MY FAVORITE PRIEST

Consecrating the earth
By Stephanie Block

n October 13, 1999. A great Jesuit died today. His rooms in Santa Fe are crammed with the memorabilia of an incredibly rich life. A cougar head sits on one end of the couch and an elk head on the other, two ferocious bookends supporting stacks of books and papers in a variety of languages, pertinent passages underlined in red and paper-clipped to mark the place where their reader might one day return. The contents of the nichos in the adobe walls bear witness to not only their departed owner’s deep faith but also his broad travels.

The man who moved among these perishable goods was 86. Years of arthritis were fought with daily hikes in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. A killer cancer—until the very last days—was denied any quarter. This disease might hurt and it might tire, but Father had sermons to prepare, visitors to counsel, and the driving need to stay abreast of a world of sin. The great virtue here was stubborn perseverance. It had been used to discipline a strong intellect and to exercise the frail flesh for all his life.

And what a life!

No limp proponents of a “sacred earth theology,” Jesuits of the old school went about the bold business of conquering the earth for Christ. The work took them anywhere a human being could bully his way and lay down roots. Amazingly, in the case of Reverend Anderson Bakewell, S.J., those disparate corners, the world’s extremes of hot and cold, dry and wet, poor and rich, powerful and weak, were ministered to by a single individual.

His curriculum vitae reads like an adventure novel. He had advanced degrees in astronomy, mathematics and philosophy but was no armchair scholar. Before acceptance into the Society of Jesus, Bakewell lived the life of an honest-to-goodness Indiana Jones, scouring South America for living specimens of venomous reptiles, exotic mammals and rare flora. His name even serves to identify one type of Mexican snake: Leptotyphlops bakewelli.

Bakewell was on the first expedition to reach Colombia’s Pico Cristobal Colon summit and mapped the ice peaks and glaciers of the Canadian Saint Elias Mountains. He trained mountain troops in Alaska for the United States’ war effort in 1941 and pioneered the use of B-18 bombers to parachute expedition supplies onto glaciers. Later, he turned these same parachutes into vestments.

Father Bakewell served for seven years in India, struggling against an oppressive climate and primitive conditions. His parish church “was in the heart of the forest, across a river (no bridges) and a seven mile walk from the isolated railway station at Manoharpur” (Bakewell, Curriculum Vitae, November 1993). He labored among the aboriginal people of the Chota Nagpur plateau, administering the Sacraments and assisting at a small clinic during the annual monsoons.

If this weren’t adventure enough, Father’s pastoral service in India was punctuated by a number of scientific expeditions. One, in the company of Dr. John B. Auden (brother of poet W. H. Auden), was the first climb of Mount Everest from the South, through Nepal. The 30-day mission brought back a complete photographic record of the climb, which is preserved in the Archives at Rome, and eventually led to the founding of a mission school in Nepal.

Another expedition required penetrating the Goelkera jungle for the purposes of retrieving the lost body of a British pilot and to open up pagan territory for the Church. Yet another foray was necessitated by the attack of a village child by an Indian Sloth Bear. Father led a safari to destroy the creature, but by late afternoon had only been able to wound it and to push it further into the “sal” jungle. Concerned that it would remain a menace to the village, Father persisted in the hunt, only to enrage the beast, which turned, charged, and mauled Father before its death.

In the mid-fifties, Fr. Bakewell returned to the United States and spent the next 12 years in Washington, D.C., working with members of the Diplomatic Corps, sometimes acting as confessor to the Apostolic Delegation. In the 1960s, as a member of the Explorer’s Club and in his capacity as a priest, Fr. Anderson Bakewell was invited to participate in the Rockwell Polar Flight, the first flight around the world crossing over both North and South Poles. The mission had a number of scientific objectives, but Father’s deeper mission was to bless the aircraft and crew, and to carry a crucifix over both Poles.

At 90° South, looking down over the immense Antarctic tundra, Father prayed that the Antarctica might be used only for peaceful purposes, and that mankind might “live together as brothers under the rule of the most Sacred heart . . .”

There was a consciousness that this business of carrying the good news to all men required actively hunting out the inhospitable and remote and opening it up to God’s graces. For the next ten years, Father Bakewell labored in Alaska, ministering to a 35,000-mile square parish, traveling by bush plane, pack train, riverboat, and snowshoes.

Fr. Bakewell’s final assignment was in New Mexico, as chaplain of the Carmelite Monastery of Santa Fe. At an age when most men have retired, Father was still restlessly roaming the local Sangre de Cristo Mountains with indefatigable feet. He was still wandering through Church politics with an agile mind. Father advised scores of students from the neighboring St. John’s College and mentored a dozen young men along the road to the religious life.

Into these far corners — into lush, tropical forest and onto arctic glaciers, into urbane ports of worldly power and governance and into the pure, dry heat of the desert — this holy Catholic priest carried the sacraments and the Crucifix around the world, literally consecrating the earth to the Lord Jesus Christ.

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