THE ENDURING HISPANIC FAITH COMMUNITIES:
SPANISH AND TEXAS CHURCH HISTORIOGRAPHY

GILBERTO M. HINOJOSA^{*}
©Copyright 1990, Texas Catholic Historical Society.
May not be reproduced electronically or mechanically without permission of Catholic Southwest.

Texas, a land of vast expanses, defies a single broad vision of its past. Varied I chronological, political, and demographic currents cut through the state's -history, giving the impression that it is fragmented. The Catholic experience in this state is no different: the legendary six-flag Texas heritage itself points to multiple civil and ecclesiastical jurisdictions. Even just under Spain, the area within the state's present boundaries came under several administrations, for it included the provinces of Texas (which extended only to the Nueces River), Nuevo Santander, Coahuila, and Nuevo Mexico. Furthermore, the land has attracted a variety of immigrants, ranging from the first Indian settlers to Spaniards, Mexicans, people from the United States, and Europeans from several nations.^{1} Scholars who have studied the Church's ministry to these groups have tended to focus on one particular ethnic group. As a consequence of this complex and varied past, no historian has adequately synthesized the role of the Church in the state's formation.

In a sense, the historiographical essays in this journal reflect that fragmentation, treating first the Spanish and Mexican periods and later the era of United States dominance. The division may seem logical at first glance, because ecclesiastical authority over the Republic of Texas was assigned to clergy coming from the United States in 1839. Such compartmentalization, however; obscures the fact that south and west of the Nueces River the Catholic communities along the Rio Grande continued to be served and administered by Mexican priests and bishops for ten to fifty years after the jurisdictional change above the Nueces Riven The historiography of the Spanish and Mexican periods, furthermore, lacks chronological and topical unity: the early mission development has received most of the scholarly attention, while the diocesan church communities have drawn only

sketchy and preliminary research. Hopefully, the renewed interest in the history of the Church in Texas will inspire efforts to merge the different currents and provide a unifying vision that brings to the work of the Church the recognition it deserves.

The Mission Communities

The Mission Story
The seed of the Catholic faith was first planted in Texas in the late 1600s and early 1700s by Franciscan missionaries who sought to convert the Indians of the region and by the soldier-settlers who accompanied the friars. later, other pioneers arrived from Spain and from the Mexican interior to establish civil communities; they, too, brought their belief and religious practices, which they passed to natives who settled in the towns and to following generations. This faith of the padres and of the immigrants has endured to the present in towns and cities, in isolated farm houses, and in countryside churches from El Paso to the Sabine River.

The Gospel was first preached within the present boundaries of Texas by mission-aries from New Mexico. In the 1590s, colonists from the core of New Spain had ventured across a vast unsettled area to the northern reaches of the Rio Grande. From there, the padres visited Indian groups as far south and east as the Concho and Nueces rivers. Foundations were not established on what would later be Texas soil until 1680, when missionaries and their Indian allies fleeing a Pueblo insurgency settled down river from El Paso del Norte. From the new Isleta and Socorro missions, the friars sought Indian converts at La Junta de los Rios (Presidio) and the surrounding area.

At about the same time that the far western settlements were started, another expansionary thrust took colonists north to Saltillo and Monterrey and missionaries and soldier-settlers as far east as the Rio Grande. From the missions and presidio established at this outpost, friars and government officials responded to a French threat in the 1690s by launching entradas (expeditions) to the Neches River area in east Texas. Upon their arrival, the Franciscans attempted to gather the Hasinai into missions, but the task proved to be full of "tears and tribulations."^{2} Disappointed, the padres withdrew from the area. Two decades later, they went back to the edge of the empire, only to retreat again, this time to the headwaters of the San Antonio River where a mission had been founded in 1718. There, the friars' efforts bore fruit, and by the middle of the century, they had gathered almost a thousand Indians in missions on the San Antonio River valley. By that time, they had also returned to minister to the norteños (northern tribes) in east Texas and were expanding the mission system into new areas. Throughout the new province, as elsewhere, the friars tended to the spiritual needs of the natives, to be sure, but also of soldiers and their families at numerous posts on the frontier and of settlers in civil communities until the arrival of secular priests.

Also at midcentury, Franciscans were ministering to the residents of several towns along the lower Rio Grande and to Indians in nearby campsites. The grey-robed friars had accompanied Jose' de Escandón in the colonization of a vast region

spanning from the Panuco to the Nueces rivers, including the area that would later he south Texas. From the towns along the Rio Grande, the padres traveled to visitas (stations) in the camps that the nomads used as bases in their migratory cycles. when the natives moved to the outskirts of the Spanish pueblos and those camps disappeared, the friars tended to the spiritual needs of the indios agregados (natives attached to the settlements) and of the townspeople as well.

The Missionary and Spanish Historians: Triumphs, Crises, and Heroes
The Franciscans on New Spain's northeastern frontier were involved in a variety of ministries to Indians, soldier-settlers, and town dwellers. Only the classic mission system, however, has drawn the attention of historians because, as institutions that dealt with controversial issues, the missions generated the documentation from which an extensive history could be written. The mission system involved more than carrying out spiritual ideals and cultural objectives of Christianizing and settling the nomads; it involved trusteeship over lands, controlling Indians, receiving Crown funds, and carrying out imperial objectives. The friars' positions on those issues were often in conflict with those of the settlers and government officials, and this required the padres to defend their policies in countless letters and memorials. Those documents were preserved in monastery and governmental archives and constitute the source from which the history of New Spain's northern frontier has generally been written. Recently many records pertaining to the missionary labors in Texas east of the Nueces River were located and microfilmed by Fr. Benedict Leutenegger, O.F.M., and Fr. Marion A. Habig, O.F.M. Those records are available in the Old Spanish Missions Research Library now located at Our Lady of the Lake University (San Antonio). Many of them were translated, edited, and published in an invaluable series by the same Lautenegger and Habig.^{3}

The missionary documents, quite understandably, reflect the views of the friars. They mention the soldier-settlers and the civilians only occasionally, and then only to condemn them for interfering with mission objectives. The Indians are judged ungrateful, ignorant, and insubordinate for not readily accepting the padres' invitation to settle in new pueblos or for resisting the quasi-monastic rules of the missions. The soldiers are all immoral, and the civilian settlers are greedy. In contrast, the padres are generally virtuous and self-sacrificing; some are holy, worthy of canonization. The difficulties they face are never the product of changing circumstances or the friars' own shortcomings; they are all due to the padres' rivals.

Early chroniclers, themselves missionaries, relied on those documents, and consequently their histories of Texas generally center on the foundational and early period of mission success, on institutional issues, and on controversies. Fray Agustín Morfi's History of Texas is an excellent example of this trend.^{4} Morfi's work is basically a countersuit to an earlier government report critical of the missionaries' goals. In his rebuttal, Morfi praises the friars and denigrates all others, implying that the missions were the only constructive force on the frontier?' It is very important for church history that none of the early publications treat

the friars' ministry to the soldier-settlers and the town dwellers; they focus, instead, almost entirely on the padres and on the classical mission system.^{5}

Occasionally, the friars' accounts did include descriptions of the natives and their cultures. Such was the case of the first published work on the Franciscan efforts in Texas, Fray Isidro Felix de Espinoza's Crónica, which sketches the traditions of the Hasinai.^{6} Also, Fray Bartolomé Garcia's manual for the administration of the sacraments furnishes an insightful description of the Coahuiltecans who made up the majority of the natives served by the missionaries.^{7} References to the Indians--or for that matter, to anyone else on the frontier other than the padres, save in controversies--are extremely rare. Such a (classic) mission-only stance provided a very limited perspective of Texas church history.

