Native American Devotion at Mission Carmel Ruins
What famous Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson witnessed on the Feast of St. Charles Borromeo November 4, 1879
In 1879, Robert Louis Stevenson, the often-ailing but determined and much-traveled young Scottish writer, who was later to become world-famous for Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, among many other works, made his way to California and sojourned in Monterey County for a few months. Stevenson later wrote an essay called “The Old Pacific Capital,” in which he described with great sympathy the plight and deep Catholic faith of native converts who had been turned out after the Mexican government secularized the missions—which he had witnessed for himself when he attended a Mass at the old church at Mission Carmel, which was then roofless with stone walls that were barely standing.
Mission Carmel had been the second mission founded by St. Junipero Serra in Alta California, in 1770 (some sources say 1771), initially located in Monterey. Serra named it Misión de San Carlos Borromeo del Rio Carmelo in honor of St. Charles Borromeo. Borromeo had been a great 16th-century archbishop of Milan, who was renowned for both his learning and his great charity; for example, he had supported up to 3,000 people a day at his own expense during a plague and personally tended to plague sufferers' needs.
The mission was moved soon after its founding to a better location about six miles south of Monterey Bay on the Carmel River and was given the full name of Misión de San Carlos Borromeo del Rio Carmel. The river itself had originally been named Rio del Nuestra Senora del Monte Carmelo after Our Lady of Mount Carmel in 1603, about 150 years before the mission was established, probably because three friars of the Carmelite Order were members of the Vizcaíno expedition that discovered it.
The river's name was eventually shortened to Rio Carmelo; it is now known in English as the Carmel River, and, similarly, the mission's name was shortened to Mission Carmel.
St. Junipero Serra died in 1784, and it is said his last wish was for a new stone church to replace the original adobe chapel. Serra’s successor Father Fermín Lasuén directed the skilled work of Native American converts (conversos) in the building of the current stone church, which was finished in 1797. When I visited the Mission last week, the docent told me that the church there was the first of only three of the mission churches made of stone. Mission Carmel also has the only arched ceiling. The ceilings of all the other mission churches were flat.
The conversos were proud of their contributions to the beauty of the mission and of their participation in activities led by the missionaries.
Music was commonly taught to the converted indigenous people by Franciscan missionaries during the time of the California Missions. The friars, including Saint Junípero Serra, Fathers José Viader, Felipe Arroyo de la Cuesta, Estevan Tapís, and especially Narciso Durán, dedicated themselves to teaching the converts how to sing chant and polyphony and play instruments during Masses. It is recorded that mothers would vie for their children to have the honor of being taught to sing and play instruments for the Masses.
While I was a member of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Oratory choir in San José, I had the privilege of singing the alto part in a Mass setting that is called the “California Mission Mass” at Mission San Rafael and at Mission Santa Clara. The “California Mission Mass” was arranged by composer John Biggs from music written down by the missionaries for the converted Native Americans to sing and play at Masses, which Biggs selected from various Masses archived at Mission Santa Barbara. The use of instruments during the early mission masses is proven by how the music was scored for flute, violin, cello, string bass, and handbells in addition to the high and low voices. For example, this snippet from the Sanctus/Benedictus from “California Mission Mass” shows it was scored for bell, violins, cello, and string bass.
In the following snippets from Stevenson's essay, we can glimpse how strong the faith was among the remaining former natives of the Carmel Mission, how much they loved and treasured the sacred music they had learned, how well they sang it in Latin, and how badly the mission had decayed after secularization. In his essay, Stevenson also deplored the lack of civic interest in preserving the historically significant mission. His description led to the first restoration of the mission in 1884, when a roof was put over the church to save it from further ruin.
Stevenson had rejected the Scotch Presbyterian faith in which he was raised, and he might have been expected to share the prejudices against popery that were common in those days, but from what he wrote about the Mass he observed at the Mission, it is clear he held in high estimation the work of the Catholic missionaries and the gifts of faith and culture they had given to the native peoples they had served.
Stephenson saw the converted natives who held onto their faith as orphaned and impoverished by the expulsion of the Franciscan missionaries from the missions, who had been exploited, first by the settlers from Mexico who tricked most of the conversos out of the mission’s former lands that should have belonged to them and had established ranches, and then by mannerless Americans who exploited both the conversos and the Mexican landholders, until neither natives nor Mexican former-ranch owners owned any land anymore. Stephenson certainly did not see the abandoned Native American converts as freed slaves, as slanderers of the Franciscan missionaries like to portray them.
I saved the following quote from a Facebook post defending St. Junipero Serra, but I didn't remember to record who wrote the comment or note the actual post it's from. It's an appropriate end to this essay.
“And speaking of the defense of Our Saint, California Mission Music is a big argument against the wholesale slander that both Our Saint and the Missions in general have to endure. Anyone who heard the music—performed correctly, as it would have been back then, not as one hears it on modern recordings—and who has read accounts of the Indian families vying for a chance to send their sons to learn orchestral instruments and how to sing; who has read the descriptions—by hostile parties—of the devotion and high skill with which the Indians performed this music—would never believe the lies that are told of the Missions and of St. Junipero.”— Author unknown
This article was originally published at Dappled Things Deep Down Things blog and has been expanded with new text, plus photos from a visit to the Mission last Saturday.