Don Juan de Oñate's public relations man gave this pueblo—New Mexico's first Spanish "capital"—a name that has stuck for almost four centuries. Oñate himself called it San Juan Bautista, St. John the Baptist, for his patron saint. Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, his poet-captain, made it San Juan de los Caballeros, St. John of the Warrior Knights, "in memory of those noble sons who first raised in these barbarous regions the bloody tree upon which Christ perished for the redemption of mankind." Nineteenth-century romantics, who rendered the word caballeros "gentlemen," figured that the name derived from the hospitality of the San Juan Indians, who moved out of some of their dwellings in 1598 to accommodate the intruders. They moved out all right, and they came to the festivities on September 8 of that year as the Spaniards dedicated the first church in New Mexico, but no more than any other Pueblo community did the Tewas of San Juan welcome the new era. [1]

83. The church at San Juan pueblo, 1881, by William Henry Jackson. The corner of Samuel Eldodt's home and store intrudes on the left. Jackson presented this touched-up print, with clouds added, to Edgar L. Hewett in 1918.

Whatever subsequent church and convento the invaders caused to be built here must have been demolished along with Fray Juan de Morales in the rising of 1680, engineered as it was by Popé of San Juan. Something more or less permanent seems to have gone back up in the first decade of the eighteenth century. About fifty years later it had to be replaced or radically rebuilt. That task fell to Fray Juan José Pérez de Mirabal. [2]

A Spaniard from Málaga, the strong-willed Pérez de Mirabal already had built the church at Taos pueblo. Later he had set up an experimental ministry to the Jicarilla Apaches and seen Governor Cruzat y Góngora wreck it. Service at a half dozen different posts gave him wide experience. Early in 1746 word reached him from Mexico City. He had been elected custos, or superior, this during the administration of a governor whom some friars considered their worst enemy of the century, Joaquín Codallos y Rabal. Soon after, Pérez de Mirabal came to San Juan, where he stayed for seventeen years, from 1746 until 1763, until, in the estimate of a later governor, he was physically "incapacitated."

Pérez de Mirabal's church at San Juan, which L. Bradford Prince considered a classic of its style, was narrow, 22 feet inside, and long, 110 feet, of single nave and transverse clerestory. Father Domínguez said it reminded him of a corridor. Outside at the top of the flat, balconied facade, rose a simple but heavy single-arched bell gable. The church faced eastward toward the pueblo, which was not then and is not today a neat square of house blocks containing a central plaza within, but rather several long, irregular house groups more or less parallel. It may be that Pérez initiated the project late in his ministry, perhaps around 1760 to 1762, because Governor Tomás Vélez Cachupín, who returned to New Mexico for a second term in 1762, paid for the altar screen and left to Pérez's successor its design, "a great hulk like a monument in perspective, all painted yellow, blue and red." Two of the statues so offended Domínguez that he ordered them burned. On the whole, however, although he found nothing in Pérez's church to praise unduly, the hard-to-please visitor of 1776 would have admitted one thing. It was appropriate. It belonged in San Juan. [3]

The advent of Lieutenant Pike, who never paid much heed to New Mexico churches, caused quite a commotion in the pueblo. It was early March 1807.

The house tops of the village of St. John's, were crowded, as well as the streets, when we entered, and at the door of the public quarters, we were met by the president priest [Custos Ramón Antonio González]. When my companion who commanded the escort received him in a street and embraced him, all the poor creatures who stood round, strove to kiss the ring or hand of the holy father; for myself, I saluted him in the usual style. My men were conducted into the quarters, and I went to the house of the priest, where we were treated with politeness: he offered us coffee, chocolate, or whatever we thought proper, and desired me to consider myself at home in his house.

