Religion: St. Michael’s 50th

All afternoon, the Navajos had been arriving in trucks and spring wagons, on horseback and afoot. St. Michael’s Mission in Arizona, the heart and nerve center of the Franciscan effort to convert the Indians of the Southwest, was having its 50th anniversary last week, and from all over their 16 million-acre reservation the Navajos came to celebrate with the Ednishodi (long-robed ones).

After dark, while monks and nuns bustled through last-minute preparations, the Indians trooped into the mission plaza for a special movie program. Wrapped in striped blankets or sheepskin coats against the cold night air, they chuckled at a cartoon and slapstick comedy, tensely followed a hard-riding western. Next morning they were up before dawn over their breakfast campfires, but it was 10 o’clock before the celebration began.

Into the packed plaza three Navajos rode, chanting the ancient Riding Song of the tribe. Behind them rolled a sleek black limousine bearing Archbishop Byrne of Santa Fe and Bishop Espelage of Gallup. Bishop Espelage celebrated Mass, the Navajo children’s choir singing the responses. Then the Indians hunched forward expectantly. Old Father Berard was going to speak.

Try Again. Father Berard Haile (pronounced high-lee) has been at St. Michael’s almost since it began. When he came to the mission as a young priest in 1900, it was a small experiment that seemed to have every chance of failure. Beginning in 1539, the Spanish Franciscans had given generously of their labors and their lives (more than 300 were martyred) to convert the Indians—with practically no success. In 1828, the last Spanish Franciscan withdrew. It was not until the century was almost over that American Franciscans decided to take up the work once again. With three monks they began St. Michael’s in an abandoned trading post on a 160-acre tract of land.

Among his colleagues, Father Berard’s erudition (he has written 17 scientific works on the Indians) earned him the title “Scholar to the Navajo.” but his Indian flock affectionately called him “Yazzie” (Shortie). For decades he traveled the barren reservation by buckboard and horseback, preaching and studying and helping St. Michael’s build up a network of schools, clinics and churches to care for some 11,500 baptized Catholics.*

Heart & Head. Last week, as thin, white-haired Father Berard, 75, was escorted to the microphone, young Franciscans in the first two rows of camp chairs cocked their ears to catch his words; from under a dozen brown habits cameras appeared. For half an hour, under a blazing sun, Father Berard spoke in Navajo of the mission’s history and the meaning of the faith.

“The fathers are willing to answer any questions,” he told his Indian flock. “There is much for you to learn . . . You say you have a religion just for the

Navajo, but the priests have a religion for all men, white or red or black . . . The Ten Commandments are a ladder which you climb in this life to live with God in heaven. If you don’t, you won’t find anything except a mess in the hereafter.””

Later there was a formal dinner for the clergy in the Community House, but Father Berard slipped away as soon as he could to join the big Navajo feast outdoors. While the Indians gulped boiled mutton, pinto beans and coffee, Yazzie moved from group to group, pinching chubby brown cheeks of babies in cradle boards, gossiping with oldsters about tribal affairs. Said one Navajo patriarch: “The Long Robes are all heart, but Long Robe Yazzie is a heart and a head.”

* About half of the 65,000 Navajos belong to Protestant denominations; about a third are

pagan.