Catholic Thought discussion

Book 8 – Gold Under Pike’s Peak

Bishop Latour takes Father Vaillant to the place where he had found the yellow rock from which his cathedral would be build. Soon after a letter arrives from the Bishop of Leavenworth talking about the dire conditions in the newly sprung up mining towns in Colorado where gold had been found and there was no priest for them. It had been the Bishop’s desire to have his friend close by, but with a heavy heart he had to submit to the circumstances. After much preparation Father Vaillant leaves for Denver. It is a hard and emotional parting for the two life-long friends.

Book 9 – Death Comes for the Archbishop

After his retirement with a new archbishop in place, Archbishop Latour lives on a small estate outside of Santa Fe. He had again planted a garden and orchard. He was still involved in the affairs of the archdiocese by training newly arrived priests and prepare them for their missions. He also kept his study in Santa Fe. When his health declined he returns to Santa Fe and a bed is set up in his study. During these last weeks he turns inward and reflects on his life and its pivotal moments. He dies at peace.

”When the Cathedral bell tolled just after dark, the Mexican population of Santa Fe fell upon their knees, and all American Catholics as well. Many others who did not kneel prayed in their hearts. Eusabio and the Tesuque boys went quietly away to tell their people; and the next morning the old Archbishop lay before the high altar in the church he had built.”

I choked up with his death, and the death of Fr. Vaillant. It was a very moving ending.

The last two chapters do tug at the heart strings. I had to put the book down several times because it was too intense. To me it wasn't only the end of two extraordinary lives, but the writing is so beautiful you don't want to come to the end of the book!

The fourth of the themes is perhaps a bit more difficult to articulate. It deals with the relationship not between Catholics in the novel but between the Catholics and the indigenous people, the various Indian tribes. It’s difficult to articulate because the relationships are varied. There is the relationship of power and domination as seen in the relationship of Fray Baltazar with the natives of Ácuma. Baltazar and the rebellion against him represent the subjugation and revolts that are part of the historical background. In contrast there is the relationship between Latour and the Navahos, as Latour does what he can to save them from slaughter. This theme of relationship is also difficult to articulate because the indigenous people present an enigma to the Catholics. And so the Catholics don’t quite know how to relate with the indigenous people.

We do know that the Catholic clergy are partly there to evangelize. And though the novel doesn’t allude to any forced conversions, if they had occurred they were thing prior to Latour. The process for Latour’s and Vaillant’s evangelization, like good Jesuits that they are, is to live among the people and merge cultures. Accept their culture, give them the dignity they deserve as human beings, while getting the natives to learn and accept Catholic culture. So here is an attempt of articulating this theme: the interaction of Catholics and Indians from which both cultures assimilate while preserving their respective identities.

While for the most part the indigenous are hardworking, family people that any Catholic religious can appreciate, there is a dark side to the indigenous culture that Latour, and, indeed, even the original Spanish Catholic missionaries, found abhorrent. There doesn’t seem to be much evidence that the Spanish missionaries made much evangelical progress with the native population in New Mexico. It seems as if two antithetical camps were formed, a Spanish-American group, sometimes called Mexican, and the native Indians. Though they lived side by side, there is a tension between the two which would occasionally flare up into violence, but for the most part the two lived in their own cultural spheres. Fr. Martinez articulates this dichotomy to Latour early in Latour’s bishopric.

"You are a young man, my Bishop," he went on, rolling his big head back and looking up at the well-smoked roof poles. "And you know nothing about Indians or Mexicans. If you try to introduce European civilization here and change our old ways, to interfere with the secret dances of the Indians, let us say, or abolish the bloody rites of the Penitentes, I foretell an early death for you. I advise you to study our native traditions before you begin your reforms. You are among barbarous people, my Frenchman, between two savage races. The dark things forbidden by your Church are a part of Indian religion. You cannot introduce French fashions here." (p.147)

While Martinez articulates the dichotomy, he also suggests an assimilation. The problem is that his assimilation is a compromise of Catholic values. He is assimilating toward the dark customs of the native people. What are these dark customs? Latour realizes these customs while traveling about with Jacinto, an Indian who helps him translate. One night by the campfire we see Latour understand.