The Manifest Destiny and New Beginnings Historians: Missionary Demise
Restrictive as that early view was, it at least described some of the dynamics of the settlement of New Spain's northeastern frontier. The historiographical trend that followed ignored the labors of the friars altogether. It was set by the historians recording the westward movement of people from the United States into Texas and across the continent in the middle of the nineteenth century.^{8} Ironically, the priests and bishops who replaced the Mexican clergy contributed to the same perspective.^{9} Both groups found it convenient to depict an abandoned or neglected region into which they permanently introduced Christianity and civilization. The perspectives of Manifest Destiny historians and New Beginnings clerical writers worked together to leave a lasting image of the history of the Church in Texas that belittled a century of evangelization by friars, secular priests, and laity.

This negative picture was so durable that Catholic historians neglected to question it. The first scholars to summarize the work of the Church in the United States reiterated the alleged failure of Spanish settlement and of religious institutions. Some scholars who had access to the friars' records and published accounts were careful to highlight missionary successes--in some instances, to the point of romanticizing them--and they even alluded to the work of the diocesan clergy. All, however, were influenced by the early literature, with its focus on the classic mission system, and by the Manifest Destiny and New Beginnings historiography that emphasized the demise of that system.^{10} From this perspective, the life of faith in the frontier communities (generally, missionary communities, for these writers) had blossomed and withered and then was restored and enhanced by the newcomers.

The Borderlands Historians and Modern Franciscan Chroniclers:
The Reconstituted Mission Faith Communities
The image of a "failed" Spanish imperial and religious enterprise was in time challenged by a group of scholars who created a new field within United States history called borderlands studies. Its founder, Herbert Eugene Bolton, researched Spanish colonization of the northern frontier in depth and expanded the mission story considerably.^{11} In a 1917 essay, Bolton characterized the mission system as a rather successful frontier institution whose goals meshed with Spanish imperial

[Photograph of Mission San José in San Antonio and photograph of Our Lady of Loreto Chapel at Presidio La Bahía near Goliad, not reproduced due to copyright considerations.]

[Photograph of Carlos E. Castañeda and photograph of 1926 Texas Knights of Columbus Historical Commission, not reproduced due to copyright considerations.]

objectives.^{12} Bolton's nonreligious framework gave mission history a new legitimacy in scholarly circles and inspired research on geopolitical designs and institutions, particularly the missions. A new day was dawning in church history, but the clouds of the early chroniclers and the Manifest Destiny and New Beginnings clerical writers were still to cast a long shadow.

Backed by the Texas Catholic hierarchy and the Knights of Columbus, Carlos Eduardo Castañeda, a Bolton follower, retold the Church's epic story in his seven-volume Our Catholic Heritage in Texas, 1510-1936.^{13} To this day Castañeda's landmark achievement remains the standard in the field. Based in part on the research of other borderlands scholars, Castañeda's work expanded mission history by detailing some of the critical events and developments and by including the foundations south and west of the Nueces.^{14} Castañeda concentrated almost exclusively on the work of the friars, practically ignoring the Indians. Furthermore, he overlooked the work of the Franciscans with the Hispanic communities that developed as the missions declined. Thus, he, too, perpetuated the image of a religious vacuum in the late Spanish era and in the Mexican period.

Nevertheless, like Bolton, Castañeda inspired a generation of historians who produced numerous excellent studies on the borderlands and on the Church. The successful San Antonio missions have received considerable study, and long-neglected El Paso and middle Rio Grande missions have been given some serious attention. Analyses of the fiascos at San Gabriel and San Saba shed new light on the missionary objectives and imperial goals.^{15} Save for the Franciscan labors in east Texas and in the lower Rio Grande, most of the work of the padres has been examined by scholars.

Yet that research has had only minimal effect on history writers of Texas and the United States.^{16} To some extent, borderlands and mission historians themselves are responsible for this. Their emphasis on the classic mission system disregards the evangelization of the natives through other means, overlooks the life of faith in nonmission communities, and gives the impression that when the missions ceased to exist as institutions all the work of the Church also ended. Furthermore, these historians have focused almost exclusively on imperial designs and institutional development, thus obscuring the dynamics of the social structure in mission communities and the acculturation and evangelization taking place there.^{17} Indeed, by failing to analyze the socio-economic processes that continued long after Spanish sovereignty ended and institutions declined, borderland scholars inadvertently confirmed the conclusions proposed by the Manifest Destiny historians.^{18}

New Trends and Challenges
Recent historiographical shifts in borderlands studies have begun to provide new insights into the development of the frontier, including the mission communities, that may reverse the view of a "failed" Spanish effort. Incorporating perspectives and methodologies from a variety of disciplines, the new trend challenges historians to view New Spain's far northern frontier as part of the economic and demographic expansion from the Mexican core rather than solely as an imperial defensive

buffer zone. To arrive at this view, scholars must examine, among other things, the socio-economic, political, and cultural processes of community formation.^{19} The failure to include this new perspective will continue to relegate the area's colonial past to an influence that ceased to exist and was therefore unrelated to subsequent developments.

In keeping with the new trend, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians researching the same missionary and governmental records that previous scholars studied have begun to focus on topics hitherto ignored in the mission literature: Indian communities (both inside and outside the mission walls) and their relation to the larger Hispanic frontier society--including its culture, politics, and economics--and to the environment.^{20} Continued investigation of these aspects of the missions will shed new light on the labors of the friars and on the religious life of those communities. The new perspective will provide the context within which the missions thrived and declined as institutions as they changed into Indian and Hispanic towns. In a very real sense, the broader view will restore the importance of the missions.

Mission studies, therefore, should not be simple narratives, but in-depth examinations of those complex societies. Past research on the missions, such as that of Bolton and of Castañeda, had a significant effect on the field precisely because it addressed issues important at the time their works were written. Contemporary mission history must be as bold, investigating forces and patterns of interaction within those Franciscan and Indian communities and between them and the larger society. Some narrative gaps need to be filled and geopolitical issues resolved. Even more, however; Texas church history needs a comprehensive and unified vision that will demonstrate how the faith, introduced and nurtured by the missionaries and the settlers and adopted by the Indian converts, lived on for generations in the new pueblos and in the communities that survived the changes in sovereignty. This vision will not be obtained through continuing the same kind of research that has been carried out in the past.

The Community Diocesan Church

The Convenience of Silence
The historiographical focus on the missions had led scholars to give only minimal--and generally negative--attention to the development of enduring Hispanic Catholic communities on the frontier The lack of research on the local diocesan church (that is, the communities of faith under the bishop's supervision) has produced the impression, accepted even by otherwise cautious historians, that the Church was not serving the Texas settlements adequately and that the Catholic faith was somehow defective and weak. Invariably, such treatment convinced writers that the Church had "collapsed" during the late Spanish and early Mexican periods.

Actually, as separately constituted institutions, the missions did disappear, but several continued as ongoing religious communities. Several mission pueblos gradually became independent settlements in their own right. In time some merged

with the nearby civil or military centers. The later Hispanic communities had developed in close economic, social, and cultural contact with the missions ever since the initial colonial foundations. During those first decades of settlement, missionaries had tended to the spiritual needs of both mission Indians and Hispanic town dwellers and soldier-settlers, with the friars readily accepting, in most areas, the bishop's authority over the ministry among the nonmission pueblos. As such communities became more self-sufficient, the bishops usually sent diocesan priests, and in some settlements a native clergy eventually emerged.

For the most part, however, those communities of faith have gone unnoticed, allegedly because no documentation exists for the Mexican period, when leadership shifted to the diocesan priests.^{21}Undoubtedly, the documentation is richer for the missions, which were closely supervised and which were dependent on government subsidies, than it is for the more self-sufficient Hispanic communities. A great amount of mostly untapped resources does exist, however, primarily in parish and diocesan archives. Those records, it is true, are often inaccessible, and they present problems because they have been pillaged and dispersed by revolutionaries, vandals, and unethical collectors and researchers since the time of Mexican independence. Nevertheless, such documents are often the sole sources for various important aspects of the local nonmission communities, including, of course, their religious life.

