Word: fe
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...archbishop of the title, whom Cather called Jean Marie Latour, was the quixotic Jean Baptiste Lamy, first Bishop of Santa Fe. His affable Sancho Panza, Joseph Vaillant in the novel, was Joseph Machebeuf, later Bishop of Denver. After decades of research, Paul Horgan, novelist and Pulitzer-prizewinning historian (Great River), has attempted to separate the fictive from the actual. His triumph is due as much to a sense of place as to discernment of character. In his account, the shimmering, arid plateaus and the indomitable Gallic spirit are as palpable as they were in the novel-and as compelling...
Still, if the cleric was taciturn, he was also a man of action. "Assure your salvation by your good deeds," he counseled his flock, and his life was a succession of such visible labors. When he came to Santa Fe, Lamy faced a diocese of 236,000 sq. mi.-larger than France. A mere dozen Mexican priests were in attendance, some of them living in open concubinage. The neglected adobe churches were crumbling into ruin before their eyes...
Indians were not Lamy's most formidable opponents. He and Machebeuf had come to Santa Fe in the wake of the Mexican War, only a few years after the U.S. Army. To the Mexicans of the new territory, the Frenchmen were simply invaders in different uniforms. When Lamy suspended Padre Gallegos of Albuquerque for insubordination, the popular priest stood for election to the U.S. Congress. There he ceaselessly pilloried his enemy. Padre Martinez, a pastor who ruled Taos like a prairie king, refused to be tithed by the new bishop. After an agonized power struggle, Lamy excommunicated his adversary...
...became Santa Fe's Johnny Appleseed, importing shade trees, fruits and vegetables, which he shared with the en tire countryside. He cultivated the arts as well: diocesan schools taught not only languages, history and mathematics but also music as a regular part of the cur riculum. He even sponsored material progress: when the railroad threatened to bypass Santa Fe, Lamy joined a group to raise capital for a spur...
When death finally did come for the archbishop in 1888, when he was 73, Santa Fe - and Lamy himself - had changed. "Bishop Juan," as his requiem Mass called him, was mourned by Indian, Mexican and Eastern American alike. "It was," reports Horgan at the conclusion of this superb biography, "the end of a fine...