Death Comes For Whoever Has To Read Death Comes For The Archbishop Essay

I Insist That You Shoot Me Now: The Pain of Reading Death Comes for the Archbishop
Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick has been termed by many the prototypical American novel, because of the different forces at work in the young country that Melville identifies and laments while detailing the mad journey of Captain Ahab after a whale that did nothing more than take umbrage at attempts to kill him, removing the captain’s leg in the process. The descriptions of such scenes as the chase that ends the novel, or the sermons of Father Mapple and the cook, or the bravery with which the whalers would send forth into the salty sea, harpoons in hand and the glory of the capture in their minds, are vivid and rich, capturing the imagination of even the most modern landlubber out there. However, there are also sequences – some of which last several chapters – in which Melville acts like the curator of a whale museum, detailing the minute physical characteristics of each of the many types of whales that there are in the sea. These pages of the book become mind-numbing and frustrate many readers who have heard the wonders of Moby-Dick and never thought they would be trapped in a journey through the back recesses of an old National Geographic video. Many people simply put the book down (or flip ahead to the next chapter) because of the sheer boredom of the entire enterprise. Of course, readers of Death Comes for the Archbishop have no such respite from the dreary text, as there are no dramatic interludes to break up the languid description that fills page after page, to the point where the reader would rather jump off one of the many mesas that dot the American Southwest, and are described at length in Cather’s wearying travelogue of the days of annexation into the United States.
The story opens with the assignment of Father Jean Marie Latour, who had been minding his own business serving a congregation in Sandusky, Ohio, as a French Jesuit missionary, to the New Mexico territory, on the occasion of the annexation of that territory from Mexico, in the aftermath of the Mexican War. Latour takes his personal friend Father Joseph Vaillant with him, along with his new rank of bishop. Their job is to bring energy back to the Catholic Church in that part of the world, which has languished for almost three hundred years without much in the way of vigorous leadership. There are priests in the area who have turned their back on celibacy, instead fathering children among the native women. In addition, they have used their power to intimidate and abuse the Indians and Mexicans, and shown a love for wealth that is not fitting for a priest. The main conflict of the book involves Bishop Latour’s attempts to instill discipline on Catholics in the Southwest. If you can imagine a plot line with a central conflict that is less intriguing than an attempt to whip some fallen clerics into shape, against the backdrop of the Painted Desert, you are either writing for the sixth installment of the Home Alone series or you are writing a maintenance manual for a lawn mower. As one might expect, the plucky bishop runs into some resistance from just about every entrenched priest in the area, including Padre Gallegos, Padre Antonio Jose Martinez, and Padre Lucero. Gallegos’ favorite vices are gambling and gluttony – neither of which involves sex, but at least one of which could compromise the authority of the church, as being in debt to one’s parishioners makes it much more difficult to speak with authority to them on Sunday mornings. Padre Martinez has developed a taste for women over time – a taste that the arrival of this new bishop threatens to dry up. Padre Lucero also has become materialistic, and has become notorious for telling lies. All of these are fairly predictable vices for priests who do not have a lot of supervision to fall into, and the arguments that they will have with the new bishop are equally predictable.
The bishop’s journey from Ohio to New Mexico takes almost a year – just slightly less than it seems to take to read one’s way through this book. He takes his possessions with him down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, and then travels on a steamboat to Galveston. Unfortunately, his steamboat wrecks on the way to Galveston, and most of his belongings are lost in the Gulf of Mexico. Hwoever, he keeps going, crossing Texas with just a pack mule and a mare. To make things worse, these rebellious priests in Mexico refuse to even acknowledge Latour’s authority to supervise them. In order to set things straight, Latour must then travel 3,000 miles to Durango, to see the Archbishop. In the era before GPS, Latour loses his way; thankfully, a native girl finds him and leads him to Agua Secreta (Hidden Water), where he learns that area priests are asking exorbitant fees to perform the marriage sacrament, which means that many of the natives are simply taking wives without the benefit of Catholic sanction. When Latour walks through the local Catholic church, he can see the syncretism that has joined the Native American beliefs with the Catholic teachings as well, from the design and the architecture. Unfortunately, Latour – and the reader – still has thousands of miles to go.
