Catholic Thought discussion

Prologue:

One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary Bishop from America were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome.

And so begins our journey to Santa Fe via Rome. The bishops are discussing the decaying situation in the American Southwest, where Franciscan Missionaries had evangelized the population in the 1500s, but after 300 years new efforts have to be made. A new Vicarate of New Mexico has been named and a suitable candidate proposed for the position in Santa Fe.

At this point in history, the See of Durango, Mexico (not to be confused with Durango, Colorado) reached all the way into what is New Mexico today. It was a huge territory and given the transportation ability of the day and geography – much of it desert – administering it must have been almost impossible. In 1848, however, we had the end of the Mexican War, and the territory north of the Rio Grande was annexed by the United States. This new political reality forced the Vatican to re-organize it's administration of the territory.

Book 1 – The Vicar Apostolic

One afternoon in the autumn of 1851 a solitary horseman, followed by a pack-mule, was pushing through an arid stretch of country somewhere in central New Mexico. He had lost his way, and was trying to get back to the trail, with only his compass and his sense of direction for guides. The difficulty was that the country in which he found himself was so featureless – or rather, that it was crowded by features, all exactly alike.

We meet Father Latour in the desert praying for a miracle before a cruciform tree. Upon his arrival at Santa Fe the local priests refused to accept his authority, so he was forced to travel all the way to Durango, Mexico to affirm his legitimacy.

Book 2 – Missionary Journeys

As we shall see, much of the book comprises of stories of Father Latour’s journeys throughout the Vicarate, the dimensions of which even he has not a real understanding of. The first story, The White Mules, shows us a typical familial situation. Men and women form families yet they weren’t married for lack of priests nor were their children baptized. So much of his work, and that of his fellow priest Father Vaillant, were to marry couples and baptize their children. Here he is at a rancho, and the owner for expedience sake doesn’t care if all the children are baptized first, for their parents are working in the fields. Father Latour deftly replies, “No, I tell you, Lujon, the marriages first, the baptisms afterward; that order is but Christian. I will baptize the children to-morrow morning, and their parents will at least have been married overnight.”

The next story, The Lonely Road to Mora brings us face-to face with the lawlessness of the “Wild West.”

With these conversation starters let us begin.

In book one, (I’m not sure if the page but it is location 259 on the kindle) Bishop Latour is suffering in the desert in his travels from thirst and sickness, he thinks on our Lord,

“He reminded himself of that cry, wrung from his Saviour on the Cross, “J’ai soif!” Of all our Lord’s physical sufferings, only one, “I thirst,” rose to His lips. Empowered by long training, the young priest blotted himself out of his own consciousness and meditated upon the anguish of his Lord. The Passion of Jesus became for him the only reality; the need of his own body was but a part of that conception. His mare stumbled, breaking his mood of contemplation. He was sorrier for his beasts than for himself. He, supposed to be the intelligence of the party, had got the poor animals into this interminable desert of ovens.”

Just a lovely reminder of faith and finding strength.

Another favorite section of mine is when Father Vaillant heats of the miracle of Our Lady of Guadalupe. It stirs within him to go on pilgrimage (one day I hope for myself as well). It is such a a beautiful miracle. Father Vaillant says at the end of book one,

“One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you. The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.”

I’ve known love to altar how we see people. But I don’t remember having heard of our “human vision being corrected by divine love” when it comes to apparitions. Maybe I have and this is the first time I’ve read the words. Just a gentle reminder through our main characters of how much we are loved and worthy.

Melissa wrote: "In book one, (I’m not sure if the page but it is location 259 on the kindle) Bishop Latour is suffering in the desert in his travels from thirst and sickness, he thinks on our Lord,

“Of all our Lord’s physical sufferings, only one, “I thirst,” rose to His lips.."

Those are moments I too loved Melissa, but those moments seem to be coming in every chapter. I have to say I never realized that thirst was the only suffering Christ mentions. I don't know if Cather thought of it or she heard of it elsewhere, but that is quite striking to me. I will never forget that now. It also reminds me of a short story Cather wrote titled "A Cup of Cold Water." As it turns out, the title comes from Matthew 10:42. It’s one of those sayings of Jesus: “And whoever gives only a cup of cold water to one of these little ones to drink because he is a disciple—amen, I say to you, he will surely not lose his reward.” And then think also on Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well. Christ is also thirsty there but tells the woman, "If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, 'Give me a drink', you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water." Water in baptism, water that is parted in the Red Sea. Water that comes out of Jesus' side. Water has huge significance in all Christian literature.

