Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather, Part 5

This is my fifth post on Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. 

Part1 was on the landscape theme. 

Part2 a photo essay of the New Mexican landscape.  

Part3 a photo essay of the actual Cathedral referred to in the novel.  

Part4 on the civilizing effect of Catholicism.  

The third theme of the novel that I identify is that of Church reform.  What Bishop Latour finds in New Mexico is a degenerated church, one that fails to live up to the standards holiness and, indeed, to Church doctrine.  We see this with the first of the priests of the “old order” that Latour finds, the “genial Father Gallegos,” the priest in charge of the parish in Albuquerque. 

Though Padre Gallegos was ten years older than the Bishop, he would still dance the fandango five nights running, as if he could never have enough of it. He had many friends in the American colony, with whom he played poker and went hunting, when he was not dancing with the Mexicans. His cellar was well stocked with wines from El Paso del Norte, whisky from Taos, and grape brandy from Bernalillo. He was genuinely hospitable, and the gambler down on his luck, the soldier sobering up, were always welcome at his table. The Padre was adored by a rich Mexican widow, who was hostess at his supper parties, engaged his servants for him, made lace for the altar and napery for his table. Every Sunday her carriage, the only closed one in Albuquerque, waited in the plaza after Mass, and when the priest had put off his vestments, he came out and was driven away to the lady’s hacienda for dinner.  (p. 82)

Dancing, poker, hunting, whiskey and fine wines, and a very suggestive relationship with a rich widow all reveal the scandalous nature of Fr. Gallegos’ life and ministry.  Certainly this cannot be approved, and Latour makes a note that he will end this scandal.  But this is what the Church, outside of a stray priest like Padre Jesus de Baca, has become in the lawless and uncontrolled wilderness of New Mexico.  Besides serving the needs of the devout Catholics, besides the evangelization of the non-Catholics, Bishop Latour must suppress the deviant clergy and bring orthodoxy and order to the region. 

A month after the Bishop’s visit to Albuquerque and Acoma, the genial Father Gallegos was formally suspended, and Father Vaillant himself took charge of the parish. At first there was bitter feeling; the rich rancheros and the merry ladies of Albuquerque were very hostile to the French priest.  He began his reforms at once. Everything was changed.  The holy-days, which had been occasions of revelry under Padre Gallegos, were now days of austere devotion. The fickle Mexican population soon found as much diversion in being devout as they had once found in being scandalous. Father Vaillant wrote to his sister Philomene, in France, that the temper of his parish was like that of a boys’ school; under one master the lads try to excel one another in mischief and disobedience, under another they vie with each other in acts of loyalty. The Novena preceding Christmas, which had long been celebrated by dances and hilarious merry-making, was this year a great revival of religious zeal.  (p. 117)

Latour in essence is a religious version of a sheriff assigned to the Wild West.  The degeneration of the Catholic Church is dramatized through the wayward priests that Latour encounters, and just like with Fr. Gallegos Latour brings a law and order to the diocese.  Besides Fr, Gallegos, there is Fr. Jose Martinez, an assertive, violent, and physically powerful man, who lives a life of “uncurbed passions,” cheating Indians from their land and fraternizing with women.  There is Fr. Marino Lucero, who lives a life of miserly storing money and greedily exploiting the poor.  There is Trinidad Lucero, who is ambiguously the son of either Martinez or Lucero, a clever touch by Cather to stain both reprehensible priests as having failed their celibate vows.  The two priests are further linked in that they together form a schismatic church to oppose the Catholic Church.

These wayward priests are referred to as “the old order,” a pun I think on the word “order” since what they have established is disorder.  This is the order that the dignitaries in Rome were hoping to bring when they assigned Fr. Latour as Bishop to the region.  Through his own force of will, Latour brings a new beginning, a new decorum, to the diocese.

