Source: Lew Rockwell | VIEW ORIGINAL POST ==>
From Nebraska, from Arkansas,
Central inland race are we, from Missouri, with the continental blood intervein’d,
All the hands of comrades clasping, all the Southern, all the Northern,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
—Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman’s poem, inspired by the adventurous spirits who formed the vanguard of the westward expansion of the United States, was itself the inspiration for the title of Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers!, a romance of life on the western prairies at the turn of the twentieth century.
In a similar vein, Cather’s novel Death Comes for the Archbishop tells the story of two pioneering priests in the “wild west” of New Mexico. Ostensibly a work of historical fiction, the novel is based on the lives of Fathers Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Joseph Projectus Machebeuf, the former of whom would become the first archbishop of Santa Fe and the latter the first bishop of Denver.
Fr. Lamy was born in the mountainous Auvergne region of France in 1814. Ordained to the priesthood in 1838, he arrived in the United States in the following year to serve as a missionary in the virgin west of the expanding New World. Having served in parishes in Ohio and Kentucky, he was appointed by Pope Pius IX to be the first bishop of the newly created Apostolic Vicariate of New Mexico in 1851.
The journey from the Midwest to the “wild west,” in the days before the railroad, necessitated months of arduous travel. In Willa Cather’s fictionalized account, the journey would take almost a year, beginning with a riverboat down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, a shipwreck at Galveston, and finally a long overland trek to New Mexico. This retelling of the real-life journey enables us to appreciate the hardships faced by the newly consecrated bishop. Having set out early in the new year, he didn’t finally arrive in Santa Fe until August 1851. Two years later, the Vicariate of New Mexico became the Diocese of Santa Fe.
Bishop Lamy set about building churches and establishing new parishes and schools, and he instigated and oversaw the construction of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi. When the Diocese of Santa Fe was elevated to an archdiocese in 1875, Lamy became the first archbishop, serving for a further ten years until his retirement. He died of pneumonia in 1888, at the age of seventy-three, a good and faithful servant who had served the Church in the United States for almost fifty years.
Fr. Joseph Projectus Machebeuf, the inspiration for the other priest protagonist in Death Comes for the Archbishop, was a lifelong friend of Fr. Lamy. Two years older than Fr. Lamy and born in the same area of the Auvergne, he accompanied his friend to the United States as a missionary priest in 1839 and served in parishes in Ohio until 1851, at which point he accompanied the newly-consecrated Bishop Lamy on his arduous journey to New Mexico. After serving as a pastor in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, he was transferred to Colorado in 1860. Thrown from his carriage on a spur of the Rocky Mountains, he was left lame for the rest of his life.
By 1868, when he was appointed Vicar Apostolic of Colorado and Utah, he had built eighteen churches, including the first-ever church in Denver. He would build a school, a convent and a hospital, as well as the College of the Sacred Heart, which is now subsumed within Regis University. By the time he was consecrated as the first bishop of the newly-created Diocese of Denver in 1887, the Catholic population of Colorado had grown to over 50,000. He died two years later, at the age of seventy-six.
