Illustration of San Xavier Mission near Tucson. A. T.
A Long Time Ago--
- no one knows just when - people paused beside the running water of the desert river. Their pause became a short stay. A short stay became a home. A home became many homes and these became a village.Water courses in deserts were their highways. Permanent water is the magnet that draws life. Animals to hunt and plants to gather were plentiful. Farming and crops of corn, teparies, squashes and other native foods were a good possibility. And thus it was that life evolved along the river. One thousand, two thousand, three thousand years ago or more.
One day in 1692 a stranger arrived. He learned the Indians called their village "Bac"-where the water emerges. He added to the name in honor of his patron saint, San Francisco Xavier. And so it came to be that Father Eusebio Kino, a Jesuit from the Tyrolean Alps, introduced Christianity to the Piman Indians of New Spain's northern outpost of empire. And so it was that San Xavier del Bac was given the name by which it is known today.
In 1700 Father Kino laid the foundations for a church. It was never built. In the 1730s or 1740s, some Jesuit successor of Father Kino built a finished mission. This was replaced between 1756 and 1759 when Alonso Espinosa, S.J., constructed the second church. Built of sun-dried adobe and with a ceiling of hand hewn mesquite beams which yet survive in part of today's mission complex, it continued in use until the present church was finished in 1797. It had been started in the late 1770s or early 1780s by Father Juan Bautista Velderrain, a Franciscan friar who died at San Xavier in 1790. The work, save for the still unfinished east tower, was completed by Friar Juan Bautista Llorens.
Never wholly abandoned, although no religious were in residence between 1831 and 1873, Mission San Xavier del Bac has been a part of the lives of Papago Indians from Kino's day to this. It continues to serve the escendants of villagers who were here beside the Santa Cruz River in time immemorial. It is a living, ever-changing monument to them and to the meeting of cultures, Old World and New. It is their church and their nation's church, even as it belongs to all men.
Copyright © 1973. The Arizona Board of Regents
