| Father
Antonio Margil de Jesus helped introduce Christianity to the wilderness of East
Texas, but his story began in Valencia, Spain, where he was born in 1657.
Margil
attended local schools where his mild manner and interest in religion gave early
evidence that he would devote his life to the Church. Margil decided to become
a Franciscan, and received Holy Orders at La Carona de Cristo, in Valencia, in
1673. After additional study Margil decided that he had been called to missionary
work in New Spain.
Margil arrived in Vera Cruz in 1683 and joined the
missionary College of Santa Cruz de Queretareo. He served as a missionary in Yucatan,
Costa Rica, and Guatemala, then, in 1797, founded the missionary College of Nuestra
Senora de Guadalupe de Zacatecas.
When Mission
San Francisco de las Tejas, founded by Father Damin Massanet near the Neches
River in 1690, closed, twenty years later Margil was placed in charge of establishing
six missions in East Texas. The government agreed because a Frenchman, Louis Juchereau
de St. Denis, had crossed Texas to the Rio Grande in 1714 without sighting a Spaniard.
Government leaders, then, wanted Spanish institutions in place to hold Texas against
French penetration. Church leaders wanted to spread the Good News.
Illness
prevented Margil from accompanying the first expedition to East Texas in 1716
and from founding the first four missions, but he arrived in time to supervise
construction of missions at San
Augustine, Texas, and Las Adaes, near modern Robilene, Louisiana. Margil remained
the ecclesiastical leader of all six missions.
The absence of additional
threats from France, resistance to Christianity by the Caddo, and isolation and
difficulties of supplies caused all six missions to be abandoned within a few
years, and but all were reinstated in 1721 by the Marquis Aguayo and remained
until all missions in East Texas were closed by the New Regulation of the Presidios
in 1773.
Margil remains the "patron saint" of Roman Catholic activity
in East Texas, though the Church so far has failed to give him official status,
pending investigation of his miracles.
Dr. Francis
Abernethy thinks he has found the twin springs, known as "The Eyes of Father Margil"
on LaNana Creek, that the priest upcapped with two blows of his staff.
When
I explained this to a visitor from Israel, he exclaimed, "Moses did this!" I could
only respond that I had never claimed that Margil or Abernethy were original,
only miraculous. |