Father Latour judged that the day of lawless personal power was almost over, even on the frontier, and this figure [Martinez] was to him already like something picturesque and impressive, but really impotent, left over from the past. (p. 141)

Through the various priestly characters in the novel, Cather builds a historical layering of holiness and degeneration.  There are of course the original missionaries, who first brought Christianity to the New World, and specifically to the American southwest.  We get a glimpse of them in the mention of Fray Juan Ramirez, “a great missionary, who labored on the Rock of Ácoma for twenty years or more.”  Father Ramirez came to the region in the early 1600’s and responsible for building the great church at Ácoma and for “the only path by which a burro can ascend the Mesa” in Latour’s day some two hundred and fifty years later.  It is still called “El Camino del Padre.”  

This original missionary order was wiped out by Indian uprisings of 1680, slaughtered because of Spanish corruption and enslavement of the indigenous population.  You can read about it here. Ultimately the Spanish retook the land and established new missionaries and Cather tells the story of Fray Baltazar Montoya as representative of that next wave of priests.  

Some time in the very early years of seventeen hundred, nearly fifty years after the great Indian uprising in which all the missionaries and all the Spaniards in northern New Mexico were either driven out or murdered, after the country had been reconquered and new missionaries had come to take the place of the martyrs, a certain Friar Baltazar Montoya was priest at Ácoma.  He was of a tyrannical and overbearing disposition and bore a hard hand on the natives.  All the missions now in ruins were active then, each had its resident priest, who lived for the people or upon the people, according to his nature.  Friar Baltazar was one of the most ambitious and exacting.  It was his belief that the pueblo of Ácoma existed chiefly to support its fine church, and that this should be the pride of the Indians as it was his.  He took the best of their corn and beans and squashes for his table, and selected the choicest portions when they slaughtered a sheep, chose their best hides to carpet his dwelling.  Moreover, he exacted a heavy tribute in labour.  He was never done with having earth carried up from the plain in baskets.  He enlarged the churchyard and made the deep garden in the cloister, enriching it with dung from the corrals.  Here he was able to grow a wonderful garden, since it was watered every evening by women,--and this despite the fact that it was not proper that a woman should ever enter the cloister at all.  Each woman owed the Padre so many ollas of water a week from the cisterns, and they murmured not only because of the labour, but because of the drain on their water- supply. (p. 103)

Well Fr. Baltazar meets an untimely death because of his callousness and injustice toward the indigenous people, but he represents a trend in the priestly caste in the region which had changed from the original missionaries.  He became self-centered and self-indulgent.  He started treating the indigenous people as if they are less than human, and as objects to satisfy his needs.  Now it is still a couple of hundred years jump to go from Father Baltazar to Fathers Martinez and Lucero, but one sees the similarities in the generations.  And perhaps there is a suggestion of another layering in between those generations in the character of Padre Jesus de Baca, a genial “old white-haired man, almost blind, who had been at Isleta many years and won the confidence and affection of his Indians” (p.84).  While Fr. Jesus is contemporaneous with Fathers Martinez and Lucero, his age situates him between them and Baltazar.  He is almost the direct opposite of his counterparts.

The priest's house was white within and without, like all the Isleta houses, and was almost as bare as an Indian dwelling.  The old man was poor, and too soft-hearted to press the pueblo people for pesos.  An Indian girl cooked his beans and cornmeal mush for him, he required little else.  The girl was not very skillful, he said, but she was clean about her cooking.  When the Bishop remarked that everything in this pueblo, even the streets, seemed clean, the Padre told him that near Isleta there was a hill of some white mineral, which the Indians ground up and used as whitewash.  They had done this from time immemorial, and the village had always been noted for its whiteness.  A little talk with Father Jesus revealed that he was simple almost to childishness, and very superstitious.  But there was a quality of golden goodness about him.  His right eye was overgrown by a cataract, and he kept his head tilted as if he were trying to see around it.  All his movements were to the left, as if he were reaching or walking about some obstacle in his path. (p.85)

So the rhythm of priestly history in the region as Cather layers it seems to be a back and forth between holiness and corruption.  With Fathers Latour and Vaillant, we see again the return of holiness and their commission to stamp out the nefarious.  They will bring reform.