San Fernando Cathedral



The San Fernando Cathedral as seen from the Main Plaza in broad daylight.  Note the young pickpocket on the right, on his way into the chapel to confess his sins and, perhaps with some loose change in his pocket, promise to sin no more.

    In 1719, the Marques de San Miguel de Aquayo, governor and captain general of Coahuila and Texas, recommended to the king of Spain that 400 volunteer families be gathered from either Galicia, or the Canary Islands, or Havana, and transported to Texas to provide settlers for the colony.  In 1723, the king decided to send 200 families from the Canary Islands.

     The governor wanted these settlers to populate the area around his newest presidio, San Fernando de Bexar.  The mission Valero, later known as the Alamo, had been established there in 1720, and settlers were needed to farm and defend the land.  The Indians in Texas were not nearly as docile as those in Mexico, and the friars were having trouble recruiting slave labor.  Comanche didn't make good slaves.

     For the next several years, governmental delays kept the project on hold, but by midsummer of 1730, twenty-five families from the Canary Islands made it to Havana and ten more to Veracruz.  The king cancelled the project, but the ten families in Veracruz, fifty-six people altogether, decided to continue overland to the remote presidio at San Fernando de Bexar, and arrived there on March 9, 1731. 

     Due to marriages while en route, fifteen actual families arrived in Bexar.  The cagey islanders must have realized that single daughters, no matter how sweet, received no land, but young daughter-in-laws and their husbands were awarded a farm.  Four single men, ranging in age from 17 to 22, arrived with their families and were collectively designated the sixteenth family.  Each family was allotted a generous farm, and the single men each received one half a family share.

     In 1731, the Canary Islanders established the San Fernando Cathedral and started construction on the chapel, which was finished in 1750 or so.  To put this time frame in context, the population of New York City was around 9,000 loyal British subjects when San Fernando was started, and the famed San Juan Capistrano Mission in Southern California was not built until almost fifty years later, in 1776.   

     The San Fernando Cathedral has quietly existed in its spot in the exact center of the city of San Antonio for 282 years.  It is the mother church of the Archdiocese of San Antonio and the seat of its archbishop.  Pope John Paul II visited there in 1987, during the only trip to Texas by a sitting pope.

      In 1831, Jim Bowie married the beautiful Ursula de Verimendi in the San Fernando Chapel and his two children were, no doubt, christened there.  In 1836, William Barret Travis and Green Jameson watched from the church's bell tower, the highest structure in San Antonio, as General Sesma led the advance guard of Santa Anna’s army into town.  The Mexicans unfurled the famous blood red, “No-Quarter” flag from the belfry and it remained there during the siege and fall of the Alamo.

The cathedral during Richemont's presentation.

     Now, in addition to its other functions,  the building is used as a backdrop for a fantastic light and music show.   For the next ten years, four nights each week, the facade of San Fernando Cathedral will be used as a sort of movie screen to reflect the imagination of French artist Xavier de Richemont.   Visitors are urged to bring lawn chairs and find places in the main plaza to watch and listen as the free presentation unfolds three times nightly.

     The show is called “The Saga at San Fernando Cathedral” and consists of a series of psychedelic-like visions in intense full color that condense the three hundred year history of San Antonio into a twenty-four minute visual and auditory experience.  It is, in a word, incredible.

     I am not a fan of contemporary art.  I’ve seen too many slick talkers foist off absolute junk on unsuspecting patsies by calling it “art.”  We had an ole boy in Lubbock named Terry Allen that scratched out a living doing just that.  Oh, he also wrote some songs that pretty much rhymed, and picked a guitar around town, just about anything to make a living without working.  One time, at an art show in New Mexico, he put a used Airstream trailer house on display as a piece of art. If I remember correctly, he artistically leaned a broom up against the side of the trailer.  He was a lot better salesman than artist.

     This “video art installation” isn’t like that.  It is art on a level with any I've seen, but entirely different.  I watched the show on the Internet and was mesmerized.  In the beginning, the chapel was all darkness with hints of red in the background, as if the viewer is peering toward an early morning red sky through a dense black forest.  Thunder rolls.  It's raining.  The sound of the rain becomes music. I feel as if this represents the dawn of time—the instant of creation.

The church as it appears toward the end of the presentation.

     In continuous color, synchronized with fantastic music, the story of Texas unfolds on the face of the cathedral.  Geronimo, Sam Houston, Stephen Austin, LBJ, Abraham Lincoln and dozens of others are recognizable on the face of the chapel.  Tepees, horses, cattle and oil wells drift by.  The Alamo with Travis, Bowie, and Crockett, all in living color and all accompanied by appropriate music, fill the scene. 

     The music ranges from distant thunder to a lonesome flute or guitar.  A complicated pipe organ ensemble precedes the plaintive lyrics of simple folk music sung by a nasal hillbilly.  Accordions and mariachis follow symphonic sounds from a full blown orchestra and choir, all perfectly coordinated with the visual extravaganza taking place on the facade of the old church. 

     I watched in rapt attention as the saga played out.  I marveled at the talent of Xavier de Richemont, and the foresight of those who commissioned him for this piece, his first in the United States.  I watched the whole show on my computer and have yet to see the saga in person, but that will be remedied shortly.  If need be, I will go alone and sit in the cold rain.  I will see this work of art in person.

     For more information on The Saga of San Fernando Cathedral, and to view the work, go to www.mainplaza.org, read about the installation and see the show.

Some of the remains of the Texians slaughtered and burned by Santa Anna's troops at the Alamo were recovered by Juan Seguin and are interred here at San Fernando.