The White Dove of the Desert

Rising from the flat scrubland of the Sonoran Desert, Mission San Xavier del Bac has been called the White Dove of the Desert, and the name fits. Its white lime plaster walls catch the desert light with a force that stops drivers on the road below. What you're looking at is one of the finest examples of Spanish colonial baroque architecture anywhere in North America, and it has been in continuous use as a house of worship for more than two hundred years.

The story begins in sixteen ninety-two, when the Jesuit missionary Father Eusebio Francisco Kino first visited the Tohono O'odham village the people called Wa:k, a word that means water, referring to the spring-fed flow of the Santa Cruz River. Kino established a mission here and the O'odham embraced it, blending their own spiritual traditions with Catholic practice in ways that continue to this day.

The present church was built between seventeen eighty-three and seventeen ninety-seven by Franciscan fathers, after Spain expelled the Jesuits and Franciscans inherited the mission network. The O'odham themselves provided the labor, working under the direction of the architect traditionally named as Ignacio Gaona. Financed by a seven-thousand-peso loan from a Sonoran rancher, the community raised an intricate structure of fired brick, lime mortar, and hand-carved volcanic stone, with interior murals, statues, and decorative plasterwork of extraordinary richness.

Look carefully at the two towers flanking the facade. One is crowned with a dome and lantern. The other is conspicuously flat and unfinished. No one knows exactly why. One common explanation is that the borrowed money ran short. A more colorful theory holds that the padres deliberately left it incomplete to avoid paying a completion tax to the Spanish Crown. A third story blames a fatal fall by a worker, after which his fellow laborers refused to return to the tower. The mystery has never been resolved.

The mission sits within the San Xavier District of the Tohono O'odham Nation and remains an active parish church. For the O'odham, it is not a ruin or a museum. It is a living place, as it has been for more than three centuries.