baltimore to participate in a plenary council; on the return journey he stopped in Kentucky and recruited sisters of the Loretto mission to hazard the journey to New Mexico to establish a convent. Lamy made this harrowing journey numerous times, often in the company of priests and nuns, and frequently experiencing attack by the Apaches and other warlike tribes such as the Pueblo, Comanche, and Navajo. In July, 1867, for example, he escorted priests and sisters to Santa Fe when Plains Indians attacked. After a fierce battle, “Sister Alphonsa Thompson, a native of Kentucky, fell sick. Night settling we camped, and she being very ill received the last Sacraments. The other sisters waited on her all night, and the next day we had to continue our journey. She was put into a wagon with four other sisters, and when we had halted, she died at ten o’clock, July 24, being not quite twenty years old.” (Quoted in M. Lilliana Owens, “Our Lady of Light Academy, Santa Fe,” New Mexico Historical Review 13(1938))

Bishop Lamy realized that to turn around declining morals, which was a consequence of ignorance, schools must be built. The Loretto Sisters helped to fill the gulf, opening a school, Our Lady of Light Academy, in 1853. The challenge of educating the poor and ignorant grew over the years; Lamy’s diocese expanded to include Colorado and the region of the Gadsden Purchase acquired by the United States in 1854. During the Civil War, to find priests to assist in the Arizona Territory, Father Lamy journeyed to California, crossing Death Valley and the Mohave Desert. Along the way he chanced upon a settler who described the bishop as “a frank agreeable fascinating gentleman with the bonhomie of the Frenchman and the earnestness of the typical Christian. . . . A man of works rather than words, whose field of work is an empire, his diocese stretching from Denver to Mexico, from the Rio Grande to the Colorado.” (Quoted in Paul Horgan, Lamy of Santa Fe, 1975.)

Lamy sent his vicar general and close friend Father Joseph Machebeuf to Colorado to organize that part of his quickly growing diocese, centered in Denver. He frequently had occasion to make the journey north into the Rocky Mountains, such as in 1866, when he made the nine-hundred-mile trip, founding churches and confirming neophytes to the Catholic faith. The next year, 1867, he journeyed to Rome to report to Pope Pius IX of the 135,000 Catholics under his charge and the fifty-one priests he directed to serve them. Lamy became Archbishop in 1875 having spent twenty-four years in the desert southwest.

Recently Pope Francis has commemorated American missionaries in Puerto Rico to carry out the Great Commission with love. There is no better example of loving self-sacrifice than Jean-Baptiste Lamy. Willa Cather, in her fictional portrait of Lamy, Death Comes for the Archbishop (New York: Random House, 1990), wrote truly of Lamy and other missionaries in America: “Those early missionaries threw themselves naked upon the hard heart of a country that was calculated to try the endurance of giants. They thirsted in its deserts, starved among its rocks, climbed up and down its terrible canyons on stone-bruised feet, broke long fasts by unclean and repugnant food. Surely these endured Hunger, Thirst, Cold, Nakedness, of a kind beyond any conception St. Paul and his brethren could have had. Whatever the early Christians suffered, it all happened in that safe little Mediterranean world, amid the old manners, the old landmarks. If they endured martyrdom, they died among their brethren, their relics were piously preserved, their names lived in the mouths of holy men. Riding with his Auvergnats to the old missions that had been scenes of martyrdom, the Bishop [Lamy] used to remind them that no man could know what triumphs of faith had happened there, where one white man met torture and death alone among so many infidels, or what visions and revelations God may have granted to soften that brutal end.”

A version of this essay appeared in Catholic Exchange