Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.  

DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP by Willa Cather (first published in 1927)

 

            It is not my intention to review all of the novels of Willa Cather. As you might have seen, I have reviewed two of her earlier novels, O Pioneers and her best known novel My Antonia. She wrote a total of 13 novels not to mention her many short stories. I have decided to review only two more of her novels… because they are neatly on my shelves. She was always interested in part of the southern parts of the United States, including Nebraska and often near to Mexico, some of which had been taken over by the U.S.A. illegally or otherwise. Her novel Death Comes For The Archbishop surprised some of her readers. First, she grew up in a Baptist family but they were not really interested in religion. Later they became Episcopalians, but with the same attitude. So when Death Comes For The Archbishop came, some Catholics thought she had become a Catholic as the novel is about an almost saintly Catholic priest. They wrote letters to her, asking if she had joined their faith. She politely said she had not, but she said she admired much about the Catholic faith. And she also made it clear that Death Comes For The Archbishop was an historical novel. It was based on the life of a real priest.

Death Comes For The Archbishop begins with a prologue in Rome in 1848 in which three cardinals are aware that the United States have taken over New Mexico. They discuss which priest should go as the leader of the missionary to look after Mexican Catholics. They choose the priest Fr. Jean Marie Latour. [This is a fictious name. The priest’s name was Jean-Baptiste Lamy…. But the novel follows his life carefully]  He is French, a Bishop and a Jesuit – in other words an erudite scholar and able to speak a number of languages. So we plunge into Fr. Jean Marie Latour’s life. In 1851 he is in New Mexico. It is grim and hot when going from town to town and he has to see the Bishop of Durango who is old and a little lax in his work. Latour teaches families who want to have their children baptised and also to get married as most had their children out of wedlock. Latour is given help with another French priest, Father Vaillant, who happens to be a very good cook and there is also Father Joseph. When the hot Mexican sun beats down on them they eat when they can. It is nearly Christmas. Mexicans are always interested in Christmas and come to mass, but they are very rowdy during mass. No matter. Latour sees it as the will of God. And in a chapter called A Bell and a Miracle, Bishop Jean Marie Latour understands the importance for the Mexicans of the miracle of Our Lady of Guadeloupe. The bishop says  “One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love.  I do not see you as you really are, Joseph:  I see you through my affection for you.  The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.”

Father Vaillant says Mass to a respectable congregation…but they do not let him baptise their children; Latour has to do it. Often Latour has to go to Albuquerque, to see how a church is being built. In his journeys he runs into some rough and violent people. Latour and Joseph, going to Santa Cruz near the wide valley of the Rio Grande, they meet an American thug who clearly wants to steal whatever they have. They steer clear of him but they learn that his wife is regularly beaten. It is at this point we hear that Kit Carson [a real person and a guider] rescues the mistreated woman; and the thug is finally put to death as he has often killed travellers.

 

  Some years go by. Latour sets up a school for girls so they can read. Latour has to deal with his Superior :  “So far, Bishop Latour had been mainly employed on business that took him far away from his Vicarate.  His great diocese was still an unimaginable mystery to him. He was eager to be abroad in it, to know his people; to escape for a little from the cares of building and founding, and to go westward among the old isolated Indian missions:  Santo Domingo, breeder of horses;  Isleta, whitened with gypsum;  Laguna, of wide pastures;  and, finally, could-set Acoma.”

Latour is aware that many Spanish priests are lazy and do not do what they should be doing, often taking women as their concubines. Latour comes to Padre Martinez. He is a priest who can present the Mass perfectly but he is more interested in money than in enlightening his congregation and he keeps a concubine as well as doing heavy drinking. Father Latour reminds him that he is now in New Mexico, a part of the United States, and can no longer behave as he used to do…. But Latour has to leave Padre Martinez alone as he is called back to a conference in Rome. As it happens, Martinez dies when Latour is away. The new priest who takes over had heard Martinez’s confession and he knew where there was all the money that Martinez had stolen. Earlier in the novel, Father Latour had heard a legend about a Spanish priest who got drunk and had killed a boy who had dropped some food… and seeing this, the Indians killed the priest.

In wild places Jacinto, an Indian, is not only a good guide for Father Latour, but he is very thoughtful and tells much of the nature of the land. “This mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plane, plateau.  The country was still waiting to be made into a landscape. Ever afterward the Bishop remembered his first ride to Acoma as his introduction to the mesa country.  One thing which struck him at once was that every mesa was duplicated by a cloud mesa, like a reflection, which lay motionless above it, or moved slowly up from behind it.  These cloud formations seemed to be always there, however hot and blue the sky.  Sometimes they were flat terraces, ledges of vapour, sometimes they were dome-shaped, or fantastic, like the tops of silvery pagodas, rising one above another, as if an Oriental city lay directly behind the rock.  The great tables of granite set down in an empty plain were inconceivable without their attendant clouds, which were a part of them, as the smoke is part of the censer, or the foam of the wave.”

Latour did say Mass to Apache people and other tribes, but often he went away thinking they had not understood him. With an Indian guide, Latour later found his way to a huge cavern which seemed to be a place where Indians held their own sacred ceremonies…. And for a while he thought that this was also a sacred place.

Again time goes by. By this stage, the U.S.A. is well on the way to taking over New Mexico and Arizona. “By the Gladsden Purchase, executed three years after Father Latour came to Santa Fe, the United States took over from Mexico a great territory which now forms southern New Mexico and Arizona.”

  Bishop Jean Marie Latour, now on his way to being an Archbishop, tells his younger priests that they must make many changes under a new country. But some American things were obnoxious. Mexico had banned slavery; but in some parts of the U.S.A. some Americans still had slaves. Latour helped an old slaved woman to be freed from her masters.

In his later years, Latour came to know very well the Navajo people, often spoke with them, and found them to be very pacifistic, quite un-like the more war-like Apache people. Towards of the end of his life, when he was an Archbishop, Latour had to deal with young men who were going to a gold-rush and he made two priest go with them to make sure they were not ruined by drink and other sins. Latour also found other priests to build a church in Denver. He was ever concerned for the way the Navajo and Apache people were having their lands being taken. Says Willa Cather : “For many years Father Latour used to wonder if there would ever be an end to the Indian wars while there was one Navajo or Apache left alive.  Too many traders and manufacturers made a rich profit out of that warfare;  a political machine and immense capital were employed to keep it going.”

            After reading Death Comes For The Archbishop, I found this novel to be more chronical than novel. Willa Cather is giving us history based on a real person, Jean-Baptiste Lamy, put together from events she had researched carefully. As for the title, it is typical of her to come up with Death Comes For The Archbishop. It might make people think that something strange had happened to the Archbishop, but in fact it was an ordinary death.