Death Comes for the Archbishop

A young French bishop named Jean Marie Latour arrives in the newly acquired New Mexico Territory after the Mexican American War, tasked with building a Catholic diocese across a vast, unfamiliar landscape of desert, adobe missions, and communities that have practiced their own version of the faith for generations without much oversight from Rome. Cather follows Latour and his lifelong friend, the more emotional and physically robust Vicar Joseph Vaillant, across nearly forty years of that work, told less as a single continuous plot than as a sequence of loosely connected episodes, a dangerous winter journey, a confrontation with a corrupt local priest, the aftermath of the Navajo Long Walk, which Latour privately judges a wrong on the scale of slavery, the story of a tyrannical Spanish priest the people of Acoma Pueblo put to death generations before Latour ever arrived. Vaillant eventually leaves to become Colorado's first Catholic bishop and dies there, still working, before his old friend does. The novel closes on Latour's own death decades later in Santa Fe, an old man who has spent his whole adult life building something he will not fully see finished, at peace with exactly how much of it remains unfinished.

Cather borrows the flat, patient rhythm of a saint's legend rather than a conventional novel's rising and falling action, and the desert light, the smell of adobe, and the slow accumulation of decades give the book a texture closer to a series of connected paintings than to a story with a single climax. It reads slowly and rewards that pace, asking a reader to care about two men's quiet, largely uneventful devotion rather than about any single dramatic turn.

Cather based Latour and Vaillant closely on two real nineteenth century clergymen, Jean Baptiste Lamy and Joseph Machebeuf, and one of the novel's stranger threads follows a fictional cardinal's search for an El Greco painting a missionary priest had stolen generations earlier from his own family, a small mystery Cather drops into an otherwise unhurried book almost as an aside.