Death Comes for the Archbishop

A Penguin Vitae Edition

In 1851, following the US's recent acquisition of the American Southwest from Mexico, the young bishop Father Jean Marie Latour receives instruction from the Vatican to oversee a newly created diocese in New Mexico. With his good friend Father Joseph Vaillant in tow, the pair travel through the harsh and seemingly-endless desert on mules in attempt to convert local residents into the Catholic faith and build a Romanesque cathedral in Santa Fe. But as Father Latour spends more time in New Mexico with the Mexican and Indigenous people who inhabit it, he begins to realize that the task he was sent to do is futile, as the local people are devoted to their own religions--some of which go back millennia--and in many cases refuse to be converted. Rather than leave, though, Father Latour decides to stay and help out the local people however he can, and in the process, gains a more inclusive and progressive outlook that shapes his views on issues that we continue to face today, including colonization, the genocide of Native Americans, and the erasure of Indigenous culture. Written in 1927 at a time when Cather herself was expanding her own ideas of race, religion, and gender, Death Comes for the Archbishop remains a moving account of one man's physical and spiritual journey of understanding in naturalistic prose as sparse as the desert plains.