The real problem lies in the fact that traditional historiographical concerns have not directed scholars to these records. Missionary, colonial, and borderlands histories have focused primarily on the geopolitical issues of the Spanish empire and on the missions as separate institutions within that context.^{22} Then, in their research, scholars have used almost exclusively government documents and the records of the missionary colleges. Mission historians, furthermore, have usually concentrated on the overly studied pre-1790 period, thus neglecting changing realities of the later Spanish colonial and early Mexican periods, when the missions became predominantly Hispanic communities and the diocesan church came of age and assumed the major share of the burden for religious life.

Manifest Destiny historians, absorbed with the Anglo Protestant takeover of an "unoccupied" west, had no reason to delve into Church records that would demonstrate a strong Hispanic and Catholic presence in the area. The New Beginnings chroniclers of the United States Church did use those documents, but only to highlight "venerable" foundations and to demonstrate the benefits of the shift in ecclesiastical jurisdiction, not to understand pre-1836 society. Additionally, the traditional reluctance of historians to address socio-economic and cultural issues has prevented them from studying the variety of dynamic human and spiritual processes on the frontier. So no one brought these communities to light, even though they were strong enough to survive the demise of various institutions and changes in political control.^{23}

Restricting focus only to the missions as institutions in a distant colonial past, furthermore, served a number of group interests. By positing a supposed cultural and religious vacuum in Texas, historians oriented toward Anglo Americans were

able to ignore the survival of Hispanic Catholic communities and their gradual subordination by the new order.^{24} Protestant ministers and sociologists have sometimes attempted to justify proselytization among the traditionally Catholic Hispanics by referring to the standard negative picture.^{25} By the same token, some Catholics have prided themselves on being the "first" to arrive in the Southwest with a "glorious" Spanish missionary past, then conveniently overlooked the questionable aspects of the takeover of the "moribund" Mexican Church.^{26} Public officials and chambers of commerce, for their part, have often romanticized a centuries-old European heritage while ignoring or denigrating the heritage of Mexican Americans. Concentrating on a "defunct" Spanish system and on long-since-disappeared friars and Indians thus avoids acknowledging the political, economic, and religious subordination of the mestizo-Hispanic Catholic communities in the past and of Mexican Americans in the present. In a word, for state historians and for the churches, Catholic and Protestant, in the dominant society, a missions-only approach is politically "safe" and even advantageous.

Chicano activists and historians have addressed the issue of the military, political, and economic conquest in the middle of the nineteenth century. They have concentrated, however, on developments after 1836-1848 and have generally viewed the Spanish and Mexican periods only as a prelude to Mexican American history. Employing a rigid race-class interpretation, some have all too readily painted a picture strangely similar to that found in most of the Protestant literature, that is, of an elitist Spanish and Mexican church oppressing and yet simultaneously abandoning the masses Such "repression" and "neglect" allegedly led to the emergence in frontier societies of a strong anti-institutional popular religiosity, complete with folk heroes. Though many Chicano scholars have espoused this view, recently some have recognized a greater complexity in the religious life of the Spanish-Mexican communities.^{27} Nevertheless, these historians, like others, have not yet overcome the legacy of "religious neglect and weakness."

The Suppressed Church Story:
Colonial Growth and Determined Mexican Perseverance
Actually, though, if we examine the question properly, we can conclude that the local church on the Texas frontier was strong. It developed from the combined efforts of the missionaries, of the diocesan priests, and of the Hispanic settlers and Indian converts. In their work in Texas, the religious and secular clergy largely avoided jurisdictional and administrative conflicts. Only in El Paso were there any serious quarrels. Everywhere else Franciscan and diocesan priests worked harmoniously to convert the natives and foster the life of faith among the town dwellers and the presidial soldiers and their families. These settlers and the new converts, in turn, incorporated their belief into their daily lives and culture, passing the faith to the next generation and to the natives who settled in the towns.

The continuous pastoral care provided to civilian and military settlements from the time of their foundations is proof of the strength of the local church. The Franciscans were the first to minister to the settlers on the frontier. Then, between

1731 and 1776, diocesan priests were installed in the parishes of San Antonio, Laredo, La Bahia, and San Juan Bautista on the Rio Grande- all before a single diocesan pastor had appeared anywhere else in the Southwest. Even the El Paso area, which was not incorporated into Texas until 1850, received its first secular pastor in 1798. In fact, El Paso was the only place in New Mexico where the initial attempt to install diocesan pastors proved permanent.

While the populous New Mexican province produced only one native priest before Mexican independence, San Antonio and the lower Rio Grande settlements could boast of several. A number of churches in those areas had full-time lay sacristans who served as official witnesses at sacramental celebrations, kept the baptismal, marriage, and burial records, and maintained the church buildings. Some parishes were large enough to demand assistant pastors. The new nineteenth century communities, which included large numbers of foreign immigrants, were assigned priests, and the military units sent to the Texas frontier were served by chaplains. From all indications, then, the Church and the faith that sustained it were strong across the vast expanse of today's Texas.

This process of development and expansion came to a halt, however, with the decades of internal strife and debilitating wars that began in 1810. These conflicts proved especially destructive and destabilizing along the lower Rio Grande and in Texas above the Nueces. Many of the parishioners and several of the priests who espoused the insurgent cause and later that of the Mexican nation in 1836 and 1846 paid dearly for their leadership in the defense of their communities. In fact, whole towns were occasionally evacuated as opposing forces wreaked havoc and the local economies broke down. Church buildings above the Nueces were battered and desecrated by the belligerents and could be repaired or replaced only with great difficulty. The one respite these communities enjoyed during the Mexican period was probably in the 1820s. During that decade, the El Paso settlements, which had become the most populous in New Mexico and were spared the ravages of the war waged in Texas, enjoyed an increased prosperity because of the opening of the St. Louis-Chihuahua trade. All the Hispanic towns in Texas also benefitted from the new economic links with the United States.

But as the period of turmoil disrupted society in the eastern half of Texas, some clergy there apparently did not live up to all the demands of their calling. Still, whatever personal failings some pastors may have had, there is no evidence that any of them ever seriously neglected their pastoral duties. Quite the contrary, several diocesan priests who served in Texas were highly praised in their own times as leaders of their communities. While these persons have barely even been mentioned, if at all, since then, the supposedly less worthy clergy have received a good bit of attention-most of it exaggerated-from historians. Given the current state of research on this question, some scholars have urged caution in generalizing about the clergy, but few writers have refrained from drawing a broad negative picture.^{28}

By 1830, a sharp decline in the number of available clergy began to make itself felt. The remarkable fact is that, despite the crises it was experiencing in the 1800s, the diocesan church of northern New Spain and of Mexico managed to maintain

almost continuous ministry in all the primarily Catholic settlements of Texas.^{29} This contradicts the standard picture of wholesale neglect and abandonment presented in traditional history. Only the new colonies of Anglo immigrants, who were mostly Protestant or attended no church and resided east of the Guadalupe River, failed to receive adequate pastoral attention. That benign neglect, contrary to the traditional explanation, was desired and encouraged by most of these settlers.

The ruin that almost all historians ascribe to the Church in Texas above the Nueces from the 1790s on actually came only with the rumblings of revolution in late 1834 and with warfare in 1835-1836. At that point, the organizational structure of the Church did tumble, but so did that of other institutions. Even so, the Mexican Church held on tenaciously. It provided clergy along the vast stretch of the Rio Grande until the late 1800s, when bishops under the jurisdiction of the United States began gradually to provide priests for the border areas.

