Glorious restoration.

• Author: Butler, Ron
• Position: San Xavier del Bac mission, Tucson, Arizona

Tucson, Arizona's famous mission, San Xavier del Bac, marks its two hundredth anniversary this year with the completion of a six-year, $2 million restoration. Numerous events celebrating the million's bicentennial are scheduled throughout the year, culminating with a special dinner and concert by Tucson native Linda Ronstadt in September.

The restoration began when a group of volunteers formed Patronato San Xavier (Patrons of San Xavier) and went about raising funds to bring the so-called White Dove of the Desert back to its original grandeur.

In continuous use since it was completed by Franciscans in 1797, the mission is unique. The elaborate, baroque decor of the domed, fifty-two-foot high interior has led some to call it the "Sistine Chapel of the United States." Rising in gleaming white from the desert floor, the mission was founded by Eusebio Francisco Kino, the Jesuit priest who brought Christianity and European farming methods to the Indians of Mexico and present-day U.S. Southwest. Kino's original church, which served as a visita for Spanish missionaries in northern Mexico, was never finished; before it was completed it is believed to have been destroyed by a Pima uprising in 1751. The present church, which includes numerous bricks from the original, was built by Franciscans between 1778 and 1797. They spared no expense or effort in creating the most beautiful and elaborate of the two dozen Kino missions that range from the Sea of Cortez to the Gila River in Arizona.

With no religious oil paintings to decorate church interiors, the frontier craftsmen painted directly on the walls using woodcut prints from bibles and prayer books as models. Working with whatever they had on hand -- pines, cottonwoods, vegetable pigments, wax rosin varnishes, and homemade brushes, they created magnificent murals and retablos, iconlike panels carved or painted on wood, in vermilion reds, Prussian blues, and sunbursts of gold, yellow, and silver. Today no other Spanish-period church in the U.S. has as much art of such quality in its very place of origin.

But until the recent restoration got under way, much of the...