Many missions are still in use as parish churches, while simultaneously offering a more-or-less sanitized history of Spanish colonization. Yet the historicity of many of these missions-as-heritage-sites is questionable: often they were reconstructed by groups less concerned with questions of authenticity than with creating concrete visible symbols of a romanticized "Spanish" history. Think Zorro, with its oddly baroque clothing and seemingly infinite number of wealthy hidalgo families.
I wasn't aware of the number of missions that existed in other states of the Southwest (or the Southeast, for that matter). A trip to Tucson a few years ago gave me the opportunity to visit San Xavier Bac, probably the most beautiful mission church in the entire Southwest, and started me on an ongoing mission hunt. Now, everywhere we go in the Southwest, I check to see if there are missions and push to find a way to visit them.
San Antonio, it turns out, was the center of an unusually dense cluster of missions. The Alamo (which, ironically, we did not succeed in visiting) was originally one of them, San Antonio Valero. South along the San Antonio river are four more. The National Park Service administers them, with local parishes continuing to use three of the intact churches.
Mission Concepcion was founded in 1731. The church that was completed in 1755 still stands, and is beautiful. Remnants of original paint are preserved in the rooms of the convento. The interior of the church preserves a section cut through to the original paint at one point, as an evident warrant for the contemporary painting of the church interior.
It is these mixtures of contemporary use-- here and elsewhere including refreshing of the paint in the church-- and a kind of bow to historical preservation that makes missions temporally complicated. I need a word here like Foucault's heterotopia: heterotempora? for a place that contains, not many places, but many times.
Even the name "Concepcion" has interesting temporal dimensions. It is a reference to the Immaculate Conception, the feast day that falls on December 8. It was not until 1854 that the Roman Catholic church declared as official dogma that Mary herself was born without original sin, so the question for me is, what did it mean to dedicate a church to Concepcion in 1731?
Among other things, it leads to a consideration of the differences between different orders of missionary priests. The three main orders responsible for missions in Latin America, the Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jesuits, were competitors, and differed fiercely in how they understood theology. These differences led to approaches to missionization that could be dramatic. (The movie The Mission represented some of the difference between Jesuits and Franciscans through the history of missionization of Paraguay's Guaraní).
(A less well known order, the Mercedarians, who were responsible for missions in Honduras in the 16th and 17th century, provide another, even better example. Unlike the dominant model in the US, which is associated with the Franciscans, Mercedarians did not bring the native people into a centralized settlement. Instead, they established a central church, and daughter churches in Indian towns, which they visited to administer sacraments.)
Reportedly, St Francis of Assisi, founder of the order, designated the Virgin Mary as "Advocate of the Order":
the Third Order Regular of Saint Francis is placed under the protection of the Immaculate Virgin Mary, its heavenly patron.The Dominican Order also had an early history of Marian devotion. But the two orders differed on specific aspects of Marian practice; as one Dominican source says
The two Marian devotions represent in the minds of the faithful two different floods of light.The Dominicans promoted the Rosary as a means of devotion to Mary. Veneration of the Virgin Mary as conceived without sin was advocated by the Franciscans; the Dominicans did not observe this feast until it was made universal dogma of the Roman Catholic church.
Approved as a "pious belief" in the early 15th century, the doctrine of "immaculate conception" was long debated. The feast day was officially recognized as a holy day of obligation only in 1708-- less than two decades before the establishment of the mission of that name south of San Antonio by the Franciscan order.
A second Franciscan mission dedicated to the same manifestation of the Virgin Mary exists in central California, named in full Mission La Purísima Concepción, although founded much later (1787).
Dedicating these mission churches to the "pure conception of Mary" served as a way to advance the doctrinal argument. At the same time, the Franciscans were advancing, knowingly or otherwise, veneration of the only American manifestation of the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, who appeared to Juan Diego on the feast day of the Immaculate Conception in 1531. According to tradition, the apparition declared herself “the ever virgin Holy Mary, Mother of the True God”.
Although the story of the vision of Our Lady of Guadalupe outside Mexico City dates to 1531, it is precisely during the period when the missionization of the Southwest began that piety directed at this American manifestation of the Virgin Mary was promoted.
And as if to underline this convergence of histories, inside the church of Mission Concepcion today there are two paintings: one, a European-style image of Mary as a young, almost androgynous girl dressed in a pink gown with a blue mantle; the other the familiar image of Our Lady of Guadalupe that is the American version of the Immaculate Conception.
Layers of time and histories converging in this one place.
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