Denver Gets an Archbishop

"This country was evangelized in 1500 by the Franciscan Fathers. It has been allowed to drift for nearly 300 years and is not yet dead. The few priests are lax in religious observance, and some of them live in open concubinage. . . ."

"But these missions are still under the jurisdiction of Mexico, are they not?" inquired the Frenchman.

"In the See of the Bishop of Durango?" added Maria de Allande.

The missionary sighed. "Your Eminence, the Bishop of Durango is an old man; and from his seat to Santa Fe is a distance of 1,500 English miles. There are no wagon roads, no canals, no navigable rivers. Trade is carried on by means of pack-mules, over treacherous trails. . . . The Vicariate of New Mexico will be in a few years raised to an Episcopal See, with jurisdiction over a country larger than Central and Western Europe, barring Russia. The Bishop of that See will direct the. beginning of momentous things."

"Beginnings," murmured the Venetian, "there have been so many. But nothing ever comes from over there-but trouble and appeals for money."--Willa Gather, Death Comes for the Archbishop.

Indeed momentous were the beginnings made by the missionary of whom Author Gather wrote, Father John B. Lamy. He became Santa Fe's first bishop (in 1875 its first archbishop), mightily revived Catholicism's failing strength in the Southwest. Unlike the Bishop of Durango, he did not neglect the outlying parts of his jurisdiction. To Colorado in 1860 he sent another famed pioneer Catholic, Father Joseph P. Macheboeuf, first Bishop of Denver when it was still a village.

Archbishop Lamy's work echoed again last week when it entered a new phase. Out of his old province the Vatican took Colorado, added Wyoming, and shaped its 20th ecclesiastical province in the U.S.: Denver, with suffragan sees in Pueblo and Cheyenne. Columnist Lee Casey of Rocky Mountain News pointed up the change 81 years had brought: "Denver's first bishop was its first priest; Denver's first archbishop will have two suffragan bishops, 437 priests and 180,250 communicants in his jurisdiction." Archbishop-elect is the Most Rev. Urban John Vehr, Bishop of Denver.

One sidelight on the church administrative situation in the new province: Catholics in the part of Colorado which once belonged to Spain will continue to enjoy the privilege of eating meat on Fridays. That privilege was given to Catholics in Spain and its possessions in recognition of Spain's fight against the Moors.

* "Over there" (U.S. Catholicism) is now--93 years after the scene Willa Cather has portrayed--a chief Financial support of the Vatican.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.