Death Comes for the Archbishop · Chapter
Book III: The Mass at Ácoma explained
Bishop Latour, after his first year in Santa Fe, sets out to visit the western Indian missions, including Ácoma.
What happens
Bishop Latour, after his first year in Santa Fe, sets out to visit the western Indian missions, including Ácoma. He travels with his guide Jacinto, observes the magnificent but harsh landscape, and reflects on the history of the great church at Ácoma built by Fray Juan Ramirez. He also hears the legend of the tyrannical Friar Baltazar Montoya. The chapter explores the cultural and spiritual distance between the European missionaries and the Pueblo Indians, and Latour's growing but cautious companionship with Jacinto.
Themes in this chapter
Cultural Clash and Harmony
Latour reflects on the immense cultural gap between European missionaries and the Pueblo Indians, symbolized by the construction of the Ácoma church and his cautious relationship with Jacinto.
Landscape and Place
The chapter vividly describes the mesa country, the rock of Ácoma, and the cloud formations, emphasizing the landscape's ancient and incomplete quality.
Faith and Doubt
Latour questions the motives of the Spanish missionaries who built the grand church at Ácoma, wondering if it was for their own satisfaction rather than the needs of the Indians.
Characters to notice
- Bishop Jean Marie Latour
Visits the Indian missions in the west, including Ácoma, and reflects on the history and construction of the church there.
- Jacinto
Serves as Latour's guide from the Pecos pueblo; shares a quiet moment discussing the stars and shows a reserved but growing trust in the Bishop.
- Padre Gallegos
The genial but scandalous priest of Albuquerque, who avoids accompanying Latour on his journey by feigning gout.
- Friar Baltazar Montoya
Mentioned in the legend as a tyrannical priest at Ácoma in the early 1700s.
- Fray Juan Ramirez
The great missionary who built the church at Ácoma and the mule trail known as 'El Camino del Padre.'
Key passages
“The more Father Latour examined this church, the more he was inclined to think that Fray Ramirez, or some Spanish priest who followed him, was not altogether innocent of worldly ambition, and that they built for their own satisfaction, perhaps, rather than according to the needs of the Indians.”
Latour suspects that the Spanish missionaries built the grand church at Ácoma more for their own pride than for the spiritual needs of the Pueblo people.
Reflects Latour's critical view of missionary motives and the theme of faith and doubt.
“He was on a naked rock in the desert, in the stone age, a prey to homesickness for his own kind, his own epoch, for European man and his glorious history of desire and dreams.”
Standing on the mesa, Latour feels isolated and longs for the familiar world of European civilization and its dynamic history.
Highlights the theme of cultural clash and Latour's personal sense of displacement.
“Something reptilian he felt here, something that had endured by immobility, a kind of life out of reach, like the crustaceans in their armour.”
Latour perceives the Pueblo people as having survived through unchanging, immobile existence, like ancient creatures in shells.
Illustrates the cultural distance and Latour's struggle to understand the indigenous way of life.