There is something about the landscape of the American Southwest that seduces writers into superlatives. I’m thinking of Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour and Wallace Stegner and, yes, Willa Cather, as here in what I can only describe as a travelogue disguised as a fictionalized version of the life of Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy of Santa Fe.

The halcyon descriptions of the landscape are many.

About the middle of that afternoon Jacinto pointed out Laguna in the distance, lying apparently, in the midst of bright yellow waves of high sand dunes–yellow as ochre. As they approached, Father latour found these were petrified sand dunees; long waves of soft, gritty yellow rock, shining and bare except for a few lines of dark juniper that grew out of the weather cracks,–little trees, and very, very old. At the foot of this sweep of rock waves was the blue lake, a stone basin full of water, from which the pueblo took its name…

…The sun had set now, the yellow rocks were turning, gray, down in the pueblo the light of the cook fires made red patches of the glasseless windows, and the smell of piñon smoke came softly through the still air. The whole western sky was the color of golden ashes, with here and there a flush of red on the lip of a little cloud. High above the horizon the evening star flickered like a lamp just lit, and close beside it was another star of constant light, much smaller.

The characters of Father Latour (the Archbishop) and his boyhood friend and fellow priest Father Vaillant are so well and sympathetically drawn that you will follow them through however many sunsets they witness. Father Latour is the intellectual and the diplomat, Father Vaillant (and later Bishop of Colorado) the energetic and enthusiastic activist, always on the hunt for sheep who have strayed from the fold or sheep who just need his help, as in the miners at Pike’s Peak. These are good men, true to their faith and dedicated to serving their communities.

There is wonderful humor, too, as when in Rome Father Latour’s advocate is in conversation with the three cardinals who hold the gift of the soon-to-be new diocese of Santa Fe.

“I am glad to see that we have the same opinion of French missionaries.”
“Yes,” said the Cardinal lightly, “they are the best missionaries. Our Spanish fathers made good martyrs, but the French Jesuits accomplish more. They are the great organizers.”
“Better than the Germans?” asked the Venetian, who had Austrian sympathies.
“Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange!”

Or when Father Vaillant visits a rancho, there to find pretty much everyone living in sin and with his usual energy determines to marry and baptize the entire community at once. The locals whisper together over him and his intentions.

“My God, but he is ugly the Padre! He must be very holy.”
“Of what use is it to marry people after they have lived together and had children? And the man is maybe thinking about another woman, like Pablo. I saw him coming out of the brush with that oldest girl of Trinidad’s only Sunday night.”

I confess to tearing up at the end, as Father Latour lays down for the last time to take stock of his life. There is a brief, searing passage about the Navajo being first dispossessed and then after five years repossessed of their traditional lands.

“Bernard,” the old Bishop would murmur, “God has been very good to let me live to see a happy issue to those old wrongs. I do not believe, as I once did, that the Indian will perish. I believe that God will preserve him.”

These aren’t the Catholic priests we see in the headlines today. Very well written, too, although there isn’t much of a narrative here, which uses the archbishop’s lifespan to lend the merest verisimilitude of chronology and interpolates frequent digressions into other people’s stories. Fine by me. Recommended.

Dana sez–During my aforementioned visit to Santa Fe (see last Monday’s post) of course I had to go look at the cathedral. Father Latour did good.

And of course there is a statue of the archibishop out front.

Book Review Monday Chatter Death Comes for the Archbishop Willa Cather