Death Comes to the Arch Bishop is a tightly woven historical novel about the rejuvenation of Catholicism in the newly acquired New Mexico Territory. Apostolic Vicar Jean Marie Latour, a 35 year old French missionary with nine years of service in Canada on the shores of Lake Huron among the Indians and French settlers, has been sent as temporary Arch Bishop to bring order to this huge sprawling territory inhabited mostly by Mexicans and Indians.

Willa Cather writes precious prose that is sometimes poetic. Her tale is spun against a landscape pastiche of the old South West, but some of Cather’s most romantic descriptions are of sensory perceptions that appear in the Prologue that sets the stage for her story in the Sabine hills of Rome. Three Cardinals meet at the villa of Cardinal de Allende, a sophisticated, rich, provincial Spaniard who knows of the New World from reading James Fennimore Cooper (in the original English he is careful to point out) and who expresses the whimsical hope that Latour has eye for art so that he might perchance recover the El Greco de Allande's grandfather gave to a Spanish missionary to this same territory a century ago:

"The villa was famous for its fine view from its terrace. The hidden garden
in which the four men sat at table lay some twenty feet below the south end
and was a mere shelf of rock, overhanging a steep declivity planted with
vineyards***********there was nothing to arrest the eye until it reached
Rome itself*************The sun was still good for an hour of splendor, and
across the shining folds of the country the low profile of the city barely
fretted the skyline--indistinct except for the dome of St. Peters, bluish
grey like the flattened top of a great balloon, just a flash of copper light
on its soft metalic surface. The Cardinal had an eccentric preference for
beginning his dinner at this time in the late afternoon, when the vehemence
of the sun suggested motion. The light was full of action and had a
peculiar quality of climax--of splendid finish. It was both intense and soft,
with a ruddiness of much-multiplied candlelight, an aura of red in its
flames. It bored into the ilex trees, illuminated their mahogany and
blurring their dark foliage; it warmed the bright green of the orange
trees and the rose of the oleander blooms to gold; sent congested spiral
patterns quivering over the damask and the plate and crystal"

These Cardinals were men of the world, but it is plain that they were provincial and would never have dreamed of missionary work in the New World---de Allende’s family home in Spain housed that country’s most prominent collection of Spanish art (some El Grecos remained) and he and his peers were quite content to get no closer to New Mexico then a reading of James Fennimore Cooper. The glorious setting on the Sabine hills of Rome stands in stark counterpoint to the New Mexico desert where we find our hero Bishop Latour roaming without water and coming upon a tree that looked like a cross, where he prays moments before stumbling upon an oasis. Rejected by the Spanish clergy for lack of documentation of his authority over the diocese, he had set out on a 1500 mile journey to Mexico to enlist the support of the Bishop of Durango.

Latour has been sent to bring order to a diocese where liturgy and church doctrine are but a distant memory among much of its faithful, where priests have married and where Indians converted to Catholicism retain pagan customs---as Cardinals de Aliened put it, “Oh, the Germans classify, but French arrange!” Latour did arrange, but it was a long hard slog, and he had to bring all of his skills to bear to do it. He and his countryman and friend, Father Valliant, travelled the vast expanse of the diocese on the backs of two mules that Valliant had acquired from a rich rancher in much the same manner that de Allende’s grandfather had been induced to part with his El Greco. Although Latour went on to build the cathedral in Santa Fe over a period of 16 years and Valliant parted from his friend and mentor to became the Bishop of Colorado when gold was found there; the heart of story is a both Cather’s vivid description of the landscape of the territory in which the characters play out their roles and the trials and hardships that these dedicated missionary priests endured as they baptized and married the faithful, reorganized the clergy and financed their dioceses in the wilderness. Along the way we encounter Indian legends, Kit Carson, mesas and pueblos, canyons, colorful and decadent clergy, noble Indian chiefs and a plethora of interesting local folks like Dona Isabella, who has to be coaxed by Latour to sacrifice her vanity and admit under oath to being 53 years old to save her inheritance (of which the archdiocese would get the remainder interest upon her death) in a will contest brought by her husband’s brothers.

In the end of course, as the title predicts, the Cardinal dies after retiring and deciding not to return to his native France. He stays “in New Mexico because the air is young and in New Mexico he always awoke a young man; not until he rose to shave did he realize that he was growing older. “

Cather’s prose is again poetic as she lays the Cardinal to rest, and one wonders upon reading it how long she labored over these lovely sentences.

“That air would disappear from the whole earth in time; but not in his day
He did not know just when it had become so necessary to him, but he had
come back to die in exile because of it. Something wild and free, something
that whispered in the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly
picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into
the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!”

Cather’s elegant style and fascinating story combine to make a very rare piece of literature that defies classification and is a delight to read.