The Prettiest Little Church in Christendom

[We’re still traipsing around Mérida, Mexico and gawking at everything like toddlers. Hope you (still) like it]

The big square in Mérida has a lot of names. The Zocalo is the one we settled on. The big cathedral is there, fronting one side of the spacious park. It’s Franciscan, massive, and somewhat austere, inside and out. Just one city block away is the park everyone calls Hidalgo Park. The park’s official name changes every so often, bending to political winds, but Mérida is not a transient city, and when people call something a certain something, it sticks. A hidalgo is a form of aristocrat, although it’s the lowest form there is. There was some sort of club or gang or bowling team of hidalgos back in the day, and they used to hang around the park, and people started calling it after them.

It’s a nice park, with a statue of someone or other on a pedestal in the middle, and lots of shade and benches. Lively, day and night. But just one block further, there’s a wonder. Another church, pretty big, but no match for the scale of the nearby cathedral. The Iglesia de Jesus.

US Americans are unaccustomed to churches named after the big fella himself. Churches are named after saints and whatnot. But this church was built by the Jesuits, and they’ve got the original CEO of Catholic, Inc. embedded right in their name. Why not their church, too?

The exterior is the usual masonry affair. It looks bland, but it isn’t. When you get up close to it, just looking at the patterns of the stones that comprise the very thick walls is endlessly intriguing. A building built bit by bit. The larger stones came from a demolished Mayan temple of some sort (sorry, Kukulkan), and are fascinating in their own right. There are lots of fossils embedded in the stones. Seashells and little fishie skeletons. It’s marvelous.

We didn’t tarry in the Hidalgo Park, because there’s another park right on the other side of this church we couldn’t stay out of, day or night, because it’s the pleasantest place on the planet, day or night. I’ll bore you with that some other time. Let’s go in the church and impress your rods and cones and at least one hemisphere of your noggin first.

That would make a pretty sweet church, but that’s just a chapel. Churches like these are laid out in a cruciform shape. Bang a right off the nave (the long, straight section leading to the main altar), and you’ll sometimes find chapels like this one in one of the transepts.

You might think to yourself, “Now we’re getting somewhere. Now that’s an altar.” Sorry, nope. Another chapel in the other transept. Let’s see what’s in the apse:

Yeah, you can always tell the main altar. They got a stone corral to keep the priests in and the parishioners from cutting the line at communion. The last time I was in a Catholic church in the US, I thought it was a converted car dealership. I forget the name of it, but I think it was named after the patron saint of vinyl siding. There’s none of that in Mérida.

Looking back towards the front door, there’s a choir loft and a nicely decorated barrel vault over the nave.

And you just have to have a dome where the nave and the apse and the transepts meet, or the Franciscans will snicker at you. No one snickers at Jesuits and gets away with it.

Here’s a video of someone passing through the church. It’s easier to get a feel for the place when you’re moving through it. And yes, there really are mendicants with their hands out in front of the church, and yes, you damn well better believe I pressed some pesos into their hands. Unlike the US, there really was something wrong with them that didn’t involve a liquor license.

The streets really bustle outside. The city posts people on the corner who speak multiple languages, to help lost souls like ourselves. We met Mario twice out front there. He was as pleasant as all get-out. He was a college professor, and went to the gym more often than I do. Or you do. Or a football team does. His English was perfect, and he pointed us back to our digs in Barrio Santiago, because we’d been wandering and were disoriented.

I had no way of knowing if he was correct about the directions, but when Mario points, you go that way. The Mexican Techno Viking isn’t just listened to. He’s obeyed.

[To be continued. Thanks for reading and commenting and buying a book and contributing to the tip jar. It keeps this place going.]