Death Comes for the Archbishop
by Willa Cather
There's something epic about this beautiful little novel by Willa Cather – and almost legendary, the story he tells is that a human life lives in the silence of the desert. In 1851, Father Jean Marie Latour came to New Mexico as apostolic vizier. What he finds is a vast area of red hills and winding arroyos, American by law, but Mexican and Indian in tradition and belief. For almost four decades, Latour spreads his faith in the only way he knows it — with a gently unforgivable sight, abandoned and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and despite having to contend with his own loneliness. One of these events, Cather, gives us an indelible vision of life unfolding in a place where time itself seems to be suspended.