The Standard Historiography:
Colonial Near-Absence and Mexican Desolation
All these accomplishments of the local diocesan-led communities have gone unrecognized. According to the almost universally accepted account, diocesan pastoral care in the Spanish and Mexican jurisdictions in Texas was all but nonexistent in the colonial period and deplorable in the Mexican. After the virtual silence on the nonmission Church by the colonial chroniclers, the first Anglo American historians of Texas depicted a practical vacuum of civilization in Texas before the arrival of the Anglos and dealt only with religion in relation to the new, mostly Protestant, colonists. Occasionally there is a brief comment on the rare ministry of a Catholic priest among the Anglo settlers. In 1841, however, William Kennedy introduced the themes of a failed missionary enterprise and a detestable local Mexican Catholic religiosity.^{30} This view, with only slight modification, has almost completely dominated the histories of the Spanish and Mexican Church ever since.

While not all historical coverage has been completely negative, constructive comments have been few. Henderson K. Yoakum's early history of the state makes some fairly positive, even if brief, remarks about both Catholic secular clergy and Catholic laity, based mostly on Pike's account of his trip through Texas in 1807. Yoakum even has praise for Father Muldoon, who worked among the Austin colonists in the early 1830s.^{31} Only one writer since Yoakum has taken note of those favorable comments: John F. O'Shea, trying to counteract the negative portrayal of the Church, exaggerated the favorable comments in his unreliable 1912 essay in The Catholic Encyclopedia.^{32}Other than this essay, treatment of the life of faith in Hispanic communities has been limited to repeating Pike's observation on the "much relaxed" Catholicism in Texas, but misinterpreting it to mean a lax and sinful society.^{33}

The only historian to pay serious attention to the diocesan church during the Spanish period was John Gilmary Shea. This author gave the first and still best account, although not without errors, of the early decades of San Fernando parish

in San Antonio. Shea's interest in promoting the diocesan clergy, however, led him to posit secular priests in other Texan posts too early. In his views of the diocesan church, however, Shea basically followed the dominant pattern. rn fact, he was the first historian to report the accusations made in 1839 against the last two Mexican priests in the Republic of Texas, charges which paved the way for the takeover by the United States Church.^{34}

Since Shea, several historians have contributed brief notices or studies of the religious history of specific Hispanic communities, but their accounts usually refer only to the founding years in the colonial period. Various authors have added a few details to the still incomplete story of the San Antonio parish.^{35} In 1935, Sister Natalie Walsh provided the best history up to that time of the Church along the lower Rio Grande up to the early 1760s, including the beginnings of the Laredo parish, which was staffed by diocesan clergy.^{36} Bolton wrote an excellent study of the short-lived civilian town of Bucareli and the transfer of the settlers and the Franciscan pastors to Nacogdoches in l779.^{37} Nettie Lee Benson presented all the information available on Bishop Marin de Porras in relation to Texas.^{38}

The only significant works on the diocesan church during the Mexican period have been those of William Stuart Red, Sister Mary Angela Fitzmorris, Carlos E. Castañeda, and David J. Weber, all of which are limited and negative in their treatment. Although Red harshly criticizes the non-Franciscan Catholic clergy, his landmark 1924 monograph on the Anglo colonists and religion in Mexican Texas presents the most thorough available treatment of the infrequent relations between those mostly Protestant or secular colonists and the Catholic Church. His work somewhat unwittingly paints a clear picture of the hostility of Austin and most of his colonists to every manifestation of Mexican Catholicism.^{39}

Several of Red's more questionable assertions have been masterfully challenged by Sister Mary Angela Fiumorris in this section of her groundbreaking 1926 dissertation that deals with the period before 1840. Her focus on Anglo Protestant colonists relegates the consideration of the more Catholic communities in Mexican Texas to a few summary paragraphs. While Fitzmorris sketched the basic outlines that have yet to be surpassed, correctly presenting the clergy situation in the early 1820s, she underestimated their number thereaften To that extent, her work also fosters the usual picture of neglect leading to desolation.^{40}

Absorbed with defending the missionary record, Carlos E. Castañeda rarely dealt with diocesan churches in any extended or consistent fashion. He did, however; include most of what previous authors had mentioned on this subject and added many other references. Since Castañeda's work has sometimes been considered the definitive word on Catholic church history in pre-1840 Texas, his adherence to the basic lines of the traditional historiography for all practical purposes doomed any subsequent serious consideration, much less appreciation, of the diocesan church during that period.^{41}

Castañeda's references to the diocesan history before 1800 are mostly short and scattered, and they add little information to the previous accounts of the parishes at San Antonio, Laredo, Bucareli, and Nacogdoches. For the neglected 1800-1821

period, during which Hispanic settlements increased initially and military units increased greatly, Castañeda does not highlight the corresponding increase in diocesan pastors and chaplains. Yet their presence can be gleaned from his sections on the beginnings of foreign colonization and the revolutionary movements.^{42}

In his highly influential chapter "The Agony of the Church in Texas, 1821-1836," Castañeda continues to underrate the reality of nonmission religious life. As could be expected, he expands on the secularization of the missions and the final years of ministry of the last two Franciscans as pastors of civilian congregations. But he provides a very summary and confused treatment of the relations of the Church with the new colonists and an undeservedly negative portrait of Father Muldoon. Most damaging, however, is Castañeda's highly derogatory and frequently erroneous treatment of scandal and desolation in the Mexican diocesan church in the introduction and conclusion of this chapter and again in his summary of the 1820-1840 period in his final volume.^{43}

Relying almost entirely on secondary sources, David J. Weber repeats this very negative picture of the diocesan church in the Mexican territory of Texas. Focusing on factors contributing to a general institutional decline, Weber minimizes the contribution of the secular clergy even more than did Fitzmorris and Castañeda. As the missions and Franciscans disappeared throughout the Southwest, he argues, the "tottering" diocesan church "failed to extend itself to the Far North;' losing its historic opportunity. Still, Weber's work is unique among general history texts in that it devotes an entire chapter to considering the nonmission faith communities throughout the Southwest (not including the Rio Grande settlements) and raising very important questions regarding native vocations and church economics.^{44}

Apart from the works by Red, Fitzmorris, Castañeda, and Weber there have been few studies on the diocesan church during the Mexican period. For the most part, contributions consist of biographical sketches of secular priests with well-known connections to Anglo history: Michael Muldoon of the Austin colony, John Thomas Molloy of San Patricio, José Antonio Valdez of La Bahía, and Ramón Ortiz of El Paso.^{45} William H. Oberste's Refugio history included some information on the Hispanic settlers near that mission, and there has been very limited and faulty information on the Alamo Company chaplaincy.^{46} Archival resources for the Presidio settlement remain untapped.^{47} Two little-known works, one published, present historical notes on the old settlements downriver from El Paso and a recent essay traces the development of the Laredo parish from its earliest days to 1857. Together, these works provide the most continuous account to date of any Texas communities.^{48}

The Ambitious Agenda: Discovering the Enduring Local Church
The caricatured history of the local Hispanic Catholic faith communities continues to thrive because so little serious research has been done on them. Therefore, the first challenge for the history of the diocesan church in Texas during the Spanish and Mexican periods is to discover it. The field is vast, since it involves all the Catholic communities that developed at every colonial and Mexican outpost

in Texas, from the Rio Grande to Los Adaes and from 1716 to as late as 1890. Since there is no solid account of nonmission faith communities over the long term, historians researching this topic must begin by piecing together the few inadequate secondary narratives on those societies.^{49}

The standard guides to primary sources for borderland studies are of limited assistance to those researching the history of the Church of this state. Although his effort to cover all of today's Texas is certainly to be commended, Henry Putney Beers gives a reliable and detailed account (in his 1979 publication) only of the local archives of the Hispanic faith communities in San Antonio, Refugio, and Laredo.^{50} Peter Gerhard's important 1982 reference work on New Spain's northern frontier provides a more helpful overview on the development of missionary and diocesan jurisdictions, covering, with varying degrees of accuracy and usefulness, each region of present Texas. His notes on the Presidio and lower Rio Grande areas are the most useful, as are certain sections on archival sources and bibliography.^{51}

One task for historians is simply to identify the clergy who supervised the religious life of these communities. Scholars are most familiar with the Franciscans who labored northeast of the Nueces. Researchers are also acquainted with the archives and documentation left behind by these friars, although these records need to be reinvestigated in view of the missionaries' work with Hispanic communities. Historians, however, know very little about the Franciscans who ministered along the Rio Grande or about the provinces and colleges other than the Querétaro and Zacatecas units from which these missionaries came. In fact, rarely are Texas researchers even aware of the archives and documentation left by these men.^{52} As for the diocesan clergy and the prelates who supervised both secular priests and the Franciscans working among the Hispanics, their names, social origins, education, attitudes, and policies must be discovered. To do this, the almost untouched parish and diocesan archives must be fully investigated.

