Willa Cather's Classic Story of Spiritualism is Simply Told But Thick with Ideas​

I didn’t really know what to expect from “Death Comes for the Archbishop.” It’s on,like, every list of Best Books Ever, so I knew it was supposed to be solid, but the copy I have has literally no synopsis or any details on the book at all. Ya boy likes to avoid spoilers, so I didn’t want to do any research online, so I went in totally blind. 

And here I was just digging the damn thing. I’d never had the pleasure of reading anything by Willa Cather before, who is just a total legend, and she did not disappoint. 

Cather writes “Archbishop” (gonna’ stick with an abbreviation here because I’m just super lazy) with a simplicity that reminded me of Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist,” except this is way better. No offense to you die-hard fans of “The Alchemist” out there, but while Coelho’s ultra-simplistic writing is more of a self-help book than a story when it comes to spiritualism and purpose, “Archbishop” is simplistically written, but written as such to almost come across as a fable or legend, its directness a disguise for some profound and deep thoughts on religion, spiritualism, hypocrisy, and what it means to actually do good in the world. 

“Archbishop” follows two French men of God, the Bishop Jean Marie Latour and his best priest pal, Joseph Vaillant, as they move from their previous parish in 1850s Ohio to the frontier of New Mexico, and with the move from the colonized Ohio to the uncharted America Southwest, find their black and white concepts of religion and faith tested as they come across Mexican and Native American cultures that have existed for centuries before them.

Now on paper I know that might seem kind of yucky, in terms of colonization and how that … wasn’t so great a thing, but Cather does a great job of personifying these two men as legitimately upstanding people who, ultimately, just want the best for their new brethren, at times even sacrificing their own Catholic creeds and missions. This isn’t a story of a Crusades scenario, but rather men learning how to be as good as they can be by learning about other cultures and coming to tolerate them. How fuckin’ novel is that in this day and age? 

And I think that’s what made “Archbishop” land so hard for me. Not only does Cather give us a great and earnest story of friendship between the two holy men that serves as an emotional binding of the story, but by creating an episodic, no frills, unbiased representation of Catholic, Mexican, and Native American cultures, she puts them all on a level playing field, resulting in a book that reads like a fairy tale of tolerance and compromise and idealism, without coming off as being sappy or unrealistic. Her American Southwest, detailed with hyper-gorgeous imagery, is a hyper-gorgeous read that encourages compassion. It’s dope, as I imagine was the exact sentiment of critics on the novel’s 1927 release.