Last summer, during a vacation in Mexico City, I received a letter from Father Wyse inviting me to speak at this Annual Convocation of the Academy of American Franciscan History. The invitation did me great honor, and in view of the many courtesies extended to me by the Academy since its founding more than seven years ago, including election to corresponding membership, I also regarded it as a command. It gives me pleasure and satisfaction to participate once more in the academic exercises of the Academy and to renew association with old friends and comrades in the field of Franciscan studies. To Father Wyse, Father Wheeler and their associates I offer congratulations for their splendid contributions to historical scholarship relating to the Americas and best wishes for continued success in the enterprise to which they are dedicated.

Linguistic Science, like history, ethnology and epigraphy, is deeply indebted to the Franciscan missionaries who worked among the Maya Indians of Yucatan. About 1566 Fray Diego de Landa, later Bishop of Yucatan, not only wrote an ethnological treatise perhaps unique in the history of that science, but, as an outstanding contemporary epigrapher recently wrote: “Landa’s description of the calendar and his illustrations of day and month signs supplied a firm foundation on which to reconstruct Maya hieroglyphic writing; it is as close to a Rosetta Stone as we are ever likely to get.” Further development of our investigation of the Maya glyphs will in all probability be closely linked with our knowledge of the language.

In the long story of the Hispanicization of Central America, the civilizing role of the regular clergy plays a major part. The difficulties of their task cannot be overestimated. Laboring in harsh and alien lands, the friars faced the problem of teaching the Christian religion and European concepts of morality to men reared in ancient and powerful religious traditions of their own which permeated every aspect of their daily lives. The conversion and indoctrination of these pagan peoples required unremitting effort, often under conditions of extreme physical hardship and mental anguish. The general history of the heroic labors and achievement of the Religious Orders is well known. But it is not perhaps as widely realized how many active missionaries also found time for study and writing that resulted in a large body of literature covering a wide range of subject matter, from works on the native languages and culture inspired by the urgent needs of the missionary program to erudite theological treatises. This bibliography of the Franciscan writers who flourished in the Yucatan and Guatemala areas during the colonial period has been compiled in the hope that it may shed more light on the scope of the intellectual activities of the missionary religious and be useful as a reference tool for future research.

Back in 1916 the world was in the midst of World War I. When I graduated from high school in that year, the United States had not entered the great struggle yet. In the fall of 1917, I, registered in the University of Texas. There was as much, if not more, uneasiness and uncertainty among students as there is today. We were already in the war. No one knew how long it would last, nor when the draft call would come.

With the lightheartedness of youth I chose engineering. In high school I had been good in mathematics, and everybody had said, “You are cut out for an engineer.” Dean T. U. Taylor of the Engineering School agreed, and I made a good record that first year. Engineering students in those days had to take public speaking and the public speaking teacher assured me the first day I came into his class that I would never make a public speaker. Time proved that if Dean Taylor was mistaken in his deduction as to my engineering vocation, the public speaking teacher was only half right.

Fray Lorenzo de Bienvenida was among the first and most noted of the founders of the Christian missions of Yucatan, a region whose conversion was almost exclusively entrusted to the Franciscan Order. The work of the friars has been fairly well studied, not only on the basis of the data supplied by the old chronicles, but also by modern research in the documentary sources preserved in the archives of America and Spain. This research has resulted in the publication of many documents and historical studies which contain important information on the Franciscan missions of Yucatan. Analysis of the information offered in these various documents and studies—although it is sometimes conflicting—enables us to reconstruct an acceptable account of the obscure period which coincides with the first decades of Franciscan activity in Yucatan.