Lamy of Santa Fe

Paul Horgan's second Pulitzer winning book, a biography, follows Jean Baptiste Lamy from his birth in 1814 in Lempdes, France, through seminary training under the Sulpician Fathers and ordination in 1838, and into a decade of missionary work in Ohio before Pope Pius IX named him bishop of the newly created Apostolic Vicariate of New Mexico in 1850, territory the United States had only just acquired from Mexico. Horgan follows Lamy's arrival in Santa Fe in 1851 and the resistance he met from local Hispanic clergy, loyal for generations to the Bishop of Durango in Mexico, who did not welcome a French outsider sent to reform practices, including the widespread concubinage among local priests, that Lamy considered a betrayal of the church's discipline.

Horgan traces Lamy's decades building a diocese nearly from nothing across the vast New Mexico territory, establishing parishes and schools among Hispanic, Native American and growing Anglo populations, and directing construction of the Romanesque Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi and the Gothic Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, buildings that carried Lamy's French architectural taste into the desert Southwest. The vicariate became an archdiocese in 1875 with Lamy as its first archbishop, and Horgan follows him to his death in 1888, buried in the cathedral he had built.

Horgan writes with the same narrative gifts he brought to his fiction, and reading the biography means meeting the historical figure who, decades before Horgan's own book, had already become famous as the model for a bishop in Willa Cather's novel Death Comes for the Archbishop. It suits a reader who wants the documented history behind Cather's fictionalized priest, told with equal attention to the man's genuine achievement and the cultural friction his mission provoked.