The pueblo, Pike observed, "was enclosed with a mud wall, and probably contained 1000 souls," not a bad guess, considering that the census of the following year had 201 Indians at the pueblo itself and 1,733 Hispanos as close neighbors. Pike overate. What with the wine and the heat of the convento, he was visited by an attack of "something like the cholera morbus, which alarmed me considerably, and made me determine to be more abstemious in future." Even though the old boy bored him with a two-hour discourse, it amused the American lieutenant that Custos González was a man of scientific learning. "This father was a great naturalist, or rather florist: he had large collections of flowers, plants, &c. and several works on his favorite studies, the margin and bottoms of which were filled with his notes in the Castilian language." Yet when Pike demonstrated how his sextant worked, the venerable scholar and the multitude that gathered to watch appeared more awed "than any nation of savages I was ever among." The reason, Pike understood González to say, was the Spanish government's policy of denying to the subjects of its provinces any branch of science that might unduly expand their horizons. [4]

84. Padre Camilo Seux late in life.

Like Diogenes with his lantern, Juan Bautista Guevara came to San Juan in 1818 looking for an honest Franciscan, though not really expecting to find him. But he did. Former Custos Mariano José Sánchez Vergara had instituted a regime that Guevara approved of. The Indians were instructed, the church and convento in good condition and clean. When, in 1826, the next ecclesiastical visitor from Durango appeared to confirm the mission's secularization and install don Juan Felipe Ortiz as pastor, he added to Guevara's inventory a renovated baptistery, a new pulpit and confessional, and a cemetery with deadhouse, depósito de difuntos, for corpses until burial. At the same time, he ordered more hide paintings out of the church. [5]

Despite the weathering away of the low-roofed baptistery on the right side and much of the convento on the left, despite the absence of the old balcony and the installation of glass panes in the window over the door, Father Domínguez would have recognized easily the San Juan church in 1876, the centennial of his visitation. It had been reroofed about 1865, but that had not changed its appearance. A new priest had been assigned here in the summer of 1868, one of the Frenchmen who now made up more than half the clergy in the diocese. Although he caused no hasty changes, he, like Domínguez, had a vision of something different, something less primitive. [6]

Born in Lyons on April 20, 1838, Camille Seux arrived in America March 2, 1865, two days before Lincoln's second inaugural. Six weeks later, at Santa Fe, he was ordained by Bishop Lamy in the adobe chapel of the Loretto convent. At Taos, Santa Fe, Pecos, and Albuquerque the young French priest—Padre Camilo he liked to be called—served his apprenticeship. San Juan was his first assignment as pastor.

A good many of the immigrant French clergymen were of poor peasant stock. Seux came from a family of means. Once more, Padre Camilo, fully aware of the New Testament's message to rich men, wanted to spend some of his wealth on the church at San Juan. He soon learned that he must proceed slowly. His efforts to have the Indians move the cemetery outside the pueblo in compliance with the laws of the Territory, in Adolph Bandelier's words, "almost cost him his life." Cautiously he maintained the old adobe building, "at his own expense, and almost against the will of the Indians, who, while they would not allow any outsider to touch the edifice, still refused to make even the most indispensable repairs." [7]

Bandelier exaggerated. When the rear wall of the church nearly washed out during the summer rains of 1880, "the Indians," related Lieutenant Bourke, "to prevent a recurrence of the damage, built it up with ox-horns," whatever he meant by that. The building "has a square squatty front of 20 to 25 ft.: is of adobe, and in places of stone, with a brown stucco facing." It was a much better structure, Bourke reckoned, than the one at Santa Clara he had just come from. In 1881 he could already see Padre Camilo's hand at work inside. "It has, to all appearances, been restored quite recently, whitewashed and provided with a new altar-piece." Four years later Bandelier commented on the beautiful organ. One by one, pretty pasty-faced plaster statues began taking the places of the old wooden figures. It was no coincidence that Bourke purchased at San Juan in addition to pottery "a wooden 'santo,' or holy figure, painted in archaic fashion." A little at a time Padre Camilo was having his way. [8]

85. Father Seux's Lourdes chapel on the day of its dedication in 1890.

Following in the tradition of Fray Ramón Antonio González, the Frenchman created of the priest's garden an Eden where the voracious Bourke "wandered at will among the trees and bushes laden with red ripe currants, black cherries, and luscious apricots." Seux enjoyed his reputation for genial hospitality. To the other French priests, San Juan became a haven, a place to gather and be nostalgic together. Clergy assembled here for conferences and retreats. Padre Camilo liked having guests. And from the 1880s on, he never lacked for some thing new to show them.