The two companions sat, each thinking his own thoughts as night closed in about them; a blue night set with stars, the bulk of the solitary mesas cutting into the firmament. The Bishop seldom questioned Jacinto about his thoughts or beliefs. He didn't think it polite, and he believed it to be useless. There was no way in which he could transfer his own memories of European civilization into the Indian mind, and he was quite willing to believe that behind Jacinto there was a long tradition, a story of experience, which no language could translate to him. A chill came with the darkness. Father Latour put on his old fur-lined cloak, and Jacinto, loosening the blanket tied about his loins, drew it up over his head and shoulders.

"Many stars," he said presently. "What you think about the stars, Padre?"

"The wise men tell us they are worlds, like ours, Jacinto."

The end of the Indian's cigarette grew bright and then dull again before he spoke. "I think not," he said in the tone of one who has considered a proposition fairly and rejected it. "I think they are leaders--great spirits."

"Perhaps they are," said the Bishop with a sigh. "Whatever they are, they are great. Let us say Our Father, and go to sleep, my boy." (p. 92-93)

What you see here are two worldviews come into contact, and yet come together. Jacinto hasn’t rejected his world view, but he does recite the Our Father. In fact that whole chapter is a wonderful coming together and acceptance of each other. Latour doesn’t require Jacinto to reject his worldview, but he is able to meet Jacinto on a human level, and in so doing Jacinto admires Latour. Later Latour is invited to sit in Jacinto’s home and have dinner with Jacinto’s wife and child, an infant who is ailing.

The Bishop bent his head under the low doorway and stepped down; the floor of the room was a long step below the door-sill--the Indian way of preventing drafts. The room into which he descended was long and narrow, smoothly whitewashed, and clean, to the eye, at least, because of its very bareness. There was nothing on the walls but a few fox pelts and strings of gourds and red peppers. The richly coloured blankets of which Jacinto was very proud were folded in piles on the earth settle,--it was there he and his wife slept, near the fireplace. The earth of that settle became warm during the day and held its heat until morning, like the Russian peasants' stove-bed. Over the fire a pot of beans and dried meat was simmering. The burning piñon logs filled the room with sweet-smelling smoke. Clara, Jacinto's wife, smiled at the priest as he entered. She ladled out the stew, and the Bishop and Jacinto sat down on the floor beside the fire, each with his bowl. Between them Clara put a basin full of hot corn-bread baked with squash seeds,--an Indian delicacy comparable to raisin bread among the whites. The Bishop said a blessing and broke the bread with his hands. (p. 121)

There is much that Latour admires about the native customs. The father, mother, and child situation he encounters here is not much different from the Holy Family situation in a barn in Bethlehem. The humanity present in this Indian family suggests the spark of God in the hearts of all humanity. And we see this humanity in several places with the native peoples in the novel. But then there are also the dark legends. We learn of the ceremonial fire that must be served and the snake worship where infants were to be sacrificed (p. 122). When taking shelter from a snow storm Jacinto takes Latour to a “cathedral” of sorts, a cave where Indian ceremonies are conducted. It’s no coincidence that the cave is described as a “Gothic chapel.” The association with religion and Latour’s later building of his Cathedral is a metaphor. But the contrast is also important. The air inside the cave had a “fetid odour” and “highly disagreeable” (p. 127). And after building a fire, Latour seems to sense something even more disturbing.

The heat seemed to purify the rank air at the same time that it took away the deathly chill, but the dizzy noise in Father Latour's head persisted. At first he thought it was a vertigo, a roaring in his ears brought on by cold and changes in his circulation. But as he grew warm and relaxed, he perceived an extraordinary vibration in this cavern; it hummed like a hive of bees, like a heavy roll of distant drums. After a time he asked Jacinto whether he, too, noticed this. The slim Indian boy smiled for the first time since they had entered the cave. He took up a faggot for a torch, and beckoned the Padre to follow him along a tunnel which ran back into the mountain, where the roof grew much lower, almost within reach of the hand. There Jacinto knelt down over a fissure in the stone floor, like a crack in china, which was plastered up with clay. Digging some of this out with his hunting knife, he put his ear on the opening, listened a few seconds, and motioned the Bishop to do likewise.