When Latour returns from Durango with his documents in hand (yes, it is an excellent question – why didn’t he get this paperwork when he received his assignment?), some of the most likely parts of the book to present any sort of drama or confrontation have taken place while we were busy hiking through the desert – the abandonment of their posts by many of the renegade priests. Somehow they had heard that Latour was on his way back with proof of his position and just left. Because of the maltreatment that their ancestors had received from the Spanish conquistadors, years and years before, many of the natives are suspicious of Latour’s motives – again, a highly predictable tension that never really produces any major conflict in the story.
Latour and Vaillant travel together to Mora, and they stop at the home of Buck Scales and his young wife, Magdalena. However, once Buck Scales leaves the room, his wife urges them to leave, because Buck had murdered four other travelers along the Mora trail. When Latour and Vaillant turn Buck in to the authorities, he is arrested and hanged; his trial might have made for some interesting reading; instead, though, we are treated to the angst that Magdalena feels, as she is certain that Buck would kill her if he escaped from prison. Luckily, that Southwest hero Kit Carson shows up to take Magdalena to live with himself and his wife, to keep her safe. Because Buck was unable to carry out his nefarious plans and kill the priests, the story begins to plod along again. Latour and Jacinto, his guide, head to the Indian missions out to the west, including a sojourn with the gluttonous Padre Gallegos. Gallegos suspects that Latour is going to ask him to join him on his trip out west, to manage the churches. To keep from having to make that trip (and from having to join more of this ennui-laden narrative), Gallegos wraps his foot up and pretends that he has gout. While Latour and Jacinto travel together, Jacinto relates the story of the evil Friar Montoya, who treated the natives like slaves, even killing (!) a servant with a goblet when the servant drops some gravy on a guest. The Indians rise up in rebellion as a result, throwing Friar Montoya from the top of the mesa; however, the scene is narrated with the same urgency with which Latour makes his way to Durango and back, one step at a time. Latour comes back through Santa Fe and replaces Padre Gallegos with Vaillant, ending the culture of gluttony and dissolution. When Vaillant catches the black measles, Latour sets out to help him and spends several not-so-gripping pages pondering the effects that white settlement has had on the natives, particularly in terms of the spread of disease. After they find Vaillant and take him to Santa Fe for care, Latour visits Zeb Orchard, a white trader who is disdainful of the Indian customs. Latour takes a stand for political correctness (nineteenth century variety) by telling him that the Indian veneration of objects is not that different from many aspects of Catholicism.
Latour’s next battle is with Padre Martinez, who has had children during his time as a priest. Martinez is unrepentant; he threatens to form his own schismatic church should he be excommunicated. When Latour replaces him with a Spanish priest and takes away his priestly office, Martinez starts his own church, like he had promised; however, he dies soon after with little interesting having taken place during the conflict. Latour decides that he wants to erect a cathedral in Santa Fe, and Don Antonio Olivares, a Mexican rancher, agrees to donate the funding. However, Olivares dies before making his bequest official, and the next section of the book details the fascinating details of the legal battle. The unfortunate Father Vaillant then contracts malaria, his second serious disease of the book (the upshot, of course, is that he gets to miss out on many of the scenes in the story this way).
Several other incidents take place the rest of the way that echo the theme that the Europeans are basically trouncing all over a pretty good system that the natives had had in place before they arrived. Vaillant receives the position of priest to the new tent cities in Colorado, after the Gold Rush, and is eager to get away from this story, but Latour makes him wait until he can build a customized wagon and fill it with supplies. As with many things in this story, it takes a very long time to build the wagon – a month.
At this point the bishop’s life begins to wind down, and he starts reflecting on the terrible things that have happened to the Native Americans, such as Kit Carson’s destruction of the hidden corn fields of the Navajo tribe. Eventually, Latour passes away, and his body is arranged in state in front of the high altar of the cathedral he had dreamed of. What had been a story of one of the greatest transformations in the history of the world – the handover from the Native Americans to the United States of some of the world’s most beautiful country. Astonishingly, one gets to the end of the story feeling like not much has happened at all.