It is to be hoped, however, that the weaknesses of the mission histories will not be repeated. The diocesan church should not be treated solely as one more separate institution viewed only in terms of its specific internal objectives, administrative personnel, and imperial designs. Rather, the character and role of the clergy, both Franciscan and diocesan, who served the nonmission communities need to be studied within the socio-economic, political, and cultural contexts of those Indian-Hispanic--and eventually foreign--communities on the northern frontier. Researching the background and attitudes of the various priests who were native to the area is of special importance, but so are the antecedents and policies of the "outsiders," whether from the Mexican interior, from Spain, or from elsewhere.

The failure to appreciate the social and economic demands made on the secular clergy on the frontier and the unfamiliarity with the cultural realities of the area have almost invariably led to serious misinterpretations of the lifestyles of priests in Hispanic frontier communities. Contemporary observers and historians researching the period often inject into their descriptions a conception of the

Catholic clergy taken from other societies. In Spanish and Mexican Texas, as elsewhere on the frontier, the diocesan clergy rarely received sufficient income from their ministerial duties to support themselves and maintain the church property. They seldom were able to acquire outside assistance. Consequently, most priests earned a living through a variety of "secular" endeavors. Many did so by ranching. Some, particularly along the lower Rio Grande, earned commissions for collecting tithes. Still others taught school, performed duties as scribes, or accepted other employment. Those who enjoyed some financial stability were expected to support dependent family members, and rectories often housed the pastor's mother, aunts, widowed sisters or cousins with children, or their own younger brothers and sisters. Given their relatively high degree of education and social prominence in frontier society, priests also were usually expected to be involved in the community's social and economic development and in the councils of government. Any treatment of the Spanish-Mexican diocesan clergy must take into account these sociocultural factors. Otherwise the only image of these priests to emerge is one filled with negative stereotypes, such as those formulated by the newcomers to the area.

Recent research has also begun to focus on Hispanic Catholic laity, heretofore even more neglected by historians than the clergy. From the earliest chronicles, the laity's religious feelings and morality were often described summarily and negatively, especially by visiting officials from Mexico City and by Anglo observers and historians. The priests who displaced the Hispanic clergy and a few sympathetic historians, however; asserted that "the faith had taken deep root in the soil of Texas," though writers rarely posited any concrete evidence of this.^{53} Recently scholars, Anglo and Chicano, Catholic and Protestant, have also taken an appreciative view of popular Catholicism in a supposedly clergyless Spanish and Mexican Texas. These historians, however, generally predate and overgeneralize the alleged shortage of clergy throughout the Southwest.^{54} While the heightened attention given to the laity is long overdue and the emphasis on the role of the people as carriers and transmitters of the faith is commendable, it is unnecessary to describe the spirituality of frontier communities in terms of either a clerical presence or a vital popular religiosity, as if these two aspects of the life of faith do not overlap, interact, and influence one another. In fact, both appear to have been strong in Texas.

Conclusion: The Broader Task

The trends described in this essay are not particular to Texas. They are applicable to church history for the entire southwestern United States.^{55} Mission studies have dominated the field everywhere, and they have focused on institutional development and on imperial objectives. Only rarely have the missions been considered as communities in their own right and as part of the larger local Hispanic society. Furthermore, the fixation on early founding periods and on the saga of mission secularization and the last Franciscans has been as prominent in Texan as in

Californian and New Mexican church historiography. Only in the story of religious life in southern Arizona, a relatively reduced area, has a fairly continuous narrative emerged, although there also historians have not paid adequate attention to the religious life of the nonmission communities. Even in the studies on northern New Mexico, where the mission historiography becomes intermingled with the diocesan account from the 1700s on, an accurate and coherent picture of the diocesan church is exceedingly hard to discern in the available literature. The story there describes little more than the gradual assertion of diocesan control and the introduction of the secular clergy just before the general disintegration of organized religion is said to have begun. Such a scenario conveniently explains the rise of the Penitentes and other popular religious expressions supposedly devoid of clerical involvement. The agenda outlined in this essay, therefore, is just as relevant to the rest of the Southwest as it is to this state.

Finally, Texas church history needs a unified vision of the development of the local faith community, a vision that does not dissect the Church's past into Indian and Hispanic, Spanish-Mexican and Anglo, missionary and diocesan, clerical and lay. This essay has underlined those distinct currents in the historical literature only to demonstrate that such clear divisions reveal more about the perspectives of the writers than about the reality of the faith communities. By uncovering and investigating the development of the Southwest's Spanish-Mexican religio-cultural past presently buried either piously or disdainfully in a distant era, historians may be able to clarify the questions and challenges that tenaciously enduring heritage of faith presents.

Notes

*. Gilberto M. Hinojosa is associate professor of history and assistant vice-president for academic affairs at the university of Texas at San Antonio. Special thanks to Fr. Robert E. Wright, O.M.I., professor of church history at Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, for generously sharing his notes, hooks, and thoughts on Texas church history. without his expertise on the local diocesan church in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this essay could not have been written. Thanks also to my colleague, Félix D. Almaráz, who graciously read a draft of this essay on short notice and made helpful suggestions.

1. Thus, a major research guide has to address the various areas now within the state of Texas in scattered references. Peter Gerhard. The Northern Frontier of New Spain (Princeton, 1982): the development of the various jurisdictions (19-23); the Presidio area in west Texas (198-199); New Mexico, including the El Paso areas (318-320); the San Juan Bautista and Texas hill country areas (330-331); central and east Texas (338-339; see also 340-341); and the lower Rio Grande area of south Texas (364-365).

2. Isidro Félix de Espinosa, Crónica de los Colegios de Propaganda Fide de la Nueva España. ed., Lino Gómez Canedo, (Washington, 1964), 719. Originally published as Crónica apostólica y seráfica de Misioneros Franciscanos Observantes (Mexico, 1746). For an English-language history that retraced the ground covered by Espinosa, filling in some lacunae but not substantially expanding the coverage chronologically, see Michael B. McCloskey, O.F.M., The Formative Years of the Missionary College of Santa Cruz de Querétaro, 1633-1733 (Washington, 1955).

3. Most of these were published in a numbered documentary series: 1. Benedict Leutenegger, O.F.M., trans. and notes, Guidelines for a Texas Mission: Instructions for the Missionary of Mission Concepción in San Antonio (ca. 1760) (San Antonio, 1976; rev. ed., 1978). 2. Leutenegger, trans., and Marion A. Habig, O.F.M., intro. and notes, Management of the Missions in Texas: Fr José Rafael Oliva's Views Concerning the Problem of the Temporalities in 1788 (San Antonio, 1977). 3. Leutenegger, trans., and Habig, intro., Journal of a Texas Missionary, 1767-1802: the Diario Histórico of Fr Cosme Lozano Narvais, pen name of Fr. Mariano Antonio de Vasconcelos (San Antonio. 1977). 5. Leutenegger, trans., and Habig. intro. and notes, The Texas Missions of the College of Zacatecas in 1749-1750: Report of Fr Ignacio Antonio Ciprián, 1749, and Memorial of the College to the King, 1750 (San Antonio, 1979). 6. Leutenegger, trans., and Habig, intro. and notes, Letters anal Memorials of Fray Mariano Francisco de los Dolores y Biana (San Antonio, 1980) 7. Leutenegger, trans., Letters and Memorials of the Father presidente Fray Benito Fernández de Santa Ana. 1736-1754 (San Antonio, 1981). (Volume 4 is not a Texas Mission document.)