I also found the image of Fr. Latour praying at the foot of the Juniper tree quite moving.

When he opened his eyes again, his glance immediately fell upon one juniper which differed in shape from the others. It was not a thick-growing cone, but a naked, twisted trunk, perhaps ten feet high, and at the top it parted into two lateral, flat-lying branches, with a little crest of green in the center, just above the cleavage. Living vegetation could not present more faithfully the form of the Cross.

The traveler dismounted, drew from his pocket a much-worn book, and baring his head, knelt at the foot of the cruciform tree.

That is a spark of imagination. Very creative and moving.

It’s hard to believe Willa Cather wasn’t Catholic; her writing in this novel is so intuitive. I loved the thought expressed by Bishop Latour at the end of Book One, too, Melissa. That was insight at the level of grace.

Reading Death Comes for the Archbishop I kept thinking of a great mural that contains both vast panoramas of limitless space and detailed vignettes — the episodes, or chapters. An exceptional intelligence imagined this story.

Frances wrote: "It’s hard to believe Willa Cather wasn’t Catholic; her writing in this novel is so intuitive."

Yes! 'Intuitive' is the right word.

Yes intuitive, but more than intuitive. She has real knowledge, either from first hand experience or research. And it doesn’t overly researched to me. It sounds like she lived among Catholics and picked up quite a bit.

I am seriously thinking of planning a visit to the Cather homestead in Red Cloud, NE. I am sure we could combine this with some other trip. It is a little over 5 hours from here.

Kerstin wrote: "I am seriously thinking of planning a visit to the Cather homestead in Red Cloud, NE. I am sure we could combine this with some other trip. It is a little over 5 hours from here."

I think I’ve seen the website for it. It looks interesting. I would read her novel, My Ántonia before visiting though, if you haven’t read it already.

I did take a number of pictures while I was in central Nee Mexico last week, and they give nice visuals to the landscapes she describes. I’ll post them in a day or two to share.

Bishop Latour has a deep sense of the continuity of history and his place within it. In the story of Hidden Water he contemplates:

The Bishop sat a long time by the spring, while the declining sun poured its beautifying light over those low, rose-tinted houses and bright gardens. The old grandfather had shown him arrow-heads and corroded medals, and a sword hilt, evidently Spanish, that he had found in the earth near the water-head. This spot had been a refuge for humanity long before these Mexicans had come upon it. It was older than history, like those well-heads in his own country where the Roman settlers had set up the image of a river goddess, and later the Christian priests had planted a cross. This settlement was his Bishopric in miniature; hundreds of square miles of thirsty desert, then a spring, a village, old men trying to remember their catechism to teach their grandchildren. The Faith planted by the Spanish friars and watered with their blood was not dead; it awaited only the toil of the husbandman.

Or in the next story The Bishop Chez Lui at dinner:

"I am not deprecating your individual talent, Joseph, " the Bishop continued, "but, when one thinks of it, a soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup."

There is a civilizing aspect to Christianity, where at the beginning you find a place that only tries to eke a living from the soil and over time a refined culture forms.

That’s such an important observation, Kerstin. Today the publication The Catholic Thing featured an article by Professor Anthony Esolen on the novel The Keys of the Kingdom, by A.J. Cronin (it was made into a film starring Gregory Peck). The story is about a priest who becomes a missionary in the interior of China. Has anyone read it? I don’t at all want to introduce anything that would distract from Death Comes for the Archbishop, I just wondered if the two books were in any way similar.

Yes, the civilizing effect of Catholicism specifically is one of the four major themes I've identified. But remember that Fr. Martinez and some of the other bad priests is not exactly a conduit for the civilizing effect.

Manny wrote: "Yes, the civilizing effect of Catholicism specifically is one of the four major themes I've identified. But remember that Fr. Martinez and some of the other bad priests is not exactly a conduit for..."

Oh, I'm looking forward to hearing of the other themes as we progress through this book! I don't read as analytical as you do :)

With Fr. Martinez and the other bad priests you have the perennial failure of selfishness trumping to serve others. I am sure we'll pick this up in more detail in Book 5 when we get to meet him up close. For now, I see him as dismantling culture not building it.

There are several major themes that govern the novel, but first among them is how the hard landscape shapes the lives of all those who live there, especially the indigenous population. The landscape is distinct. We see this in the very opening scene in the novel proper, not the prologue, where Latour traveling down into central New Mexico finds himself lost in the desert.

