Death Comes for the Archbishop

About Death Comes for the Archbishop Death Comes for the Archbishop by American author Willa Cather is a work of literary fiction first published in the US. ‘The Miracles of the Church seem to me not to rest 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.’ In 1848, the Vatican instructs the young bishop, Father Jean Marie Latour, to supervise a new Roman Catholic diocese in New Mexico. Travelling with his good friend, Father Joseph Vaillant, through a vast territory of red hills and twisting arroyos, the pair encounter natural adversity, corrupt Spanish priests, and the apathy of the Hopi and Navajo to establish their church and erect a cathedral in the unforgiving wilderness of the southwestern desert. Fundamentally a character study, the novel examines Latour's inner struggles and his relationship with the land which, through Cather's beautiful and evocative descriptions, becomes a formidable, unyielding character in its own right. A powerful, epic tale in which time itself seems oddly suspended from events even as they unfold, Death Comes for the Archbishop is one of Willa Cather’s most celebrated works.