The projected complete San José documentation was never concluded. The two volumes issued were published separately from the numbered series, but in the same spiral-bound format. Leutenegger et al., trans., and Habig, comp. and annot., The San José Papers: The Primary Sources for the History of Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo from its Founding in 1720 to the Present. Part I: 1719-1791 (San Antonio, 1973); [Leutenegger and M. Carmelita Casso, I.W.B.S., trans., Leutenegger, annot., and Habig, comp.] Part II: August 1791-June 1809 (San Antonio, 1983).

Two documents and a special combined work were published elsewhere, and only in English. Leutenegger, trans., and Habig, intro. and notes, "Report on the San Antonio Missions in 1792," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 77 (April 1974): 487-498; Leutenegger, trans., and Habig and Barnabas Diekemper, O.F.M., intro. and notes, "Memorial of Father Benito Fernández Concerning the Canary Islanders, 1741," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 82 (January 1979): 265-296. Leutenegger, trans., The Zacatecan Missionaries in Texas, 1716-1834: Excerpts from the libros de Los Decretos of the Missionary College of Zacatecas, 1707-1828, and Habig, A Biographical Dictionary (Austin, 19'73).

4. Juan Agustín Morfi, History of Texas, 1673-1779, trans. and ed., Carlos Eduardo Castañeda, 2 vols. (Albuquerque, N.M., 1935).

5. Juan Domingo Arricivita, Crónica Seráfica y apostólica del Colegio de Propaganda fide de la Santa Cruz de Querétaro en la Nueva España (Mexico, 1792). On the work of the friars from the Zacatecan college, see José Antonio Alcocer, O.F.M., Bosquejo de la historia del Colegio de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe y sus misiones, año de 1788. Rafael Cervantes, O.F.M., ed. (Mexico, 1958); Francisco Frejes, O.F.M., "Crónica del Colegio de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de Zacatecas, año de 1834," Rafael Cervantes, O.F.M., ed. (microfilm copy of typescript, Old Spanish Missions Historical Research Library, Our Lady of the Lake University, San Antonio, Texas); and José Francisco Sotomayor, Historia del Apostólico Colegio de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de Zacatecas (Zacatecas, 1874). For a more recent history of the College, see Cuauhtémoc Esparza Sánchez, Compendio histórico del Colegio Apostólico de Propaganda Fide de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de Zacatecas (Mexico, 1957).

6. Espinosa. Crónica, 683-717.

7. Bartolomé García, Manual para administrar lot santos sacramentos de penitencia, eucharistía, extrema-unción, y matrimonio; dar gracias despues de comulgar, y ayudar a buen morir a los Indios de las naciones . . . que se hallan en las misiones del Rio de San Antonio y Rio Grande (Mexico, 1760).

8. Mary Austin Holley, Texas (Lexington, 1336); L. T. Pease, "A Geographical and Historical View of Texas," in John Milton Niles, History of South America and Mexico, Comprising Their Discovery, Geography, Politics, Commerce, and Revolutions (Hartford, 1837); Henry Stuart Foote, Texas and the Texans, or Advance of the Anglo Americans 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1841); William Kennedy, Texas: The Rise, Progress, and Prospects of the Republic of Texas 2 vols. (London, 1841), l:2l6-235, 250-256, 364; 2:391-392. See also David B. Edward, The History of Texas;. . . or, The Emigrant's, Farmer's, and Politician's, Guide . . . (Cincinnati, 1836), 119-120, 137-139; and John Henry Brown, History of Texas, from 1685 to 1892, 2 vols. (St. Louis, 1892, 1393), 1:83-85, who described the missions as a "gloomy undertaking," which amounted only to "desolation and decay."

9. P. F. Parisot and C. J. Smith, O.M.I., comps., History of the Catholic Church in the Diocese of San Antonio, Texas, 1685-1897 (San Antonio, 1897), exemplify the observations made by most of the new clergymen.

10. For example, see John Gilmary Shea, History of the Catholic Missions among the Indian Tribes of the United States 1529-1854 (New York, 1855); Henry de Courcy and John Gilmary Shea, History of the Catholic Church in the United States (New York, 1879); and John Gilmary Shea, A History of the Catholic Church Within the limits of the United States 2, 3 (New York, 1886, 1890).

11. Herbert Eugene Bolton, Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century: Studies in Spanish Colonial History and Administration (Berkeley, 1915); Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542-1706 (New York, 1916); and The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest (New Haven, 1921). For lower Rio Grande history, Bolton benefitted from Alejandro Prieto, Historia, geografía y estadística del Estado de Tamaulipas (Mexico, 1873).

12. Herbert Eugene Bolton, "The Mission as a Frontier Institution in the Spanish American Colonies," reprinted in Bolton and the Spanish Borderlands, John Francis Bannon, ed., (Norman, 1964), 187-211.

13. Carlos E. Castañeda, Our Catholic Heritage in Texas, 1519-1936, 7 vols. (Austin, 1936-1958).

14. Some of the more important studies used by Castañeda were the following: Sister Mary Angela Fitzmotrris, Four Decades of Catholicism in Texas (Washington, 1926); Thomas P O'Rourke, C.S.B., The Franciscan Missions in Texas (1690-1793) (Washington, 1927); Edward W. Heusinger, Early Explorations and Mission Establishments in Texas (San Antonio, 1936); Anne E. Hughes, "The Beginnings of Spanish Settlement in the El Paso District," University of California Publications in History, 1 (April 1914): 295-392. For the same time period, also see Vina Walz, "History of the El Paso Area, 1680-1692" (Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, 1951), and William H. Oberste, History of Refugio Mission (Refugio, 1942). Castañeda also used the prepublication manuscript of Paul H. Walters, "Secularization of the La Bahía Missions," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 54 (January 1951):287-300.

15. Gary B. Starnes, The San Gabriel Missions, 1746-1756 (Madrid, 1969); Marion A. Habig, O.F.M., The Alamo Chain of Missions: A History of San Antonio's Five Old Missions (Chicago, 1968; rev., 1976) and San Antonio's Mission San José: A State and National Historic Site, 1720-1968 (Chicago, 1968); Félix D. Almaráz, Jr, Crossroads of Empire: The Church and State on the Rio Grande Frontier of Coahuila and Texas, 1700-1821 (San Antonio, 1979). For the last few decades, Almaráz was greatly aided by Lino Gómez Canedo, "Misiones del Colegio de Pachuca en el Obispado del Nuevo Reino de León," Estudios de Historia del Noreste (Monterrey, 1972), 117-168; Robert S. Weddle, The San Sabá Mission: Spanish Pivot in Texas (Austin, 1964), and San Juan Bautista: Gateway to Spanish Texas (Austin, 1968); Gerard Decorme, S.J., "Las misiones del Valle del Paso" (unpublished typescript, ca. 1957, Catholic Diocese of El Paso Historical Archives and Museum); Rex E. Gerald, Myra Ellen Jenkins, and Kenneth P. Neighbours, Apache Indians III (New York, 1974).

