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The church of San Xavier del Bac, “The White Dove of the Desert”, was founded by the Spanish Jesuit missionary Eusebio Francisco Kino in 1700. Named in honor of the saint known as “The Apostle of the Indies”, it remains an active Catholic church for the largely Native American congregation it serves nine miles south of Tucson. The church’s carved frontispiece and ornate buttressed towers reflected contemporary Spanish Baroque design, though their detailing was necessarily coarsened by the limited materials and skilled labor available to the builders. This naive execution of Spanish prototypes was typical of mission churches throughout the Americas, and was one of the traits that later proponents of the Mission Revival found most endearing.
Douglas Keister