Father Latour lay with his ear to this crack for a long while, despite the cold that arose from it. He told himself he was listening to one of the oldest voices of the earth. What he heard was the sound of a great underground river, flowing through a resounding cavern. The water was far, far below, perhaps as deep as the foot of the mountain, a flood moving in utter blackness under ribs of antediluvian rock. It was not a rushing noise, but the sound of a great flood moving with majesty and power.

"It is terrible," he said at last, as he rose.

"Si, Padre." Jacinto began spitting on the clay he had gouged out of the seam, and plastered it up again. (p. 129-130)

The river is “one of the oldest voices of the earth,” secret, powerful, antediluvian, that is pre-Noah’s flood. It associates Jacinto’s culture with the primordial and therefore pre-divine revelation. Yes, Jacinto’s culture has elements of Christian humanity, but they lack the benefit of divine revelation of God and Christ. And so they have accrued these dark legends and, perhaps from a Catholic point of view, demonic cultural practices. Zeb Orchard explains to Latour that the Indians “got their own superstitions, and their minds will go round and round in the same old ruts till Judgement Day.” But the bishop is not dismayed.

Father Latour remarked that their veneration for old customs was a quality he liked in the Indians, and that it played a great part in his own religion. (p. 135)

Latour doesn’t want to obliterate the indigenous culture. He wants to absorb it, and he wants them to absorb his Catholicism. Through Latour’s actions, his prayers, his blessings, his living out the faith, he is trying to plant the seeds of Christianity in this garden that is New Mexico. This is why Cather spends some length going over the Guadalupe apparition and Mexican conversion. The indigenous people absorb the Virgin and assimilate their colors and clothing to the Blessed Mother. This is why we see Fr. Jesus de Baca absorb the beauty of parrots—a distinctly native bird that was integral to the Native American sensibility—and integrate it into his church. Entering into Fr. Jesus’ garden, Latour was surprised at how Fr. Jesus had absorbed the Indian sensibility.

This enclosure was full of domesticated cactus plants, of many varieties and great size (it seemed the Padre loved them), and among these hung wicker cages made of willow twigs, full of parrots. There were even parrots hopping about the sanded paths--with one wing clipped to keep them at home. Father Jesus explained that parrot feathers were much prized by his Indians as ornaments for their ceremonial robes, and he had long ago found he could please his parishioners by raising the birds. (p. 84-86)

The difference here from Fr. Martinez is that Fr. Baca has absorbed the positive elements of Indian life but reformulated them. I think it significant that the cacti are “domesticated” and birds’ wings are clipped. The parrot can be seen as an Indian version that is the dove of the Holy Spirit. And so Latour naturally understands that Fr. Baca’s methods is a model for his mission. He isn’t going to alter the native people’s customs but infuse their customs with the breath of Christianity. We see later the culmination of this theme in the wonderful relationship Latour builds with Eusabio, the rich Navajo leader.

As always, Manny, this is fantastic! You put a lot of thought into this.

Throughout reading the novel I was reminded again and and again how Catholicism at its best never destroys an underlying culture, but perfects it. If a people are to be transformed for Eternity one has to have the patience to let Truth penetrate. Each and every person on the planet, after all, is made in the Imago Dei. The patience will be rewarded in due time as the Faith takes hold and the darker aspects of the culture recedes and vanishes.

Kerstin wrote: "Catholicism at its best never destroys an underlying culture, but perfects it"

Great observation. Yes! And thank you for your kind words.

