Anyone who has ever read the classic American novel “Death Comes for the Archbishop” by Willa Cather realizes the unique history of the American Southwest in relation to the Catholic church.
The story’s protagonist, Jean Marie Latour, is based on the historical personage of Jean-Baptiste Lamy, the first Archbishop of Sante Fe (meaning in Spanish “Holy Faith”).
Lamy was born in 1814 in Auvergne, France, not far from Avignon, where the popes lived in luxury from 1309-77.
This region of France had had a crucial role in Catholic history. The popes (and especially the curia) of the medieval period were more than a little enamored with the wealth and prestige of the Frankish court, and so the seat of Christendom moved to Avignon from its traditional home in Rome, where Peter and Paul had been martyred. After almost seven decades in France, St. Catherine of Siena was instrumental in convincing Pope Gregory XI to return the papacy to Rome, where it had always been associated with the “Vaticanus,” one of the seven hills of the ancient city. Coincidentally, the period spent courting favor and influence in France was roughly the same as the Israelites’ “Babylonian Exile” under the evil Nebuchadnezzar, a fact not lost on Martin Luther, who, centuries later, used it as a polemical resource in his criticisms of papal excess.
These historical realities, as well as the Revolution and Reign of Terror, shaped the church in the lush vineyards and pastures of Lamy’s upbringing, where he studied under the Jesuits and Suplicians, before agreeing to serve the missions in North America. As Cather’s historical fiction attempts to portray, his future land was much less verdant and comfortable than the one in which he was raised.
His sprawling new diocese, acquired by the United States after the Mexican-American War, was at this time largely uncharted, if not completely unevangelized, territory. The Franciscans of Junipero Serra’s day had spread the faith beyond California into the deserts and rugged mountains of Arizona and New Mexico centuries before.
But much time had passed before Lamy arrived, and the Native American and “New Mexican” descendents of this first generation of believers had tried to integrate Catholic theology and practice with their own culture and ancestral traditions in the intervening period. Some of their experiences were wonderfully pious and creative innovations allowing the faith to take root in new lands and among new peoples; others a misconstrued “syncretism” of activities and thought-systems incompatible with Catholic doctrine. Lamy had an arduous task in determining which rites and practices fell into which category. Many of the people within his flock had been forced to practice their faith without seeing priests or catechists for years or decades, and were rather self-educated when it came to Christian teachings. Their understandings and routines, for good or for ill, had had much time to become entrenched and many were not eager to alter the status quo, even if informed it did not coincide with the “deposit of faith.”
Lamy spent most of his vocational life alone, sun-baked and hungry on the back of horses and mules, traversing the craggy arid landscape to bring the gospel and sacraments to people he had not met and would likely not see again. Having personally met with Pius IX, Lamy also was the primary figure in establishing new ecclesiastical structures as far away as Yuma and Denver. Yet, he was until death came for him, the quintessential European Catholic dwelling in America, and that was not always an unqualifiedly positive reality. His crowning achievement of Santa Fe’s cathedral, the Romanesque St. Francis of Assisi Basilica, while beautiful, exhibited his preference for European stone masonry and styles over local adobe architecture. His life, while heroic in selflessness and unfailingly committed to the people in his care, did display the standard predilection of European clergy of the day for an “exported” and homogenizing Christianity, a reality not always welcomed by natives in the Americas, Africa, or the East.
Michael M. Canaris of Collingswood is an administrator at Fairfield University’s Center for Faith and Public Life and is on the faculty for the Department of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies at Sacred Heart University.
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