Landa de Matamoros, Querétaro, façade detail

To each side of the choir loft window of the ornate façade of the mission church of San Francisco & Santo Domingo in Landa de Matamoros, Ágreda is appropriately coupled with the Scottish priest and Franciscan friar Duns Scotus (1265/6-1308). Some three centuries earlier Scotus had also espoused the immaculacy of the birth of the mother of Christ, through his concept of “preservative redemption”. Both figures are depicted hard at working authoring their texts beneath Franciscan insignias and just above a statue of the Immaculate Conception herself in what is an overall splendid composition.

The church is one of five missions founded in the 1750s high up in the Sierra Gorda of Querétaro by the so-called “fernandinos”, Franciscan friars from the evangelizing college of San Fernando in Mexico City. Headed by future famed California evangelizer Junípero Serra (1713-1784), the missions were conceived as a final attempt to convert the especially resistant Pame indigenous, but were secularized only a couple of decades later. Since the Dominicans in fact disavowed the belief in the immaculacy of Mother Mary’s birth, it is of interest that its Franciscan
Second tier of church façade, including Duns Scotus (left) and the Immaculate Conception (below center):