In wrapping up Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop I would like to explore the significance of its final and dominating image, the Cathedral that Latour has built over the course of his lifetime. The Cathedral is there throughout the novel, either in directly after it has been built, in desire to be built once Latour conceptualizes it, and perhaps in allusion prior to its being conceived.

We see only see the Cathedral fully built late in the novel. It occurs on Latour’s last entry into Sante Fe, and he contemplates its beauty as the sun sets upon it.

Father Latour made his last entry into Santa Fé at the end of a brilliant February afternoon; Bernard stopped the horses at the foot of the long street to await the sunset.

Wrapped in his Indian blankets, the old Archbishop sat for a long while, looking at the open, golden face of his Cathedral. How exactly young Molny, his French architect, had done what he wanted! Nothing sensational, simply honest building and good stone- cutting,--good Midi Romanesque of the plainest. And even now, in winter, when the acacia trees before the door were bare, how it was of the South, that church, how it sounded the note of the South! (p. 269)

The significance of the architectural style—“Midi Romanesque”—is given right there in Latour’s thoughts: simplicity. I couldn’t find anything on “midi” but Romanesque refers to a style of late antiquity which absorbed many of the pagan Roman simple geometric forms. Midi I suppose refers to a revival of Romanesque during the middle ages. What it most certainly is not is Gothic, with hard lines and abundant—perhaps overly abundant to the point of garish—embellishments. Latour is proud that this style is most fitting to the “South,” and here I think he means the Southwest. Latour then contemplates the Cathedral in its setting.

No one but Molny and the Bishop had ever seemed to enjoy the beautiful site of that building,--perhaps no one ever would. But these two had spent many an hour admiring it. The steep carnelian hills drew up so close behind the church that the individual pine trees thinly wooding their slopes were clearly visible. From the end of the street where the Bishop's buggy stood, the tawny church seemed to start directly out of those rose-coloured hills--with a purpose so strong that it was like action. Seen from this distance, the Cathedral lay against the pine-splashed slopes as against a curtain. When Bernard drove slowly nearer, the backbone of the hills sank gradually, and the towers rose clear into the blue air, while the body of the church still lay against the mountain. (p. 269-270)

The Cathedral is set against the hills and slopes of the mountains that are the terrain of the New Mexican landscape that has been so crucial to the novel. It is as if the church building grows out of the mountainside, “to start directly out of those rose-coloured hills.” And here is the significant qualifier: “with a purpose so strong that it was like action.” The church building may stem from nature, but it has power over nature. We see this even more so in the next paragraph.

The young architect used to tell the Bishop that only in Italy, or in the opera, did churches leap out of mountains and black pines like that. More than once Molny had called the Bishop from his study to look at the unfinished building when a storm was coming up; then the sky above the mountain grew black, and the carnelian rocks became an intense lavender, all their pine trees strokes of dark purple; the hills drew nearer, the whole background approached like a dark threat.

Despite storm or hills that have an ominous “dark threat,” the church stands calmly and with strength in opposition to the dangers that nature presents. It is planted in place and stands strong against the dark forces of the world. It recalls Matthew 16:18, “upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.”

But the Cathedral doesn’t just emerge from the mountain; it is part of the mountain. The very stone of the Cathedral came from one of the mountains in the area. We get a little vignette of Latour showing Vaillant one day as they passed that particular mountain.

The two priests left Santa Fé a little after midday, riding west. The Bishop did not disclose his objective, and the Vicar asked no questions. Soon they left the wagon road and took a trail running straight south, through an empty greasewood country sloping gradually in the direction of the naked blue Sandia mountains.

At about four o'clock they came out upon a ridge high over the Rio Grande valley. The trail dropped down a long decline at this point and wound about the foot of the Sandias into Albuquerque, some sixty miles away. This ridge was covered with cone-shaped, rocky hills, thinly clad with piñons, and the rock was a curious shade of green, something between sea-green and olive. The thin, pebbly earth, which was merely the rock pulverized by weather, had the same green tint. Father Latour rode to an isolated hill that beetled over the western edge of the ridge, just where the trail descended. This hill stood up high and quite alone, boldly facing the declining sun and the blue Sandias. As they drew close to it, Father Vaillant noticed that on the western face the earth had been scooped away, exposing a rugged wall of rock--not green like the surrounding hills, but yellow, a strong golden ochre, very much like the gold of the sunlight that was now beating upon it. Picks and crowbars lay about, and fragments of stone, freshly broken off.