16. Rupert Norval Richardson, Texas: The Lone Star State (New York, 1943), 40-41,61. See also Rupert N. Richardson, Ernest Wallace, and Adrian Anderson, Texas: The Lone Star State (4th ed. Englewood Cliffs, 1988), 40. For other textbooks following the failure thesis, see D. W. Meinig, Inperial Texas: An Interpretive Essay in Cultural Geography (Austin, 1969); Seymour V. Connor, Texas, A History (Arlington Heights, 1971), T. R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans (New York, 1968); and Archie P. McDonald, Texas: All Hail the Mighty State (Austin, 1983).

17. John Francis Bannon, The Spanish Borderlands Frontier, 1513-1821 (St. Louis, 1970). Bannon's view was still the same in his article a decade later, "The Mission as a Frontier Institution: Sixty Years of Interest and Research," Western Historical Quarterly 10 (July 1979): 309-311.

18. For example, see the highly anti-Hispanic account in the "Missions and Religious Life" chapter in Odie B. Faulk, The Last Years of Spanish Texas, 1778-1821 (The Hague, 1964), 72-82. Faulk's A Successful Failure, The Saga of Texas, 1519-1810 (Austin, 1965) is more even-handed, but his conclusion is not much different.

19. See Gerald E. Poyo and Gilberto M. Hinojosa, "Spanish Texas and Borderlands Historiography in Transition: Implications for United States History," Journal of American History 75 (September 1988): 393-416.

20. Edward H. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533-1960 (Tucson, 1962); Elizabeth A. H. John, Storms Brewed in Other Men's Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540-1795 (College Station, 1974); George Phillips, Chiefs and Challengers: Indian Resistance in Southern California (Berkeley, 1975); Thomas D. Hall, Social Change in the Southwest, 1350-1880 (Lawrence, 1988); Mardith Keithly Schuetz, "Indians in the San Antonio Missions," (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, Austin, 1980); T. N. Campbell and T. J. Campbell, Indian Groups Associated with the Spanish Missions of the San Antonio Missions National Park (San Antonio, 1985); 12-13; Environmental and Cultural Services, Inc., Historic and Cultural Landscape Study for the San Antonio Missions (San Antonio, 1982); James B. Ivey and Marlys Busch Thurber, The Missions of San Antonio: A Historic Structures Report and Administrative History (Santa Fe, 1988); Félix D. Almaráz, Jr, The San Antonio Missions and Their System of Lond Tenure (Austin, 1989); Gilberto M. Hinojosa, "The Religious-Indian Communities: Goals of the Friars and Mission Realities," in "18th Century Origins of the Tejano Community of San Antonio," Gerald E. Poyo and Hinojosa, ms; Hinojosa, "Friars and Indians: Towards a Perspective of Cultural Interaction in the San Antonio Missions," US Catholic Historian (forthcoming); Ann B. Fox and Gilberto M. Hinojosa, "Indians and Their Cultures in San Fernando de Béxar" in "Tejano Community of San Antonio," ms.

21. Barnabas C. Diekemper, O.F.M., "The Catholic Church in the Shadows: The Southwestern United States during the Mexican Period," Journal of the West 24 (April 1985): 46, 52.

22. Faulk, The Last Years of Spanish Texas, and A Successful Failure; Ricardo Santos, "The Organization of the Church on the Frontier" and "The Age of Turmoil," in Frontera: A History of the Latin American Church in the USA since 1513, ed., Moises Sandoval (San Antonio, 1983), 83-85, 158, 160. Oakah L. Jones, Jr, ed., The Spanish Borderlands--A First Reader (Los Angeles, 1974), 184, lamented the lack of research on the diocesan church. Perhaps for that reason he hardly considered that church in the southwestem sections of his groundbreaking study of the civil settlements on the northern frontier, Los Paisanos: Spanish Settlers on the Northern Frontier of New Spain (Norman, 1979). Subsequent studies of the Hispanic civil settlements continue to say little shout their religious history. The Mexican American Cultural Center is currently working toward the publication of another collaborative effort on the Hispanic Church in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, in which the Texas entries will reflect the traditional historiography.

23. Poyo and Hinojosa, "Spanish Texas and Borderlands Historiography," 394.

24. Meinig, Imperial Texas, 33, and McDonald, Texas, 33, are the only survey authors in a century and a half even minimally to recognize Hispanic Catholicism as part of the ongoing legacy bequeathed by the Spanish and Mexican periods to Texas.

25. Ellwyn R. Stoddard, "Religion and Church," in his Mexican Americans (New York, 1973), 84-99; Edwin E. Sylvest, Jr., "The Hispanic American Church: Contextual Considerations," Perkins Journal 29 (Fall 1975): 25-27; Leo D. Nieto, "The Chicano Movement and the Churches in the United States," Perkins Journal 29 (Fall 1975): 34, 36; Richard L. Hough, "Religion and Pluralism among the Spanish-Speaking Groups of the Southwest," in Politics and Society in the Southwest: Ethnicity and Chicano Pluralism, eds. Z. Anthony Kruszewski, Richard L. Hough, and Jacob Ornstein-Galicia (Boulder, 1982), 169-195; Edwin E. Sylvest, Jr., "Hispanic American Protestantism in the United States," in Fronteras, 290-295; Ellwyn R. Stoddard and Julian C. Bridges, "Religion and Church," in Borderlands Sourcebook: a Guide to the Literature on Northern Mexico and the American Southwest, ed., Ellwyn R. Stoddard, Richard L. Nostrand, and Jonathan P. West, (Norman, 1983), 272-7; John W. Storey, "Battling Evil: the Growth of Religion in Texas," in Texas: a Sesquicentennial Celebration, ed. Donald W. Whisenhunt, (Austin, 1984), 371-373; Edwin E. Sylvest, Jr., "Re-thinking the 'Discovery' of the Americas: A Provisional Historico-Theological Reflection," Apuntes 7 (Spring 1987): 3-13.

26. Shea, History of the Catholic Church, 711-714; Parisot and Smith, Diocese of San Antonio, 51-59; I M. Kirwin, ed. Diamond Jubilee, 1847-1922, of the Diocese of Galveston and St. Mary's Cathedral (Galveston, 1922), 13-5, 33-5; Laurence I FitzSimon, "Roman Catholic Church in Tens," in The Handbook of Texas, ed., Walter Prescott Webb and H. Bailey Carroll, 2 vols. (Austin, 1952), 2:500; Lucey, "The Catholic Church in Texas," in The Catholic Church, U.S.A. ed., Louis J. Putz, C.S.C. (Chicago, 1956), 225-227; Ellis, Catholics in Colonial America (Baltimore, 1965), 106; New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York, l967), in its general entry on Texas and in the entries on the various Texas dioceses; Hennesey, American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Con'ntunity in the United States (New York, 1981), 16, 135-136.

27. Typical examples of the broad condemnation arc Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of the Chicanos, 2^nd ed. (New York, 1981), 55-56 and 114-115, and Alfredo Mirandé, "The Church and the Chicano," in The Chicano Experience, an Alternative Perspective (Notre Dame, 1985), 113-145. Arnoldo Dc León presents a somewhat modified version of this position, from the Protestant view of a merely "perfunctory" or "nominal" attachment of the Tejanos to Catholicism, in The Tejano Community, 1836-1900 (Albuquerque, 1982), 8-9, 137-140, 152-153. No one has paid any heed to E. C. Oroxco's criticism of this anti-Church historiography in Republican Protestantism in Aztlán: The Encounter between Mexicanism and Anglo-Saxon Secular Humanism in the United States Southwest (n.p., 1980), l-46 and 105-22.

An example of a study recognizing greater complexity is José Roberto Juárez, "La Iglesia Católica y el Chicano en Sud Texas, 1836-1911," Aztlán 4 (Fall 1973): 218-222. His article was heavily used by Carmen Tafoya, "The Church in Texas," in Fronteras, 183-186. Tafoya, in turn, is a major Texas source for Sandoval's book on the Hispanic Church in the United States soon to be published by Orbis Press.

