“A Message That We Didn’t Matter”—Diocese’s Removal of Apache-Themed Icons Stirs Old Outrages

Under the half moon, the community gathered, dancing to drumbeats and chanting around a fire. In the circle, dressed in traditional buckskin, two native girls, now celebrating their coming of age, shuffled and moved in patterns traced by their ancestors untold ages ago.

The following morning, the people who had danced and chanted in their native tongue the previous night celebrated Mass.

The parishioners of St. Joseph Apache Mission church in Mescalero, New Mexico—a church built a century ago—are devout Catholics—and Apaches. For 35 years, an 8-foot painting of Christ—an icon created by Franciscan friar Robert Lentz in 1989—hung behind the church’s altar under a crucifix.

The painting depicted the Savior as a Mescalero medicine man, greeting the sun, a symbol of which is painted on his left palm. In his right, he holds a deer hoof rattle. Greek letters in the upper corners are abbreviations for “Jesus Christ.”

But one morning in late June, parishioners showing up for Catechism class were stunned to see a blank wall above the altar. The initial thought was that the painting, along with another smaller painting and Eucharist chalices and baskets from the Pueblo community, had been stolen. The truth, however, cut deeper.

The church’s then-priest, Peter Chudy Sixtus Simeon-Aguinam, had removed the items under the authority of Bishop Peter Baldacchino of the Diocese of Las Cruces.

The community’s outrage was answered by the diocese’s silence. Not until the media gave the people of the church a broader platform from which to voice their sense of betrayal did the diocese act—returning the icons and replacing Simeon-Aguinam with another priest.

For some, that is not enough. Old wounds have been reopened: the attempts over the generations to cleanse Indigenous peoples of their heathen ways (read “cultural genocide”) and the more recent reconciliation process and apology from Pope Francis in 2022 for the Catholic Church’s part in forcing Native children into residential schools to destroy their culture and separate families.

Church elders Glenda and Larry Brusuelas said the bishop must issue a public apology to thoroughly purge this wrong and make up the damage.

“You don’t call or send a letter,” Larry Brusuelas said. “You face the people you have offended and offer some guarantee that this is not going to happen again. That’s the Apache way.”

Earlier priests understood the intertwining of Indigenous culture with the Catholic faith. Both are inseparable. Both are sacred. Parishioner Sarah Kazhe explained, “Jesus meets you where you are and he appears to us in a way we understand,” she said. “Living my Apache way of life is no different than attending church. … The mindless, thoughtless act of removing a sacred icon sent a message that we didn’t matter.”

The church—one of over 340 Native American parishes in the United States—is filled with symbols of the culture. There are figures of teepees and a Last Supper mural depicting Christ and the apostles as Apache men. Paintings of the crucifixion and resurrections are adorned by crowns known as “game.”

As for the 8-foot painting, Larry Gosselin, the priest who served St. Joseph at the time of its creation and secured approval for its display, said of its artist, “He poured all of himself into that painting,” explaining that Lentz sprinkled gold dust on himself and skipped showering, using his body oils to adhere the gold to the canvas.

Gosselin believes the painting was “divinely inspired,” adding, “This has resonated in the spirit and their hearts. Now, 35 years later, the Apache people are fighting for it.”

Incorporating the motifs and imagery of a culture to better connect with the divine is nothing new in religion and certainly nothing new to Christianity. Over a thousand miles to the south, in Mexico City, is the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, erected to honor the appearance of the Virgin Mary to an Indigenous peasant half a millennium ago. She appeared to him as a bronze-skinned Native woman and spoke to him in Nahuatl, the language of the former Aztec Empire. It is the most visited Catholic shrine in the world.

And in our advanced Western civilization, we depict Jesus Christ not as he likely appeared to his people—a Palestinian man with Semitic features—but as something more suited to our tastes: a white man with features that would blend in with any group possessed of the genetic stuff of white Anglo-Saxon/Norwegian folk. The trappings of faith are just that—trappings. The Diocese of Las Cruces would do well to consider that truth lest they get trapped by the trappings and lose sight of the faith at the core.

Image credits: St. Joseph Apache Mission by Jocnewt, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.