"It is curious, is it not, to find one yellow hill among all these green ones?" remarked the Bishop, stooping to pick up a piece of the stone. "I have ridden over these hills in every direction, but this is the only one of its kind." He stood regarding the chip of yellow rock that lay in his palm. As he had a very special way of handling objects that were sacred, he extended that manner to things which he considered beautiful. After a moment of silence he looked up at the rugged wall, gleaming gold above them. "That hill, Blanchet, is my Cathedral." (p. 238-239)

Deep into the heart of the landscape is where the very rock that will be used to build the Cathedral resides. The stone is of a distinct color, unlike the stone in the entire region. It is part of the mountain itself. One supposes that all stone that go into buildings must come from nature, but given the importance of landscape to this novel, seeing the virgin stone in the mountain, seeing the picks and crowbars that will cut the stone out, and holding sample stone in a character’s hand allows the reader to fuse the Cathedral with the landscape. But it is more. It is not just from the landscape; in being transformed into a Cathedral it has been transfigured into the holy. It is akin to transubstantiation, where the simple elements of bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. Through the simple elements of mountain rock, a holy tabernacle is formed.

There are several churches that either prefigure or contrast against the Latour’s cathedral. First in contrast was the mission church at Ácoma, an “old warlike church.” “Gaunt, grim, grey, its nave rising some seventy feet to a sagging, half-ruined roof, it was more like a fortress than a place of worship.” When Latour served Mass there,

he felt as if he were celebrating Mass at the bottom of the sea, for antediluvian creatures; for types of life so old, so hardened, so shut within their shells, that the sacrifice on Calvary could hardly reach back so far. Those shell-like backs behind him might be saved by baptism and divine grace, as undeveloped infants are, but hardly through any experience of their own, he thought. When he blessed them and sent them away, it was with a sense of inadequacy and spiritual defeat.” (p. 100)

The church at Ácoma represents the spirituality of the old order, the Spanish missionaries of the latter generations that maintained a power relationship over the population, and that had fallen into corruption and heresy.

There was also the “Gothic chapel” of the cavern where Jacinto and Latour took refuge from the winter storm. Here was a pagan structure where dark ceremonies were performed and an underground river flowed untamed, “far, far below, perhaps as deep as the foot of the mountain, a flood moving in utter blackness under ribs of antediluvian rock. It was not a rushing noise, but the sound of a great flood moving with majesty and power” (p. 130). Here the forces of nature threaten existence itself. These are the very forces that Latour’s Cathedral stand against.

And there are the churches that prefigure the Cathedral. We get a glimpse in the Prologue of the dome of the Vatican, St. Peter’s Basilica, set against the hills of Rome. Here too at one time the hills of Rome were pagan and “antediluvian,” encompassing a savage culture. Latour’s Cathedral is clearly an allusion to what St. Peter’s achieved, the taming of the savage culture not by war as the Church at Ácoma projected but by assimilation. The Catholic Church didn’t conquer pagan Rome; it assimilated it.

Finally there is another prefiguring of the Cathedral early in the novel, when Latour is on his first journey in New Mexico and lost comes upon the simple and devout Mexicans. There he performs baptisms and marriages and a Mass. He performs the sacraments in a house, which in essence becomes a House Church. Near this idyllic community is also a stream,

a spring overhung by the sharp-leafed variety of cottonwood called water willow. All about it crowded the oven-shaped hills--nothing to hint of water until it rose miraculously out of the parched and thirsty sea of sand. Some subterranean stream found an outlet here, was released from darkness. The result was grass and trees and flowers and human life; household order and hearths from which the smoke of burning piñon logs rose like incense to heaven. (p. 31)

Here we see that same stream that was below the “Gothic chapel,” which threatened with its dark powers, now “released from darkness” and graces the landscape in a sort of benediction. Bishop Latour sat by that river and contemplated its existence.

