the rivers met, the boundary would be drawn to the Pacific Ocean along the existing line which divided the provinces of Upper and Lower California. The agreement was shown in the adjustment of a map published by one J. Disturnell in New York in 1847. By treaty terms, both nations in due time were to set up a joint boundary commission which would conduct a proper survey and permanently fix legitimate possessions of both nations.
Something of the difficulties of defining a conclusive boundary was reflected in a letter written by an Army officer and quoted in a speech on the floor of the House in Washington by Congressman Truman Smith of Connecticut. “The boundaries of the territory have never been very exactly defined, as a great share of the line lies over desert countries, where very little importance can attach to an exact location. Whilst in Santa Fe I endeavored to ascertain the exact southern boundary of the territory, but I found that various lines had been claimed both by New Mexico and Chihuahua. All agreed, however, in considering the settlements to the north of the ‘Jornada del Muerto’ (‘Dead Man’s Journey’) as belonging to New Mexico, whilst those to the south of it were considered as belonging to Chihuahua.” The congressman for his part spoke sentiments which to one degree or other were shared by a vocal minority of his fellow citizens. He announced that the common people were very ignorant, the women less educated than the men, and both sexes were, as he understood, “under the control of the clergy to an extraordinary degree. The standard of morals is exceedingly low … the country is little better than a Sodom.” He thought the whole acquisition of the territory a disaster. “The moral desolation which exists in Northern Mexico must long continue; … I am free to say that if all the vices which can corrupt the human heart, and all the qualities which reduce man to the level of a brute, are to be ‘annexed’ to the virtue and intelligence of the American people, I DO NOT DESIRE TO BELONG TO ANY SUCH UNION.” The congressman ended his grand periods by saying, “It is apparent that we have extorted a bargain from Mexico at the point of a bayonet, and cheated ourselves.”
In any case, such a political separation, imprecise as it had to be in its first phase, and relying on self-interest as well as lines drawn on a map, brought another serious matter for debate; and that was the question of religious jurisdiction in the new United States territories. All lands that had been ceded had been administered by bishops of Mexico. What should now be decided? Should this, could this, old ecclesiastical authority continue, even across national boundaries?
The American bishops nearest the problem were those who presided at New Orleans and Galveston. Bishop Blanc of New Orleans had given much thought to the question, and had gathered what information he could. In January 1849, he wrote to his colleague and far neighbor, Bishop Odin of Galveston. “New Mexico,” he stated, “is under the Bishop of Durango [in Mexico], who is there at the moment (in New Mexico) and plans to spend six months there—it seems that matters there are not good—and in general are even worse than those in California.” Durango was fifteen hundred miles from Santa Fe, the civil and ecclesiastical capital of the province of New Mexico. But there, too, was California, dependent on the bishop of Sonora. Texas—at least the eastern Gulf portion—was independent of Mexican jurisdiction, having been established under the Texan Republic. But the Mexican bishops were as concerned as the American, and, wrote Blanc to Odin, “having jurisdiction over the ceded parts of their territory, have consulted Rome to know if they should continue their control of those lands which are now American.”
Rome’s reply was astonishing, and bore the seed of years of legalistic wrangling. Rome “answered the Mexican bishops in the affirmative”—they were to continue to exercise their episcopal authority north of the border. “No doubt,” said Blanc, “it is for this reason that the Bishop of Durango went off to New Mexico, on ecclesiastical affairs.” Bishop Blanc had been told that the Mexican bishops were extremely responsive to everything which must interest them concerning the spiritual good of those provinces. Blanc thought two very capable men were needed in those territories—men who spoke both languages, English and Spanish. He did not specify their nationalities—but that was nothing new, since a bishop from far away often was sent to preside over a new diocese. He ended with a local bulletin: the cholera epidemic at New Orleans was drawing to its close, after having carried off at least between twelve and fifteen hundred people.
But the territorial problems were not to be readily resolved. How could Rome, in her great distance from the scene, grasp the realities of the scale of the land, the needs of the people, indeed, the fallen state of the Church herself in the ex-Mexican states? At Baltimore three archbishops and twenty-three bishops assembled in synod to enter into more than the recommendation of additional American archbishoprics and dioceses.
They gathered in early May 1849 in the archbishop’s residence at the rear of Latrobe’s superb classical cathedral, which though not completed (the pedimented portico was not yet built) was the finest Christian monument in the country, symbolic of the earliest Catholic colonization, seat of the premier bishop, who at the time of this convening was Archbishop Eccleston. Led by a crucifer, and wearing mitres and copes, carrying their croziers, and following a long column of lesser clergy, attended by acolytes, and watched by a crowd of citizens, the women in crinolines and the men uncovered, the prelates processed to the opening session from the archbishop’s house, along the south side of the cathedral, around the corner, passing a locally admired iron fencing which enclosed the premises, and entered by the main doors on the west front. The cathedral’s serenely unadorned lines were enriched within by nine large religious paintings sent from Rome in 1824 as a gift from Cardinal Fesch, Napoleon’s uncle, and by two even larger donated by the last Bourbons of France. Under the noble coffered dome of the cathedral and before the high altar with its classical pillared apse, the bishops, conducting their business in Latin, entered upon their agenda.
The matter of the new archbishoprics would not have taken long to deal with—the developing provinces were immense, several bishops were needed in each, and a presiding head, or metropolitan, must assist with the making of policy for each suffragan bishop. But more difficult, perhaps even more urgent, was the question of the Mexican territories now within the United States, their proper administration, and the state of the Church within them for the past many years. There was much to be brought forward about the latter point, before the territorial issue was to be taken up.
Shocked observations of Mexican life had been made by soldiers who had gone to the border war. Many such men were officers who recorded their impressions. Some drew faithful if not wholly skilled pictures of aspects of the Mexican life now so abruptly incorporated into the American territories, and some accounts had been published. The Mexican society and—so far as the Council was concerned—the Church could only be described as outlandish in their condition. Thousands of Catholics—Mexican and Indian—who had inherited the faith so laboriously and successfully implanted by the Franciscans between the Spanish conquest and the early nineteenth century—when they had been withdrawn from the vast area now annexed to the United States—thousands lived in scattered sites, far removed from each other, and almost totally without spiritual succor. Even where this was present, as in the older settlements of New Mexico, in particular Santa Fe, the lives of the priests appalled visitors from the States and from abroad. It was the bishop of Durango in Mexico, fifteen hundred miles from Santa Fe, who was responsible for the whole of New Mexico as part of his immense diocese, and he had paid only three visits there in the twenty years before the war. An English traveller reported that to come there, the “good old man was glad to return [to Durango] with any hem to his garment, so great was the respect paid to him …” It was thought a miracle that he escaped death at the hands of Apache or Comanche warriors in the course of his three-thousand-mile round trip over an empty landscape which was a seemingly endless repetition in sequence of desert, parched river, and mountain barrier.
New Mexico’s condition was incredible, as the bishops at Baltimore considered what was needed. Her churches were for the most part in ruins, and all of them had been built of earthen walls and roofs. There were no schools. Most of the parishes made no proper observances. There were only nine active priests in over two hundred thousand square miles. The deportment of most of these was reprehensible. United States Army officers had often been