On April 9, 1888, "before an immense concourse of people and priests" Archbishop Jean Baptiste Salpointe blessed a life-sized bronze statue of the Immaculate Conception, a copy of the one at Lourdes, imported by Father Seux and set high on a carved stone pedestal at the entrance of the churchyard, which was now enclosed by a trim and tidy white picket fence. Almost at once, the archbishop recalled some years later, it became the habit of passers-by to kneel awhile on the monument's steps and pray. This set Padre Camilo thinking of a chapel where pilgrims could come and do their devotions in all weather. The result, "a nice little gothic structure of stone, well finished inside with a rustic grotto in the sanctuary and furnished with rich sacred vessels and vestments," appeared across from the old church, facing it like a frozen Gallic mirage. On June 19, 1890, with twenty-three priests in attendance, the archbishop blessed it, too. [9]

Later that summer a special agent of the Eleventh U.S. Census, Henry R. Poore, who cared about Indian education, not about miracles or grottos, came to inspect San Juan. He did not appreciate Father Seux's attitude.

A large Catholic church stands beyond the western end of the plaza, and in front of it has recently been placed a gilded statue of the Virgin, heroic size. This is erected upon a pedestal and inclosed by an iron railing, a gift to the pueblo by the residing priest. 20 yards from this, and in the plaza, a neat chapel of stone has recently been built at a cost of $10,000, also a gift of the priest. The priest who is a Frenchman, speaking no English, is 1 of the 9 now among the pueblos, recently installed in the places of Mexican padres. In conversation he said: "The Indians care absolutely nothing for any religion save the Catholic. Although not half of them attend mass, or care to hear me preach, they are very particular to send for me when they are to die, and would not think of being buried save by me. I baptize and marry all Indians. It is foolish to teach English at the schools. It is no better than Latin to a boar; a thing for which they have no use, and soon forget for that reason." [10]

Meantime, the Frenchman's renovation of the old church had begun to show on the outside. Most obvious was the new roof-line, pitched, with two-tiered belfry topped by a tall spire. The new windows, the millwork around all the openings, and the painstaking lines incised with a straightedge in the new hard plaster to simulate stone masonry completed the disguise. In 1896 Father Domínguez would not have recognized the San Juan church on a bet.

86. Rectory, statue of Our Lady of Lourdes, and eighteenth-century church in nineteenth-century guise, San Juan pueblo, October 16, 1898.

The parish was becoming a showplace, and Father Seux knew it. In October of 1895, when His Eminence James Cardinal Gibbons was in Santa Fe to confer the pallium on Archbishop Chapelle, locals put the first Prince of the Church to visit New Mexico on the Denver and Rio Grande's "Chile Line" and brought him to see the Lourdes of San Juan. Pilgrims from as far away as southern Colorado flocked in every year for the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, September 8, the same day, ironically, that Oñate's Franciscans had dedicated the very first church in 1598.

Padre Camilo kept building: a large two-story rectory, a parochial school, and finally in 1912-13 "a beautiful brick church, with wooden floor, beautiful [marble] altars and stained glass windows." It rose right on the dust of its venerable dried-mud predecessor, which had been knocked down to make room. The Fred Harvey Company hauled off the carved vigas for an addition to El Ortiz, the Santa Fe—style inn at Lamy.

87. Father Camilo Seux's triumph of 1913 looks much the same today.

At San Juan, seemingly, no one protested. The Frenchman had outlived most everyone who remembered how the old church looked before his coming. "Not an intellectual genius," wrote a clergyman who served with him, "he was always known among his brother priests as a man of 'bons sens,' good, steady, common sense. He died in 1922. They buried him in his Lourdes chapel as he wanted. His ministry at San Juan had lasted fifty-three and a half years, from the reign of Emperor Napoleon III to the presidency of Alexandre Millerand in his beloved France. In all those years, it is said, he took only one vacation, in 1875 when he went home. The rest of the time, Padre Camilo brought France to San Juan. [11]

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