|
Last Franciscan in early Texas relinquishes missions
On this day in 1830, José Antonio Díaz de León, the last Franciscan
missionary in prerepublic Texas, reluctantly complied with the Mexican
state government decree that missions be secularized--that is, turned
over to diocesan authorities. Díaz de León had been appointed ad interim
president of all the Texas missions in 1820, three years before the
Mexican government ordered their final secularization. Díaz de León
declined to comply without instructions from his superiors in Zacatecas,
the first in a series of delays that lasted seven years. Díaz de León
surrendered the San Antonio missions to the Diocese of Monterrey in
1824. In 1826 he was officially named president of the Texas missions.
But Anglo settlers wanted the mission properties, and in 1829 the town
of Goliad (formerly La Bahía) obtained a new decree to enforce
secularization. Díaz de León continued to resist, but on February 8,
1830, he finally surrendered the last remaining missions. The mission
lands, as he had expected, were soon made available to colonists. The
bishop of Monterrey assigned him a parish post in Nacogdoches. Díaz de
León was murdered on November 4, 1834. He was the thirty-first, and
last, Zacatecan missionary to die in Texas. In 1926 the German author
Robert Streit published a historical novel about Díaz de León; the work
remains untranslated.
- Links to Related Handbook of Texas Online Articles
- DIAZ DE LEON, JOSE ANTONIO
- FRANCISCANS
- SPANISH MISSIONS
- NUESTRA SENORA DEL REFUGIO MISSION
- SAN JOSE Y SAN MIGUEL DE AGUAYO MISSION
- COLLEGE OF NUESTRA SENORA DE GUADALUPE DE ZACATECAS
- Other Texas Day by Day Articles for This Date
- Violence presages end of notorious red-light district (1887)
- Brewster County exposes "dummy town" (1910)
|
