On March 4, 1992, Antonine Tibesar, O.F.M., died in San Antonio, Texas, of a heart attack. During his stewardship the Academy of American Franciscan History, which he directed from 1954 to 1963 and 1970 to 1978, undertook a publication program that resulted in some 38 volumes on the history of Latin America and the U.S. Southwest. He taught at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., from 1948 to 1974— plus the ensuing decade as an emeritus—and edited The Americas from 1970 to 1988. He steered this journal toward an emphasis on social and intellectual history and inaugurated “archival notes” in each issue to publicize little-known depositories. He also edited the Latin American section of the New Catholic Encyclopedia. Since 1990 he had lived in retirement at the parish of Our Lady of the Angels in San Antonio.
Antonine Tibesar combined scholarship and historical insight with a keen interest in the indigenous populations and the history of the Franciscan missions in Peru. Born in Quincy, Illinois, he entered the Franciscan order in Hinsdale, Illinois, and pursued graduate studies at the Catholic University of America, receiving a Ph.D. in 1950. He went to Peru as a graduate student in the 1940s and was befriended by several Peruvian scholars, including Jorge Basadre and Raúl Porras Barrenechea. Fr. Tibesar s research in the archives of the Convent of San Francisco and in Rome produced his pathbreaking book Franciscan Beginnings in Colonial Peru (1953). He maintained a lifelong scholarly interest in the injustices perpetuated by the alternativa, a topic that made him less than popular with some members of the clergy. Tibesar wrote and edited numerous books and articles on the Franciscans, Peru, and the Catholic church. Last year he sent to Lima, for publication by the Universidad Católica, an annotated edition of the Jerónimo Oré catechism, which, he asserted, was “based on the early one of the 1590s … the handwritten one by the friars of Cusco.”
During Fr. Tibesar’s tenure at the Academy of American Franciscan History, this center for historians and archivists flourished in a Spanish-style stucco house in Potomac, Maryland. For many years it served as a haven for Iberian and Latin American intellectuals and Franciscan friars who came to the United States to study history. Franciscan friar-scholars Lino Gómez Canedo and Francisco Morales spent intermittent years there. In addition, during Fr. Tibesar’s directorship the academy honored distinguished intellectuals—Gabriela Mistral, Howard F. Cline, Miguel León-Portilla, and Richard Greenleaf, among many others—with its prestigious Junípero Serra Prize.
Fr. Tibesar edited the four-volume Writings of Junípero Serra (1955-1966), Junípero Serra and the Northwestern Mexican Frontier (1985), and La conquista franciscana del Alto Ucayali (1981), among other works. Through Canedo s and Tibesar’s efforts, the academy assembled an important library of books, periodicals, and microfilm documenting the history of Franciscans in the Americas; microfilm of colonial manuscripts copied in archives on both sides of the Atlantic; and a valuable collection of works about northern Mexican and southwestern U.S. indigenous groups and languages. Researchers from the United States and abroad were welcome to use these holdings. In 1989 the academy and its library were transferred to the Franciscan School of Theology in Berkeley.
Antonine Tibesar’s ties to the Library of Congress dated back to the late 1930s. He was a close friend of David Rubio, the library’s first specialist in Hispanic culture (1931–1942), and of Howard F. Cline, director of the Hispanic Foundation (now Hispanic Division) from 1952 to 1971. While on a research grant from the Hispanic Foundation, Tibesar copied for the library documents on colonial church history from the Archivio Segreto in the Vatican.
The Spanish government bestowed on him the Fray Junípero Serra Medal in 1985 and the Order of Isabel la Católica in 1987. A legend in Peru, Fr. Tibesar traveled throughout the sierra by bus. Even in his later years, suffering from emphysema, he continued to do research in the country he so loved. Fr. Tibesar was thoroughly devoted to colonial history, the Franciscans, and Peru. Having known him and learned from him was a privilege for many of us.
