Ravages of Time and Bats Threaten Stone Church on Indian Reservation

On warm nights, migrating Mexican bats soar near the 80-foot ceiling of St. Joseph’s Apache Mission Church. Black shapes fly over the portraits of Chiefs Geronimo and Victorio. Bats make passes over the green-and-gold painting of the Apache Christ. They leave calling cards on the roster of Apache war veterans.

The Rev. Tom Herbst knows this. His church workers clean every day from April to October.

“In the mornings, there’s guano over every piece of art in the building. It smells like ammonia,” said the mission’s Roman Catholic priest. “The bats chew holes in the mortar. We need to re-mortar inside and out at a cost of about 500,000 bucks, which is infinitely more than we have.”

St. Joseph’s, on the 460,000-acre Mescalero Apache Reservation in south-central New Mexico, is built of stone and thus not included on historic preservation lists designed to heighten the awareness of New Mexico’s endangered adobe churches.

Nonetheless, it needs protection from the ravages of time.

If there were a parable of St. Joseph’s, it would offer more than one lesson.

It would teach about the dedication and dreaming it takes to tear down a crumbling abode church and build a stone cathedral with native materials and little money. It was a process that took 23 years.

The parable also would illustrate the difficulties of keeping that dream alive.

“It is a beautiful place, however impractical it is to maintain,” said Herbst, who has served at the mission 6 1/2 years.

The cross of the bell tower stands 103 feet over the reservation village nestled in a canyon at the entrance to the White Mountains and Sacramento Mountains--sacred mountains of the Apache.

The vision of a Franciscan priest inspired by the cathedrals of Europe, the mission was built by Apache volunteers and Franciscan brothers who abandoned a crumbling adobe church and between 1916 and 1939 raised a new church built with native materials.

The walls are 4 feet thick and 50 feet high, with a roof that soars 30 feet higher. The church is 131 feet long and 64 feet wide on a foundation that in some spots was hand-dug to 7 feet deep.

Church history says the Rev. Albert Braun, the inspired Franciscan, started the work with $100, two volunteers and not even a plan for what he wanted the church to be.

It was not until he returned from service in the Army’s chaplain corps in World War I that he knew more specifically what he hoped to build.

“While in the Army he saw beautiful churches in France of Romanesque design. The church was built as a point of pride for the reservation, as a symbol of dedication,” Herbst said.

Plans were finally drawn as a gift to the mission by William Stanton, a Philadelphia architect.

The cornerstone was laid in 1920, and the stonework started on the building that Braun was later to dedicate to two groups he particularly revered: the Mescalero Apaches and U.S. veterans killed in war.

The construction was not without disaster. The Rev. Salesius Kraft, a former German artilleryman in World War I, was unloading stones from a truck when a stone slipped and crushed his chest. He is buried outside the mission.

“It is ironic, isn’t it, that the church is dedicated to U.S. veterans killed in action. Kraft was on the opposite side of the battle. He joined the Franciscans after the war and came to work on the mission,” Herbst said.

Braun returned to the Army during World War II, serving as a chaplain in the Pacific. He was taken captive by the Japanese and survived the Bataan Death March before returning to Mescalero.

Shortly after World War II, he was transferred to Phoenix, where he died at age 95 in a nursing home in March 1983.

He is buried in the mission sanctuary near the altar.

The church windows were boarded up until 1961 when rosy pink stained glass decorated with large gold crosses were installed. Since then, the windows have been restored or replaced. One is broken now and boarded up again.

The center arch has been reinforced, a small chapel was added, and 10 years ago the tiles were torn up to put in a radiant heating system that Herbst complains still doesn’t work correctly. Six large propane heaters now line the pews.

Art has been added over the years, including Stations of the Cross made in the Philippines. Shrines to the only American Indian candidate for sainthood, Kateri Tekakwitha, have been installed. A long list of names of Mescalero and Chiracahua Apache veterans has been framed and hung: 116 served as U.S. Army cavalry scouts, 10 served in World War I, 90 in World War II, more than 50 in Korea and more than 50 in Vietnam.

“A bright star,” visitor Marti Warn of Tucson, Ariz., wrote in the guest book in the sanctuary.