Two weekends ago, Jonathan and I watched our friends John and Mari pledge their faithfulness to each other in a stucco-covered adobe church in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Congratulations, Mari and John! It was a beautiful Orthodox Christian wedding. The church itself is Antiochian Orthodox, one chain in the lush emblazoned tapestry of culture and faith that is Santa Fe.

I personally found it risible that Jonathan and I are Roman Catholic, and Santa Fe was formally founded in 1608 by Spanish Roman Catholics, and yet we came to this city specifically to witness a religious ceremony of a church that split apart from the Roman church in the Great Schism of 1054. After all, I had to look up the Schism in Wikipedia prior to writing this entry to make sure that I had it spelled correctly. Prior to witnessing this desert observance, I had never before been inside an Orthodox church.

At the same time, during my 48 hours in Santa Fe, I found myself as a tourist ruminating the footprints of my own religion on America's history.

I love reading about American history, but most of the history that I have studied has not been the history of Roman Catholics. Most of the American history classes that I took in junior high and high school mainly touched on East Coast American history up until about World War I. Beside from a few brief mentions of the Catholic settlers of Maryland and the discrimination faced by the mainly Catholic European immigrants in the early 20th century, most of the of the courses highlighted the struggles and triumphs of Protestants. When we learned about the French and Indian War, it was from the viewpoint of the Protestant British, not the French Catholics that they eventually defeated. The same thing with the Mexican War - I remember learning about the Texans' fight against their enemy, the Mexican Catholics led by the infamous Santa Anna. (Yes, I know, history is written by the victors.)

When I was a teenager, I read a lot of non-fiction and historical fiction about early American history, including books about the founding fathers and their early Presidents and their wives. I also loved such books as Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series. None of these books were about Roman Catholics.

On the day after John and Mari's wedding, Jonathan and I took one last drive around Santa Fe before we had to turn in the rental car and prepare for our train ride back home. We parked along the street outside of the Cathedral_Basilica_of_Saint_Francis_of_Assisi. We read the plaques on the church's grounds detailing the roles of strength and survival that the church's followers had played during centuries of New Mexican history, and the discrimination that they faced from their fellow Americans in Congress when New Mexico became part of the United States but was denied statehood in the mid-1800's.

I have found a great deal of inspiration from many of the stories of early American that I have read. I think that now would be a good time for me to expand my reading to include the Spanish influence on early America.