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. (p. 31)

Here the Christian priests had planted a cross as well. Here that cross had tamed the subterranean river. That cross serves as the Cathedral in place. The cross may be local, but the Cathedral will stand as that cross for the entire archdiocese.

And so, the Cathedral encapsulates all four of the themes: the landscape as defining the life of the region, the civilizing effect of Catholicism, the reform of the Church from the accumulated heresies, and the assimilation of the indigenous culture. The novel itself can be seen as the building of the Cathedral.

I've been trying to summarize my takeaway from the story. I end up rambling..... But simply put, I was moved by Latour's epiphany at the end when he recognizes that place and time shape us and in turn are shaped by what we do in our place and time. Two quotes ringing in my head: "Bloom where you are planted"--again, the garden! And "Behold I make all things new."

Madeleine wrote: " "Bloom where you are planted"--again, the garden! "

Yes, and I don't know if I was clear but the Cathedral is his greatest blossom.

Beautiful Manny!
You are teaching all of us how to pull together the different components of a novel, their connection, and how they are related to one another on a deeper level.

Thank you Kerstin. Of course a novel has to have those integrated components. That’s one of the reasons I said Dante’s Divine Comedy is the greatest work of literature, the incredible degree of integration. I found Death Comes to the Archbishop to be a fine work of art, not just because of the lovely writing but because of this integration. Is a work of literature that is highly integrated a greater work than one that isn’t? That’s debatable. I would say it is, but I can see the argument against it. For instance, Cather’s My Antonia is also a great work of literature, and I think slightly greater work (if one can create a pecking order among great works) than Death Comes for the Archbishop. Now to my memory, I don’t think My Antonia is quite as integrated as this novel but yet I hold it higher esteem. Why is that, I ask myself?

I think it comes down to a few minor deficiencies I’ve been attuned to in Death Comes for the Archbishop. The one that sticks out at me is the story structure, or in a sense lack thereof. DCFTA is a picaresque novel, that is, one that goes from episode to episode. That doesn’t mean picaresque novels can’t be great—Don Quixote is a picaresque novel—but there is something loose about them that strikes a reader as less satisfying if the themes are not transcendent. DCFTA rises to great themes, but they are mostly themes of a time and place, whereas Don Quixote and Divine Comedy (also picaresque) are able to reach for more universal themes. My Antonia by the way is superbly structured. Perhaps I’m being overly critical here of DCFTA but I’m just trying to find a shade of difference between great works.

Another deficiency is that the novel seems inappropriately titled. Yes, Latour dies, but does death actually come for him other than it being a natural end to his life? And is death really a theme in the novel that it would warrant being in the title? It’s not as if death started for Latour in the opening pages and then caught up to him at the end. There are numerous deaths throughout, but I don’t see any thematic thread that connects them. Again, this is a minor criticism, or perhaps it’s me not seeing the thread. It could be there.

The beauty of the DCFTA is that it’s like an impressionist painting. It spreads out before you with color and geometric links that give you an overarching effect. I think this is why Cather needed to be so integrated. The novel is beautiful, and I would rank this in the top American novels of all time. Willa Cather, in my opinion underrated, has at least two novels in such a ranking.

Here’s another interesting tidbit. Cather published this novel in 1927. D.H. Lawrence, the British novelist, lived in New Mexico (around Taos, which is an hour north of Santa Fe) in the first half of the 1920s. He wrote a novel with the same sort of indigenous people called The Plumed Serpentbut he set it in Mexico. He published his novel in 1926, so the two novels amazingly overlap. Both novels deal with the local cultures and deal with religion. However, they are almost diametrically apart. By this time in his life, Lawrence was a Primitivist, and therefore glorified the primitive cultures. The dark, demonic of the indigenous cultures win out in his novel, while in Death Comes for the Archbishop, Catholicism is firmly planted. I don’t recommend Lawrence’s novel. It’s interesting but one of his poorer ones. He has better novels. I did my Master’s thesis on DH Lawrence, so I had to read far more of his work than one would have liked.

