The picture above, taken on August 11th,2020, shows the vandalism done to the statue of Fray Angelico Chavez in front of the Historical Library and Photo Archives of the State of New Mexico in Santa Fe, which bears his name. Many, many things have been said by the friars – especially those who lived with him – about Fray Angelico, but without doubt, no matter the disagreements and the difficulties caused by his particularly prickly personality, none of the friars would have wanted to see him disfigured in this way.

Fray Angelico has been painted with a broad brush, not only literally here with red paint, but also figuratively as a symbol of many things that he was not. Fray Angelico, born in 1910, was certainly not part of New Mexico’s colonization in the 17th or 18th century, though he took enormous pride in being a descendant of some of the first Hispanic colonizers to come to New Mexico. Fray Angelico was not San Junipero Serra, in charge of many missions and friars, as a matter of fact he was never a pastor or a guardian of a Franciscan community. Fray Angelico was not a man of political power. But Fray Angelico was a missionary, a military chaplain who made beachhead landings with Marines in the Pacific during
the Second World War alongside New Mexican Native Americans, Hispanics, and Anglos. Fray Angelico was an artist, a poet, an archivist, and an historian. And in all of those things, Fray Angelico was most especially a man and a friar of his times.

Probably those who threw the paint on Fray Angelico’s statue or wrote the graffiti on the wall of the building behind it, had no real idea as to whom Fray Angelico was and who he was not. In all likelihood, they saw a statue of a friar in a habit in Santa Fe in front of a public building and presumed that rather than researching and writing about colonial New Mexican history, he had helped make it. In
that assumption, Fray Angelico, as a man in a Franciscan habit, became in their minds a symbol of many things, including both colonial oppression and racial prejudice. Where will we stand and how shall we be dressed? When I was a Franciscan novice back in Cincinnati, and we received the habit for the first time, I can recall that Father Joseph Rayes, my novice director, choked up a bit, as he
shared his deep feelings with us, that putting on the habit is unlike putting on any other piece of clothing that we would ever wear. Publicly putting on a Franciscan habit, he told us, is becoming for the whole world to see one of the hundreds of saints and one of the thousands of sinners who have worn the habit for centuries
before us. As friars we profess an ideal of Gospel living that we often struggle and fail to fulfill, but still we try. Every day, putting on the habit should remind us of our commitment to that struggle to live up to an ideal that we may never attain, but which holds within it, the best hope that we know for making the world a
better place as we try to be the best men that we can be.

Fray Angelico, the historian, the missionary, the military chaplain, the poet, the priest and friar was not without faults. In his youth, New Mexico went from being a Territory to being a State of the United States. That transition came about in part, because the idea became widespread that like all of those English and later
European immigrants in the original thirteen colonies, the Hispanic citizens New Mexico were somehow directly and exclusively descendants of European immigrant ancestors. That idea, which ignores hundreds of years of intimate historical connection between Hispanic and Native American inhabitants of the Territory;
intimate connections which were not always voluntary, remained deep in Fray Angelico’s heart throughout his life. So, at a time when the dominant historical
narrative in the United States ignored both the Hispanic and Native American experience, he was a pioneering academic voice raising the consciousness of
the rest of the nation as to the place of marginalized people. He revised the history of the United States by adding a Hispanic voice to the conversation.

But the study of history must always be an ongoing conversation. Fray Angelico’s voice added his ancestors, people he knew to have been too long ignored, to the conversation. But without doubt, even then, there were also voices that Fray Angelico himself was not ready to hear, especially those of the Native Americans all around him. He had something to say, and what he had to say must be respected, even though we know now that his was not the last word. On the night of August
10th, the three hundred and fortieth anniversary of the Pueblo Indian Revolt, Fray
Angelico’s bronze habit got marked with red paint. But like the Pueblo Revolt itself, this act of vandalism was a cry from the heart of hurting people into the winds of history. That cry must also not be the last word in this historical conversation. As Franciscans we must speak up about injustices, as Fray Angelico did in his time regarding Hispanic New Mexicans, but we must also remember one very basic tenet of all fruitful conversations. If you wish to be heard, first you must listen. We need to listen with attention and compassion to learn from the lessons that we still need to learn in the Order, in the Church and in society from those who would paint everyone in a habit with the same broad brush. While at the same time, we sinners and saints in habits need to never shy away from as gently and effectively as we can, with God’s help, adding a voice of peace and good to the conversation.

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Special thanks to Pinon Post for allowing us to publish their photo of Fray Angelico's vandalized statue. Retrieved from https://pinonpost.com/vandals-defacestatue-of-catholic-priest-in-santa-fe/