And while Death Comes for the Archbishop draws the French priests as highly distinct figures of rather contrary social background, personal character, and approach to faith, 2 the narrative depicts the two men’s joint “heroic” struggle to fulfill their mission in a uniquely positive manner. 1 Although told through the voice of a third-person narrator, the novel presents all action from the perspective of its French missionary protagonists, fictionalized here as Bishop Jean Marie Latour and Father Joseph Vaillant. In a similar manner to many of Cather’s other novels, Death Comes for the Archbishop addresses the European pioneer experience on the U.S.-American frontier as well as the interconnected U.S.-Americanization of a culturally and ethnically diverse population, on the one hand, and the “civilization” process of a frontier and border region, on the other. Willa Cather, who had made several trips to the region during the 1910s and ‘20s, was inspired to write this novel in particular by a statue of New Mexico’s first archbishop, Jean-Baptiste Lamy (1814–1888), that she saw in Santa Fé as well as by a biography of his fellow French priest and missionary companion, Joseph Macheboeuf (1812–1889) (Cohen 149 Sevick 191 Stout 230–33).

Told in a non-chronological series of loosely-connected episodes informed by Christian hagiography, art, and symbolism (Chinery 98 Cohen 150), Death Comes for the Archbishop depicts the struggle of the titular cleric and his vicar general to establish their newly formed diocese and (re)install Church authority in this neglected area of the Catholic empire in the second half of the nineteenth century.

When New Mexico became a territory of the United States, the Catholic Church divided what had hitherto been the North Mexican diocese of Durango to form the Apostolic vicariate (later elevated to diocese and then archdiocese) of Santa Fé and thereby make ecclesiastical territories comply with the new national borderline between the United States and Mexico.

Death comes for the archbishop review