As far as he could see, on every side, the landscape was heaped up into monotonous red sand-hills, not much larger than haycocks, and very much the shape of haycocks. One could not have believed that in the number of square miles a man is able to sweep with the eye there could be so many uniform red hills. He had been riding among them since early morning, and the look of the country had no more changed than if he had stood still. He must have traveled through thirty miles of these conical red hills, winding his way in the narrow cracks between them, and he had begun to think that he would never see anything else. They were so exactly like one another that he seemed to be wandering in some geometrical nightmare; flattened cones, they were, more the shape of Mexican ovens than haycocks — yes, exactly the shape of Mexican ovens, red as brick-dust, and naked of vegetation except for small juniper trees. And the junipers, too, were the shape of Mexican ovens. Every conical hill was spotted with smaller cones of juniper, a uniform yellowish green, as the hills were a uniform red. The hills thrust out of the ground so thickly that they seemed to be pushing each other, elbowing each other aside, tipping each other over. (p. 17)

The desert is a “geometrical nightmare” where the hills “seemed to be pushing each other,” and if they are pushing each other then they could be an overwhelming threat to a mere human. We also get an immense scale of the land. It is common in the story to travel thousands of miles. And the weather often shapes their travels across boundless region. At another instance we see the two priests riding across vast territory

The priests were riding across high mountain meadows, which in a few weeks would be green, though just now they were slate-coloured. On every side lay ridges covered with blu-green fir trees; above them rose the horny backbone of mountains. The sky was low; purplish lead-coloured clouds let down curtains of mist into the valleys between the pine ridges. There was not a glimmer of white light in the dark vapours working overhead—rather, they took on the cold green of the evergreens. Even the white mules, their coats wet and matted into tufts, had turned a slaty hue, and the faces of the two priests were purple and spotted in the singular light. (p.64)

Look at what the landscape and the natural elements have done to the mules and priests. It shapes them, their activities and their lives. There are many such scenes and descriptions throughout the novel. The landscape is central to the novel, and perhaps even more than just as it impacts travel and lives. The landscape has shaped the native people. It has shaped their culture, their language, their child rearing, and their myths. I’ll develop that theme another time, but I want to end with another quote on the landscape, this one showing how deep into history the landscape originates. The description below is of the surrounding landscape of the town of Ácoma.

The mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau. The country was still waiting to be made into landscape. (p. 95)

The landscape here is connected to creation, not just creation by natural process, but back to the Creator’s initiating acts. Cather provides a depth of history rooted in the landscape that is fathomless, mystifying, primeval. And her point is that it’s incomplete. The Creator didn’t finish, and so the culture isn’t finished either. Just as the landscape is “waiting” to be completed, so are the people.

Manny wrote: "TThe landscape here is connected to creation, not just creation by natural process, but back to the Creator’s initiating acts. Cather provides a depth of history rooted in the landscape that is fathomless, mystifying, primeval. And her point is that it’s incomplete. The Creator didn’t finish, and so the culture isn’t finished either. Just as the landscape are “waiting” to be completed, so are the people. "

That's a great way of putting it!

To do the landscape theme full justice, I should also point out how the seeds of the theme are planted even as the novel opens in the Prologue. The Prologue does not open with Fr. Latour or even in New Mexico. It opens with a dinner in Rome by three Cardinals and a different Bishop at a villa to discuss the appointment of a bishop to this just created New Mexican episcopate.

One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary Bishop from America were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome. The villa was famous for the fine view from its terrace. The hidden garden in which the four men sat at a table lay some twenty feet below the south end of this terrace, and was a mere shelf of a rock, overhanging a steep declivity planted with vineyards. A flight of stone steps connected it with the promenade above. The table stood in a sanded square, among potted orange and oleander trees, shaded by spreading ilex oaks that grew out of the rocks overhead. Beyond the balustrade was the drop into thin air, and far below the landscape stretched soft and undulating; there was nothing to arrest the eye until it reached Rome itself.

If you parse carefully the language of this opening passage, the landscape in Rome is actually a microcosm of the landscape we will see in New Mexico. The four dignitaries are sitting on a terrace, “a mere shelf of a rock, overhanging a steep declivity.” That is exactly what the plateaus are that we see in New Mexico. Several of the mesas had ad hoc steps as passageways up. Surrounding the villa are hills—the Sabine hills—which correspond to the surrounding mountains in the New Mexican landscape. The table at the villa stands on sand, echoing the desert sand of the “monotonous red sand-hills” of the American territory, and the various trees offer European versions of the American junipers and fir trees that we will come across later. The landscape in Rome undulates, simulating that in New Mexico are fissures. The drop from the villa is apparently very high, just as we see the drops from the mesas.

