Death Comes for the Archbishop

Content Warning: The source text contains dated and at times offensive terms for Indigenous people. When not directly quoting the source text, this guide replaces the term “Indian” with Indigenous.

In the summer of 1848, three cardinals and a missionary bishop dine together in a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome. They’re discussing the founding of a new apostolic vicarate in New Mexico, a territory that the US recently annexed. The cardinals are relatively unfamiliar with New Mexico and are only tangentially interested in the region. The bishop, a missionary in the Great Lakes region, explains that New Mexico, formerly “New Spain,” has long been the “cradle of the faith in the New World” (3). At the time, the New Mexico churches fall under the purview of the Bishop of Durango, whose home is nearly 1,500 miles from Santa Fe, the seat of the Catholic Church in New Mexico. The Bishop of Durango has a candidate in mind for the new vicarate, but the bishop at the meeting argues for choosing someone else because the bishop in this new territory will one day wield tremendous power in the church. Although the region is dangerous and both the churches and their parishioners are still given to quasi-pagan practices, Catholicism was introduced hundreds of years ago and is, in its own way, thriving.