“I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die having lived.”
I just read Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather. Surely, I was required to read some Cather in high school or college, but I don’t remember reading her works. So, I’ll call this my first experience with her classic writing.
Death Comes for the Archbishop was initially published in 1927. It tells the story of Catholic missionary Bishop Jean Marie Latour shortly after New Mexico became part of the United States. He is accompanied by his devoted priest, Fr. Joseph Valliant. The friendship between these two missionaries is one of the more compelling aspects of the novel.
The novel highlights the challenges of planting mission churches in an untamed land and maintaining fidelity and perseverance in the face of loneliness and lack of oversight.
This novel is a character study, not a page-turner, yet fascinating. It’s multinational, starting in France and ending in Mexico, and includes the Navajo and Hopi of the American Southwest. It’s a story about Catholicism and the proselytizing of many. The story highlights the geography of Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. It is a story about friendship, but mostly, it is a story of one man’s great desire to live fully and completely in his calling.
A favorite quote near the end of the book —
The Bishop rode home to his solitude. He was forty-seven years old, and he had been a missionary in the New World for twenty years–ten of them in New Mexico. If he were a parish priest at home, there would be nephews coming to him for help in their Latin or a bit of pocket-money; nieces to run into his garden and bring their sewing and keep an eye on his housekeeping. All the way home he indulged in such reflections as any bachelor nearing fifty might have.
But when he entered his study he seemed to come back to reality, to the sense of a Presence awaiting him. The curtain of the arched doorway had scarcely fallen behind him when that feeling of personal loneliness was gone, and a sense of loss was replaced by a sense of restoration. He sat down before his desk, deep in reflection. It was just this solitariness of love in which a priest’s life could be like his Master’s. (Cather, p. 190)
Have you read this novel? Or any of Cather’s works? Would you recommend her books?
Do you have a classic you love?
Cather, W. (2023). Death comes for the Archbishop. Cluny.
Also published on Substack.