But, if the landscape in Rome is a microcosm of the landscape we will see in New Mexico, it is but a tamed version, a landscape that has undergone a civilizing process. The sand on which the table sits is a controlled square, not a vast desert. The passage leading up to the villa are cut steps, not natural formed rock, and those steps lead to a “promenade,” not to indigenous cliff dwellings. The trees about them are potted or forced to grow out of rocks instead of the random and uncontrolled sprouting. The undulations are soft in the Roman landscape, not “oven-baked” cracks in the earth or even canyons. While there are echoes of the New Mexican landscape in Rome, there is also contrast. Indeed, the four dignitaries at dinner in Rome seem to echo and contrast with the four priests at dinner on the Ácoma mesa in the story of Fr. Baltazar with very different outcomes. The Sabine hills recall a brutal pagan Roman past, echoing the Indian native dark pagan culture. But the Roman landscape leads to the dome of St. Peter, not the “gothic cathedral” of a cave where Indian fire and snake ceremonies take place.

We have in Willa Cather a writer of immense skill, one who can simultaneously echo and contrast with imagery at will.

Great analysis. I had felt that the landscape is almost another character here, but you explain it so very well.

Thank you Madeleine.

Before we started reading the novel I mentioned I coincidentally had a business trip to central New Mexico, and that I would take pictures. OK, I've put up those pictures on my personal blog. In my photo essay I try to connect the pictures with various landscape descriptions from the novel. If you want to see the photo essay, it's here:
https://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot....

Lovely photos, how lucky to have business at that place and time, and what a great way to experience literature! Thank you for sharing this!

Manny, the pictures are wonderful. A reader can go back through the story and mentally see them in many places, especially the vast sky that Willa Cather writes about. Thank you so much.

My pleasure ladies. I hope it helps to visualize the landscape.

Madeleine wrote: "Lovely photos, how lucky to have business at that place and time, and what a great way to experience literature! Thank you for sharing this!"

The pictures are great! Thanks, Manny.

We were in Taos, Santa Fe, etc. just this spring. Drove south on I-25 all the way down to Hatch and then took the cut-off to I-10 to Tucson. The landscape is truly mythic. You drive along the Rio Grande and everything is bright green, and beyond it is desert. On the way back we came from the west into Albuquerque, the cathedral-style mesas Cather describes are even more pronounced to the west of Albuquerque coming from Gallup and they are a deep red, very similar in color to Sedona.
The hotel we stayed at in Taos sold a little booklet with all the missionary churches in the vicinity. We didn't have time for it on this trip but we'll be back. It's "only" 12 hours from here.

It was this trip that prompted me to suggest the book :)

Kerstin wrote: "Madeleine wrote: "Lovely photos, how lucky to have business at that place and time, and what a great way to experience literature! Thank you for sharing this!"

The pictures are great! Thanks, Mann..."

There was a missionary church within a few blocks from where I stayed. I got pictures of that too, though only from the outside. Unfortunately it was closed when I got there in the evening. But they did have a mass schedule, so it was a fully operating church. That church goes back to the 1600's. I'll post those pictures too in time.

Manny wrote: "Before we started reading the novel I mentioned I coincidentally had a business trip to central New Mexico, and that I would take pictures. OK, I've put up those pictures on my personal blog. In my..."

Thank you for sharing the pictures. It helps to picture in my mind the setting as I read.

The author captured and re-created the spirit of the land of New Mexico, a place like no other, as its official nickname has it “Land of Enchantment”. What attracts me here is the mood which is dominated by the desert and strongly recalls what it’s like traveling through these vast landscapes—“the hundreds of square miles of thirsty desert” that comes alive in the spring in great glory. The landscape is, as Manny sees it “central to the novel.” I was lucky to experience its magic first time in the mid seventies crossing the Colorado to New Mexico pass on I-25 and coming down into the land of the mesas at sunset. This included the portion that Kerstin mentions from Taos to Tucson. I had to stop and pause for a while to take in the extraordinary views at the first sight of the table-shape mesas. In more recent years I returned to explore a greater part of the South West, its historic missions and mission ruins, and see the desert in full spring. (A few of the photos are on my profile here.) This part of the world is like no other I’ve seen. Cather describes with great precision. Seeing it, the White Sands, Sedona, Petrified Forest, and Painted Desert bears out how she captured the spirit of these lands.