Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
My husband, a teacher of American History at a middle school, was looking for novel he could assign his eighth graders to read that told a part of the American story. He already has them read E. L. Doctorow’s The March about the civil war, and Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of an American Slave. For his world history class he has them read Siddartha and Tale of Two Cities. He was thinking there might be a appropriate novel of the gilded age, but neither Washington Square or The House of Mirth really fit the bill. Another possibility was a novel dealing with westward expansion, or the immigrant experience of the nineteenth century and we thought of this novel, as well as Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, which I read a few weeks ago.
Cather published Death Comes for the Archbishop in 1927, her ninth novel. She would write three more before her death in 1947. She had earned the Pulitzer prize for her 1922 novel of the First World War, One of Ours. She had become a respected and popular writer, although sometimes characterized by her critics as conservative both in her writing style and politics. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse was published the same year as Death Comes for the Archbishop. Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises was the year before, The Great Gatsby the year before that.
Death Comes for the Archbishop begins in 1850 or so. It tells the story of a French Priest, Jean Latour, sent by the church to become the Bishop of the territory of New Mexico with a new Diocesan seat at Santa Fe. He brings with him a friend from his seminary days back in Clermont, France, a priest named Joseph Valliant, who will serve officially as Vicar, but also as a companion, and helper in the work. The two men had previously worked as missionaries together in Ohio and Indiana. The territory had recently switched control from the Mexican government to the U.S. following the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). The church felt the northern part of the large diocese centered at Durango, in Mexico, now needed to be split off, following the political alignment of the new country. The inhabitants are mostly Mexican and native Americans. The land is undeveloped. Travel across the desert is by horse or mule.
The novel follows the priest’s lives from arrival in New Mexico to their deaths, 40 some years later, but is told not as a continuous narrative but as a series of episodes. The novel is divided into nine chapters with titles like “missionary journeys” preceded by a Prologue set in Rome with the cardinals discussing the need for a Bishop in Santa Fe, and who to send. The last chapter has the same title as the novel, “Death Come for the Archbishop.” But it’s really a collection of stories, like the thousand and one nights, where the stories could be given titles such as, “the tale of the pueblo in the sky”, or “the tale of the abused woman and the narrow escape” or “the tale of the lustful priest and the miserly priest” or “the tale of the proud widow who would rather lose a fortune than reveal her true age.” The stories feature Vailiant equally with Latour, sometimes together, sometimes alone. We also get the story of Juan Diego and the Virgin of Guadalupe, told to Father Latour by a visiting priest who had made a trip to the shrine. The explorer Kit Carson appears as a character in a few of the stories. There’s story toward the end concerning the missionary in California, Junipero Serra, who while traveling through the desert spends the night with a mysterious family, father, wife and young son, holding a lamb, who disappear the following day and are revealed to have been the holy family.
Religion is treated respectfully in the novel. Latour and Vaillant are pious and honor their vows, and they are good at their work of administering the church, disciplining other priests under their supervision, raising money, and caring for the people of their far-flung parish. I could recommend the novel to my ministry colleagues as models of how to abide patiently with a problem person until the right time to act, or how to artfully encourage a generous gift in a way that satisfies the giver as well as benefitting the church, or how to deal pastorally with a frightened, desperate woman. The two Priests are kind always, courageous when they need to be. They bear much hardship, but also recognize the blessing and privilege of a life of service to an ideal they find worthy. Having just read Search, which I also recommend but as a cautionary tale for the way church work can go wrong, it was refreshing to read this novel about church work done well.
Cather based her novel on the true life Bishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy. Many of the details in the novel are true to Lamy’s life, from his birth in France to the name of the seminary he attended and so on. Lamy had been a missionary in Ohio. He came to Santa Fe in 1851. I don’t know of any real life counterpart to Latour’s friend Valliant. One of the stories is of Latour’s hope to build a cathedral in Santa Fe. Over time he raises the money and becomes even more excited and determined when he chances upon a location outside Santa Fe where he can quarry the stone of exactly the special gold color he wants for his building. And in truth, the stone for the actual Santa Fe cathedral does comes from this site, now called “Lamy” after the actual Bishop. Lamy is buried at the Santa Fe cathedral and a bronze statue of him stands in front.
As a teenager, when I first tried to read this novel, I supposed I imagined Death Comes for the Archbishop would be a crime thriller like an Agatha Christie mystery. I was disappointed, and didn’t get very far. Nor is the novel the theological meditation on mortality you might expect. The death scene comes only at the end and is told as quietly and simply as is the rest of the novel. There is no character of death that comes to meet the Archbishop. Latour fades away, lost in memories and surrounded by friends. The actual moment of death, Cather doesn’t even describe.