Cacique: A Novel of Florida’s Heroic Mission History

by Bishop Robert Baker

with Tony Sands

St. Catherine of Siena Press, 2006

288 pages, $14.99

To order: (877) 484-1600

www.theobooks.org

This is fine Catholic historical fiction — a well-told story about a fascinating, often neglected period of American history that reveals the glory of the Church and her mission as well as the heroism and failures of human beings.

Telling of the clash of cultures that occurred when Spaniards set up military settlements and religious missions in Florida, the tale has well-developed characters, dramatic conflicts, heart-racing action, great feats of charity, sad acts of depravity and, most of all, moving examples of the extraordinary power of God in extraordinary circumstances.

Written by the bishop of Charleston, S.C., the book also serves an important pastoral purpose. The story of the Spanish missions is designed to instill pride in today’s Catholics and inspire them to greater love and zeal for the faith. This is especially important as the Church in the United States becomes more Hispanic.

Cacique (pronounced “ca-SEE-kay”) was the Indian word for chieftain. The novel not only tells the success and setbacks of the Franciscan missions in Florida, but it also follows the lives of the caciques of the Potano people over the course of a century, beginning in 1608. The underlying theme is that people of different races and traditions need not destroy one another. They share a common humanity that is free to respond with goodness to the sacred nature of the other, with guidance from the saving truths of the Catholic faith.

The action through most of the book is told from the perspective of Fray Tomas, a strong, youthful, idealistic friar whose boldness forges the foundation of a mission in the heart of Potano territory. He saves a baby in the wilderness, who turns out to be heir to the title cacique, though born of an illicit relationship between an Indian mother and a Spanish father. The message is that the blood and the fates of the two peoples are mixed, both in flesh and spirit, as they are challenged to see God as their common Father.

Readers familiar with Death Comes to the Archbishop, Willa Cather’s classic about Spanish missionary activity in the Southwest, will find this book a geographical complement. If nothing else, Bishop Baker’s story will open the eyes of readers who think that Christian settlement in the United States began with English Protestants.

The Spanish roots of this country’s Christianization are too easily passed over even in Catholic classrooms by texts and teachers anxious to get to the more familiar stories of John Smith and Pocahontas, the Pilgrims and Thanksgiving. What many do know of the Spanish presence in the New World is often summed up in the awful images of “conquistadores” and the naïve search for the Fountain of Youth. Although there is truth to these images, they tell only a narrow story of a vastly complex era.

Far from pursuing a strategy of systematic annihilation, the Spanish sought to educate, assimilate and convert the native peoples. The missions set up by the Franciscans under the Spanish crown were testaments to the respect shown the natives. As fellow human beings created by God, they were worthy of receiving the Christian faith, at great expense of Spanish gold and blood.

This is the heroic story Bishop Baker, with depth and insight, seeks to bring to light.

Stephen Vincent writes from

Wallingford, Connecticut.