The next time you light a match to the votive candle in the nicho, dust off the saint in the garden, or stare up at the cobwebs on your high small windows, say a little prayer for the founding fathers—the padres of New Mexico. You may or may not be a practicing Roman Catholic, but if you live in New Mexico, you are probably far more touched by the lives of the early padres than you would ever suspect.

When the first explorers ventured to New Mexico, they were accompanied by a Catholic priest. By the time the moving carts arrived with soldiers and settlers bringing their possessions up from Mexico proper, the priests had already begun laying out their new houses—houses of worship. Simple huts quickly gave way to large ambitious structures made of stone or adobe with huge ceiling beams and glorious corbels and moldings. Massive structures found on the furthest frontier of northern New Spain, these impressive churches, some still standing after almost four centuries, not only served as important community centers of learning, training, and proselytizing but also as the primary locale for the dissemination of European architecture, art, and design on the frontier. The buildings they designed would have done Saint Peter proud, so similar were they to the plain, dignified basilica-style structures of the earliest Christian churches.

These early missionaries were sent out into the so-called wilderness loaded with something far more precious than the silver and gold monstrance they might have carried. They arrived as semitrained architects, builders, musicians, carvers, and painters. Large monasteries in Mexico were established as training centers for priests. Like the university of today, the monastery was the training ground for the young and ambitious, in this case sons of both the conquistadors and the scions of the former ruling natives, as well as Europeans seeking to make their way in the New World. With a direct mandate from the Old World, they set out to change the New World—and they did.

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