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The Reverend Stafford Poole, C.M., is a retired
Roman Catholic priest of the Congregation of the
Mission (Vincentian Community) and a full-time
research historian. His area of specialization
is colonial Mexico, particularly the Church in
the sixteenth century.
Father Poole was born in Oxnard,
California, on March 6, 1930, into a family of
English and Northern Irish background. His
parents were Beatrice Hessie Smith and Joseph
Outhwaite Poole, Sr. He grew up in North
Hollywood, where he attended both public and
parochial grammar schools. The latter was Saint
Charles where his schoolmates included Bing
Crosby's sons and the future Cardinal Roger
Mahony. His high school years were spent at the
Los Angeles College. Upon graduation in 1947 he
joined the Vincentian Community and spent his
seminary years at Saint Mary's of the Barrens,
the house of formation in Perryville, MO. He
took his vows in 1949 and was ordained to the
priesthood on May 27, 1956. In 1952 he was
granted a B.A. in philosophy.
After ordination he served at
Cardinal Glennon College, the college seminary
of the archdiocese of Saint Louis, where he was
dean of students for four years. In 1964 he was
assigned to Saint Mary's in Perryville until
1971. In the latter year he joined the faculty
of Saint John's Seminary College in Camarillo,
CA, part of the seminary system of the
archdiocese of Los Angeles. He served as
president-rector of Saint John's from 1980 until
1984, when he resigned in a disagreement with
the archdiocese over the governmental structure
of the college seminary. In 1990 he retired
from active teaching and became archivist for
the western province of the Vincentian
Community.
In February of 1958 Father Poole
received his M.A. in Spanish literature from
Saint Louis University. The title of his thesis
was "The Auto de Repelón of Juan del Encina: A
Translation and Linguistic Commentary." He then
began work on his doctorate in history, a task
that was made easier by the fact that the
director of the department was Father John
Francis Bannon, S.J. His brother, Jim Bannon,
was a well-known radio announcer in Los Angeles
and a B-movie actor, as well as a parishioner at
Saint Charles. In the aftermath of World War II
Father Bannon would visit him during the
summer. Father Poole would be his altar boy
when Father Bannon celebrated early morning
Mass. Father Bannon had a photographic memory
for names and faces, and, remembering his former
altar server, smoothed the way for him.
Father Poole's major was United
States history and the minor Modern Europe. His
original intention was to write a dissertation
on slaveholding by Catholic institutions in
Missouri. As it happened, another Jesuit,
Father Ernest J. Burrus, was circling the globe
hunting for Jesuit sources which he
microfilmed. At the Bancroft Library at the
University of California in Berkeley, he
rediscovered four volumes of the working papers
of the first three Mexican Provincial Councils
(1555, 1565, 1585), which had been thought
lost. He immediately contacted Father Bannon to
assign a graduate student to work on them.
Thus, overnight, Father Poole became a
specialist in Mexican colonial Church history,
an area for which he had no preparation
whatever. His dissertation was titled, "The
Indian Problem in the Third Mexican Provincial
Council, 1585." He received his Ph.D. in June
1961.
In 1964 Father Poole distilled his
reactions to seminary teaching in an article
"Tomorrow's Seminaries," which appeared in the
Jesuit journal America. Within days he
received calls from two publishers to write a
book on the subject. The result was Seminary
in Crisis, published by the American branch
of the German firm Herder and Herder (1965). He
published more articles on this and related
subjects in America, Commonweal,
and other Catholic journals. He served as
Associate Research Director, Center for Applied
Research in the Apostolate (CARA), in 1965,
helping to survey American Catholic seminaries.
In 1968-1969 he was a consulter to the American
Bishops' Committee on Priestly Formation. He
served on the editorial board for history of
Roman Catholic Theological Education in the
United States, sponsored by the Cushwa Center
for the Study of American Catholicism, Notre
Dame, and the Lilley Endowment (1985-1988). In
1981 and 1982 he was respectively vice-president
and president of the Midwestern Association of
College Seminaries.
In the field of Mexican history
Father Poole's first interest was the Third
Mexican Council. He wrote several articles on
this topic for the Franciscan journal The
Americas and for the Hispanic American
Historical Review. In the late 1960s the
late historian Lewis Hanke asked him to
translate Bartolomé de las Casas's Apologia,
a Latin work in defense of the Indians delivered
at the Valladolid dispute of 1550-1551. This
was published in 1974 by Northern Illinois
University Press. A second edition appeared in
1992 and is still in print. He also researched
the life of Pedro Moya de Contreras, the third
Archbishop of Mexico, who had convoked and
presided at the Third Mexican Council. This
biography was published by the University of
California Press in 1987. A second, revised
edition is currently being prepared for
publication by the University of Oklahoma Press,
and a Spanish translation by the Colegio de
Michoacán, Mexico. His research into the
archbishop's life caused him to be interested in
that of the prelate's mentor, Juan de Ovando.
In 2004 the University of Oklahoma Press
published the biography Juan de Ovando:
Governing the Spanish Empire in the Reign of
Philip II.
In the 1970s Father Poole became
interested in the controversy surrounding the
devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico. It
was not until after his retirement from
teaching, however, that he was able to pursue
this. In 1990, as part of his preparation he
began the study of Nahuatl (sixteenth-century
Aztec) with Professor James Lockhart at UCLA.
The first work to appear was Our Lady of
Guadalupe: The Origins and sources of a Mexican
National Symbol, 1531-1794, followed by a
translation of the Huei tlamahuiçoltica
(jointly with Professor Lockhart and Professor
Lisa Sousa, 1998), and The Guadalupan
Controversies in Mexico (2006). Father
Poole was an active participant in the campaign
to stop, or at least slow, the canonization of
Juan Diego, the visionary of the Guadalupe
tradition. The campaign failed. In January
2005 he gave a history of it in a luncheon
lecture of the Conference on Latin American
History, titled "History vs. Juan Diego." This
was published in The Americas (July
2005).
Father Poole also had a
long-standing interest in the history of the
Vincentian Community. In 1974 he privately
published A History of the Congregation of
the Mission, 1625-1843, the first
comprehensive history of the community. In 1975
he helped to found the Group International
d'Études Vincentiennes, which was reorganized as
the Secretariat International d'Études
Vincentiennes in 1981. He also was a founder
member of the Vincentian Studies Institute and
was editor of its journal, Vincentian
Heritage, from 1986 to 1987. In 2006 the
Vincentian Studies Institute awarded him the
Pierre Coste prize for his contributions to
Vincentian history. He returned to an earlier
interest when in 1986, together with Douglas
Slawson, he published Church and Slave in
Perry County, Missouri, 1818-1860.
Father Poole has lectured in the
Republic of Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands,
Vatican City, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Chile,
and Australia. He is a diplomate of the
National Academy of History of Venezuela, and a
distinguished guest of the city of San Cristóbal
de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico. He is a
fifty-year life member of the American
Historical Association and also belongs to the
American Catholic Historical Association, the
American Society for Ethnohistory, the
Conference on Latin American History, and is a
member of the executive committee of the Rocky
Mountain Council for Latin American Studies.
Since 2003 he has been included in Who's Who
in America. In March 2009, the Rocky
Mountain Conference for Latin American Studies
had a special session dedicated to him and his
work. He has a reading knowledge Latin,
Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and
Nahuatl.
Father Poole lives at the Amat
Residence in Los Angeles, where he continues his
historical studies.
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