28. For a protest against the rush to judgement, see Castañeda, Our Catholic Heritage, 7:26; see also 47, fn. 23.

29. This conclusion is the result of ongoing research by Robert E. Wright, O.M.I., based on the extant sacramental registers of the various communities, and, in their absence, documentation in various archives as well as indications in published works.

30. Kennedy, Texas: the Rise, Progress, and Prospects, 1:216-234, 250-256, 364; 2:391-392.

31. Yoakum, History of Texas, 2 vols. (New York, 1855), 1:129-141, 268. Thrall, A Pictorial History of Texas, from the Earliest Visits of European Adventurers to A. D. 1879 2nd ed. (St. Louis, 1879), 738, followed Yoakum in noting the presence of these clergy but made no comments as to their quality or those of the Hispanic Catholics.

32. 0'Shea, "Texas, State of," under "Catholic History and Progress," The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York, 1912), 14:548.

33. A reading of all of Pike's journal makes it clear that Pike himself meant to make a favorable comparison of Texan tolerance with what he viewed as a much more inflexible or "fanatic" attitude (stereotypically expected of Catholicism) in some other regions through which he had been conducted. William Ransom Hogan's witty use of Pike's phrase has brought it into prominence as a standard cliche for describing the state of religion in Texas. William Ransom Hogan, The Texas Republic: A Social and Economic History (Norman, 1946), 191.

34. De Courcy and Shea, History of the Catholic Church, 674-676. Shea, History of the Catholic Church, 1:498-500, 503 fn. 1, 505-508; 3:707-715.

35. Parisot and Smith, Diocese of San Antonio, 19-33 and 49-53; Castañeda, Our Catholic Heritage, 3:91-92, 98-101; 5:197-199; 6:311-317; Habig, The Alamo Chain of Missions, 257-265; Richard Santos, "A Preliminary Survey of the San Fernando Archives," Texas Libraries 28 (Winter 1966-1967): 152-172, gave a valuable description of the extant church records from before 1840.

36. Natalie Walsh, "The Founding of Laredo and St. Augustine Church" (MA. thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1935). Other details are added by the following: Florence Johnson Scott, Historical Heritage of the Lower Rio Grande (San Antonio, 1937), 21-117; Castañeda, 3:156-164, 168-173; J. B. Wilkinson, Laredo and the Rio Grande Frontier (Austin, 1975); Gerhard, The North Frontier of New Spain, 364-365; Gloria Villa Cadena and Angel Sepúlveda Brown, San Agustín Catholic Church, Laredo, Marriage Records: Book I (1790-1857) (privately printed, 1989). This last work includes an introductory essay on the Laredo parish history up to 1867 by Robert E. Wright, O.M.I.

37. Bolton, Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century, 375-446, summarized in 113-119.

38. Nettie Lee Benson, "Bishop Marín de Porras and Texas," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 51 (July 1947): 1640.

39. William Stuart Red, The Texas Colonists and Religion, 1821-1836 (Austin, 1924). Red's monograph (often as mediated through Richardson's textbook) has remained the almost exclusive basis for the limited remarks about religion in Texas between 1800 and 1840 in all the general histories of the state.

40. Fitzmorris, Four Decades, 10-46.

41. Since Castañeda there has been no serious attempt, not even any movement in that direction, to present an adequate survey of the Church in Texas during the pre-1840 period. Reflecting the general sense that only the post-1840 period is in need of serious attention, of which it certainly is, Rev. James Moore has been commissioned by the Texas bishops to write the church history of that latter period. A first volume of his history is reported to be nearing publication, while a subsequent one is still in the research stage.

42. Castañeda, Our Catholic Heritage, vols. 5, 6, and 7.

43. Castañeda, Our Catholic Heritage, 6:307-355; 7:1-3.

44. Weber, "The Church in Jeopardy;' in his The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846: The American Southwest under Mexico (Albuquerque, 1982), 69-82, summarized in "'From Hell Itself': The Americanization of Mexico's Northern Frontier, in his Myth and History of the Hispanic Southwest (Albuquerque, -1988), 109-10.

45. Linda Trigg, "Father Michael Muldoon: The Story of an Early Pioneer Priest" (M. A. thesis, St. Mary's University, San Antonio, 1940). Mary Whatley Clark, "Father Michael Moldoon," Texana 9 (Autumn 1971), 179-229; Rachel Bluntzer Hébert, "John Thomas Molloy, 0. P." in her The For-

gotten Colony: San Patricio de Hibernia (Burnet, 1981), 112-122; Hobart Huson, "Valdez, José Antonio," The Handbook of Texas, III: A Supplement ed., Eldon Stephen Branda (Austin, 1976), 1056; Fidelia Miller Puckett, "Ramón Ortiz, Priest and Patriot," Angelico Chavez, ed., New Mexico Historical Review 25 (Oct. 1950): 265-295. Mary D. Taylor of Las Cruces is doing major new research on Ortiz, which is reflected in her article, "Cura de la Frontera, Ramón Ortiz," US Catholic Historian (forthcoming).

46. Oberste, Refugio Mission, 272-277, and appendixes. The Alamo chaplaincy is found in Yoakum, History of Texas, 1:457-461, summarized in 107-109; Parisot and Smith, Diocese of San Antonio, 45-46; and Habig, Alamo Chain of Missions, 70-71.

47. Charles J. Kelley, "The La Junta Archives," New Mexico Historical Review 25 (April 1950): 162-163.

48. Decorme, "Las misiones del Valle del Paso" (unpublished typescript, ca. 1957, Catholic Diocese of El Paso Historical Archives and Museum).

49. Weber; Mexican Frontier, 393.

50. Henry Putney Beers, Spanish and Mexican Records of the American Southwest: A Bibliographical Guide to Archive and Manuscript Sources (Tucson, 1979), 181-186 and 191-193. Beers's information on the church archives along the Rio Grande is unreliable.

51. Gerhard, The Northern Frontier; 19-23, 198-199, 318-320, 330-331, 338-339, 340-341, 364-365.

52. José Arlegui, Crónica de la Provincia de N.S.P.S. Francisco de Zacatecas, 2d ed. (Cumplido, 1851), has appended (389-488) to the original account published in 1737 the Memorias para la continuación de la Crónica de la muy religiosa Provincia de N.S.P. San Francisco de los Zacatecas "acopiados par Fr. Antonio Galvez, año de 1827," although the history continues until 1829. See Marion A. Habig, O.F.M., "The Franciscan Provinces of Spanish North America," The Americas 1 (January 1945): 337. An excellent research tool for an important archival collection of Franciscan activity on the northern frontier, with a lengthy and invaluable introductory essay on Mexican Franciscan archives by Linda Gómez Canedo, is Ignacio del Rio, A Guide to the Archivo Franciscano of the National Library of Mexico (Mexico and Washington, 1975).

53. Castañeda, Our Catholic Heritage, 7:1, 25-26.

54. For the Catholic school, see Diekemper, "Catholic Church in the shadows," 46-53, and Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Time to the Present (Garden City, 1985), 29, 176-177. For the Protestant school, see Sylvest, "The Hispanic American Church," 25-27, and "Re-thinking the 'Discovery' of the Americas," 3-13. For the Anglo school, see Richardson, Wallace, and Anderson, Texas: the Lone Star State, 4th ed., 51; 5th ed. (1988), 40. For the Chicano school, see note 48.

55. Robert E. Wright, O.M.I., "Local Church Emergence and Mission Decline: The Historiography of the Catholic Church in the Southwest during the Late Spanish and Mexican Periods," US Catholic Historian (forthcoming). This article surveys the literature that deals with the Southwest as a whole, and then focuses on the influential New Mexican model as a case study. It thus complements this essay, which pays particular attention to the Texas case.