Thanks so much for the insights, Manny, and the overall brilliant analysis.

When this novel was selected by our group, I was intrigued by the title and decided to do some research. If anyone wishes to, Google: Art in Willa Cather’s Fiction: Death Comes for the Archbishop. There is a rich source of material regarding the novel. For example: “The Bishop in Death Comes for the Archbishop is named Latour. Cather probably recalled Georges de La Tour’s Saint Joseph for the Acoma Altar painting of St. Joseph.”

Cather: “ ‘At Acoma,’ he said, ‘you can see something very holy. They have there a portrait of St. Joseph, sent to them by one of the kings of Spain, long ago, and it has worked many miracles.’ “

(The above is from Polly Duryea’s 1993 dissertation on Willa
Cather)

Polly Duryea goes on to explain what is mentioned in several other accounts: that Willa Cather was deeply affected by the series of woodcuts done by Hans Holbein the Younger which he titled “The Dance of Death.” In the last panel of the series, Death comes for a Bishop. I really recommend this site for all the information about the novel it contains. The many illustrations alone are worth seeing.

There is another minor theme in the book. That of the immigrant. Maybe because I come from the Old Continent, these parts were especially poignant to me. Bishop Latour's decision to retire in Santa Fe captures the transition from the old life to the new life especially well:

All his relatives at home, and his friends in New Mexico, had expected that the old Archbishop would spend his closing years in France, probably in Clermont, where he could occupy a chair in his old college. That seemed the natural thing to do, and he had given it grave consideration. He had half expected to make some such arrangement the last time he was in Auvergne, just before his retirement from his duties as Archbishop. But in the Old World he found himself homesick for the New. It was a feeling he could not explain; a feeling that old age did not weigh so heavily upon a man in New Mexico as in the Puy-de-Dôme.

"In the Old World he found himself homesick for the New." Ultimately all of life is transitory until we get to go Home.

In New Mexico he always awoke a young man; not until he rose and began to shave did he realize that he was growing older. His first consciousness was a sense of the light dry wind blowing in through the windows, with the fragrance of hot sun and sage-brush and sweet clover; a wind that made one’s body feel light and one’s heart cry “To-day, today,” like a child’s. Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up to him for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again.

Loved this!

Kerstin wrote: "There is another minor theme in the book. That of the immigrant. Maybe because I come from the Old Continent, these parts were especially poignant to me. Bishop Latour's decision to retire in Santa..."

Good catch Kerstin. I missed that. Another minor theme, which I didn't bring up, was that of friendship. There are numerous friendships throughout the novel, and that between Latour and Vaillant the most important.

And though I don't think it is a theme, the interaction between the fictional and real historical characters could be an interesting discussion.

Now as it turned out, last week I had a second business trip to New Mexico, and having an afternoon to myself, I drove to Santa Fe to visit the very Cathedral from the novel. Of course I took lots of pictures and I'm going to share what I can with readers who participated here. Here is my blog post as a photo essay of the St. Francis of Assisi Cathedral of Santa Fe. I think my comments explain everything. If not, please ask.

https://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot....

I don’t know which is more remarkable: these professional grade photographs, or the thoughtfulness of the man who took them. Thank you, Manny. What a treasure!

Thank you for sharing. What a beautiful church.

Christine wrote: "Thank you for sharing. What a beautiful church."

You're welcome Christine.

Love your pictures, Christine. I'm from New Mexico originally, and have loved this story as I can picture the church and know the land in northern New Mexico. We just took a drive from Santa Fe to Taos thru Chimayo, visiting some of the churches that were founded around this time in New Mexico. What a rich history of faith!

I think you meant my pictures Ashleigh. Welcome to our book club.