When he arrived in San Antonio in the summer of 1932 to become the first Jesuit pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church, Father Carmelo A. Tranchese must have hoped it would be his last post.
After spending two or three years ministering to parishioners of the West Side church, Tranchese, who had taught physics and literature at the Jesuit College of Naples in his native Italy, hoped to devote himself to what he really wanted to do: conduct scientific research, maybe in astronomy.
“But in 1932 came the assignment that was to occupy his most creative years and bring him national fame: He was sent to Guadalupe Church, where for 22 years he was the apostle of the poor,’’ according to a history of Tranchese published in the Woodstock Letters, a publication of the Society of Jesus named after Woodstock College, a Jesuit seminary in Maryland.
The letters, published from 1872 until 1969, offer historical perspective on work done by Jesuits in North and South America.
Tranchese had seen poverty in previous stints in churches in El Paso; San Jose, California; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Colorado but the wretched conditions he found on the West Side must have been shattering.
Residents of the neighborhood were among the poorest in San Antonio, whose Mexican American population numbers at the time were second only to those for Los Angeles.
The majority of residents in what was known as the “Mexican Quarter’’ lived in small, dilapidated, overcrowded hovels that had once been stables. Few had indoor toilets or running water. There were no paved streets and when it rained, the roads flooded.
Cruelly, postcards of the era referred to the shacks as “Mexican mansions’’ and to their inhabitants as “happy Mexicans.’’
Victims of the terror and lawlessness that broke out during the 1910 Mexican Revolution, entire families fled across the U.S.-Mexico border with little more than the clothes on their back. By the thousands, they streamed into San Antonio and South Texas.
Illiterate and uneducated, the immigrants who could find work in San Antonio did menial labor or became pecan shellers, earning as little as $2 a week.
The priest also found that there was a shocking number of infant deaths and infectious diseases with high rates of tuberculosis, smallpox, typhus, diphtheria and typhoid fever.
That, along with Our Lady of Guadalupe’s debt and general indifference from the public and local authorities, were some of the challenges Tranchese faced in his first years at the parish.
A walkout by pecan shellers because their wages were to be reduced from 6 or 7 cents a pound to 5 or 6 cents led to a 37-day strike in 1938. Hundreds of protesters were arrested. Implementation of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act setting the minimum wage at 25 cents an hour led owners of the pecan shelling companies to replace workers with new machinery or close down.
Seeing thousands of people out of work and facing starvation, Tranchese began to seek donations of “stale bread or tortillas, vegetables on the verge of decay, and money,’’ note the Woodstock Letters.
According to the Jesuits, Mayor C.K. Quin ordered two squad cars and four policemen to help Tranchese collect the food.
A daily bread line was set up in the church yard for parishioners. Through the Catholic Relief Association, people received donated food and clothing.
In 1935, Tranchese founded La Voz de la Parroquia, a weekly newspaper in English and Spanish used to educate parishioners about health issues.
After Congress passed the Housing Act of 1937 that established the U.S. Housing Authority and provided funds for construction of public housing and clearing slums, Tranchese began a letter-writing campaign to officials in Washington to bring some of that money to San Antonio.
Those two goals — securing public housing for the poor and demolishing the slums — moved Tranchese to seek help wherever he could. He won a few allies: Maury Maverick, who represented Texas’ 20th District in the U.S. House of Representatives, and civil rights activist Alonso S. Perales.
In 1937, the City Council named Tranchese to serve on the newly-created San Antonio Housing Authority.
The Roosevelt administration approved funds for a housing project in San Antonio but then the U.S. Supreme Court declared national housing projects unconstitutional.
Eventually, the project resumed. But it nearly fell apart again when Nathan Strauss, head of the National Housing Authority, learned unscrupulous slum owners had extracted $1.2 million from SAHA for 30 acres of slum land.
Tranchese appealed to first lady Eleanor Roosevelt who got Strauss to continue the work and she even traveled to San Antonio to meet Tranchese and see for herself what was going on.
“The city and state regulate stables for horses and cows; why not regulate human habitations also,’’ Tranchese is said to have told Mrs. Roosevelt.
Between 1938 and 1941, Alazan Courts, Apache Courts’ extension to Alazan, Victoria Courts, Wheatley Courts and Lincoln Heights Courts were built by SAHA.
As a thank you for the president, Tranchese composed a poem in Latin.
“This poem has been written in the slums where I live, and where I try to help those who suffer,’’ the priest wrote Roosevelt, adding that he hoped the “modest tribute of admiration and gratitude come as a drop of balm to your heart.’’
Tranchese, who once admitted that he had been “put to do the work he least wanted,’’ continued working for the poor. In 1943, he helped establish the Guadalupe Community Center at 1801 W. Durango St., where people could receive medical attention, attend prenatal classes and obtain food and clothing.
In 1953, Tranchese had a nervous breakdown and was sent to the Jesuit Novitiate at Grand Coteau, Louisiana. He recovered and began helping students.
He would have celebrated his golden jubilee in the Society of Jesus in December 1956 but he had two separate heart attacks on July 13, 1956, and died that same day.
Julia Castellano-Hoyt, who met the priest when she was a child, said she would like to see Tranchese attain sainthood someday.
“He blessed our home in the Alazan-Apache Courts,’’ she recalled. “My recollection is that my father, who worked for Kelly, and mother thought a lot of him.”
A retired City of San Antonio employee, she still has a framed print of the Sacred Heart of Jesus signed by Tranchese.
“I treasure it because he did so much for San Antonio,’’ she said.
COMING FRIDAY: The curious doorway at Mission Espada.